“Give me liberty or give me death.” Patrick Henry’s words ring in my ears as we near Passover, the holiday celebrating the Israelites’ liberation from slavery in Egypt. Thousands of years later, this biblical story is so important to us Jews that we reenact it each year in the Passover seder.
But this story isn’t just an important one for Jews. Much of the free world, without recognizing its foundation, is still inspired in its pursuit of freedom by the story of Exodus. This story of freedom from oppression inspired the American Founding Fathers as they demanded their freedom and crafted a new republic.
Unfortunately today, many devalue freedom for two primary reasons: they misunderstand what freedom is and they think of freedom as a binary.
What is Freedom?
The late, great Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks points out that Hebrew has two words for freedom—herut and hofesh. Hofesh is the modern Hebrew term for vacation, meaning freedom from work and life’s usual responsibilities. There is no profound holiday celebrating hofesh because there is no spiritual significance to freedom from responsibilities.
Herut, on the other hand, means freedom from bondage in order to establish ourselves as a nation to live out certain responsibilities and values. This is the freedom celebrated on Passover that inspired the American Founding Fathers and freedom movements around the world. America would be a nation founded on freedom to live up to ideals, such as the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This type of liberty is intrinsically bound to responsibilities.
Many authors have written about freedom as an internal state. So long as we are slaves to our desires and habits, so long as we think other people and things outside of us are determining our internal states, we are in a form of bondage.
Viktor Frankl, the Austrian Jewish psychiatrist who lost his family in the Nazi concentration camps, which he survived, wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning:
“The last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you become the plaything to circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity...”
Indeed, the ultimate freedom is internal.
Do we allow circumstances and other people to determine our inner worlds and states, or do we take responsibility for ourselves? Most of us are far from this standard. I am far from it, which brings me to my next point.
Freedom is a Process, not a Destination
We are all born with negative tendencies towards addiction, depression, negativity and the like. Life’s challenges saddle us with more baggage. Some we never overcome fully, but we dare not invent artificial limits before even embarking on the project of spiritual growth.
The Israelites left the bondage of Egypt only to wander and complain in the desert for 40 years. The United States Declaration of Independence declared, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” and then took almost 100 years to abolish slavery and the work is still far from finished.
You may struggle with anger, negative thoughts, or addiction to a substance, social media, or your phone. The struggle to free yourself from these burdens is well worth it, but we must not let perfection be the enemy of progress. The goal is to improve little by little over a lifetime. The work is difficult, but knowing it is a process without a fixed destination eases the burden. And this work is the only thing giving life any real meaning. It is the purity of the effort that allows a just and blessed rest at the end of the journey.
Do you think we ever fully "free" ourselves from these burdens? I especially think about anger here. I have anger and I am learning to integrate it, to love it, to harness it, to actually foster it in a way so that it can show itself and show that it is safe to do so.
I love the contemplation that writing brings to others. I just listened to a podcast with the spiritualist Gordon Biernat on "Britevibe" podcast. I would be curious what you think. I know I need to go back and listen again and again.