Sometimes we have a moment of clarity. It’s a time when there’s a lot weighing on you and you feel nothing is as it should be. That moment when you can finally take a deep breath and “let it go”. That moment is something to be embraced and seen as transformative. We often miss the opportunity. We’re often too dug in and unable to see we can let go of all that’s holding us back. Many of us have had moments where the pain is too intense. The hurt is too real. Many of us have built a narrative where we’ve been wronged and nothing can be done to make it right. These painful moments bury us and make us unable to embrace the reality all around us. It’s hard to accept the world as it is, and not as it should be. It’s hard to move on. It’s hard not to find a sense of closure.
The moment you have clarity, and the ability to choose to keep going in one direction or to reverse course, is a moment we’ve all had many times in our lives. It reminds me of the traveler in the poem by Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, who stands at a crossroads and must choose which path to walk down. Will it be a path of continued hurt and resentment, or a path of courage and change? “Pharaoh’s courtiers said to him, ‘How long shall this one be a snare to us? Let those involved go to worship the ETERNAL their God! Are you not yet aware that Egypt is lost?’” (שמות י:ז) When Pharaoh’s servants say these words to him, they’re from a point of clarity and exasperation. They’re saying to him “give up… it’s over”. They’re pointing out what everyone aside from Pharaoh knows. It was time for him to let go and yet he couldn’t. We know why he couldn’t. God had hardened his heart and made it impossible for him to move on and let us go. God had done so because Pharaoh was irredeemable and because he was a foil to teach the world about the evil of slavery and abuse and degradation of other people.
Each of us would do well to recognize the advantage we have over Pharaoh because our hearts are not hardened. We have the ability to look with clarity and see that we can change and do things differently. We can look and see that we don’t need to be the way we are or to be stuck in our situations. We can move forward and we can move on. The recipe is to never allow ourselves to harden our own hearts and to see there’s a way past the way we feel.
This is all against the backdrop of a bigger situation than the psyche of each of our daily lives. We’re living in a time when another pharaoh is being asked to let people go. The Iranian people are demanding a better tomorrow. A tomorrow where they’re not a pariah nation. A tomorrow where their kids can be raised in a society that’s the proud descendants of people who gave the world incredible gifts in science, mathematics and philosophy. A tomorrow where girls can be seen and heard and not ignored. A tomorrow where there is hope. A tomorrow where the riches of their nation are spent on building rather than destroying. That’s what they are protesting and asking to be released from.
Over the last number of years there have been too many protest movements in Iran to count. They continue to chip away, but unfortunately not to break the resolve and inability of the Ayatollahs to let go and give up. Their hardened hearts are filled with a hunger for power and a thirst for destruction. They’re nurtured by their false sense of having been wronged and their need to do undo these perceived wrongs. They refuse to hear the words of Pharaoh’s servants that all is lost and that it’s time to give up. We, as a world, must not let this happen. We, as a world of builders, must prop up those who stand up to them and work to defeat them. Thus, they will be freed from their tyranny.
We’ve seen what it’s like to stare down the choice of keeping up a fight or letting go. To let go is liberating, not only for us, but those around us as well. The same is true in the realm of the world stage. It’s time to see that all is lost and to let them go so we all can be free.
