Bari Weiss: What It Means to Choose Freedom
"Human nature is full of riddles," wrote the famous Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn. "One of those riddles is: how is it that the people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength in themselves to rise up and free themselves first in spirit and then in body, while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for it, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery?"
One time a few years ago, before the pandemic and the wars and so much else that would reshape our world, these themes were already on my mind. And so when, on a trip to Israel, I met my hero and now my friend, Natan Sharansky, I really only had one question for him. I asked him if it was possible to teach courage. He paused and said this: "No. You can't teach it. You can only show people how good it feels to be free."
https://www.thefp.com/p/bari-weiss-what-it-means-to-choose