First Parish Unitarian Universalist"Circle Round for Freedom"
Sermon by the Rev. Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
April 8, 2001
Like Christians and Muslims, Jews are a "people of the book." More so than the other two, one of the beauties of Judaism is that the Book is ever open to interpretation. True, there is at the center the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. But, it is surrounded by circles of interpretation, or as it is called "midrash"-from the Mishnah of second century (C.E. ) rabbis, the Gemara completed by the fifth to comprise, with the Mishnah, the Talmud, through the Middle Ages to the present, each informed but not restricted by the earlier circles of midrash.
I experienced this concentric assemblage of interpretation at the last Canton Clergy meeting. Rabbi Dan Judson of Temple Beth David led us in a study of the Torah text for the upcoming Shabbat service. First we read, one of us reading aloud, the passage in question. Dan focused our attention on one particular reference that seemed out of place or odd. What might it mean? Then we read, one reading aloud, pieces of midrash Dan had assembled, two pages of short paragraphs quoted from various and conflicting commentaries, many of them from the Middle Ages, several contemporary.
The celebration of Passover, or Pesach, is similar. Though the structure of its celebration can be found in the second century Mishnah, the intent was and is that the celebrants will interpret the Exodus story, finding its meaning for their own lives. And, indeed, people have.
Down through the centuries since, the order, the Seder, of the Pesach meal has been maintained, but Jews have re-written the Haggadah-the telling of Passover-to express their own Exodus stories, their own bondages, their own struggles for freedom. This afternoon, in our Parish Hall, we will celebrate Passover with a Seder and the Haggadah has been adapted by UU's of Jewish background, to have meaning for us today.
I can remember my first Seder somewhat hazily. It must have been 1971 or 1972. College friends and I had traveled from central Ohio to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for a huge anti-war demonstration. The weather was great. People had assembled from all over. It was Passover, about which I knew very little. A peace and freedom Seder had been organized. My friends and I went, not knowing what to expect.
Looking back, it must have been a very free version-I seem to recall it was held in a church! And there was no meal, no food-probably because they wouldn't have known how many people to expect and couldn't possibly have fed everybody who came, never mind seat everyone at a table with appropriate china and enough matzah, maror, and charoset to go around. But, what I remember is how inspired I was by the way the Jewish students who led the seder found meaning and encouragement for the anti-war effort in the ancient story of the Israelites exodus from Egypt.
Another modern adaptation of Passover I enjoy stems from a now well-known story. Not long ago a young woman was told by a traditional Jew who opposed feminism that "a woman would become a Rabbi the day an orange would be found on the seder plate." As you may know, the Seder plate traditionally displays a roasted egg, parsley, horseradish, a shank bone (or for vegetarians a beet) and charoset (a ground mixture of nuts, apples or raisins, and a bit of wine), and.no orange! But, these days, in celebration of the fact that women can now be Rabbis, many Jews put an orange on the Seder plate as a sign of their commitment to equality between men and women.
According to Rabbi Judson out on Randolph Street, a similar custom has developed in some Jewish households, of putting a glass of water on the table in honor of Miriam as a feminist counterpoint to Elijah's cup.
So, we see that Passover works just like Arthur Waskow said in the first reading this morning, the story of Moses leading "his people into the wilderness of open space and choices gave rise to a festival intended both to memorialize and to re-enact the story-to keep it ever-fresh as a resource for renewal of the struggle to be free." (Seasons of Our Joy, p. 134).
Even today we have our struggles to be free. As individuals we do. As a religious community, as a nation, as people on the earth, we have struggles to be free. We need stories, like the Passover story, as resources for renewal in those struggles to be free.
What is the freedom we seek, you seek, this day? Is it freedom from something? freedom of something? Or freedom to, freedom to do or be something?
In the Babylonian Talmud, there is a debate between two colleagues, Rav and Samuel, on the question, "What is the essential transformation one should undergo through the seder experience?" Samuel teaches that its essence is political-participants should experience the move from slavery to freedom. But, Rav argues that the key experience is a spiritual transformation-to live through the contrast of the idolatry of [the] ancestors and the religious liberation of exodus.that Jews celebrate. (Rabbi Irving Greenberg, The Jewish Way, p. 53).
I think the seder is meant to provide both experiences. Our spiritual liberation and our political liberation are intensely intertwined.
For example, in the "Weaving of the Fabric of Diversity" class that ended a week and a half ago, we explored different kinds of oppressions-discrimination based on age, ability, race, class, and sexual identity. We uncovered how they intersect and overlap. In regard to each one, we identified political and institutional ramifications of the oppression. But we also could see individual and spiritual ramifications, for both the dominant and the oppressed groups.
