We Who Believe in Freedom
You know that moment when you come back to the present moment but didn’t realize you had left? Best described as mysterious experiences of time travel, I find myself in places and moments I’ve been before. At an outdoor market in Rome, buying a scarf for my mother amidst tables strewn with caffetiere and demitasse spoons, costume jewelry and clocks from another time. My favorite cafe in Oakland, noticing the light filtering through leaves of the sycamore trees and the wind jostling the trees’ branches. Other times I’ve found myself entering the Old City of Jerusalem through the Damascus Gate, going from blanching sunlight to the dark, damp and musty beginning of the souk before it opens up to the air and light once again.
Recently, I found myself returned from Sproul Plaza on the UC Berkeley campus, circa 2000. Passing through on my way to class, the most beautiful, resonant voice stopped me in my hustle to be on time. The song being sung by a fellow student was “Ella’s Song”, inspired by the words and philosophy of Ella Baker, a grassroots leader of the Civil Rights movement.
This is “Ella’s Song”:
We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes
Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons
Is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers’ sons
That which touches me most
Is that I had a chance to work with people
Passing on to others that which was passed on to me
To me young people come first
They have the courage where we fail
And if I can but shed some light as they carry us through the gale
The older I get the better I know that the secret of my going on
Is when the reins are in the hands of the young, who dare to run against the storm
Not needing to clutch for power
Not needing the light just to shine on me
I need to be one in the number as we stand against tyranny
Struggling myself don’t mean a whole lot, I’ve come to realize
That teaching others to stand up and fight is the only way my struggle survives
I’m a woman who speaks in a voice and I must be heard
At times I can be quite difficult, I’ll bow to no man’s word
We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes
My college years were directed by the determination to gain the tools and knowledge to tackle the world’s injustices, to fulfill my purpose to make the world a better place. Never having heard these lyrics before, they landed directly in my heart center. I stood a little taller and continued on my way to class. To my idealistic dreamer self, hearing “Ella’s Song” on that overcast day felt like receiving a prophecy, informing me that, indeed, my path was a righteous one.
Reliving this memory and that moment in time — in the present — a tightness formed in my throat. The tightness that can only be alleviated with a primal scream. A scream that wasn’t appropriate to release in the dairy section of Trader Joe’s.
What was that about?
Not only for me: October 7 shattered my world view. It obliterated the illusion I lived under throughout my formative years, that, as humankind we were on a trajectory where kindness would overcome the tyranny of cruelty, where international law would mete out justice in a way that punished the evil and protected the good. (And that the world agreed on what was meant by good and what was meant by evil.)
We Who Believe in Freedom.
In the United States, we are one week away from celebrating 250 years of partaking in a social experiment centering life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all. Foundational principles that are meant to bind us to each other because we are equally entitled to them. What one loses or gains would, eventually, be deprived or enjoyed by the entire polity. A country admired because of the value placed on so many types of freedoms. Freedoms that were not extended to many in the nascent years of the country’s establishment, or even one century after its founding. The tension – between what was promised and could therefore be, and what is and where it falls short – generating the force needed to catalyze the change to realize those noble freedoms.
Back to that primal scream lodged in my throat.
The world that I came up in portended to be almost of a messianic era, not in the redemptive envisionings of the Abrahamic faiths. Rather, I believed that a global era of peace and justice was just around the corner; of course, built upon bloodied, tortured corpses and killing fields of innumerable dark moments in history. But, if it all culminated in a shiny new world where everyone’s humanity was recognized, then the turmoil and tragedy would be vindicated. Afterall (and not in chronological order), my eyes read the news of Slobodan Milosevic dying in custody of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and three senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge convicted. Just two years before I stood on Sproul Plaza feeling one with all the others who believed in freedom, the the International Criminal Court formally codified rape as both a war crime and crime against humanity.
That was then. This is now.
In the last week, New Yorkers practiced their freedom to choose leaders who believe the way forward is to dismantle the United States and its oppressive system of global exploitation; and Israeli women survivors of rape and their advocates confronted the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women on her continued minimization of evidence of sexual crimes committed on October 7 by Hamas terrorists.
Since October 7, I find myself constantly grappling with definitions, the meaning of words. Embarrassed by my assumption that those of us who believe in freedom shared a lexicon of terminology. I suppose, the upside of being forced to face my own naivete is that it only befell me in middle age. It was a good run.
Yet, the point of sharing all of this is not to further immobilize those of us who have fought against our own paralysis in this strange moment. I’ll bring it back to “Ella’s Song”:
Struggling myself don’t mean a whole lot, I’ve come to realize
That teaching others to stand up and fight is the only way my struggle survives
For those of us reflecting on our possibly precarious place as Jewish-Americans on the eve of the United States’ 250th birthday; or as Israeli Jews screaming for our humanity to be recognized in the places created to safeguard the concept of human dignity and equality under the law, it is not the time to rest.
