Some of Judaism’s most profound truths are to be found not in texts but in time, in the Jewish calendar itself. Nowhere is this more so than in the case of Sefirat haOmer, the counting of the forty-nine days from Pesaḥ to Shavuot. “You shall count seven complete weeks from the day following the [Pesaḥ] rest day, when you brought the Omer as a wave offering, count seven full weeks. To the day after the seventh week you shall count fifty days. Then you shall present a meal-offering of new grain to the Lord” (Lev. 23:15–16).
These words contain no obvious political dimension. The counting of the days has to do with the period of the harvest in the land of Israel. Immediately after the first day of Pesaḥ, an offering was made of the first produce of the barley crop. Seven weeks later, on the festival of Shavuot, firstfruits were brought in thanksgiving. The period between was one in which the Israelites were especially mindful of divine blessing and protection. It was God who had “brought forth bread from the earth,” who sent the rain that made the crops grow and protected them from damage and storm. At no other time was the presence of God in nature – “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower” – so apparent. So Israel was to count the days, giving thanks for the blessing of each.
But Jewish tradition rightly saw a quite different meaning to the act of counting days. Among the revolutions brought about by the Torah was the shift of consciousness from nature to history. The Jewish festivals are not only about the seasons of the year. They are also about decisive events in the birth of a people. Pesaḥ is about the Exodus from Egypt. Sukkot represents the forty years of wandering in the wilderness when the Israelites had only temporary homes. There is no explicit connection between Shavuot and a historical event, but tradition understood it as the anniversary of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. This connection gives an entirely new significance to the counting of the Omer.
The forty-nine days mark the period between leaving Egypt and the day the Israelites stood at the foot of the mountain and received their constitution as a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6). According to Maimonides, the people counted the days in longing as they approached the moment of revelation. For the Jewish mystics, the days represent the gradual purification of the Israelites from the corrosive effects of slavery. For Nahmanides, they mean that Pesaḥ and Shavuot are actually a single extended festival. Just as Sukkot is followed seven days later by Shemini Atzeret, so Pesaḥ is followed seven weeks later by Shavuot. The days of the Omer are the equivalent of Ḥol HaMo’ed, intermediate days of the festival.
What each of these interpretations implies is that Pesaḥ does not stand alone, because the Exodus as an event does not stand alone. Leaving Egypt was only the beginning of freedom. Without a moral code – the commandments heard at Sinai – the Israelites might have gained release from oppression, but they had not yet acquired liberty. The counting of the days expresses the unbreakable connection between Pesaḥ and Shavuot as stages on a single journey from slavery to redemption. Freedom begins with exodus but it reaches its fulfillment in the acceptance of a code of conduct, the Torah, freely offered by God, freely accepted by the people. The counting of the Omer is thus an act of retracing the steps from individual freedom to a free society.
In one of the most influential political essays of the twentieth century, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” the late Sir Isaiah Berlin distinguished between what he called “negative” and “positive” freedom. Negative freedom means freedom from coercion and constraint. It is the ability to do what I want. Positive freedom is freedom to: to act in my own best interests, or in accordance with my “true” self, or some other fundamental purpose. Writing in 1957, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and when the Soviet Union was in full force, Berlin was concerned to argue the case for liberty against totalitarianism. He knew as well as anyone that even the most brutal regime was capable of arguing that it alone gave people true freedom. That was because Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx, two prophets of totalitarianism, both claimed to have finally understood the meaning of liberty. For Rousseau, freedom meant merging your individual will with the will of society as a whole. For Marx it meant collective ownership of capital so that the rich could no longer oppress the poor. Marx spoke of freeing the workers from their chains, Rousseau of “forcing men to be free.” Berlin was rightly concerned with the crimes committed in the name of liberty and therefore argued in favor of negative freedom alone. A society should leave people as free as possible to do what they want. Anything else – any form of positive freedom – opened the doors to tyranny.
Berlin’s analysis is impressive but wrong. Few faiths have reflected as deeply on the meaning of freedom as Judaism. Pesaḥ is zeman ḥeruteinu, the “festival of freedom.” The biblical account of the Exodus includes a declaration on the part of God that uses four different words to describe freedom (one reason for the four cups of wine at the seder service): “I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians and deliver you from their slavery; I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty judgment. I will take you to Me as a nation” (Ex. 6:6). Clearly, for the Torah, freedom is a process, a complex idea that cannot be reduced to simple formulae.
