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I doubt that any concept has greater currency among Americans than “freedom” and its synonym, “liberty.” It is prominent in the Pledge of Allegiance, which ensures justice and liberty for all; in the Star Spangled Banner, which characterizes the United States as a “land of the free and home of the brave”; and in the words of practically every politician, as they pay lip service to the concept while vying for public office or promoting legislation.
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Being in the tomb doesn’t mean there is an absence of life, but, rather, the dominance of death.
I see the tomb present in so many of our lives all the time. The longing to be partnered and have children as a still single 35 year old can consume us, suck all the air out of the room. And we are obsessed, all other lights are shut out, we are, in other words, “entombed.”
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I’ve attended the circus exactly three times in my life—twice as a child and once as an adult. The first two were the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey circus (under the big-top, the “Greatest Show on Earth”) and the third was Cirque de Soleil, held in an auditorium theater.
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This year what has taken hold of me about Passover is not so much the story itself, but the very fact that the story is reliably told and retold, generation after generation, at the family Seder. The story is a fundamental part of the language of a people. It provides the basis for religious identity, and helps to preserve the community, sustaining an enduring culture and tradition.
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In the early 1990s I interned in the Church of the United Community, a tiny storefront congregation in the Marcus Garvey Center in Roxbury, Massachusetts, triple yoked between the United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, and Unitarian Universalists.
Many in the congregation had been through drug treatment. More had been to jail, at a time when crack cocaine was plentiful and arrests of young black men more plentiful still. Many had contracted “the virus,” as AIDS was called there.
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The Passover story is, of course, a story about freedom. It’s the story of how the Israelites went from being slaves in Egypt to being free people with a land and a religion of their own. But I wonder when exactly in the story it is that the Hebrew people finally become free.
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Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out
under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers
of light, the fields of dark—
freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine
remembering. Putting together, inch by inch
the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.
Excerpted from “For Memory” by Adrienne Rich, published in 1981by W. W. Norton & Company in her book of poetry A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far.
March 2013
“To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
—Nelson Mandela
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