Nobody's God and my Ongoing Exodus

All those commandments! In Judaism, no fewer than 613 line up to be responded to one way or another. For, as all of us know, "No" is an answer, too.

Even the famous first ten are a hefty challenge. When I most feel that, I remind myself of how God sets them--and us--up, right at the outset, with a not-especially-subtle reminder that He earned the right to issue them by leading us out of Egypt.

(When I picture that event, I sometimes imagine a whole lot of folks kicking and screaming internally. After all, what a slave knows is slavery, and it is a bleak fact of human nature that most of us–nearly all of us--prefer the known, however grim, to the unknown. Isn’t that why so many folks in unhappy marriages stay married?)

Yet the language we use, when we talk about the exodus from Egypt, is that, in bringing us out of Egypt, God made free men of slaves. I see that famous trek through a dry path in the Sea of Reeds as only the first steps to our freedom.

Bigger steps toward freedom, it seems to me, are the commandments. I realize that there are people who see any commandment, let alone half a dozen hundred of them, as diminishing our freedom. But in my opinion the end result of the commandments is to offer us 613 chances to be truly free people. Together, the commandments are like a mikvah, a ritual bath, cleansing us of our sand-clogged nature.

A memory from years ago used a diffrent image that, to me, says much the same thing. It appeared in an interview in Time magazine with Jean Kerr, then at the height of her playwrighting fame. I remember the exact words of neither the question nor of Kerr's answer, but the exchange has stayed with me. Kerr was asked something like: How can as brilliant a woman as you possibly be a serious Roman Catholic? The gist of her response: Within that box, I am totally free. To her, the rigorous teachings of the Church
formed the requisite box within which freedom lay.

I believe that. Without the strictures of Catholicism or the commandments central to Judaism, there is no freedom. Only an illusion of freedom, closer to chaos than to the real thing.

That’s why I am very thankful for God’s commandments. For the currently feasible ones I obey with a whole heart and mind, which have given me more than a taste of freedom. And, also, for the ones I continue to wrestle with, in hopes of surrendering yet another inch of my will and thereby finding still more abundant freedom.