Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin is most often credited with introducing the two basic concepts of freedom, namely freedom from or negative freedom, and freedom to or positive freedom. According to Berlin, who introduced this idea in his University of Oxford inaugural lecture in 1958:
Freedom from consists in the absence of obstacles or constraints to one’s own action. By contrast, freedom to identifies the possibility to autonomously determine and achieve individual or collective purposes.
While scholars continue to debate the “Jewishness” of Berlin’s philosophy, I would argue that the Torah, millennia before Berlin’s birth, understood freedom along this axis. In fact, I believe that freedom—as the Israelites experienced it immediately after Sinai—is offered precisely in these two forms.
Over and over, the Torah reminds us that the foundational experience between God and the Jewish people is the freedom from Egyptian bondage. I am Adonai your God, the Torah says, whom I freed from the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage. Our covenantal relationship begins with an act of collective liberation—we are freed from.
But before the moment of liberation, the conditions are set. I have written before about the erasure of the second clause of God’s famous catchphrase, but it is precisely in that second clause that the Israelites—and we—are introduced to the notion of freedom to. Let My people go that they may serve Me is a clear directive of freedom to; we are being freed for the purpose of serving God. Our freedom is the freedom to worship as God commands, to behave as God commands, to live as God commands.
Rabbi Sarah Wolf writes: If we take the Exodus narrative seriously, we have been liberated in order to serve God, so we might consider how, exactly, we’re meant to do that. Perhaps, that is some of our work this week.
-Rabbi Sari Laufer