Translated from Hebrew by S. NAthan

l'ilui nishmat Esther bat mordechai

Sucot “IN SUCAS, I HOUSED B’NEI YISRAEL.” It was but a moment ago that B’nei Yisrael were leaving the house of bondage, and now they are already passing over to the other extreme – to the desert, to the vast spaces of the wilderness, endless expanses of heavens, with no earth, no shade, no home, and no shelter.
    Human beings know three conditions of existence: A prison, a home, and homelessness. One might follow a track that weaves its way like a crimson thread through the beads of most of the events of human history: The incessant and tireless efforts at liberation from oppressive frameworks, to break the walls and go forth into the vast space, into freedom.
    Attempts at liberation today as well constitute a topic for philosophers, who seek a way out, and for hallucinators who believe there is a way out, and for artists who delve deeply into the effort at liberation, and for psychologists who attempt to persuade us that the way out is to be found inside the walls.
    It is all a matter of point of view, or of illusion. The proof is that a life prisoner feels that a homeless person is in an enviable position, while a homeless person envies the roof over his head and the regular meals that are given the prisoner: It is a dream come true, a life free of the worries over existence, which regularly embitter the life of the homeless person.
    The homeless person prefers to ignore the no-free-choice aspect of the prisoner’s life. Everything is given to him, if in limited fashion, but with no consideration for his opinion or taste, whether in clothing or in food, which are forced upon him with no consideration for his personal needs.
    Choiceless versus homeless. Which is preferable? This question remains open, because both of these are situations lacking in consideration for the needs of existence. The prisoner is placed in a situation of Belonging, severed from Freedom, while the homeless person suffers from an exclusive Freedom that has no Belonging. The former is choked by the oppression of humiliation, while the latter is paralyzed by fear of the unknown.
    A no-man’s land awaits, lurking in ambush for the escaping prisoner, opening its arms, concealing its fangs, gloating over its prey.
    An investigation into the substance of these emotions points to a greater destructiveness and danger in the emotion of fear than in the oppression of humiliation. Due to our compulsive, continuous preoccupation with the attempt at liberation, toward the vast spaces of freedom – a preoccupation that has become an inertia of day-to-day routine – our attention is not sufficiently alert to the all-encompassing, increasingly invasive manifestation of homeless people, for well over a generation.
    This phenomenon is expressed in culture as well as in day-to-day living. In the public as well as in the individual. In science as well as in art. In lifestyles and in the family unit.
    Religions are perceived to be frameworks strangling every attempt at escape from prison. Morality too seems to be a whip in the hands of the ruling power. The law itself is a threat to the anarchist, who is perceived to be a daring hero, the representative of freedom.
    Leftism has adopted wantonness, and lack of values, and all that is anti-moral and lacking in consideration for the individual’s human needs. Robing themselves with the mantle of the law and with the crown of morality, they pushed traditional law and morality into the ruins of the much-maligned world of frameworks. Thus did lawlessness become the law, and thus did moral corruption – which jeers at sensitive, anti-egotistical moral considerations – present morality as a bubble of illusion, long burst and gone.
    It was a movement preaching wantonness for its own sake, shabby clothing as a value in its own right. Whoever believed in personal and social order, and in responsibility towards one’s family and towards one’s fellow human being, never realized and never noticed that heartless egoism was winning the day. Rather, foe was perceived as friend: Psychology, which majored in confusing priorities, celebrated its victory, offering a pseudo-scientific and pseudo-philosophical basis for the Post-Modern wantonness.
    Everything was absorbed into this no man’s land. Personal dignity, authority, and responsibility were turned into rusting wrecks. “Youths ruled over us, and old men are following them,” in a desperate attempt not to lag behind the freed prisoners.
    After all, who would dare to dispute progress, liberatd from every yoke and every fence? Such is modern art and such is music, which has become a cacaphony that jars the ears with a rhythm that is not even sound. It is a dance of drugged demons, risen from hades, leaping at the forefront “atop every hill and beneath every greening tree.”
    The fear of the homeless is a fear that hates silence and loves noise. Through noise, the individual can be forgotten – devoured – in the mighty whirlpool, mighty in quantity and dizzying in madness, and then one’s conscience cannot distress one, with regard to one’s fellow, who becomes a mere anonymous other.
    This expresses the hypocritical pretenses of the egoist disguised as liberal, who adopts an ideal for himself that is empty of responsibility toward the other: There is another whose needs are known to him, and those needs require an immediate, localized response. Yet he prefers the idea, behind which lies no commitment that might require any immediate practical action. Why get carried away?
    Yet if we pause a moment in our frenzied rush, and breathe deeply, we suddenly notice that there a most central phase that characterizes the Jewish people, and it too merges undisputed with the great rhythm of freedom, and it is none other than the exodus from Egypt in all its glory, from which God’s people marched forth from servitude to freedom, straight ahead to the barren desert, land of wilderness, den of snakes and scorpions, a blazing sun, and endless, trackless vistas.
    “That your generations know that in Sucas, I housed B’nei Yisrael.”