“I am not a number. I am a free man.” Number 6, The Prisoner, from the tv-series of the same name.
The Prisoner was an avant-garde series about a former secret agent trapped in a bizarre holiday village. His attempts at maintaining his identity and escaping are maddeningly frustrated at every turn. The show became a cult sensation because it so perfectly captured the existential fears of the late sixties.
In the second blessing of the Amidah, which talks about G-d’s power, one description of G-d’s extraordinary abilities is “He Who frees prisoners.” Clearly, the rabbis thousands of years ago shared the concerns of The Prisoner’s British producers 2000 years later. The fear of being confined is archetypal, and has many manifestations.
First, there is the fear of actual physical confinement. Indeed, one of the major social issues facing the medieval Jewish communities was pidyon shevuim, “ransoming the captured,” These were Jews that were kidnapped and held for ransom. Freeing them was considered among the most important mitzvot, and there was always a balancing act between paying enough to free them but not paying so much that you encouraged more kidnapping.
At the same time, though, matir asurim has a more intimate and personal meaning. When we say Birkot Hashachar in the morning, we use that expression to describe the working of our body as we rise out of bed. Honestly speaking, I don’t have many fears of being kidnapped to some magical holiday village. But being bedridden is another story altogether. The blessing in Birkot Hashachar teaches me not to take my physical mobility for granted, and the passage from the Amidah reminds me that the gift of physical freedom is a gift from G-d.
Still, there is another even more common manifestation of G-d’s power to free the imprisoned. Kidnapping is rare, and physical infirmity, while more common, is still not ubiquitous or inevitable. That said, no one is free from thoughts, memories, and self-perceptions that capture and trap us, sometimes for years on end. An abusive parent, an unrequited love, an unexpected tragedy, an unsuccessful educational or professional experience, an accident, a natural disaster—any one of them is enough to paralyze us emotionally.
But Hashem can free us from all of it. I actually saw it happen. When I was in Sweden, I had a congregant who had more joie de vivre than anyone I had ever met. Turned out he was a Holocaust survivor who had gone through 5 different concentration camps. When I spoke with him about it, he explained it succinctly: “G-d let me live. Every day I am reminded that I am here, and Hitler, yemach shmo, isn’t. To not live life to the fullest would be an insult to G-d and a victory for Hitler, G-d forbid.”
If a man can be freed even from the horrors of the Holocaust, then all we can say is that G-d is indeed matir asurim, “He Who free the captives”.