We saw how prejudice based on racial differences and prejudice against homosexuality, to give two examples, are internalized by just about everyone in the society, whether one is in an oppressed group or a dominant group, so that the struggle to be free is both a political struggle for justice and an internal struggle for personal liberation. Neither one, alone, is enough.
Back in the days that orange-on-the-seder-plate story originated, there was a slogan that still rings true for me today, though I hear in it more complexity than I did back then. "The personal is political."
So what about the cancer survivor Helene in her fuchsia dress and four inch heels?!! (the second reading, from "The Long Way Home" by Rachel Naomi Remen, MD in her Kitchen Table Wisdom, pp. 110-113) Her exodus story is a story of freedom from perfectionism, certainly a personal and spiritual transformation! Yet, I even see a political connection there (though you're entitled to think I'm stretching it). It's this: anybody who has, or once had or was, a pre-adolescent daughter is well aware of the ways in which our culture presents and reinforces Helene's ideal of the perfect woman. So perhaps Helene took it to the extreme, but so do the increasing number of anorexic girls who think they are too fat and therefore do not eat.
In this case, as in so many, the struggle to be free requires a personal transformation. But, it also requires societal transformation, so that when the inevitable relapses occur there are positive, wholesome external messages that reinforce the new internal sense of self struggling to be free. Helene said it helped her to remember the look of love in her fianc‚'s eyes on the day of the earthquake, but she'll have to cancel most of her magazine subscriptions and turn off her television if she wants to shut out the images that may tempt her back into her old perfectionist ways!
The wise physician who told Helene's story observes, "Wholeness is never lost, it is only forgotten. Integrity rarely means that we need to add something to ourselves: it is more an undoing than a doing, a freeing ourselves from beliefs we have about who we are and ways we have been persuaded to 'fix' ourselves.[in order to] know who we genuinely are. Even after many years of seeing, thinking, and living one way, we are able to reach past all that to claim our integrity and live in a way we may never have expected to live. Being with people at such times is like watching them pat their pockets, trying to remember where they have put their soul.
.Often in reclaiming the freedom to be who we are," she writes, "we remember some basic human quality, an unsuspected capacity for love or compassion or some other part of our common birthright as human beings. What we find is almost always a surprise but it is also familiar; like something we have put in the back of a drawer long ago, once we see it we know it as our own." (pp. 108-109)
What is the freedom we seek, you seek, this day? Is it freedom from something? freedom of something? Or freedom to, freedom to do or be something?
My colleague up in Burlington, VT, UU minister Gary Kowalski muses on the Passover story this way. "In the book of Exodus, Moses set out to liberate the children of Israel, but most of them didn't want to be freed. Many preferred the security of Egypt to the risks of a race across the Sinai desert.
"I suppose the same is true today. We like our addictions. We cherish our prejudices and parochialisms. We hold onto outworn ideas and ineffective ways of coping because they seem safe and familiar. We confine and imprison ourselves in unhealthy relationships, in self-defeating habits, in compulsive consumerism, in fixations with food and body image, in authoritarian religious systems, in dependent attitudes and behaviors, in forms of inappropriate guilt, in unwarranted anxieties and unfounded fears.
This is not to suggest that the Pharaoh is not real. External constraints do exist. But the biggest obstacles to seizing control of our own destiny are often internal. Not even a Moses can lead us to freedom unless we are willing to take the first step." (Green Mountain Spring and Other Leaps of Faith, p. )
Is there a first step you are longing to take? I invite you into a time of silent meditation on these questions, a longer time than our usual shared silence. What freedom do we, do you, struggle for? Is it freedom from something? freedom of something? Or freedom to, freedom to do or be something? Is it a public, political freedom or a personal, spiritual freedom, or both?
Long pause.
May our longings for freedom never be drowned out by the cares and pressures of these days, this world. May the cry for freedom stir the Moses in each of us to lead and not turn back. Even when the naysayers inside or around us prefer the safety of known bondage to the unknowns of the Promised Land, even when we can see that the transformation we seek will not happen in our own lifetimes.even then, especially then, may we find within and around us the resources for renewal for our struggle to be free. May we find such resources in the Passover story, in each others stories, and in the circle of community we have nourished here among us.
For, as my friend and colleague Mary Harrington has written, "This is where faith comes in, for me. Faith and trust that no matter what, it's worth it to do the right thing, that we will find love and support on the way if we look for it and let it in, and that whatever good we set in motion or join hands with will go on long after we have returned to dust."
So may it be.
Amen.