"What Makes Us Free?"

READING

Theodore Zeldin’s An Intimate History of Humanity ranges far and wide across subjects, making original connections and dispensing information in quirky but never rambling narratives. Here are some of his thoughts about slavery.

“Humans became slaves in the past for three main reasons. The first was fear: they did not want to die, however much suffering life caused. They agreed to be despised by kings and knights and other addicts of violence, who believed that death in battle was the honour, and for whom to enslave humans, and to domesticate animals, was part of the same search for power and comfort. . . .

“Before twelve million Africans were kidnapped to be slaves in the New World, the main victims were the Slavs, who gave their name to slavery. Hunted by Romans, Christians, Muslims, Vikings and Tatars, they were exported all over the world. Slav came to mean foreigner; most religions taught that it was acceptable to enslave foreigners; British children who were exported as slaves – the girls fattened up to fetch a higher price – ended up as Slavs. More recently, when Slavs found themselves ruled by tyrants and saw no hope of escaping, some gloomily concluded that there must be something in the character of Slavs which dooms them to be enslaved. This is false reasoning, pretending that what has happened had to happen. No free person can believe that: it is a reasoning imposed on slaves to make them despair.

“Fear has nearly always been more powerful than the desire for freedom: humans are not born free.”

According to Zeldin, most of history chronicles the various forms of oppression people have experienced. He also covers what he calls “voluntary” slavery – when the choices are grim; and the slavery in ancient Rome – which meant anyone who actually worked. But fear and freedom are our topic for today.

Theodore Zeldin. An Intimate History of Humanity. New York: HarperCollins, 1994, pp. 7-8.

SERMON

Something happened in ancient Egypt, something so primal and timeless, that even though we have inherited it as the story of the Jewish Passover, its meaning crosses over religious identity. It reveals the best and the worst in humanity. It suggests cosmic struggle – not just between people and their oppressor – but within human nature itself.

The Passover story tells how the Israelites made a dangerous and epic escape from slavery. “As the story has come down to us,” according to Arthur Waskow, “the small Israelite clans which came to Egypt under royal protection first prospered and multiplied there. But a change in royal politics or family brought to power Pharaohs who feared and despised them. So they were subjected to forced labor on the Pharaoh’s city-building projects, and then to a concentrated attack on their high birth-rate: all their boy babies were to be killed at birth.”[i]

Resistance – first from the midwives, perhaps both Hebrew and Egyptian – led to outright rebellion. Moses, who himself had been saved by an Egyptian princess, challenged Pharaoh. With assistance from divine intervention, Moses invoked ten catastrophic plagues “that shattered the Egyptian tyranny and led his people into the wilderness of open spaces and choices,” as Waskow describes their liberation.[ii]

There is an “intensity of thought and feeling that accompanied this moment of revolutionary change,”[iii] Waskow notes, so much so that it lives on in the religious imagination to this day. It survives in the African American spiritual, “When Israel Was in Egypt’s Land,” which we sang earlier. It is the story of freedom anywhere. The Passover story teaches us that what makes us free is the strength to prevail over our fear. It is the act of risking everything we have. It is the hope to take on the unknown rather than to submit to oppression. It is the choice of death, quite possibly, over life.

French scholar Theodore Zeldin describes how threads of brutality and slavery have run through all the years of history. They are the warp and woof of the human condition. The pattern is not a pretty one.

“Addicts of violence” learn how to use fear to make other people do their bidding.[iv] People do not want to die, so they buckle under. Slaves are made – by fear, by bigotry, by economic pressure – but most of all, slaves are made by other people. The bullies of the world generate downward spirals of oppression, teaching those under their power that this is how the world is. And sad to say, it is.

Which is why the story of Passover has such intensity, such possibility. An oppressed group of people somehow escaped the bully. They suffered in their travels; they doubted themselves and their leaders; you couldn’t say they were happy, but they were free. This sort of outcome does not happen very often.

Theodore Zeldin points out after surveying the history of slavery, that in fact, “fear has nearly always been more powerful than the desire for freedom.”[v] That is an observation about humanity – about us. We are slaves to fear. Even when we have no master.

Zeldin adds another observation that I find even more difficult to accept. “Humans are not born free,”[vi] he writes. We are born afraid. “There was slavery, first of all,” Zeldin concludes, “because those who wished to be left alone could not keep out of the way of those who enjoyed violence. The violent have been victorious for most of history because they kindled the fear with which everyone is born.”[vii]

It’s not an optimistic view of the world. But when you look around, how else do you explain people’s actions? How many times – how many times a day – in the steady flow of global information do we witness the suffering caused by human brutality? Not just brutality inflicted on other humans, but on animals, on the earth itself. It’s numbing, all we could know.

The story of Passover may not mean much to those of us who are simply too overwhelmed to think about our world today. People are supposed to be free – that’s a given. It’s our right. But it’s not the way the world is. And it takes tremendous courage to change it.

Which is why the Passover story can speak to all people. Yes, it is very hard to be free. It asks more of ourselves than we sometimes have to give. I was sick with a bad cold all week and indulged myself a little with my reading, including a story in a recent issue of The New Yorker. The story was titled “The House Behind a Weeping Cherry,” by Ha Jin, a Chinese-American writer. Young Chinese immigrants board together in a house in New York, working off the cost of their illegal steerage to this country in various forms of servitude. Whatever money they make they give to their boss in New York or to their families in China. If they rebel or try to change the terms of their employment, someone will hurt their people back home. They are fearful and they are trapped.

Two of the young people, a prostitute and a sweatshop worker, slowly discover that they care for each other. They summon up their courage, go to the boss and ask if they can buy their freedom. He refuses and makes ominous threats.

They realize that they have only one choice: to leave everything behind and escape. Their families will never know where they went, for that knowledge would endanger everyone. The young man reasons, “To my family, I would be as good as dead. In this place, we had no choice but to take loss as necessity.”[viii]

Another Passover story. Freedom comes at great cost – and only with great courage. Loss is part of the deal. But the image of these two young people: walking away from exploitation by everyone they knew, and still having each other; moving toward the future “without looking back,”[ix] and finding in their love for each other the strength to do this superhuman feat; is how freedom looks today.

As Theodore Zeldin reminds us, slavery always seems to be with us, as long as there is fear and people willing to use others. Not everyone will have the courage or opportunity or willingness to leave everything behind to win freedom the way Ha Jin’s young people did. And what happens next for them, who have nothing except each other? Are they free? Are we?

The Passover story has retained its singular power because it teaches that winning freedom takes tremendous determination and risk, and that it is almost impossible to do alone. The Israelite clan that fled Egypt was a network of people, related by blood and adversity, vision and strength, enough so that if one faltered or complained, someone else could be strong for them.

The work of freedom is done by people working together. Helping each other be strong. Keeping the story alive so that others may hear it. And asking more of ourselves than we may think we have to give. Though our fear is great, what we can do together is even greater; and that, this Passover, is why freedom is so precious and so rare.

______________
[i] Arthur Waskow. "Seasons of Our Joy." Boston: Beacon Press, 1982, p. 134.

[ii] Ibid., p. 134.

[iii] Ibid., p. 134.

[iv] Theodore Zeldin. "An Intimate History of Humanity." New York: HarperCollins, 1994, pp. 7.

[v] Ibid., p. 8.

[vi] Ibid., p. 8.

[vii] Ibid., p. 8.

[viii] Ha Jin. “The House Behind a Weeping Cherry,” in "The New Yorker," April 7, 2008, p. 75.

[ix] Ibid., p. 75.