Better Days, and Becoming Free

"Each of us is attached to the eternal and transcendent. If we would only let go of our self-imposed guardrails, we'd find what we previously imagined unattainable — dropped neatly at our doorstep."

By Andrew Rashkow

The darkness that descended upon Egypt during the penultimate plague remains impenetrable in large part still today. What else could explain the widespread lack of awareness regarding the sudden and calamitous demise of 80 percent of the entire world’s Jewry? 

The Torah conveys, by means of an uncommon expression, that only one-fifth of the Jews who were enslaved in Egypt actually merited leaving during the Exodus. The rest perished and were buried during the atramentous moments when the Egyptians stood frozen in place, unable to move.

Our sages identify the precise line of demarcation that determined who among us emerged and who succumbed. After more than two centuries of Egyptian exile, when nearly the entire Jewish nation had plummeted to the lowest of spiritual levels, the only vital difference remaining that separated those who would eventually be redeemed was a readiness and willingness to accept the calling to a higher destiny.

How could anyone refuse?

The answer is the same reason as to why someone would choose not to pray: They have convinced themselves that they don’t believe. Whether it’s G-d’s existence or concern or involvement they question, the opportunity to beseech our Creator for our various and plentiful needs seems futile or frivolous at best. While this perspective may be understandable, it unfortunately reduces the future to the finite fringe of man’s imagination, beyond which outcomes that cannot be conceived are summarily dismissed, such as life of true freedom after centuries of abject servitude.

But we who have seen history unfold in ways that defy the pundits’ predictions and the historians’ explanations must acknowledge that facts are a stubborn thing with which we must reckon.

We are impossible — and yet we are here.  We are despised, yet still we persist.  We can’t understand the lies but we hide too easily from the truth.  We bear a message, willingly or unwillingly, that ultimately cannot be ignored. 

Still facing an opposition which is as boisterous and unrelenting as it is myopic and misdirected, all might seem hopeless — if hope were a finite commodity.  Thankfully, we draw from an endless reservoir of potential which emerges from the only unlimited resource, G-d.  

Whether we recognize it or not, each one of us is attached to the eternal and transcendent. If we would only let go of our self-imposed guardrails, we would find what we previously imagined to be unattainable, dropped neatly at our doorstep.

This is the decision that rests with each one of us. We live, perched on a precariously thin, razor sharp edge known as “now.”  In that tiny, fleeting gap between fading memory and future possibility, we choose what we believe in each moment, with the results amounting to who we are. A poem that illuminates this critical juncture was penned by the great Talmudic sage Avraham Ibn Ezra in the 11^th century:

 העבר אין, העתיד עדיין, ההווה כהרף עין

The past is gone.

The future does not yet exist.

The present passes by like the blink of eye.

Our decisions are influenced in large part on how far ahead we train our focus. This is why candy is so irresistible to children since the dentist’s chair remains a remote abstraction while the sticky, sweet delight enticing them is right in their plain sight. As we mature, we are constantly recalibrating the far end of our scope to incorporate increasingly further time horizons.  

When asked a week before his death about his future plans, the world famous director of The Ten Commandments, Cecil B. DeMille responded: “Another picture, I imagine… or, perhaps, another world.”  

It is all merely a matter of perspective.

ANDREW RASHKOW is the CEO of Imbibe, Co-founder of Heaven’s Door Spirits, and a Jerusalem-based Teacher and Adviser.

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