The journey to freedom involves dismantling a structure based on fears, suppression and lack of empathy and building with others one based on love, embrace and an awareness of the multi-faceted nature of life. View the study sheet here. Watch the recording here.
In America we easily give voice to words like “freedom” and “liberty.” Embedded in the very document proclaiming the founding of the United States as a sovereign nation is the notion that each of us is “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” More than ten years before the Declaration of Independence was written a group of American colonists formed a grass-roots clandestine organization to confront and disrupt unjust English rule: the Sons of Liberty, led by Sam Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere and others who risked life and fortune.
However, by the end of the 18th century there were in the Western world two contending notions of freedom. One found expression through the French Revolution. This first notion was a confidence in the capacity of human beings through the exercise of reason to destroy one way of life and to construct another more enlightened and beneficent one.
The second notion arose in England and gained hold in the American colonies. It was based on a cautious view of human nature and on the need to have structures that could restrain human nature’s more destructive tendencies. The founding designers of American governance were not advocates of a direct democracy. They constructed a system of indirect democracy with checks and balances.
The American Revolution turned on its head the idea that sovereignty, and the source of liberty, lies at the top: “In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example of charters of power granted by liberty” (James Madison). But the goal of the American Revolution was not unfettered individual freedom. It was the release of inherent individual dignity in order to promote the general welfare.
The Book of Exodus opened with a grand tale of freedom from slavery and oppression. It closes with a description of a thickly layered, multi-dimensional structure, the Mishkan. It is through this structure that the Israelites will experience the presence of God, the source of their freedom. This is what the Israelites are to carry with them on their journey. Form and structure are foundational to the Jewish notion of freedom.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. (PST) Thursday March 3 as we explore structure and freedom.
