Liberty and Its Limits

From the Garden of Eden and onward, humanity has been confronted with the delicate balance of personal freedom and its limitations. “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and master it.” (Gen 1:28) Our very first command is a libertarian’s dream, as Jefferson noted, “The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.” To be human, it would seem, meant to be free. And then on the heels of that first command came the second one, “Of every fruit of the Garden you are free to eat, but as for the tree of knowledge, you must not eat of it...” (Gen 2:15) Not one chapter has elapsed and the limitless liberty endowed to us by our Creator is limited. First, what we can eat; then how long we will live, what we can know and what we may do. It is this state of affairs – this tension between personal liberty and its limitations – that has been our lot, as individuals and as a society, ever since. We seek, we hope for, we aspire toward, and believe in that Edenic state of unbridled personal liberty, but we know that for us to exist as a functioning society, that liberty must come with limitations.

Think about any issue in the news today. It is this tension that sits at the core of so many of them. As Americans we hold no right more sacred than our ability to be free to speak our mind freely, a core value codified in the First Amendment. This freedom, however, is not absolute, and it is in the balancing act between this freedom and its exceptions, certainly in this election cycle, that the First Amendment remains one of the most controversial and contentious components of American jurisprudence. Or, if you like, consider free markets. Four years into serving this community I am just starting to understand the business section of the paper, but from what I can make out, an incredible amount of time, energy and political capital is being spent right now on determining just how free our markets should be. Economic liberty is also a core value, part of our self-definition as a nation, and yet we know that there are profound consequences to a system left to its own devices. Or, if you like, consider questions regarding sexuality. Whatever your views may be, all the recent posturing on sexual preference ultimately comes down to a question of personal liberty and its limitations. If one truly believes that the consenting acts of two adults are nobody’s business but their own, then who is the government to use its coercive power to interfere with those freedoms? Nevertheless, it is a sign of moral responsibility, not prudishness, to ask whether, if ever, the public interest should extend its reach into our private affairs.

At the crux of all these debates – political, economic, sexual and others – lies the question of liberty. It is one of our inalienable rights and we bristle at the suggestion that it be limited. And yet, no matter what the sphere at hand, we know from experience and reason that liberty without limits is nonsensical and dangerous.

The late, great Sir Isaiah Berlin, one of the dominant philosophers of his generation, made a famous distinction between two conceptions of liberty: negative and positive. Negative liberty refers to freedom from any constraints or coercion. The person who is, as the song goes, “free to be you and me” is the person who suffers no interference from any external force that would compromise that person’s ability to do or be all that she or he seeks to be. Positive liberty, on the other hand, is not about external impediments to liberty, but internal ones – about an individual’s ability to control his or her own destiny and achieve self-mastery. The person who can not help but go to the cupboard for a late night snack, for instance, does not suffer from any negative liberty; the Double Stuff are readily and freely available. That individual, however, in the inability to control his or her own cravings, is in the second sense unfree, fettered by the internal passions standing in the way of self-realization, or in this case, self-discipline. And, as Berlin explains, the challenge we face is how to ensure that one liberty is not bought at the price of another. How do we make sure that our own access to free speech, education, healthcare or other privileges does not impede another’s right to the same.

The Jewish discussion on the nature of liberty begins not with Berlin, but with the Bible, specifically this week’s commandment to "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof." (Leviticus 25:10) More important than the verse on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia is the context in which dror, liberty, would be proclaimed. For seven cycles of seven years the land is to be sown, and in the fiftieth, the Jubilee year, everything shall return to its initial holding. Slaves are redeemed, land is returned and debts are released. Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of such an arrangement may be, the ethic it embodies is clear enough. Our resources, our land, our ‘selves’ are in truth not ours – everything ultimately belongs to and serves God. The paradox of the biblical Jubilee is that one and the same act both proclaims our liberty and asserts our obligations to God and the community. If anything, the Jubilee proclamation of freedom affirms that not only are liberty and collective obligation not opposites of each other, but they are necessarily interdependent for a just society to exist.

It would be easy enough to understand, and many have, a life of liberty and a life of obligation to be mutually exclusive. For Jews this conversation is not new. Indeed, as long as there have been Jews living by the mitzvot, there have been those who have contended that it is these very commandments that limit the full expression of our humanity. Did God, the thinking goes, really create us in the Divine image only to then place restrictions on how we can express that humanity? And yet, if the Biblical concept of Jubilee is any indication, given the choice of being either totally free or totally obligated, as Jews we reject the choice as a false one. Rather it is in the service of God and in the performance of mitzvot that we express our freedom. The iconoclast Israeli intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz (interestingly, a childhood contemporary of Berlin’s in Riga, Russia), forcefully argued that the whole purpose of mitzvot is to demonstrate that we are capable of transcending our base human selves. By limiting what we eat, by limiting the days we work, by limiting with whom we sleep, we are giving expression to something akin to Berlin’s positive freedom, in that we are proclaiming liberty by demonstrating our ability to transcend our physiological impulses. Only in expressing our limitations is humanity liberated from the chains of biology; only in accepting the yoke of Torah is the yoke of nature lifted. And in the case of the biblical Jubilee, only one who is free can declare service to God, and only one who lives in service to God can be free. Tellingly, the rabbis explain that the word to describe God’s inscription on the tablets of the law – harut – may also be read herut, meaning freedom. As the rabbis continued, “The only free person is one who is concerned with Torah.” (Avot 6:2)

While there exists no shortage of biblical precedent and varied philosophic defenses, we need only examine the particulars of our own lives to recognize that a life of freedom and a life of obligation are two sides of the same coin. Think of a person you love, a job you love, anything in this world you love. Our loves, our passions are inevitably found in those spheres that permit us to express the fullness of our selves within the bounded contours and cadences of existence. Like a poet maintaining verse, a musician holding a rhythm, a painter following technique, or one lover covenanted to another, we find the artistry of our lives in the dynamic interplay of form and freedom. Somewhat counter-intuitively, it is in the very relationships in which one allows oneself to exist fully in categories that define and delimit identity – ‘spouse,’ ‘parent,’ ‘citizen,’ ‘Jew’ – that one actually finds the grandest possibility of self-realization.

It seems to me that a strident defense of liberty must go hand in hand with a willingness to consider the limitations necessary to protect that liberty. The defense of free speech or free markets or free anything must never come at the cost of denying others the very things we claim to hold dear. The delicate balance of liberty and obligation in the Jewish sources is instructive because it sees no contradiction between autonomy and obligation on an individual or communal level. It is this lesson that liberty without limits is really just another form of servitude that is a desperately needed correction to our present national discourse.

In just a week, we will be celebrating the festival of Shavuot, the holiday when the Israelites were made a nation at Mount Sinai. As the rabbis tell it, God shopped around the law from nation to nation, offering it to each and every one. Upon hearing that the law would limit their liberty to steal, to murder, to commit adultery, one by one the nations refused God’s offer. Only the Israelites accepted the Torah sight unseen. Na’aseh v’nishma, “we will do and we will listen.” Only the Israelites understood that if they wanted to be a holy nation, they would, of their own volition, have to give a little bit of themselves in the process. And they did, with love and with joy. It was not a concession, it was a moment of growth and transformation, and it was the difference between Israel and every other nation. May each of us, like the Israelites of old, in embracing our obligations, embrace our liberty, and in so doing, enable ourselves and each other to achieve the fullness of being that is our right and our blessing.