Reflection by Rabbi Jericho Vincent
WORD WATCH: FREE, How are we in this reality?
When I was seventeen years old, living on my own in New York City, I bought a bottle of Tommy Hilfiger’s perfume. I didn’t care what it smelled like. I only cared about its name, the word inscribed on the bottle: “Freedom.”
Growing up in an ultra-Orthodox home, I was told there were two kinds of people: frum or frei — pious or free. We were definitely not frei. I was not free to wear pants, question my father, talk to boys, or choose a career. When I tried to claim more freedom, I lost my family. So by seventeen, I knew all too well how expensive and precious freedom was. If Tommy Hilfiger was manufacturing its scent, I had to have it at any cost.
All these years later, freedom is still a sacred word to me. I’m staggered by how much of it I now have. I get to do what I want, love whom I please, serve Spirit in a way that feels true. But I’ve also learned freedom is more than something you do or don’t have. Frei is not only a state, it’s also a practice.
This year, as we approach the High Holidays, what wants to shift in our practices of freedom? The word freedom is so often colonized by bombastic rhetoric or surface-level anthems. But we can reclaim the word’s sanctity. We can notice how the word freedom invites us into greater healing and flourishing. We can ask:
How can we claim our freedom to examine closely held beliefs—and the freedom to hold on to what still serves and release what doesn’t?
How can we use whatever freedom we have to widen someone else’s freedom?
How can we claim our freedom to feel our grief instead of suppressing it?
How can we claim our freedom to turn up the volume on our love—to love effusively, extravagantly?
How can we claim our freedom to dream of the world we want to live in and to help birth it?
As we ready ourselves for the new year, may the word freedom reveal its many gifts to us. May the freedom we claim within ourselves make us fiercer as we fight for freedom in the world. May we wear our freedom like a perfume that sweetens the air of every room we enter.
Ken teheye ritzona—may it be so.
