Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] The exodus from Egypt is the central theme of the entire Torah.
[00:00:08] But what God tells the Jews after he frees them from slavery is quite puzzling.
[00:00:14] He says that since he liberated them, now they have to be his servants. It sounds like a gangster who defeats a rival mafia group and then tells their captives, I'm liberating you, but since I'm the one who feed you now, you have to be my servants. What kind of liberation is this?
[00:00:36] Slavery takes away a person's freedom. But the problem that many people have with religion is that it takes away people's freedom.
[00:00:47] And here God directly says that he considers us to be his slaves.
[00:00:54] So it turns out that when we were leaving Egypt, we simply exchanged one bondage for another. We switched masters.
[00:01:03] It seems to be a kind of unsuccessful attempt at liberation.
[00:01:09] The question really is, what is freedom? People usually say that a free man is the one who does what he wants.
[00:01:15] But from ancient Greek to modern philosophers, including Immanuel Kant, Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin, people wondered, if a free man is the one who does what he wants, then it has to be that the freest person in the world is a drug addict who has his drugs. He wants nothing but his drugs, and he has it.
[00:01:38] A German philosopher, Schopenhauer, wrote that if this definition of freedom is correct, then when educating our children and encouraging them to strive higher, we rob them of their freedoms.
[00:01:54] Because if people know more and desire more, then at the end, they will probably achieve a smaller percentage of what they think is possible.
[00:02:07] So we should keep our children ignorant, and then they will grow up to be the most liberated people in the world.
[00:02:15] That's what it turns out.
[00:02:18] According to Judaism, a free person is not the one who does what he wants, but the one who does what he wants to want.
[00:02:29] An addict wants drugs, but ask him when he sobers up if he wants to want his drugs. If he says no, then he's not a free person. He is enslaved by his desires.
[00:02:44] The Torah says that sinners are full of regrets. But why? They always did what they wanted.
[00:02:51] Yes, they did what they wanted, but now they regret what they wanted.
[00:02:56] A Jewish woman who lived near a synagogue told me that she sees people walking to the synagogue on Saturdays. I envy them so much, she said.
[00:03:10] I would love to go to the synagogue as they do, but I just don't feel an inner desire for it.
[00:03:18] She did not know that when I wake up early in the morning to go to a synagogue, I also don't have any inner desire to get out of my bed. I have only one inner desire to roll over to the other side.
[00:03:34] A person who was does what he wants to want is free.
[00:03:41] What he wants at that moment is irrelevant to our conversation about freedom. This is not a factor in the determination of how free he is. What important is only what he wants to want.
[00:03:55] If a person obeys what others want, he is a slave.
[00:04:01] If a person obeys what he wants, he is also a slave.
[00:04:06] He is enslaved by his desires. When God gave us his commandments as instructions for our lives, he gave us a chance to be liberated from both forms of slavery, from the slavery of other people's desires, and from the slavery of our own desires.
