Rabbi Daniel Siegel – Head of Jewish Life

Inside and out

Long ago, our Jewish tradition warned against living a double-life. In our Freedom and Responsibility class, we recently read the midrash about Avraham not being able to be false to himself in adhering to or feigning to practice the “idolatrous” conventions of his father’s society. Whereupon, Terach, his father, sought to “re-educate” his son, much as we find in totalitarian re-education camps and programs today.

Terumah, this week’s parashah, states that the Ark is to be “pure gold, inside and out”. Our Rabbis explain, that we must not live adulterous lives in which we are untrue to ourselves or to others. The Talmud states: “Any scholar who is not the same in private as in public is not a true scholar”.

A conflicted life is self-destructive, as illustrated in the doppleganger classic of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and seeking to survive by means of doublethink, as in Orwell’s 1984, leads to a disappearance of self. Significantly, God’s voice is said to be audible between the two cherubim upon the Ark, only when they are facing each other in a state of dialogue. Experiencing the divine is possible only when we encounter each other from a place of personal and individual integrity.

Speaking of his journey from Soviet Russia to Israel, Natan Sharansky writes:

I started my own life as a doublethinker at the age of five in 1953… Once I had done it, once I was no longer afraid, I realised what it was to be free. I could live in history, a real history, with ups and downs, fits and starts, not the bland, ever-changing history-like-putty dictated by the authorities. I could live with real people and enjoy real friendships, not the cautious, constricted conversations of winks and nods among fellow doublethinkers. Most important, I could live without that permanent self-censorship, that constant checking of what you are going to say to make sure it’s not what you want to say. Only then do you realise what a burden you’ve been carrying, how exhausting it is to say the right thing, do the right thing, while always fighting the fear of being outed for an errant thought, a wrong reaction, an idiosyncratic impulse.

May our journey of self-discovery and expression be pure and continuously liberating.