In keeping with my weekly practice of monitoring the Hungarian news, I found the following ironic yet tragic piece. Csanad Szegidi, a member of the far right Jobbik party, is known for his incendiary remarks about Jews. He came to prominence in 2007 as a founding member of the Hungarian Guard, a party whose black uniforms and striped flags re-ignite the Arrow-Cross, a pro-Nazi party which governed briefly after World War II, killing thousands of Jews. Eventually the Hungarian government banned this party. At that point he joined the far right Jobbik party and has become one of its most vocal and visible symbols. He currently serves in the EU government. He has accused them of buying up the country, desecrating national symbols and permeated the elite of the society. But for some time internet chatter rumored that he too was Jewish. In June he finally admitted that his maternal grandparents were indeed Jewish. His grandmother survived Auschwitz and his grandfather survived forced labor camps.

Two years ago an audio tape was made between a meeting between Szegidi and a convincted felon. The latter confronted Szegidi of his Jewish roots. Szegidi tried to bribe the felon to swallow the information, to make it disappear. He sounded very surprised to hear this information. Zoltan Ambrus, the convict, was not interested in the money or the favors, and taped the conversation as part of internal Jobbik politics. In early August, Szegidi met with Rabbi Shlomo Koves, a Chabad rabbi in Hungary, who also discovered late in life that he was Jewish. Now Szegidi is a pariah in his own party, the object of angst of his party's platform.

I love the United States. But perhaps one of the top reasons I would ever have hoped the Revolution never took place in the 1770s was that Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks would currently be my rabbi. One can understand why they are struggling to find a successor to him in Great Britain. Everything out of his mouth are really pearls of wisdom. I can’t get enough of him and adore his accent. I found his thoughts on Re’eh extremely profound and his sentiments on the origins of freedom brilliant.

We read the opening verses of our parsha – see, Hashem proclaims, that I lay before you blessings and curses. You choose your path. Rambam uses this verse and others later in the Torah as the basis for the Divine axiom of man’s Free Will. Rabbi Sacks concludes, however, “If humans are free, then they need a free society within which to exercise that freedom.”

Rabbi Sacks describes the freedom associated with Moshe not about power or personal interest, but as a “Great experiment.” “Can we create a society that is not Egypt, not empire, not divided into rulers and ruled? Can we stay faithful to the more than human hand that has guided our destinies since I first stood before Pharaoh and asked for our freedom? For if we truly believe in God – not God as a philosophical abstraction but God in whose handwriting our history has been written, God to whom we pledged allegiance at Mount Sinai, God who is our only sovereign – then we can do great things.” Rabbi Sacks then speaks about the great things, which are moral in character, not the typical assets of a hegemonic empire and how being told this as a nation was a chiddush –something new in world history. Hashem invents the notion of moral leadership. He warns the Jewish people not to mimic their idolatrous neighbors, but to follow a new code of ethical behavior He had set out before them. Second, Lord Sacks notes that the idea that our destiny is tied to our piety is radical as well. That if I misbehave, I ruin it for the collective. He notes, and I repeat it with pride, “This is the origin of the American phrase (which has no counterpart in the vocabulary of British politics), ‘We the people’” Third, posits the Lord, this was a God-centric polity. No word in the ancient word could capture this. Flavius Josephus coined the word ‘theocracy,’ but that term has been hijacked by fanatics. Rabbi Sacks prefers the American “one nation under God.”

Before reading Rabbi Sack’s brilliant essay, I merely saw the opening of the parsha as offering two choices. But like so many in the history of mankind, two choices have always been offered, since the Garden of Eden. I know I have said this before, but Jewish freedom cannot be separated from responsibility. Victor Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search for Man’ suggests having a Statue of Responsibility on the US’s west coast to complement the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast. What seems as a simple choice can be the difference between serfdom and lordship, between democracy and totalitarianism between ‘for the people and by the people’ and absolute monarchy, between modern day Israel and modern day Syria, which could not care one iota about the life of any of those whom Bashar Assad y’mach shemo governs.

Choice means that we are trusted to make decisions. Choice implies a certain confidence in allowing us to opt for what we think is best for us, while laying out the consequences. We have quoted a British Lord thus far. Now to be fair, I’d like to cite something said in the British House of Commons on November 11, 1947: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.” Churchill’s brutal honesty and eloquence predicts that a system governed and led by imperfect men cannot lack flaws. But the idea is perfect; its execution by mortals, by definition cannot always be perfect. It’s an honor to be a citizen of a democratic society, as imperfect as it may be.

Case in point. Just this past Thursday, I was a bit under the weather with a cold and I left my office in Manhattan to venture to a famous kosher deli about 2 blocks away to get myself some Jewish penicillin, some of their chicken soup. I was walking on W. 37th St towards Broadway, when I saw to my right a man assaulting a woman in a store. They were screaming at each other and he grabbed her by the neck. She was screaming. There were a few of us standing there, total strangers before this episode. One was a man in a car, waiting for his wife and the other was a meter reader for a utilities company. We looked at each other, wondering what to do. We slowly moved into the store and the man finally let the woman go. He ran to the back of the store. The other two men ran to see how she was. I immediately called 9-1-1. The three of us were going to wait until the NYPD showed up to testify what had happened and to try to offer this woman protection. The people in the store were clearly immigrants, with heavy accents. I saw a mezuzah on the door of the store. The woman who was assaulted was ok and came out and begged us to go. We refused. We said that what we saw is criminal and cannot be justified. She needs to be protected from him. She told us that it’s ok, it was just a bad day, he was in a bad mood. Filled with emotion and pride, I said to her, “Not in my country! In the US, men cannot do that to women. We have laws and this is unacceptable. I have been trained to call 9-1-1 and ask questions later.” The perpetrator emerged and saw us waiting outside. By this time the man in the car had to leave. But my friend Wilson and I remained. Smoking and drinking coffee like an embargo was about to be enacted, the violent man laughed and told us in language I cannot repeat, that the NYPD doesn’t care, unless a car is double-parked or a the meter has expired. We didn’t want to believe it. We waited and waited and waited. Remember, this location is 30 feet from Broadway and 37th St, five blocks from Times Square, ground zero to neon lights, New Years revelry and the epicenter of Sinatra’s declaration of New York as the city that never sleeps.  Not one officer showed up. I pulled aside some traffic cops, but they had nothing to do with the NYPD. Unbelievable! Just last week NYPD cops shot a man at this location. After about 40 minutes I too left, feeling that Churchill’s words had become prophetic between Times and Herald squares.

We can opt for blessing or we can opt for its opposite. The road to blessing is not always an easy one – often it’s harder and more laden with risk, turmoil, challenge and heartbreak. But we have the choice. We are free to choose because God loves us and trusts us and His Torah enough to know what is right.

Csanad Szegidi made a choice. He chose to take a coward’s way – to blame life’s letdowns on a race of people. Then, as almost out of a Rod Serling script in the 60s, Szegidi walked in the moccasins of those he debased, mocked and hated. He was kicked out of his party and lost his political future, all because of a Jewish grandmother who refused to let Hitler win.

Let us never lose track of the gift of liberty, the choice of freedom and remember that our destiny is tied to “We the People” and living the covenantal way we promised we would.