Welcome to “Things Worth Remembering,” in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. Today, Mijal Bitton, a spiritual leader based in New York City, reflects on the right to be different, a freedom that Jews have died for—and which makes it possible for Jews to continue to live.
Being Jewish has often meant doing things others—including other Jews—may find strange: building a sukkah in a city courtyard, avoiding electricity on Shabbat, or declining the birthday cake because it’s not kosher. These quiet acts of difference shape our lives, though none of them feel that significant, most of the time.
One man who understood their significance, though, was Simon Rawidowicz. A Polish-born, German-educated Jewish philosopher, he did not fit into any neat boxes. He studied ancient religious traditions, and was obsessed with enabling Hebrew to be reborn as a living language. He formed his ideas in the academy, then shared them unpretentiously with the public. An advocate of Jewish nationalism, he loved the land of Israel, while daring to critique the Jewish state’s treatment of Arabs. He was heterodox in every way, so he understood the importance of being different.
Even when it is fatally risky to be so.
Born in Grajewo, a Polish town that was then part of the Russian Empire, in 1896, Rawidowicz moved to Germany as a young man; he was considered for a position at what was then the University of Berlin, but after Adolf Hitler ascended to the chancellorship in 1933, Rawidowicz left for England. There, he looked on in relative safety as World War, and the Holocaust, swept across Europe, annihilating his people and shattering the world he once called home. It was from that vantage point that he heard that U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt had given what some consider to be the greatest presidential speech of the 20th century: his “Four Freedoms” address to Congress, on January 6, 1941.
Roosevelt was speaking to an America gripped by isolationism, a nation unprepared to send its young men into distant battles. He needed to explain why the Second World War wasn’t just Europe’s war but America’s. “The future and the safety of our country and of our democracy are overwhelmingly involved in events far beyond our borders,” Roosevelt declared, before outlining four human freedoms worth fighting for, worth defending, “everywhere in the world.”
These freedoms—which, he said, would bring about “the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny, which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb”—were as follows: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
When Rawidowicz heard Roosevelt’s list, he thought it inspiring—before the end of the decade, he would travel to America to start a new life—but he also thought it incomplete. Rawidowicz believed that FDR had overlooked a Fifth Freedom, without which the others could not be preserved. In an article—which may have begun life as a speech, before appearing in Hebrew in 1945 and English in 1975—Rawidowicz gave it a name: Libertas Differendi.
The freedom to be different.