“Between a rock and a hard place,” Rabbi Elaine Zecher’s Shabbat Awakenings
January 24, 2025 | 24 Tevet 5785
Welcome to Shabbat Awakenings, a reflection as we move toward Shabbat. You can listen to it as a podcast here.
Abraham Lincoln knew about freedom and liberty and the perilous thin line on which they had to balance. In 1858 (four years after the founding of Temple Israel of Boston), he offered this insightful argument in his debate with Stephen Douglas in their pursuit of an Illinois Senate seat.
“What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, our army and our navy. These are not our reliance against tyranny. All of these may be turned against us without making us weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is the love of liberty which God has planted in us. Our defense is in the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men [sic], in all lands everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.”
The Israelite people, enslaved by a cruel and self-centered Pharaoh, also knew something about the lack of liberty and independence. Their lives became impossibly bound to their servitude. When the portion, “Vaera,” opens God spoke to Moses invoking the covenant with the ancestors and the assurance of redemption “with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary chastisements.” (Exodus 6:6)
Moses had tried to convey God’s promise that they could be delivered out of their misery. As Exodus 6:9 states:
“So Moses told this to the Israelites but they did not listen to him because their spirit was broken and because the labor was harsh.”
Their inability to even imagine they could have hope or liberty resulted from both a physical and spiritual reason. Immobilized by crushed spirits and brutal bodily exertion, the Israelites slaves were between a spiritual rock and a physical hard place.
Had they become their own obstacle to liberation by what seemed like a willingness to maintain a painful status quo than risking change for potential freedom? As we already know from telling and retelling this narrative each year in the Torah cycle and at each seder table, it would not be an easy process and it would take Moses’ leadership to see freedom where his people could only see slavery and God’s outstretched arm and extraordinary chastisements to disentangle themselves from the life of bondage.
In Lincoln’s debate, he looked toward the south and recognized that the path to end slavery would take the engagement of the citizens to enact the full appreciation of liberty and freedom while they still had it. His language was one of reaching out to engage while also offering an extraordinary chastisement of what they could lose.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has noted
“Freedom is less a gift than an achievement. Even a Pharaoh, the most powerful man in the ancient world, could lose it. Even a nation of slaves could, with the help of God, acquire it. Never take freedom for granted. It needs a hundred small acts of self-control daily, which is what, [mitzvot, sacred obligations of ritual and ethics], are all about. Freedom is a muscle that needs to be exercised: use it or lose it.” (Judaism’s Life Changing Ideas, pg 75.)
In every generation we can feel the cruel crush of our spirits in the face of what challenges us while we also face the risks to overcome it. We, like the ancient Israelites, do so as part of a people which can strengthen our resolve to find a way forward from under a rock and out from a hard place.
Shabbat Shalom שבת שלום
I welcome your thoughts and reflections here.

Rabbi Elaine Zecher