Faith and Freedom

A friend of mine lived in Bombay (Mumbai) for a few years. He was in charge of security for Israel's embassy and consulates and El Al in India, and one of the perks of the job was a luxury flat on an Indian Ocean beachfront. His neighbors in this building were Indian millionaires and billionaires that lived lifestyles extravagant even by western standards. And the ironic thing was, he said, that just a couple of blocks over are literally millions in abject poverty.




I asked him if they had security personnel to keep the poor with nothing to lose from storming the homes of the rich. No, he said. As poor as they are, the people on the street live and die on the streets they were born on because they believe that you are born into a certain caste of society and nothing you do can free you from who you are. According to their religion they cannot change their fate. The rich don't need an army to protect them, because the masses are slaves to their beliefs. .

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Slavery is a state of mind. Whips and slave drivers are never enough to keep free people in bondage. Human beings will fight for freedom so long as liberty is in their spirit, but once they believe that they are slaves, they are.

The emancipation of slaves in the South during the Civil War didn't free African Americans. Like Huckleberry Finn's Jim, they continued to act like slaves, to be slaves, when in fact they had been liberated, because their minds were in bondage. They served new masters - intimidation, terror and exploitation - for more than a hundred years until a man named Martin Luther King persuaded them to claim their freedom.

Moses didn't go down to Egypt to deal with Pharaoh. His real job was to sell freedom to the Hebrew people, but why should they buy it? Pharaoh was so convincing with his pyramids and soldiers and spears. That's what he tried to tell God at the burning bush. "Who will believe me?"

Moses wasn't in Egypt to negotiate and the ten plagues weren't meant to get permission to leave. The Israelites weren't in iron chains. They could have picked up and left at any moment. Moses' job was to inspire belief; God's wonders were object lessons, props to demonstrate a message.

Once Israel believed, all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't enslave them again. It wasn't miracles, it wasn't Moses, that freed them. It was faith.

What is Passover all about? Why do we have to drag up memories of Egypt? The minute we forget, we will be slaves again. If we remember, we will believe. And so long as we believe, we are free.
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