As we prepare to celebrate July 4, this week we will reflect on the themes of liberty and freedom across our tradition. There is a remarkable text hidden in an unexpected section of the Talmud (Makkot 23b-24a) that attempts to essentialize Judaism. Answering an unasked question – what is the central teaching of Judaism – the rabbis of the Talmud imagine a parade of sages, beginning with Moses, taking the commandments of the Torah and reducing them further and further until Habbakuk, they claim, offers a singular teaching. In other words, they seem to be trying to take Jewish law from the many to the few, boiling it down to its most essential.  This text begins, as many of us have learned, with 613 commandments: There were 613 mitzvot stated to Moses in the Torah, consisting of 365 prohibitions corresponding to the number of days in the solar year, and 248 positive mitzvot corresponding to the number of a [...]

As we prepare to celebrate July 4th, this week we will reflect on the themes of liberty and freedom across our tradition. The introduction of Juneteenth as a federal holiday has raised a question for students of history: When does freedom begin? The Juneteenth holiday, as many of us have learned in recent years, commemorates June 19th, 1865, the day when Union troops freed enslaved people in Galveston and other parts of Texas. Juneteenth is often described as celebrating the ending of slavery in the United States. Only, the National Museum of African American History and Culture describes the night of January 1, 1863 – almost two and a half years earlier – as “Freedom’s Eve.” The museum explains: On that night, enslaved and free African Americans gathered in churches and private homes all across the country awaiting news that the Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect. At the stroke of midnight, [...]

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, [...]