Sermon Archives

Free Beer and Free Speech

When I worked on campus, I learned a lot about things that are free. For five years, David and I served as educators at Princeton University, and we witnessed all the things that college students don’t have to pay for. We learned about free t-shirts, free trips to Israel, and of course, free food. For the over 21 crowd, there was often free beer. And yes, there is a certain irony to getting things “for free” when on the campus of a prestigious university that costs upwards of $60,000 a year, but we all pretended not to notice. 

When I began working for Sefaria, I learned about a different kind of free commodity: free texts. And, I learned about an important distinction, attributed to one of the originators of the open source movement, Richard Stallman: the difference between free speech, and free beer. Free speech means we are at liberty to share our thoughts and words without fear, whereas the advantage of free beer is simply that you don’t have to pay for it. It turns out that lots of things you don’t pay for come with strings attached (even freedom of speech). Free Jewish texts - like the free software that Richard Stallman was talking about -  was free for the taking, but couldn’t be changed or manipulated by the user. Similarly, prior to Sefaria, Jewish texts could be accessed freely online, but not necessarily copied and pasted legally into a Google doc to teach a class. They are free like beer, because you can consume them, but not free like speech, where you are at liberty to be creative. 

And in the Torah as well, there are different kinds of freedom that play different roles in the story of the Jewish people. When we tell the story of the exodus from Egypt, we often talk about Bnei Yisrael being freed from slavery, going free from the bondage of Pharaoh and the burdens of hard physical labor. But the Torah never uses the word “free” to describe what happens when the Jews leave Egypt. In the Torah, the Jews leaving is just that - yetziat mitzrayim, the going out from Egypt. 

In popular culture, what Moshe says to Pharaoh is “let my people go” - a broad, sweeping request for release which conjures up the Prince of Egypt images of the people streaming across the sea and dancing (spoiler alert for next week). But the word “chofshi” only appears in the discussion of freeing the Israelite slave.What Moshe actually says to Pharoah is שַׁלַּ֥ח עַמִּ֖י וְיַֽעַבְדֻֽנִי - God says: send out my people, so that they may serve me. There’s some back and forth about who will go and serve God - Pharoah suggests that since ten men make a minyan, only the men need to leave, and Moshe refuses this offer. 

This is sometimes viewed as a kind of elaborate ruse, as though really, Moshe wants bnei Yisrael to go free, but is just framing it as a kind of short-term break to go daven mincha out in the desert. But as my teacher, Rav Yehuda Brandes, points out, Moshe is telling the truth. The Hebrew root for “serve” here is the same as that of the word “eved” - slave - and it is a word that appears again and again in this parashah. The people will not serve Pharoah anymore, they won’t serve flesh and blood. As rabbinic sources recount it, God said: avaday hem - these people are my servants, and not meant to be enslaved to other human beings. We were destined to serve the Divine. We are released from human servitude, so that we can serve a higher purpose.

Yetziat Mitzrayim is the exodus from Egypt - not an escape to complete freedom. It doesn’t mean that the Jewish people have nothing binding us, no restrictions, nothing that dictates our actions. In fact, we walked out of Egypt into a world of obligations, a framework that binds us to mitzvot, and to one another. It is these obligations that bind us together as a community.   When we stood at Sinai and accepted the Torah, we entered a new space together, a space that would be constructed by shared understandings and a sense of being bound to one another and to certain obligations. We make choices, and we exercise freedom of speech and lots of other freedoms, but we do so within a shared framework. 

“To be a Jew, according to the classical textual tradition, is to be obligated.” These are the opening words of Dr. Mara Benjamin’s truly excellent book, The Obligated Self, in which she looks at the framework of obligation and the role of the Divine through the lens of motherhood. There is an element of consent, even excitement, in most modern Western parents’ experience of having a child. We opt in to a framework which will then obligate us to another human being. But, she emphasizes, even if there’s an element of choice in the framework, you don’t make the rules. What she calls “the law of the Baby” is what matters once one has a child, and this is not “the law of any baby” but “the law of this Baby.” This baby will have particular needs, which cannot be anticipated, and must be met, whether or not we enjoy it. The experience as a whole may bring joy and fulfillment, but on a day to day basis, there is work to be done. So too, our ancestors obligated themselves to Torah and mitzvot, a demanding schedule of needs and wants that sometimes tests our commitment to the system as a whole. 

This shared framework of obligation is ultimately what sustains Jewish communities in which people consistently take care of one another.  We are bound to one another by this framework, and these bonds mean that we will do things for each other - in happy times, sad times, and even just normal times - that outsiders might find surprising. We pick things up at the store and ferry other people’s children around and find each other doctors and therapists. And of course this week, we stay glued to the news, rejoicing each time a hostage is freed. I know I am not the only one who watches the reunion videos more than once, and cries tears of joy when families I have never met embrace each other after more than a year of separation. We would all do anything for these families we do not know at all. 

I could tell you my stories of chesed, but we all have these stories: Stories of being stranded somewhere, and finding a Jewish family to take you in for a meal, or a night. Stories of taking in a random person, because they are stranded where you live. Times when we squished another chair around our table, defrosted more chicken, or got back into the car yet again to run an errand for someone in need. I was 23 years old, and David was 22,  when my father died, six weeks before our wedding date. The invitations were in cardboard boxes in my living room, waiting to be sent out, but without my shul’s chesed committee, it never would have happened. The committee licked envelopes and stuck on stamps and mailed every last one of those invitations within a day after I got up from shiva.

The true test of a community’s sense of obligation, of being bound together in Divine service,  is the strength of a shul’s chesed activities. There’s no question that the people who have helped me over the years were incredibly kind and loving people, and yet the commitment to sustaining people in need, day in and day out, must emerge from a sense of obligation or it will ultimately founder. Unlike ritual obligations, acts of chesed are easily filed under the rubric of “being nice” - something we may or may not have space for at any given moment. There is no blessing to recite over acts of lovingkindness; they are not ritual acts, and in fact often happen out of sight of those who gather for religious moments with the community. But actually, avaday - God’s servants - are the people who, like God, exert kindness in the world. Hopefully most of the time, we do it out of the goodness of our hearts - but it isn’t just an ethic, it is an obligation. Even when we don’t feel kind, or we don’t feel generous, or we just don’t like the person who is in need of a meal - we might have to invite them anyway, because we are not free to look away when a member of our community is in need. 

Yetziat Mitzrayim is the correct term for what happens in this week’s parsha, and it is richer, stronger, and qualitatively different from “going free.” Mitzrayim, in Hebrew, can also be read as “meitzarim,” or constraints. Egypt represents the things that hold us too tightly, that push us too hard, that constrain our choices so that we feel that we have no freedom, and prevent us from having the mental space to be creative and expansive in our thinking. Bechol dor vador, the haggadah tells us - in every generation, we re-inhabit this story, the story of having been oppressed, and then entering into a covenant, together.  The loving embrace of Torah and mitzvot guides and obligates us, not only to the Divine, but to one another. 

There are a lot of needs in the world right now; a great deal of pain, near and far. To embrace freedom from the crushing weight of oppression today, in our generation, means, among other things,  to lean into our obligation to support one another.