At the base of the Liberty Bell, there is a verse from this week’s Torah portion: “Proclaim Freedom Throughout the Land.” As politicians debate the meaning of freedom, it’s worth looking at the verse that our Founders chose – and perhaps, at the larger context of the Torah portion – to see if we can find the true meaning of freedom.
The Torah portion concentrates on the sabbatical year. Every seven years, the fields were to be left idle – not just a few fields, by the entire land. No one could reap their crops, and no one could prune their vineyards. And the fiftieth year was the Jubilee – an extra year without farming in which freedom was declared throughout the land.
While some saw this as crop rotation, the sabbatical year and the Jubilee had a deeper meaning. Once every seven years, the Israelites were forced to look around them – at the fields and the vineyards growing wild – and to say, “None of this is mine. I am just preserving it for God.”
To be Jewish was to spend one year in seven living the words of the Psalmist, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.”
We were not put on this earth to scrape for a living, to toil in the fields. We were put here to be thankful for the gifts that God has given us, and to give those gifts to others.
One of the most distinctive aspects of Judaism is its insistence on the difference between ownership and possession. The land that I own – or the billion-dollar business – is not really mine. The money, the possessions have just been put in my hands for safe-keeping, so that I can use them to help the less fortunate.
And this is to the Jewish definition of freedom: to know that everyone around us has a soul – a point within them from God up above – and that the purpose of life is to nurture that soul in others.
Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman teaches that “There is a fundamental question that all of us must answer: what is the nature of existence, our own and eternity’s. There are only three answers, and it is only a matter of faith. We can go through life as if it is a power game on a cosmic scale, casting ourselves as robber barons of the earth. Or we can believe that life is essentially random.”
But Rabbi Hoffman teaches that there is a third approach. We can revere the universe as a possession of God. And we can live a life of blessing, stewards of God’s sacred bounty.
This is the Jewish definition of freedom. We do not have to believe that life is random. We do not have to spend our lives clawing and scraping, trying to be the richest robber baron. We can spend our lives helping others, living as stewards of God’s sacred bounty.
The choice lies before us. What greater freedom could there be?
For the detail-minded
Some of you will notice that the Liberty Bell actually contains the words “Proclaim liberty.” But the Hebrew the same.
The Liberty Bell translation comes from the King James translation. But many of the Founding Fathers knew Hebrew. It is likely that they know the correct translation.