As they struggled against Soviet power, Russian dissidents asked Rabbi Hillel’s questions: “If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, what am I? And, if not now, when?” Westerners wondered: what motivated people to demonstrate on Red Square against injustice when they knew they would be immediately arrested and dispatched to the Gulag? They replied that to achieve outer freedom one must display the courage for inner freedom. One must stop paying lip service to false values and affirm ultimate ones regardless of consequences.
Soviet morality denied that higher values exist. “Only the result counts,” Lenin taught, and so the Party not only can but must do whatever works. The dissidents therefore placed personal integrity first. Each person had to be “for myself” because that is how one can be “not only for myself”; and each could not delay or “temporize.” If not now when?
“To act alone is an enormous responsibility,” explained Vladimir Bukovsky.
With his back to the wall, the individual . . . comes to prefer physical death to spiritual death. . . .
“Why me, of all people? – each member of a crowd asks himself.
And all are lost.
“If not me, then who?’ the individual with his back to the wall asks himself.
And he saves everyone.
When Aleksei Navalny returned to certain death in Putin’s Russia, a journalist asked Natan Sharansky why anyone would do that. Sharansky replied angrily: “If you think the goal is survival—then you are right. But his true concern is the fate of his people—and he is telling them: ‘I am not afraid, and you should not be either.’ ” The soul demands there be something higher than the self. If not I, who? And if not now, when?
Gary Saul Morson, a prize-winning teacher, is the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University and has written or edited 21 books.
For Every Jewel There is a Question:
Have you ever put yourself on the line for something bigger?