To understand the biblical approach to freedom we have to remember that the Torah describes two disasters, each of which symbolizes a world gone wrong. The second is slavery in Egypt. The first is the Flood. The second represents totalitarianism. The first was the result not of too oppressive an order, but of the opposite: lawlessness, chaos, violence, the absence of restraints, what Hobbes called the war of “all against all.” If freedom is the ability to do what we wish, then it means freedom for the violent against the peaceful, the aggressive against the passive, the exploitative against the trusting. It means freedom for the strong but not the weak, the cruel but not the kind, the rich but not the poor. That is why the theorists of liberty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not call it freedom at all. They called it “license.” Negative freedom in Berlin’s sense cannot be sufficient for a just and gracious society. It brings individual but not collective liberty. It favors some but not all.
That is what makes the Torah’s approach to freedom so rich and subtle. There is a biblical word for negative freedom, namely ḥofesh. That is what a person receives when he or she is released from slavery. They now no longer have someone ordering them to do this or that. They have become their own masters. That, for the Torah, is a precondition of human dignity. As we saw in an earlier chapter, many institutions of Judaism – from Shabbat to the release of slaves and cancellation of debts in the seventh year and the return of ancestral land in the fiftieth – are about this kind of freedom, about not being enslaved or indebted to someone else. When the poet Naftali Herz Imber sat down to compose HaTikva, the national anthem of the State of Israel, he used this word. He spoke of the Jewish hope to be am ḥofshi be’artzeinu, “a free people in our own land.” Ḥofesh means freedom as personal independence.
But independence is only half of the human situation. The first time the Torah uses the words lo tov, “not good,” it is to make this point: “It is not good for man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18). Human beings cannot survive in isolation. We are, said Aristotle, “political animals,” or as Maimonides put it, more Jewishly, we are “social animals.” We need the assistance of others for our most basic requirements of food, shelter, and defense. The very process of procreation needs partnership. We want to be independent, but we are also and inescapably interdependent. From this flows the whole drama and pathos of the human situation. Hegel once put the problem simply by asking, what do porcupines do in the winter? If they stay apart, they freeze. If they come too close, they injure one another. The art is to find the right balance between closeness and distance. So it is with us.
We need one another to survive. But the very act of forming a partnership with someone else creates potential conflict. I want this; you want that. Whose will is to prevail? If mine, then you suffer. If yours, then I suffer. The human condition is fraught with the tension of clashing interests, desires, passions, and pursuits. It happens within marriages, families, communities, societies, and between nations, and it leads to violence and sometimes war. The problem of freedom is never as simple as its theorists would like it to be.
The classic solution – it has appeared in almost infinite forms since the birth of civilization – is to use force, centralized in the form of the state. This is the simplest way of preventing one person from robbing or injuring another. There are laws, and they are enforced. The significant questions then become: who is the state, and how intrusive is it? The first question preoccupied the ancient Greeks, who distinguished between forms of government (monarchy, oligarchy, democracy). The second concerned figures like John Stuart Mill, who argued that the state should never interfere with people’s lives unless they are directly harming others. Isaiah Berlin belongs to this second tradition.
One of the most original insights of the Hebrew Bible, however, is that force is not the only or even the best way of getting people to cooperate. There is an alternative. Imagine that you and I, different in our interests and strengths, realize that we will both gain if we work together. Neither of us wants to use force. That would be an assault on the other’s integrity. But neither of us wants to risk betrayal by the other. The alternative to the use of force is trust. Trust is created by the use of language. We talk, communicate, share our dreams; we begin to understand one another and realize that we can work together. We can then go further and make a promise to one another. We can enter into a mutual pledge. This is a highly specialized use of language known as performative utterance. It means the use of words to create facts – in this case, mutually binding obligations. What then has to happen for trust to be effective is that I must keep my word, and you, yours. The Torah has a special word for a mutual pledge of this kind. It calls it a brit, a covenant.
The most basic form of covenant is a marriage. In marriage two people agree to join their destinies to one another, to cherish, support, and protect each other, so that neither is condemned to face an uncertain future alone. Marriage is a remarkable institution because, to the extent that it is honored, it shows that two people, each respecting the integrity of the other, can nonetheless create a collaborative partnership that relies for its strength not on the use of force but on love, loyalty, fidelity, the willingness to undertake responsibilities and keep to them, and the readiness to consider another person’s interests as sacred as one’s own. Not by accident is the Book of Genesis largely about families and marriage: Adam and Eve, Noah and his household, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Rachel, and Leah. Knowing the Bible as well as we do, we rarely if ever stop to consider how strange this is. But it is strange to the point of being unique. Every other literature until modern times (the times, say, of Jane Austen) is about epic heroes, gods or demigods, figures of legendary strength and power. The stunning originality of the Book of Genesis is that its heroes and heroines are ordinary people in ordinary situations, made extraordinary not by their power but by their loyalty to one another and to God.
