RISKS to being freed by your ABUSER (עבדים היינו)

How do you know if your freedom is real? If it's stable? How do you know it's not just circumstantial? That it's just because of uh because of the situation you happen to be free or feel free in this moment, but maybe it can leave you the next moment. Maybe you can become reabducted the next moment. How do you know if your freedom is true? And the answer is ask yourselves does this freedom have contingencies or are there no contingencies? If it's dependent on someone or something, someone or something human or man-made, then that is a contingent freedom and it might not last. So, if you're trying to feel free in your relationship and you're thinking, I'll just feel a little bit more free if my partner would do X, Y, and Z, you're trying to create contingencies on somebody else instead of taking initiative, which would be real freedom. If, god forbid, somebody's being abused, and their abuser abuses them a little bit less, you're not more free because that's contingent. you have to break away in on on a more geopolitical level uh Israel and the hostages. If Hamas frees them, that's freedom that is contingent on an abuser, on a terrorist and that is not total freedom. You can't trust that freedom. It's not stable. In order for there to be re real freedom, you have to go to the source. So you have to go to the ultimate source of freedom which is God. Because God is the epitome of independence. Pretty much everything that exists is dependent. And God who is the creator of everything that exists is the ultimate and epitome of independence. And if we could connect to the ultimate epitome of independence, we can be truly free. And this is why in the Hagada we say we were slaves to Egypt. God had freed us with a strong and mighty outstretched hand. And were God not to have freed us, we would have still been slaves to Pharaoh. And commentaries say, "How could we have still been slaves to Pharaoh today?" Pharaoh would have been dead already. Politics change, things change, the whole biblical decree that we were supposed to be slaves in Egypt was only for a definitive amount of time anyway. How could we have still been slaves to to Pharaoh? And the reason is because if it were Pharaoh who had allow us to go free but not God who had freed us himself, we would have attributed our freedom to Pharaoh. And our freedom internally would have been contingent. And if it was contingent, we could have still been abducted by other people, by other forces, by other circumstances. But what God gave us at the Exodus of Egypt was internal freedom. Like Rabbi Yseph used to say that only the body of a Jew can become captive, can become imprisoned, can become exiled, but the soul remains free. And when we connect to true freedom by removing all contingencies and seeing that the only thing we really have to rely on is God, we have true freedom. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.