Page 15 - Harlem Shavuot Companion 2020

The Responsibility of Freedom
By Dimitry Ekshtut, Co-Founder of Kehillat Harlem

Embedded In the cycle of the Shalosh Regalim — the three
pilgrimage festivals in the Jewish calendar — is a model for
liberation on both the personal and national level. Pesach,
Shavuot, and Sukkot, in their own way, each ask the same
essential question: What does it mean to be free?

Pesach begins the sequence, responding that the prerequisite
for any true freedom is first achieving physical independence
and emancipation. Pesach invites us to remember what it means to be enslaved, not only
physically but also emotionally and spiritually, and what it means to engage in Yetziat Mitzrayim
- to “go out” (yetzei) from a “narrow place” (tzar), a place of constriction - and acquire agency
and bodily autonomy.

But this does not necessarily tell us what to do with our new-found freedom. The road toward
liberty does not merely end with freedom of our corporeal selves from enslavement. We can be,
as many of the fledgling Israelite nation were, held captive by the slavery of the mind long after
the fetters of physical bondage have been broken. Exodus comes in an instant, and the
transformation from servitude to freedom is swift. But our tradition emphasizes that the next
forty years were spent in the wilderness, unlearning the habits of centuries of servitude to man
and recalibrating to the opportunities and challenges that come with seemingly unlimited
options. Indeed, freedom can be paralyzing, overwhelming, and fraught with uncertainty and
danger. The Midrash teaches us that only one-fifth of the Israelite slaves actually left, even after
all the signs and wonders wrought in their midst, while four-fifths elected to remain in Egypt.
Sometimes, freedom means stepping into the great unknown.

But the purpose of Yetziat Mitzrayim was not achieved merely by the crossing of the split sea,
for the ultimate purpose of being granted freedom is to learn how to wield that freedom
responsibly. In a way, freedom is a burden, an obligation. We are obligated to choose, and we are
burdened with the results of our choices, whether for the good or for its opposite. Comic book
empresario and unintentional Jewish sage of the 20th century Stan Lee (full name: Stanley
Leiber) put it this way: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Among the many things that Shavuot commemorates, primary among them is the notion that
responsibility and obligation both temper and yet simultaneously affix meaning to our freedom.
The Sages say that G-d literally held Mount Sinai over the Israelites’ heads at the giving of the
Torah, as if it were a wedding canopy or chuppah under which the Jewish people and G-d were
being betrothed. So in a very real sense, there is a level of contractual obligation that comes with
our freedom. And at the same time, the holding of the mountain overhead served as a means of
coercion. In the rabbinic imagination, it would only be much later - after the events of Purim -
that the Jews re-entered this covenantal relationship with G-d entirely of their own volition.

Sukkot, which follows last in this cycle of pilgrimage festivals, asks of us to make ourselves
vulnerable — but this can only be accomplished through an already-extant relationship built on
trust and the accumulation of shared history. By contrast, Shavuot is the consummation of the

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