So many of us live our lives in a state of reaction to Life.

Many of us tend to believe that life is happening to us and that our best chance at attaining happiness is to take our lumps as best we can and hope for the best. Maybe we’ll win the lottery and all will be well.

I believe that all of us, you and I, have an opportunity in this life to not only be free, but to be in a state of peace and joy as well. However, in order to get to that place of peace, we require liberation. Liberation not necessarily from the physical chains that bind us or prisons we occupy; liberation from the thoughts and ideas that keep us trapped in disappointment, resentment and sadness.

Victor Frankl was an Austrian Jewish psychiatrist who spent much of the Holocaust in a concentration camp. Upon his physical liberation from that veritable Hell, he wrote about the process that kept him alive all those years in captivity. More than anything, Frankl suggested, the realization that even locked away in a concentration camp was he free provided the greatest awareness that fed a deep sense of empowerment. He became clear that no matter what anyone does to us, no matter our external circumstances, we always have the ability to choose our attitude.

(T)here is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man’s attitude to his existence, and existence restricted by external forces…. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. (1963, Man’s Search For Meaning, p. 106)

This sense of choice when it comes to our state of mind, our affect, and our response to the world is, at its core, our Liberation. The manner in which we answer the beauties and the challenges of life is what sets us free to joyfully dance to the pulse of creation in each heartbeat.

At its core, it is this choice which liberates us to Life.

What liberates you to your life? What thought, opinion, or decision frees you to make love to life as the sky makes love to the earth?

Growing up as a Jewish boy in America, grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I often dreamed of being taken away. There were recurring night terrors of trying to find hiding places in my house or a neighbors’ house and then silently waiting to see if I would be safe or if someone close to me would turn me in. The most intense moment of these dreams was typically when a person close to me, a teacher or one of my parents’ friends for example, would open the closet where I sat huddled and would stare at me for a split second, deciding if they would close the door and keep going or start screaming that they “found one.” I woke up from these dreams feeling unsafe, unsettled and desperate to fit in.

After I watched The Social Network about Mark Zuckerberg’s creation of Facebook, I had the same feeling as I did in those childhood dreams. I hadn’t felt those feelings in decades yet there was something very similar in watching the film makers’ perception of Zuckerberg as an isolated, desperate boy/man in a world where he felt he wasn’t enough, wasn’t safe somehow, and that his successes just wouldn’t matter.

We don’t have receive any information about Zuckerberg’s family history in the film. In fact, we hear about his best friends’ father a lot, meet the twins’ father and perceive his influence throughout, yet there is no connection for Mark with his father. Zuckerberg’s dad is clearly absent in mention but dramatically present as a ghost role. This was, for me, one of the most unsettling factors in the film. We are to believe that the man behind the curtain doesn’t have parents and that he is as alone in the world as he seems; or as he forcefully creates himself to be, squeezing even the people who like him out of his tiny bubble.

It’s easy to watch the film or read articles about Zuckerberg and brand him a classic ass hole, as was suggested several times in the film itself (only by women, incidentally). Yet, beneath the ass hole persona is a clearly wounded young man, desperate to connect while constantly disconnecting. The girl he is rejected by in the beginning of the film is the woman he still attempts to connect with at the end of the film. Unsafe,unsettled and desperate. There is more to the character’s behavior than his character, there is his wound.

My grandparents lived long lives beyond the camps and the Holocaust, but I remember the packed suitcases always stowed in the front closet of their Brooklyn apartment. Just in case. There is a tribal consciousness that exists for many Jews, albeit unconscious, that affects the way many of us interact with the world. It is a millenniums old history of working our way into the public trust, only to be rejected when we “get too powerful.”

In a week when Rahm Emmanuel returns to Chicago from the White House to run as the first Israeli mayor of a major U.S. city and when Rick Sanchez is fired from CNN because of his anti-Semitic remarks, it is hard to argue that the tribe continues to strive to feel safe, settled and part of the society that has embraced us better than any other in history. It is hard to argue that Mark Zuckerberg is/was consciously playing out a need to fit in as a result of being Jewish, but it would be equally challenging to argue that it doesn’t exist somewhere in his unconscious, tribal self.

How does one enter the collective relationship status for an entire tribe?