Freedom is Wild
A few weeks ago, I stood above the Ballard Locks. My two kids and I watched the salmon leap in their enchantingly awkward dance towards home. We cheered them on. But then, the salmon scattered, and a plump seal swam through their midst, looking for what we would learn was probably a fifth or sixth breakfast that day. My son was horrified. “I’m so afraid for the salmon. The seal will eat it,” he said. I looked helplessly towards a nearby nature guide, who calmly and gently said, “The seals and the salmon are in an ancient dance, doing what they’ve always done. The salmon swim home, and the seals eat some of them. The problem now is that because we humans have changed the way back upstream, the salmon have only a small opening to get through, so the seals just hang out there. We’ve made it extra easy for them to snack. But still, it doesn’t seem to be a big problem.” I’m not sure Ami was convinced, but we turned back to watching the age-old performance play on.
The poet W.H. Auden once wrote some lines meditating on nature, and our strange human place in it.
So from the years their gifts were showered: each
Grabbed at the one it needed to survive;
Bee took the politics that suit a hive,
Trout finned as trout, peach moulded into peach,
And were successful at their first endeavour.
The hour of birth their only time in college,
They were content with their precocious knowledge,
To know their station and be right for ever.
Till, finally, there came a childish creature
On whom the years could model any feature,
Fake, as chance fell, a leopard or a dove,
Who by the gentlest wind was rudely shaken,
Who looked for truth but always was mistaken,
And envied his few friends, and chose his love.
He then rewrites a version of the exile from the Garden of Eden, capturing so much of our human condition in just a few short phrases:
They left. Immediately the memory faded
Of all they'd known: they could not understand
The dogs now who before had always aided;
The stream was dumb with whom they'd always planned.
They wept and quarrelled: freedom was so wild.
Nature is in an intricate dance. All things instinctively know their role, except humans, who have forgotten the steps. Freedom is so wild. Auden suggests that what is so hard for us is precisely the open possibilities of being human. What we celebrate also haunts us, what we struggle with also contains seeds of healing and growth, if we know how to plant and tend to them.
There is a story I’ve heard which has been transcribed in various versions from different Indigenous American sources. Here is one version:
Inside a cave an old woman is weaving the most beautiful garment ever imagined. But now and then, she has to pause to stir a pot over the fire that’s at the back of the cave. And that pot holds all the seeds of the earth and if she doesn’t go to the back of the cave and stir the pot, the seeds will burn and life itself will vanish from the world.
While she is away, a black dog (or some say a trickster crow) slips in and unravels her weaving, thread by thread until only chaos remains. When she returns, she pauses. Not in anger but in stillness and presence. Then she picks up the thread. And in that thread she imagines an even more beautiful garment, one that didn’t exist before the unraveling. And again she begins to weave.
Freedom is so wild. We weave the world into order, and then we watch it unravel. We weave the world into beauty, and then an ugly tug undoes the threads. We weave ourselves into better people, then something wicked this way comes and hands us a mirror. We humans, what are we doing?
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The prophet Isaiah told a very short story long, long ago, his version of the woman weaving in a cave. Isaiah, whose name means “God will save”, said it this way:
Ko amar adonai, Thus says God: (Isaiah 45:1)
…
I am God and there is none else (ain od zulati);
Beside Me, there is no god.
I engird you, though you have not known Me,
So that all may know, from east to west,
That there is none but Me.
I am God and there is none else,
I form light and create darkness,
I make peace and create chaotic evil—
I God do all these things. (Isaiah 45:5-7)
It would be comforting to think there is a dog or crow or demon or devil out there, pulling at the threads of God’s creation, but no, Isaiah says, God is One, there is nothing but God, God is in a dance of delight and disaster with Godself, light here, dark there, peacefully complete and unraveling at the same time.
As Friedrich Nietzche said, “I would believe only in a god who could dance.”
The Buddhist master Thich Nhat Han taught that we too should see ourselves in a dance with our own natures:
I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.
I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being attacked by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.
We are all of us weaver and unraveler, victim and perpetrator, full of light and carrying darkness, and crucially, inheritors of a key to a door of the heart, the door of compassion.
