GEN482 We lose our freedom gradually, often without noticing it. The classic statement of free will appears in the story of Cain and Abel. Seeing that Cain is angry that his offering has not found favor, God says to him: “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it” [this verse]. The maintenance of free will, especially in a state of high emotion like anger, needs willpower. … what Daniel Goldman calls an “amygdala hijack” can occur, in which instinctive reaction takes the place of reflective decision and we do things that are harmful to us as well as to others. Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam, 1995). That is the emotional threat of freedom. Then there is a social threat. After the Holocaust, a number of path-breaking experiments were undertaken to judge the power of conformism and obedience to authority. Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments in which eight people were gathered in her room and were showing a line; they were then asked which of three others was the same length. Unknown to the eighth person, the seven others were associates of the experimenter and were following his instructions. On a number of occasions the seven gave an answer that was clearly false, yet in 75% of cases the eighth was willing to give an answer, in conformity with the group, which he knew to be false. Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram showed that ordinary individuals were willing to inflict what appeared to be devastatingly painful electric shocks on someone in an adjacent room when instructed to do so by an authority figure, experimenter. Stanley Milgrom, Obedience to Authority: The Experimental View (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).  The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Philip Zimbardo, divided participants into the roles of prisoners and guards. Within days the “guards” were acting cruelly and in some cases abusively towards the prisoners and the experiment, planned to last a fortnight, had to be called off after six days. Philip G. Zimbargo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007). The power of conformism, as these experiments showed, is immense. That, I believe, is why Abraham was told to leave his land, his birthplace, and his father’s house. [Genesis 12:1 – AJL] There are three factors-culture, community, and early childhood-that circumscribe our freedom. Jews through the ages have been in but not of society. To be a Jew means keeping a calibrated distance from the age and its idols. Freedom needs time to make reflective decisions and distance so as not to be lulled into conformity. Most tragically, there is the moral threat. We sometimes forget, or do not even know, that the conditions of slavery the Israelites experienced in Egypt were often enough felt by Egyptians themselves over history. The great pyramid of Giza, built more than a thousand years before the Exodus, even before the birth of Abraham, reduced much of Egypt to a slave labor colony for twenty years. Toby Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (London: Bloomsberry, 2010), 72 – 91. When life becomes cheap and people are seen as a means, not an end, when the worst excesses are excused in the name of tradition and rulers have absolute power, then conscience is eroded and freedom lost because the culture has created insulated space in which the cry of the oppressed can no longer be heard. That is what the Torah means when it says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Enslaving others, Pharaoh himself became enslaved. He became a prisoner of the values he himself had espoused. Freedom in the deepest sense, the freedom to do the right and the good, is not a given. We acquire it, or lose it, gradually. In the end tyrants bring about their own destruction, whereas those with willpower, courage, and the willingness to go against the consensus acquire a monumental freedom by resisting the idols and siren calls of the age. SACKS 88-9