Rabbi Akiva Rutenberg - Freedom From Or Freedom To?

this past week the Wall Street Journal came out with a very shocking study looking at the last 25 years across all of America and asking people what are your highest values and the study came out that the value of having children of community involvement religion and patriotism went down dramatically for example having children went down from 60 percent of the population seeing that as an important value to only 30 percent what is happening to our society that we seem to be losing the sense of responsibility I think in the holiday of pesach we can find an answer from a Torah perspective we know that every holiday has a theme what is the theme of the holiday of PESA Passover the theme is freedom but what is the Jewish concept of Freedom the Tama tells us something peculiar the talmud says there's no true free person except the one who is engrossed in a life of ethics and values how do we understand that how is the life of ethics and values give you freedom and I think the answer is we have to remember the following words freedom from or Freedom too our society says freedom from I am free from responsibility I am free I don't have responsibilities I'm like a kid who has a free period in school I'm free the tourist concept of freedom is freedom to freedom to choose freedom to make choices that need our heart and our mind that use our free will to make meaningful choices that sometimes aren't easy but create tremendous sense of purpose and meaning in our lives I ask my students sometimes is a squirrel free and on the surface a squirrel seems very free it jumps it runs it doesn't pay taxes it eats whatever it wants sleeps whenever it wants but the truth is that squirrel is very not free because that squirrel is a total slave to its instincts we as human beings need to strive to not live the freedom of a squirrel but to live the really meaningful Freedom that the Torah is trying to give us you know what's interesting in that same 25-year period we also saw the rates of depression suicide go up as well by pretty large numbers and I don't think they're a coincidence because I think when we move away from a sense of responsibility from a sense of of of how what can I do to live the most meaningful life to how can I become free of responsibility which is the freedom from it actually brings us to higher rates of those issues as well you know at Emmett one of the things we strive for is to give our students that sense of responsibility that sense of of acknowledgment of their personal responsibility their communal responsibility and what they can accomplish and Achieve and when a person has that it gives them a tremendous sense of meaning and purpose wishing each and every one of you a hakash of for a very meaningful pesach holiday that gives us the true sense of Freedom that only Torah can offer us