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What I am trying to dance with here, what I’m trying to weave together, is uncomfortable. How do we move through a world of hate and fear while remembering we - and others - are complex, multifaceted humans and groups of humans? How do we stand up for what we think is right without demonizing those who disagree with us? How do we rend our garments in sorrow and then smile at each other? How do we hold dread and delight in the same heart? How do we create necessary boundaries, and how do we soften the severity of our judgment on each other? Political violence, Jewish isolation and internal Jewish fault lines, personal grief, climate disasters. How do we survive the wild freedom of this beautiful and terrifying world together?
One text that has been nestling in my heart for a while orients us towards what we are doing in gathering for Yom Kippur together. The opening line of the prayer Anim Zemirot, which some of you may chant tomorrow early in the morning, says:
אַנְעִים זְמִירוֹת וְשִׁירִים אֶאֱרֹג כִּי אֵלֶיךָ נַפְשִׁי תַּעֲרֹג
Anim zemirot v’shirim e'erog, ki eilecha nafshi ta'arog.
I will sweeten melodies and songs I will weave (e’erog), for to you my soul longs (ta’arog).
While we pray in our woven tallitot, we will weave songs of our soul’s longing. I think it is incredible that in Hebrew weaving and yearning rhyme, e’erog, ta’arog. My restless mind spins and spins on what I can do, when it feels like the world is unraveling. But perhaps the first threads of repair require me to be in touch with my deep yearning, with a vision of a better future.
The prophet Isaiah gave us a vision of that better future as absurd as it is inspiring.
The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
The leopard lie down with the goat;
…
The cow and the bear shall graze,
Their young shall lie down together;
And the lion, like the ox, shall eat straw.
The seal and the salmon, dancing together as playmates not as predator and prey! Or to use Auden’s words, we humans no longer faking being leopard or dove, but just harmoniously ourselves. Can you imagine a world where people didn’t grasp for power, or punish opponents, or attempt to purge enemies, or where hatred didn’t fester for the other side, or where greed and self-interest didn’t warp the common good? I find it hard to envision, and Isaiah’s absurdity is oddly reassuring - it isn’t that we are failing, exactly, but that we are deep in the midst of the human condition. Every one of us is complicit in being human.
But here’s what is incredible about being human. Unlike a wolf or lamb, humans have such an incredible range of moral possibility, including the most callous and cruel but also spanning to the most aspirational and soaring and love-oriented dreams any creature could dream. It isn’t Isaiah’s vision of God or the messianic era that draws forth my hopeful yearning, but the fact that this human, so long ago, had the creativity to envision something so beyond what the world has yet experienced. In the face of a compelling picture of despair, Isaiah made a choice to tell us a different story.
And we, in our prayers, in naming our yearnings, shape the story of the year to come.
On Kol Nidre, we wear the tallit because tonight we recite the 13 Middot Harachamim, God’s 13 attributes of compassion. Long ago, high up on the mountaintop, Moses, yearning to encounter God directly, is told no. The fullness of God’s being - the intricate dance of nature, outer and inner - isn’t our ultimate focus. Instead, as the Talmud teaches, God wraps that shining shawl of a tallit around godself and demonstrates to Moses how to pray the words that will open the door of the divine heart, the door of compassion.
Adonai Adonai, el rachum v’chanun, O God, all-that-is-was-and-will-be, Creator-of-everything, Weaver and Unraveler, El Rachum v’chanun - be a power of compassion and grace. It is as if God is saying, “I am God of everything, but I want you to invoke me as god of mercy. Tilt me in that direction.”
Choose, God says. Choose to tilt your nature and Mine towards compassion. Wear your woven garment, your tallit, weave your songs and yearnings together, pray your prayers and let the angel, as a midrash suggests, collect all of the prayers and weave them into a crown for God, a crown of compassion for the creator of all possibilities, both light and dark, a crown for the one who created our ability to choose, and therefore the one who calls us into choice.
At the heart of the human condition, in the midst of the wild freedom, there is a dance of thread, a dream of what a new and beautiful world can be, and a door always there waiting for us.
Rabbi Jay LeVine
Yom Kippur 5786 - Oct. 1, 2025
