Shelo Asani Aved

Instagram has reminded me recently that some Jews have learned a particular dance to perform in polite company. It involves a little softening here, a strategic silence there, and carefully omitting anything that might make the room uncomfortable. Israel comes up, and suddenly everyone starts talking about something else. Antisemitism is mentioned, and the conversation acquires several interesting qualifications. One becomes, in short, the sort of Jew everyone can get along with. Or so they’d like to think.

The choreography is familiar. The music changes with the room. (Trust me, I know.)

It is an old temptation, made newly fashionable by the times: to become a little less conspicuously Jewish in the hope of becoming a little more acceptable. To distinguish oneself from those Jews, that Israel, that particular expression of Jewishness. To assure the world, pre-emptively, that one is not the sort of person it has decided to dislike.

The trouble with making yourself smaller is that the room won’t necessarily make more space.

Jewish tradition has a word for narrowness: Mitzrayim, the Hebrew name for Egypt, is associated in Chassidic thought with meitzarim—straits, constraints, places where movement becomes difficult. In this reading, the Exodus is not only the story of a people leaving a geographical location. It is also a story about escaping the conditions that keep us small and inauthentic.

We tend to picture slavery rather literally: chains, bricks, unbearable heat, and a particularly unpleasant supervisor. But there are other kinds of captivity: the opinions we cannot risk challenging, the parts of ourselves we learn to conceal, the approval we pursue at the expense of our own convictions. No Pharaoh required. The arrangement can be entirely self-administered.

There is, in fact, a Jewish blessing that makes for an intriguing companion to all this. Every morning, we say Shelo asani aved: “Blessed are You, G-d, who has not made me a slave.” It is one of the Birchot HaShachar, the morning blessings, a small daily acknowledgement (and reminder) of freedom.

Freedom, of course, is easier to appreciate when no one is asking you to explain yourself at a dinner party.

The blessing is not a claim that we are immune to constraint or that a sufficiently positive attitude can overcome every difficult situation. Antisemitism is real, and the pressures it creates are not imaginary. But the blessing invites us to consider what freedom means even when circumstances are less than favourable: how we preserve our convictions, our dignity and our capacity to see clearly when the world would prefer us to be someone else.

That said, we want to turn the story to the Hebrew alphabet.The word aved, slave, begins with the letter Ayin (ע). Ayin is also the Hebrew word for “eye.” In mystical tradition, the letter’s shape has been associated with two eyes joined together—a small piece of Hebrew typography carrying rather more philosophical baggage than one might expect.

Jewish thought has plenty to say about how we look at the world. In Pirkei Avot (chapter 5, Mishnah 19), the Mishnah contrasts the students of Avraham, who possess an ayin tova—a good eye—with those of Bilaam, characterised by an ayin ra’ah, an evil eye.

The distinction is not simply between optimism and pessimism, or between people who see the glass half-full and those who would like to speak to the manager about the glass. It is about the quality of our attention: whether we approach the world with generosity, looking for possibility, or with an eye trained on deficiency, resentment and blame.

The good eye doesn’t see less. It sees beyond.

This is not an instruction to ignore what is ugly. A good eye is not a blind eye. It can recognise antisemitism without allowing it to dictate the entirety of its vision. It can identify cowardice without deciding that cowardice is all a person is.

And perhaps that is where the two eyes of the Ayin become especially interesting. We need one eye to see the world as it is, without euphemism or wishful thinking, and the other to see what it might yet become. To see the danger without letting it discourage us. To recognise the narrow place as a chapter, not the whole story.

A Jewish life cannot be lived entirely in reaction to those who misunderstand it. Nor should it have to be edited into something more palatable before it can be presented to the world.

Shelo asani aved. A blessing about freedom, recited each morning. A reminder that there are forms of captivity we must recognise and resist, and that freedom includes the ability to see clearly—even when the view is uncomfortable.

We’re working on something inspired by this little letter and its two ways of seeing. Consider this your advance notice: Ayin is on our minds, and a new Mamash poster is taking shape.

Keep your eyes open.