In moving from Genesis to Exodus the Torah takes the idea further in a radical leap of the imagination. What if covenant might be the basis not only of marriage but of a society as a whole? What if the Israelites, already forged as a people in the crucible of suffering, undertook a pledge with one another and with God, to respect each other’s freedom, to value someone else’s property and safety with the same vigilance that I do my own, and to see society as an extended family, so that I owe to others the same duty of concern and care that I owe my brothers and sisters? Such a society would be held together not by the use of force – not by rulers, armies, police, and courts – but by the power of words to bind us to one another in open-ended and mutual commitment. These words would, of necessity, be sacred, which is to say, commanding, obligating, binding, to be taken with the same ultimate seriousness as life itself.
That is what happens to the Israelites at Mount Sinai. Accepting only God, and no human power, as their sovereign, they pledge themselves to one another by agreeing to a code of duties to each other and to God. They become the first – and until the birth of the United States the only – nation to be formed by a covenant, whose written constitution was the Torah, and whose force was none other than the word undertaken and honored as a matter of reciprocal loyalty and binding commitment. Thus Judaism became the first religion of the word, whose most sacred object is a book, and whose ultimate reality is God, who enters into a covenant with a people (a covenant seen by the prophets as a form of marriage), thus turning love into law and law into love.
What an extraordinary idea of freedom this is. It depends, for its success, not on power, but on moral obligation. Needless to say, this places a greater burden on the educated conscience than any other political system, and therefore requires unique institutions. It needs constant education. The people must know the law; they must hand it on to their children; they must speak of it constantly until it becomes part of their innermost being. It needs regular rehearsal – dramatic enactments like the festivals, through which Israel reminds itself of who it is and how it came to be. But the gain is immense. It means that Israel, if it is loyal to the covenant, will experience a freedom greater than any other people in ancient or even modern times. They will keep the law, not because of fear of arrest, trial, and punishment, but because of their love of God, their concern for their neighbors, and their shared sense of past and future. Only once we understand this can we appreciate the strangest fact of all in Jewish history – that without sovereignty and a land, without police or an army, without any of the normal accoutrements of nationhood, the Jewish people kept Jewish law voluntarily in exile for two thousand years. There is nothing else remotely like this in history.
Judaism has a special word for this unique form of freedom. It is ḥerut. In Ethics of the Fathers, the sages explained it by way of a brilliant play on words. Noting the similarity between ḥerut and ḥarut, “engraved,” they reread the biblical text in which Moses descended from Mount Sinai, holding in his hands the two tablets of stone containing the law of God. The verse reads, “The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets” (Ex. 32:16). The rabbis said, “Read not ḥarut but ḥerut [not engraved but freedom], for the only person who is truly free is one who occupies himself with Torah study” (Mishna Avot 6:2). What they meant was that if the law is engraved on the hearts of its citizens, it does not need to be enforced by police. True freedom – ḥerut – is the ability to control oneself without having to be controlled by others, accepting voluntarily the moral restraints without which liberty becomes license and society itself a battleground of warring instincts and desires.
That, therefore, is the journey the counting of the Omer represents: from ḥofesh, the negative freedom of Pesaḥ and the release from slavery, to ḥerut, the substantive freedom of the covenant and the revelation at Mount Sinai. Freedom means more than losing your chains. It involves developing the capacity to think, feel, and act for the benefit of others. That needs families, schools, places of worship, conversations between the generations, rituals, prayers, and the telling of stories. It needs “habits of the heart,” and it takes time – which is why, between Pesaḥ and Shavuot, we become conscious of time by counting days. Pesaḥ is the beginning of the journey, not the end.
Covenantal politics stand as the great alternative to three other systems: hierarchical, organic, and contractual. Hierarchical politics are built on divisions of class or caste. Organic politics, of which nationalism and fascism are examples, are predicated on the idea that the individual has meaning only as part of the whole. Contractual politics take the opposite view, that the individual is supreme, and that politics is the pursuit of self-interest. I gain by handing over some of my powers to a government that, by securing the rule of law, the defense of the realm, and providing certain services, makes me better off than I would be otherwise.
