Two Concepts of Liberty in Hebrew

I learned something interesting from a recent issue of The Forward, that venerable weekly founded more than a century ago by Jewish socialists in New York City. The newspaper’s regular column “On Language” related the following story about a recent American migrant to Israel who opened a pizzeria in the town of Bet-Shemesh. Apparently the proprietor chose the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center for his logo because his rabbi advised against his first choice, the Statue of Liberty. The rabbi reportedly said that the Statue of Liberty was “a problem, spiritually speaking,” because observant Jews “don’t have chofesh [the Hebrew word for liberty]. We are servants of God.”

Says The Forward:

This would be all very well and good if only the Statue of Liberty were known in Hebrew as pesel ha-hofesh, as the owner of American Pizza and his rabbi seem to think it is. Alas, they’re mistaken. It’s pesel ha-herut….

Hebrew, like English, has two words for ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty,’ and they have very different connotations for ultra-Orthodox Jews. The adjective hofshi, from the noun hofesh, has the meaning in ultra-Orthodox parlance of ‘freethinker’ and is a pejorative term for a non-observant Jew. There is a measure of support for this in rabbinic usage, in which the phrase hofshi min ha-mitsvot, ‘free from the commandments,’ refers to someone not obliged or not willing to observe Jewish law. Herut, by contrast, has a positive ambience in Jewish tradition. The holiday of Passover, for instance, is called in the prayer book z’man heruteynu, ‘the time of our freedom,’ and in the Haggadah, Jews praise God for taking them mi’avdut le’herut, ‘from slavery to freedom,’ and express the wish that they themselves will become b’nei-horin, ‘free men.’

In contemporary Israeli Hebrew, too, hofesh has more the sense of mere freedom from external restraints, herut more that of the freedom to be oneself.

The Puritans who came to New England made a similar distinction. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville quotes John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who distinguished between natural and civil liberty. The former is the liberty to do whatever one wishes, which Winthrop held to be “incompatible and inconsistent with authority.” The latter is “a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest,” and it referred, he said, to covenants, whether among men or between G-d and man. If this sounds like a language The Forward’s Orthodox pizza maker could readily understand, it’s no accident. As the American philosopher Michael Walzer has pointed out, the Puritans’ covenant theology was modeled on the Exodus of the Jews. Here we have a case of (ancient) Israel showing Winthrop’s America the image of its future – or at least the future to which Winthrop aspired.

If I’m only allowed to do that which is good, just, and honest, what kind of freedom is that? In his essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” the British philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin argued that this “positive” concept of liberty presupposes a division between a higher self, which is identified with reason and with a “social ‘whole’ of which the individual is an element,” and a lower self, which is identified with “irrational impulse” and “uncontrolled desires” in need of disciplining. Berlin thought this concept of liberty was dangerous because it could easily justify coercion – if you object to my authority, I can say it’s just your lower self talking.

Berlin was surely right about the dangers of this way of thinking, but even so, I can't help but think there’s something valuable in herut (Winthrop’s civil liberty) that can’t be found in hofesh (Winthrop’s natural liberty). The covenant theology of the Jews (and later the Puritan founders of New England) is not merely a pretext for coercion, though it always has the potential to be distorted in that fashion. As Walzer argues in Exodus and Revolution, “the Exodus ... would look very different if the people simply transferred their slavish obedience from Pharaoh to God. But God’s service is radically unlike pharaonic slavery (even though the two are named by the same Hebrew word).” Unlike slavery, a covenant is a set of mutual and reciprocal commitments into which one freely enters. “Having committed themselves, of course, they are in an important sense unfree, bound to obey the law. Since they have bound themselves, however, they are freely bound.”

So, then, am I arguing, like Winthrop, for herut over hofesh? Not exactly. I’m uncomfortable with any view that divides man against himself (or woman against herself), opposes reason to desire, or insists on the pitiless suppression of natural impulses. I think the Hasidim took a wiser view. They encouraged people not to silence or suppress their desires, but to sublimate, “lift,” and redeem them by connecting them to a higher purpose. In the words of that irrepressible Jewish rebel Emma Goldman, “If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.”