Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Rabbi Grussgott’s sermon at Kehilath Israel Synagogue on May 29th.
As the Jewish people wandered through the Sinai desert, they began to complain (what else is new!) One of their complaints in particular is almost comically tragic: (Bamidbar 11:5) – “We remember the fish that we used to eat for free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.” For free! (“Chinam”, in Hebrew).
Rashi comments that of course the food did not in fact come for free – it came in exchange for forced labor! Rashi exposes the true underlying psychology behind their bizarre nostalgia: “chinam min hamitzvot” – they really missed being free from the commandments.
We can universalize Rashi’s comment as meaning “free from responsibility.” A slave of course has numerous tasks, but no real responsibility; because responsibility, as represented by the covenant of mitzvot, implies choice (“I call upon the heaven and the earth this day as witnesses for you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. And you shall choose life, so that you and your offspring will live”).
Some people prefer slavery to responsibility. At least your choices are narrowed, and your anxiety therefore curtailed.
That was the sin of that generation. And so, God babied them, as they required: He rained down magical food from heaven (the manna), built them ready made huts to dwell in (sukkot), protected them with magical clouds of glory.
Their children would be ready to be sovereign in the Promised Land, but not them. The word chinam means “free” in its connotation as an adverb; free of cost. But freedom as an adjective, as a state of being, is represented by the word Cherut. “No one is free (Ben Chorin) but he who engages in Torah” (i.e., he who grapples with his/her set of ideals, responsibilities, and principled choices), teaches Pirkei Avot. Cherut and Chinam are two very different things.
There appears to be a line of thought among some young and misguided American Jews that if only the state of Israel didn’t exist, we would not have to contend with antisemitism anymore.
This was the apparent line of thinking of the comedian Sarah Silverman when she tweeted, in response to the recent violent attacks on Jews all over America: “Jews in the diaspora are not Israel!”
Considering that close to half the world’s Jews live in Israel, and a strong majority of the other half support it in some way, it simply is not the case that one can so neatly separate Jews from Israel.
But for the sake of argument, I’ll accept Silverman’s premise. Perhaps it is indeed the case that if only we’d stop peskily asserting our right to simply exist as a nation in our homeland, free from genocidal terror, that the Jews in the diaspora would be left alone. I suppose this is true of anything in life: if you stopped asserting your rights and needs, you’d likely be free from the need for confrontation. Your life would be free of cost and sacrifice. This would be a state of Chinam. But you wouldn’t have Cherut, freedom. And neither would the Jewish People, without the State of Israel.
“Today we are here, next year we will be in the Land of Israel; today we are slaves, next year we will be free (bnei chorin)”, begins the Maggid narrative of the haggadah. Being free is intertwined with our presence in Israel.
We always knew that our cherut in Israel would entail struggle, cost and sacrifice. Bamidbar 10:9: “And it shall be that when war comes to you in your Land against an aggressor who attacks you, you shall sound a long blast on the trumpets, that you may be remembered before the LORD your God and be delivered from your enemies.”
I imagine that those long trumpet blasts sounded just like the sirens that people in Ashdod and Ashkelon heard last week, giving them about 10 seconds to run to shelter from the rockets raining down. Thank God for the miracle of the Iron Dome.
I’ve been horrified and even traumatized by the antisemitic violence of the past week. One source of comfort I draw is in telling myself that if this is the price of standing up for our right to national liberation as a people, I’ll accept it. I’d rather have cherut than chinam.
And why are we so willing to pay that high cost, much of the world seems to wonder? Wouldn’t you rather live without confrontation, without sacrifice? The most concise answer I’ve seen of late was provided by a Vietnamese general, as quoted in a recent article on timesofisrael.com:
In the mid-1990s, two IDF major generals were coming to the end of their long and storied military careers…They applied for visas and made a special request to the Vietnamese authorities: to meet General Vo Nguyen Giap…When the Israelis rose to leave, Giap suddenly turned to the Palestinian issue. “Listen,’ he said, “the Palestinians are always coming here and saying to me, ‘You expelled the French and the Americans. How do we expel the Jews?’ The generals were intrigued. “And what do you tell them?”
“I tell them,’ Giap replied, ‘that the French went back to France and the Americans to America. But the Jews have nowhere to go. You will not expel them.”
He was not a righteous man, Giap, but it seems that he had some wisdom.
As we lament the cost and the sacrifice that is occasionally unjustly and outrageously exacted upon diaspora Jewry for supporting Israel, let’s also find space to celebrate the fact that that cost derives from our resolute and undeterred willingness to support the freedom of our brothers and sisters in Israel; and let’s continue to pray for the day, as we always have, that Jews and Arabs can both live in a sense of peace and liberation together in Eretz Yisrael. Amen.
Rabbi Grussgott is senior rabbi at K.I.