Covenantal systems are unique in placing ethics at the heart of society. They place a high value on loyalty and trust. They cherish the family as the birthplace of virtue. They speak about respect for parents and responsibility to children. They emphasize community, the bonds of belonging, voluntary work, and service. They assume no conflict between responsibility for oneself and responsibility for others (Hillel’s “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I?”). They assume, not as a fact but as a value to be constantly worked for, the equal worth of all, especially the dependent and vulnerable. And they depend on belief in a set of ethical principles beyond the autonomous will. In a covenantal society, “I ought” does not mean “I want.” Covenantal societies are based not on abstract principles but on concrete historical memories. They are about this people and how it came to be, and what led its founders to make this particular pledge in pursuit of that vision, these ideals. Covenants create societies, not states. A covenant is, in this sense, prepolitical rather than political. The children of Israel did not become a state until they chose a king in the days of Samuel. Until then Israel had been a loose collection of tribes. But it became a society – a republic of faith under the sovereignty of God – at Mount Sinai, several centuries before.
As I intimated in the previous chapter, the greatest covenantal society in modern times has been the United States. The early colonies were formed by covenant. Presidential inaugurals regularly invoke both the word and the idea. America’s definitive covenantal document is the Declaration of Independence (1776), constructed eleven years before its constitution. What John Schaar writes about the political beliefs of Abraham Lincoln applies to America as a whole:
We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments among ourselves and throughout the world. Those principles and commitments are the core of American identity, the soul of the body politic. They make the American nation unique, and uniquely valuable, among and to the other nations. But the other side of the conception contains a warning very like the warnings spoken by the prophets to Israel: if we fail in our promises to each other, and lose the principles of the covenant, then we lose everything, for they are we. (Legitimacy and the Modern State)
At the heart of the politics of the Hebrew Bible is the understanding, achieved through painful experience of exile and exodus, that liberty depends on a shared moral code, and on the education of new generations to internalize its values. Much of the Bible is a commentary on the historic difficulties faced by the Israelites as they tried, and often failed, to realize the social vision of the covenant. A period of disorder in the days of the judges (“In those days there was no king in Israel; each person did what was right in his own eyes” [Judges 21:25]) was followed by a succession of sometimes corrupt and tyrannical kings. The ideal of the Torah – lofty but not utopian – is of limited government accompanied by personal self-government, the law of the state taking second place to the law of the heart. Only a self-disciplined people will be able to sustain for long the political framework of liberty. For without moral restraint, society is condemned to oscillate between anarchy and oppression, too little government and too much, and sometimes both at once.
One of the ironies of the postmodern West is that the triumph of freedom over totalitarian regimes has gone hand in hand with an erosion of the moral bases of freedom. Morality has been relativized into self-fulfillment. Responsibilities have taken second place to rights. The very idea of objective standards of right and wrong has become suspect. If history teaches any lesson at all, it is that this, if unchecked, is a prelude to disaster. The man who said so best was an unlikely figure, Bertrand Russell. Russell, hardly a religious man, thought that the two great ages of mankind were to be found in ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy. But he was honest enough to admit that the very features that made them great contained the seeds of their own demise:
What had happened in the great age of Greece happened again in Renaissance Italy: traditional moral restraints disappeared, because they were seen to be associated with superstition; the liberation from fetters made individuals energetic and creative, producing a rare fluorescence of genius; but the anarchy and treachery which inevitably resulted from the decay of morals made Italians collectively impotent, and they fell, like the Greeks, under the domination of nations less civilized than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion. (History of Western Philosophy)
To win freedom is one thing; to sustain it, another. Judaism taught this truth in the simplest of ways, by counting the days between Pesaḥ and Shavuot, exodus and revelation. Freedom begins with the defeat of tyranny, but it is preserved by a code of virtue – the Torah, Israel’s “constitution of liberty” – which lies beyond the realm of democratic vote, individual preference, or passing fashion. Judaism’s early sages asked, “Who is strong?” (Mishna Avot 4:1) They answered: not one who is strong enough to defeat his opponents, but one who is strong enough to practice self-restraint. Moral virtue needs a different and more difficult strength than military courage. That is what we learn on the journey from Pesaḥ and Shavuot, from individual to covenantal freedom.