A reflection on Rona
Woolworth’s lunch counter, Greensboro, N.C. Image by Getty Images
Editor’s Note: The Forward is featuring essays, poems and short stories written for our Young Writers Contest. Today’s entry was written by Asher Wexler, a 17-year-old student at the Research Triangle High School in Durham, N.C. You can find more work from our young writers here.
I knew a thing or two about freedom, so I thought. Living in NC, I had walked past the store where the immortal “Greensboro Four” staged their first sit-in. Like so many of the tribe, and as a great-grandson of Austrian immigrants, I also understood, conceptually, that America was a haven for refuge-seekers everywhere. Levi Strauss, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, and millions of others were a testament to that too. Driving around the neighborhood in my dad’s Prius for the first time, I had never felt freer. Oh, and that time when my English teacher told us we could use one OR two spaces after a period – that was the ultimate freedom.
Pre-COVID, I had never been forced to think deeply about freedom or rights or liberties, nor had I ever had the opportunity for practical application. Back then (pre-virus really does seem like a long time ago), freedom was theoretical, distant, exclusively historical, unifaceted, and abstract. After spending the last 42 days confined on a half acre slice of America, however, my definition of freedom, like so many other things, has become much more complex. Be it from staring for hours up at my younger brother’s mattress, or laboring through a heady book ‘recommended’ to me by a parental unit, or tallying social media screen times too colossal to admit; the coronavirus (or Rona, as we fondly refer to her in the colloquial) has proven a catalyst towards a more mature understanding about how I view freedom.
In Jewish time, it was only a short while ago that we reveled in Moses’s immortal words to Pharaoh, “let my people go…”. But notice the ellipsis? There’s an important qualification to Moses’ petition, made all the more relevant during Sefirot HaOmer (counting of the days between Passover and Shavuot). What follows the demand is “… so that they may serve [Hashem]”. Including or not including this qualification, according to R. Jonathan Sacks, represents two modes of being free: ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’. At Passover, the Children of Israel became ‘free from’ Egyptian enslavement and being subject to another. This liberty, however, was not an end in itself. Soon, they would be ‘free to’ live under a system of laws that would provide structure and order, a destination. This ‘freedom from/freedom to’ framework has helped me navigate some of the questions the pandemic has raised and has provided a new lens on liberty.
The colors of freedom, as manifested by each political camp, have proven educational in a time when education has been absent in the traditional sense. From one side of the political spectrum, I’ve learned that freedom is wrapped up in autonomy and individualism. As Costco can attest, there are many who would wish to be ‘free from’ face masks, claiming infringements on their constitutional rights (to breath COVID particles, maybe?). From the other side of the aisle, I’ve also come to appreciate how relinquishing some liberties ensures others are preserved. For example, even in our quarantine mandate, we have retained our ‘freedom to’ health and safety, trusting in and respecting the institutions that are attempting to protect us.
The notion of American and Israeli democracy can be framed within the same paradigm. In early March, the Shin Bet started using mobile-phone data to track people who might have been exposed to the Coronavirus. Even though the ‘cyber-monitoring’ was recently banned, there seemed to be little outrage reported from Israeli media sources. I can’t even imagine what would’ve happened in our country if this idea was merely suggested by the CDC (images of the Civil War come to mind). Founded on the Lockean principle of inalienable rights, our American democracy is much more attracted to the autonomy and liberty of the individual. After all, we ain’t having Uncle Sam tracking our mobile phones. Conversely, Israel’s ethnic democracy has a higher threshold for such invasive governmental overreach. Due to the geopolitical realities of the time, its founders had a radically different vision designed to ensure survival. In this COVID haze, I can see more clearly that America has an affinity for the ‘freedom from’ mentality while Israel, in this framework, represents ‘freedom to’. So, even today, 4,000 years after the Exodus, freedom is still spoken with a Hebrew accent, as Heinrich Heine said; it’s just that there might be someone else listening in.
I’ve been out of school for seven weeks, and frankly, I’d rather be talking about summer camps than political camps. But, in hindsight, Rona has taught me an important lesson in nuance that I’m unlikely to get anytime else – and for that, I’m grateful. In juxtaposition to my sanitized exterior, the pandemic has spawned a petri-dish of arguments, viewpoints, and perspectives internally. It’s like that famous optical illusion; some see a duck, some see a rabbit. But there exists a millisecond wherein neither image is comprehensible. I’m learning to live in that magical space, in the penumbra between ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’. So, what is freedom? Maybe the legendary Inigo Montoya said it better than Moses: “I don’t think that means what you think it means.”
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