Parshat Tzav
SERMON Parashat Tzav April 11 2025
Rabbi David Edleson Temple Sinai South Burlington, VT
Difficult Freedoms
Dara Horn just came out with a new graphic novel called ONE LITTLE GOAT, or Had Gadya. It is a trippy book with a portal into other dimensions and a talking goat leading a kid bored at an endless seder to a series of seders throughout Jewish history.
One of the key images is that when we have our seders this year, the room our seder is in stands on the top of a tower of rooms where other seders have happened going back to the first seder in Egypt. It is a like a tower of light boxes, and we can go and turn on the lights in one and imagine what that seder was like, how it was the same, how it was made different by the times people were living in.
One thing the book made me think of is how different freedom itself can be at different times. We know the Seder is a symposium on freedom, but even in my own life, how I think of freedom has changed dramatically over the years.
When I was young, freedom was getting out of small-town Georgia, getting away from all the Southern Baptists, and finding a city that had gay people and Jews. It was, I can now see, the freedom of escape, or getting away and it was exhilarating. Everything was new. Anything was possible.
It was also a freedom that was very much about me, and what I wanted, and it was the freedom to be reckless and experiment and have drama and fun.
When we went to Israel for two years in our early 20’s, my sense of freedom was shifted by the ways Israelis thought about freedom. Yes it was celebratory and individual, but underneath that, was a deep layer of collective responsibility, of the need to serve and sacrifice and the willingness to give up things for a greater good.
I think many people experience this when they have kids, or there is a great tragedy in a community that requires everyone to pull together. For me, it was coming back to the height of the AIDS crisis in New York in the 80’s. It was the opposite of escape; it was putting your entire being into community, into surviving and resisting and fighting. What we personally wanted didn’t matter so much. It didn’t seem free; it seemed self-involved. Yet, as terrifying and horrible as those years were, they were in their own way very freeing, and it was freedom through commitment, freedom in community, freedom of resistance.
Of course, Judaism figured this out long before I did. Our tradition is clear that getting out of Egypt, escaping slavery that we will retell tomorrow night, was not fully free. It was the freedom of escape. But the wilderness was not really freedom. It was better than Egypt, but it was also full of pettiness, and acting out, and rebellion that put everyone at risk.
In our tradition, the deeper freedom is the freedom at Sinai, the freedom to choose to commit to a different set of ethics and laws, to balance the needs of the people with our own personal needs. Freedom is not the ability to do whatever we want. It is the ability to balance what I want with what we need to flourish together, and at the very least, not turn on one another.
We are living in a time when there are so many questions about freedom. Freedom for whom? What if one group’s freedom prevents another group’s freedom? Does freedom require strong institutions of government or does strong government keep us from being free? What if both are true. What if freedom of speech actually creates forms of oppression? These are not easy questions and freedom is easily turned into a bumper sticker, when it is a much more complex concept.
The famous French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called these Difficult Freedoms, and saw Judaism as a tradition that recognized the power and freedom that comes in covenant and recognizing our obligations to others and to the Divine Other.
So this Pesach, I would invite you to go back to that image from Dara Horn, of a tower of light boxes and think about what freedom meant at different times in your own family history, in your own life, in your children’s lives, and in the centuries of Jewish life that come before us. What did freedom mean to each of the four children in the Haggadah? To Rabbi Akiva and his students who were up all night planning a revolt against Rome? To your parents and grandparents? What might it mean to your great great great grandchildren of the future? How is the meaning different between Jews in Israel and Jews in the Diaspora? How it freedom different tonight and this year than all other nights?
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach,
David
