What is Freedom? (Pesach 5782)

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 19 April 2022

‘Sound the great horn for our freedom, and raise a banner to restore all of us who experience exile. May the voice of liberty and freedom be heard throughout the four corners of the earth for all its inhabitants, for You are a God who redeems and rescues. Blessed are You God, who sustains Your  people Israel.’

So reads the central benediction of our Amidah – our daily prayer.

It is a call against oppression and displacement – not just about the ingathering of Jewish exiles but about the proclaiming of liberty for all.

Today, Pesach, is called zman cheruteinu – the time of our freedom. But what does it mean to be free?

In his famous essay on two concepts of liberty, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote: ‘Almost every moralist in human history has praised freedom.’ But, ‘like happiness and goodness, like nature and reality, the meaning of this term is so porous that there is little interpretation that it seems able to resist.’ We all want liberty, and so often we think we know it when we see it. People throughout history have coveted liberty, many have died for it. Today, war continues to rage in the Ukraine – a country that is fighting for its freedom. But what does that freedom look like?

If the exodus from Egypt was a journey from slavery to freedom, what was it that the Israelites were hoping that freedom would entail? As they stood at the shore of the sea, having passed through its parted waves, what did they expect would be next? Was it enough for next to be free of the lash of the slavedriver’s whip? Or was there something more they anticipated from their freedom?

In his essay, Berlin laid out two conceptions of freedom that we have inherited – each one answering this question differently. What Berlin calls the ‘negative’ conception of liberty says that it does not matter what the Israelites did with their freedom – that freedom has to allow us to do whatever we want, otherwise it’s not freedom. Liberty is simply the absence of an impediment to doing what we desire. So, if the Israelites had wanted to make camp in the desert, drink cocktails and get the barbeque going, that would have been a very acceptable fulfilment of their new-found freedom. The people of Ukraine want a life free from violent oppression, and to live as they wish.

The ’positive’ conception of liberty requires more – according to the ‘positive’ conception, there needs to be a presence of something rather than simply an absence of something.

For the twentieth-century Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt, in order to be free one must be involved in politics. In her essay entitled ‘What is Freedom?’, Arendt writes: ‘The raison d’etre of politics is freedom.’

For Arendt, we are living our most free life when we are engaged in politics. If we are not engaged in politics, we might possess other things that we desire, but we are not free. So, sitting in the wilderness, opening a bar and starting a barbeque might be great, but it would not have made the Israelites free.

Of course, we come to this later in the Torah, when the Israelites, sick of the manna with which God continues to provide them, begins to bore them, and they long to return to the flesh pots of Egypt – security in familiarity is not freedom.

On this reading, it was not simply enough that the Israelites do whatever they like – they had to fulfil something else in order to be considered free. That something else appears to be living in covenant with God, and being part of the story of the Jewish religion that comes right down to us today. Arendt herself tells us that we have to be in relationship with others to begin to understand the concept of liberty.

Berlin was very skeptical of the positive conception of liberty, since it often led to the negation of negative liberty. If I believe that the only way to be free is to realize some nationalist goal, but you, belonging to the same nation, do not want to join me in its pursuit, then I would be impinging on your freedom in realizing my own.

There is a midrash that I love to quote – in fact I spoke about it a few weeks ago just before Purim. The rabbis of the Talmud are trying to understand the nature of revelation and how and why we are bound to it, and Rav Avdimi son of Chama, son of Chasa, says: ‘The Holy Blessed One held Mount Sinai over the Israelites like a pail, and said to them: “If you accept the Torah – good. If not, this will be your grave.”’ In other words, if you don’t accept this covenant I am offering to you, then I will drop the mountain on you and that will be the end of that.

This is perfectly consistent with Berlin’s idea of positive freedom – if you think that the way to be free is to fulfil a religious imperative, then intimidating and coercing the population into it is surely perfectly fine!

But the other rabbis of the Talmud are incensed – they say this is a great protest against the Torah. How can we continue to uphold the commandments and injunctions of the Torah if it was initially accepted only under duress?

One answer to this problem is to say ok – yes, the Torah initially had to be imposed by coercion because it is so incredibly difficult. In a lecture he gave on the idea of freedom a few years before his death, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks took this position. And therefore freedom is hard – he likens it to Pesach cleaning.

He said: ‘It’s the work of memory, of telling the story, and understanding the law, and that is why there are so many Jewish lawyers because we are the only people that expects every single one of its children to become constitutional lawyers.’

The midrash that I mentioned ends with the reassurance that, even if the Israelites had been initially coerced into accepting the covenant with God, it was ok because they did ultimately accept it in the days of Ahashverosh – in the time of the Persian exile.

Rabbi Sacks argues that this is significant because they had now had the chance to see what they were missing – they had been exiled from their land, and alienated from their Torah, and now they realised how important it was to live under God’s rule. God is not present in the story of Esther, so the people are also missing their relationship with divinity.

This is the positive liberty of which Isaiah Berlin wrote – it requires the Israelites not merely to be free of constraint or limitation, but to be working towards something. But, Sacks assures us, this is not the same as the positive liberty Berlin was criticising. He does not see how living under the rule of Torah could be something that we would not want. For how can Torah be oppressive?

Perhaps Torah itself is not oppressive – the Torah may contain texts that we find very difficult to reconcile with modern ideals of ethics and propriety – but ultimately, it is those who interpret the Torah who are able to oppress, through the imposition of meaning onto the text. And this is where I want to add a final conceptual consideration to the discussion.

There is a danger that coercion might come not from powers above us, but from around us and within us – that we are limited in our freedom to act according to our own interests and desires by the prevailing behaviour and attitudes of the society in which we find ourselves.

The nineteenth century British philosopher, John Stuart Mill, brought out this problem very clearly in his essay entitled ‘On Liberty’, in which he criticized his contemporaries for having lost their individuality – their individual ability to think for themselves: ‘Society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.’

Referring to his contemporaries, Mill wrote: ‘It does not occur to them to have any inclination except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done.’

Thus, freedom requires of us a constant vigilance and a constant degree of detachment by which we question ourselves, ensuring that we act not merely out of custom but out of sincere conviction or desire.

This is the value of progressive Judaism, since we act not according to what our rabbis tell us to do. We do not simply do things because that was how they were always done. We continue to maintain our traditions while constantly asking ourselves the question: could we do this differently? Being free does not require us to actually do it differently – we could end up doing the same as we have always done. But when we question and take a step back, look at all the alternatives and weigh them up against each other, we ensure that we are doing things from a context of freedom.

Thus, freedom and unfreedom are not simply states that are imposed on us by gods or governments – they are states that we can impose on ourselves.

Slavery did not end when we left Egypt. It did not end when we arrived in the Promised Land and conquered it. It did not end with the return from exile. Nor did it end with the establishment of the State of Israel. Slavery continues to challenge us.

In the words of the poet, Amnon Ribak:

Every person needs to have a certain Egypt,
to redeem themselves from it,
from the house of slavery,
to go in the middle of the night to the desert of fears,
to march straight into the waters,
to see them open before them to both sides.

So, when I say those words with which I began: ‘Sound the great horn – the great Shofar – of our freedom’ – what does that mean? I don’t know. The imperative of Zman Cheruteinu is not to know, but to question. Rather, I invite us all to take this opportunity to reflect on what makes us feel free. What gives us a sense that we live in a state of liberty? What can we do for others to increase their freedom? How can we ensure that next year will indeed be in Jerusalem, whether that is the actual physical place, or simply a world more perfected? How will we be free between this Pesach and the next?