Jews & Freedom
Freedom in the Jewish Cannon
G!d commands Moses to go to the Israelites and introduce them to the G!d of their ancestors with the words, “I am HaShem. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage” (Exod. 6:2). And yet G!d redeems the Israelites from the “house of bondage” and from Pharaoh only to substitute another master: “For it is to Me that the Israelites are servants: they are My servants, whom I freed from the land of Egypt” (Lev. 25:55). Acknowledging at once the irony of this situation as well as its religious meaningfulness, the Rabbis of the Midrash depict G!d reassuring the Israelites, “You are My servants and not servants to servants!” (Mekhilta Masekhet Bahodesh, 5).
Jewish Freedom in the Torah
This might be understood throughIsaiah Berlin’s analysis of the two kinds of liberty: negative liberty (freedom from) and positive liberty (freedom to). While negative liberty, the Exodus from Egypt, is essentially concerned with the absence of restraint, positive liberty, the revelation at Sinai, paradoxically often requires restraint for it to be realized.
True freedom, then, is not only Exodus, freedom from oppression, but Sinai, the positive liberty of access to education and economic independence. The commandments that enjoin these freedoms, then, do not hamper liberty, but enhance it.
Religious Freedom under Foreign Rule
Judaism became a predominantly diaspora faith with the loss of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Texts from the rabbinic and medieval periods reveal a scattered people adapting to the transition from living under Roman (and largely pagan) rule to Christian and Islamic rule. Jews often negotiated a mostly peaceful, if second-class existence in which they were free to practice their faith as long as they kept their place.
The rabbinic and medieval era also witnessed the creation and expansion of one of the best conceptual tools leading to a robust Jewish interpretation of religious freedom, that of the Noahide law, the Jewish understanding of natural law. Jews had a language for articulating this notion, one that emerges from Jewish tradition but is based on wisdom, which is universal.
Freedom As Religious Emancipation
In the middle of the 18th century, European Jews slowly began to gain citizenship. This gain occurred with a concurrent loss of Jewish communal autonomy. Jews were no longer to be viewed as a corporate body, but as individual citizens whose religious choices were a private matter. Identification with Judaism was to be completely voluntary. Emancipation radically redefined what it meant to be Jewish: it was now seen by political authorities and elite culture as a choice, whereas previously it had been understood as inscribed from birth, nurtured by the community within, and enforced from without. This novel situation gave individual Jews more religious freedom than they had ever had, and diminished communal liberty proportionately.
Freedom under Religious Emancipation
Like every human relationship, a relationship with G!d limits our freedom. Lovers, friends, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons—every human relationship that we freely enter into and continue to be engaged with limits our choices and inevitably comes with responsibilities. And yet we choose to voluntarily enter these relationships. Ultimately, we believe that a life lived in relationship, deeply connected and responsible to someone is more meaningful than a life lived where we may possess the unconstrained freedom to act.
Freedom of Religion in the USA
One religious-freedom issue that has recently come up a lot in the news is that of abortion access and reproductive freedom. Jews across denominations arguing that anti-abortion laws infringe on their religious freedom, since Jewish law supports reproductive rights, abortion restrictions violate Jewish people's right to make choices about their lives in accordance with Jewish law.