Freedom is on my mind, as it should be at this time of year, but it's pretty hard to be connected to the news lately, any news, and not sense that 'freedom' has pretty much become a cliché. A word we lightly throw around when we need it, when it suits our ends, and all too often to galvanize our own rigid dogmas; it has become a weapon to protect our own spiritual and material excesses. It is happening now in Indiana and in Georgia, where freedom apparently means possessing the unfettered power to discriminate behind the veil of a dangerous interpretation of religious liberty.
I crave something more of freedom, though. We all should.
I'd like to share three transformative and interconnected teachings I have received in the past couple of months that I hope lift up something meaningful for me - and by extension, you - regarding Passover and its pervasive freedom message.
1) I recently helped organize a seminar for rabbinical students at Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, an institution that provides hope, training, and support to formerly gang-involved and previously incarcerated men and women. My students had the privilege of hearing from my close friend Jose Osuna, transparently share his personal story of redemption after having spent much of his life in and out of the prison-industrial complex. He is a remarkable community leader and current employee of Homeboy Industries, who devotes his (long) days to helping others with similar backgrounds escape the streets, as well as their felony convictions. His is a life dedicated to second chances and possibility. After his presentation we asked him quite candidly how he manages to see each person who walks through his office door with such deep love and compassion, and without judgement. He is, of course, keenly aware that each human who seeks his expertise and council is a living soul that carries the trauma of a past most of us couldn't imagine.
His answer was simple and will never leave my heart: "I remind myself to consider each encounter from God's perspective. In other words, do your best to look at her in exactly the way you think God looks at her, and in exactly the way you'd like God to look at you".
Sacred, not awkward, silence followed. When the air returned to the room each of us came to terms with the depth of Jose's teaching. Using God's eyes certainly does not mean we simply erase somebody's past and pretend it didn't happen. It's actually just the opposite. Jose taught us that we should look at each individual with the fullness of their history, awful mistakes included, and to see them in the now, and more importantly, to let them know we see them for their potential to transcend that past for a bigger future; for their best possible future. The task is to help them understand that their emotional escape from the street's clutches, or from a justice system that undeniably profits off their backs, offers a freedom they could never have imagined.
Dr. Erich Fromm described this freedom so clearly almost 50 years ago:
"But freedom is not only from, but also freedom to; freedom to participate actively and responsibly in all decisions concerning the citizen, freedom to develop the individual's human potential to the fullest possible degree."
(On Disobedience, 69)
2) I imagine that in some way Jose received this teaching from his mentor and founder of Homeboy Industries, Father Gregory Boyle. In Father G's memoir, Tattoos On The Heart (an essential read for everyone, ever), he tells a story of a heroin addict, a gang member, street person, and occasional prostitute, named Carmen. One Saturday morning while feeling pressed to get from leading mass in the probation camps to an afternoon baptism, he stopped in his office to try and quickly clear some busy work off of his desk, a rarity in his line of work. Just as he was about to begin to utilize as best he could the short 30 minutes, Carmen defiantly barges in, sits across from him, and says:
"I went to Catholic school all my life. Fact, I graduated from high school even. Fact, right after graduation, is when I started to use heroin." Carmen enters some kind of trance at this point, and her speech slows to deliberate and halting: "And I ... have been trying to stop ... since ... the moment I began."
Then I watch as Carmen tilts her head back until it meets the wall. She stares at the ceiling, and in an instant her eyes become these two ponds, water rising to meet their edges, swollen banks, spilling over. Then, for the first time really, she looks at me, and straightens.
"I ... am ... a ... disgrace."
Suddenly, her shame meets mine. For when Carmen walked through that door, I had mistaken her for an interruption."
(Tattoos, 41-42)
And in that moment they were both released from slavery and marched together toward freedom: A freedom that asks us to simply recognize that if God created each of us - or if each of us is created in God's image - we have infinitely and qualitatively more in common with each other than that which differentiates us. Purposefully denying this truth in words, practice, or presence only attempts to make God small. And God can't be made small.
3) My mentor, Rabbi Brad Artson, taught me a similar lesson a few months back. I had asked him how he so honestly and intensely engages with each and every person who seeks him out, especially when he might prefer to hide, as we all sometimes do. It is not hard to intellectually grasp that each and every person who seeks us out is worthy of our time. But we also face the reality that we are human and sometimes anticipate encounters we'd rather just avoid. He answered me: "I ask myself, if I were that person's father, what would I see in them right now - " Not wholly pure, not at all uncomplicated, but with a familial love that stands above and beyond our immediate biases.
I now realize that if I can harness these three teachings, allow them to fully permeate my heart, I can perhaps give people what they desire and deserve: simply to be seen as the holy, sacred vessels they are. To cultivate moments in which both seer and seen become momentarily unbound from what was and feel the promise of what can be.
This year I want to enter Passover with a renewed sense of freedom. I now understand that this freedom depends not only on what I see when I look at those who seek me out, but whether or not they truly feel seen by me.
Hag Sameach.