Points to Ponder #18: Mishpatim ⎸Translated by Leah Hartman
Illustration: Olga Golovizina
The Torah isn’t just stories or tales of signs and miracles. It is also a myriad of laws, big and small, that affect every aspect of our existence. The transition from the Torah portion of Yitro to that of Mishpatim may seem like stepping out of a fantasy movie straight into a conference of lawyers. Is it any wonder that many people feel that Judaism robs them of their freedom?
From Slavery to Freedom or From Slavery to Slavery?
And frankly, it is an open secret of Judaism: G-d says, “For the children of Israel are servants to Me; they are My servants…” (Leviticus 25:55). The famous freedom that G-d offered the Israelites at their liberation from Egypt? It was in reality a new form of servitude—to Him.
The classic explanation to this is that servitude to G-d is something entirely different from servitude to anything else in the world. According to the Jewish sages, the words “they are My servants” mean “and not servants of servants”—that is, of other human beings who are inevitably also enslaved to something. This idea was repeated in their commentary on the verse “...engraved [haruth] on the tablets” (Exodus 32:16): “Read not haruth [graven] but heruth [freedom]. For there is no free man but one that occupies himself with the study of the Torah” (Mishne Avot 6:2). Rabbi Yehuda Halevi also said this in his well-known poem “The servants of time are slaves of slaves / A servant of God alone is free / When every man asks his share / ‘My share is G-d’ says me”.
This idea is simple to say, but more difficult to understand. I would like to suggest a particular method that is widely used in fields such as logic and mathematics: proof by negation. Let us examine what happens if we go to the opposite extreme and make freedom the supreme value—or even just a supreme value—not subject to any higher value (except to the right of others to the same freedom).
Conveniently, this experiment is already being conducted in a very large laboratory not far away, a laboratory known as "contemporary liberal culture." The results are coming in, and we can already point to...
Three Paradoxes of Freedom
Yes: the moment you place freedom as the highest value, paradoxes arise. We can point to three such paradoxes, familiar to all of us living in the liberal era.
Paradox #1: The tyranny of freedom. If the main message conveyed to us from all sides is that freedom is the highest value, that being free is the most wonderful and important value, and that the freedom fighters of previous generations gave their lives to grant us the freedom they never had, then an additional message is conveyed between the lines: You must enjoy this freedom! You have to! If you don’t, you’ll be missing out on life itself.
The imperative to take advantage of freedom is never explicitly stated. That would defeat the whole idea of liberalism. Instead what you always hear is: freedom is freedom, and it’s your choice to use it or not. And on paper, this is true: no one is going to force you to do something you don’t want to. But this freedom exists only in theory. In practice, anyone who grows up in a society that holds freedom as the highest value has no choice but to experience things that he almost certainly wouldn’t have chosen to otherwise, only to avoid being labeled “heavy,” “hung up,” or even just “missing out.”
Paradox #2: Infinite possibilities. In his book The Paradox of Choice, American psychologist Barry Schwartz describes how a simple outing to buy jeans turned into a stressful experience. "Do you want them slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, baggy, or extra baggy?” the saleswoman asked him. "Do you want them stonewashed, acid-washed or distressed? Do you want them button-fly or zipper-fly? Do you want them faded or regular?" He finally bought a pair, but the experience was both time-consuming and riddled with “no small amount of self-doubt, anxiety, and dread.”
Schwartz demonstrates in his book that the natural tendency to correlate our degree of freedom with how many choices we have is false. Although some choices are certainly a requirement for freedom, too many choices sabotage our freedom. The overwhelming variety of options that accost modern people on every supermarket shelf, when they open their smartphones, or when they try to watch a movie on one of the numerous streaming services available to them, creates an effect of paralysis and despair—before, during, and after the choosing process—and actually makes it very difficult for them to make good choices. This phenomenon has even been given a name: FOMO—the Fear Of Missing Out.
Paradox #3: The one experience that cannot be amassed. One cannot experience everything at once, but one can, one by one, try to accumulate as many experiences as one can: travel to all the places, taste all the drinks, try all the adventures. But there is one experience that, by definition, only slips further and further away from us as we accumulate other experiences: the experience of innocence. The experience of focusing on one place, one partner, one way of life—this gets lost in the race to achieve everything.
And yet another thing gets lost alongside our innocence: depth. Transitioning from wandering the surface of the world, a horizontal kind of movement, to a movement that is vertical in nature and allows us to deepen, requires that we stop and settle in one spot. Whether it’s a well we want to dig in order to discover water, or a tower we want to build in order to reach the sky, we must choose one place and start our vertical movement there. The same applies to any kind of deepening: it requires focusing on one thing and relinquishing other options.
Liberation in Boundaries
The freedom granted us by modernity is a marvelous thing, and has led to unprecedented prosperity. Who among us would wish to live under a dictatorship or military rule? But when we make freedom the supreme value paradoxes arise, like whirlpools in the sea of possibilities. The reason for this is that freedom is only a means, not an end. Without a positive set of values that freedom is subservient to, it stops being our servant and becomes our master.
This is the meaning of the sayings, “There is no free man but one that occupies himself with the study of the Torah” and “A servant of God alone is free.” The Torah is a system of laws and judgments designed to help us connect with our Creator and ourselves, and to bring out the best in us. On the surface, it can seem restrictive and limiting, but in reality, it is meant to free us from the most elusive prison—the transparent cage of freedom.