Delivered February 1, 2025

If I were to call you up in the middle of the night to ask what’s the main action in the first half of Sefer Shmot—the Book of Exodus—you would rightly say Yetziat Mitzrayim—the escape from Egypt. And if you still hadn’t hung up on me, and I got to ask a follow-up question about the reason for the exodus, you would probably say freedom.

Freedom is a word that we hear a lot these days. It’s a core concept in the framing of our democracy, and it comes up rhetorically in contexts ranging from electoral politics to tropical vacations to drug commercials. But the Torah’s understanding of freedom is rooted in ideas that seem to be absent from many modern conceptions of the word. In a moment when freedom has become a buzzword to represent so many different things, it’s worth going back to our primary source, to think about how the Torah defines freedom, and what, according to our tradition, it demands of us. 

It’s become axiomatic these days to say that freedom isn’t free. This is usually meant as a slogan in support of military or law enforcement personnel. The people who bear the weight of fighting for or defending our nation and its laws know the price of freedom more than most of us ever will. 

Yet there are many ways in which freedom isn’t free.

Take freedom of speech, for example, one of the main principles on which our society is built. There seem to be more and more people who regard freedom of speech as meaning that they can say whatever they want regardless of consequences. Nasty comments on the internet? Go for it! Lying about someone else’s private life? By all means! Antisemitic conspiracy theories? Be my guest!

These examples (and many more) remind us that, even in a society that values freedom, actions have consequences and so does speech. The rise of social media has taught us a hard lesson, and it keeps teaching us the same lesson. An anonymous rumor—whether or not it’s true—can have devastating consequences. Think back to the suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi in 2010, shortly after two fellow students outed him as gay on twitter. 

It isn’t always in situations regarding the shocking or the prurient that freedom gets twisted. In a more mundane sense, there are people who think that freedom means less government regulation and oversight. To an extent, I agree. Not everything needs to be dictated from Washington. And yet, part of the point of such oversight is to ensure that someone is taking responsibility for the good of society as a whole. A laissez-faire government that doesn’t bother to supervise the safety of its food supply or ensure quality control over vaccines could wind up with a population that gets sickened unnecessarily.

Freedom is complicated, in another way. As the ceasefire and hostage deal plays out, we are seeing all too clearly the ways in which freedom for one party can be costly for another. As thousands of Palestinian prisoners are released from Israeli prisons, in exchange for a fistful of our hostages, Am Yisrael faces an impossible bind. Knowing that some of those who were recently released had been imprisoned in the first place because of past terror attacks means that their freedom is purchased at the cost of increased anguish for the families of their victims. And knowing that the architect of the October 7 massacre is  one of the prisoners exchanged for the freedom of Gilad Shalit back in 2011, we cannot help but have the sinking feeling that the next butcher is no longer in prison but rather is biding his time and envisioning future carnage.

Freedom sounds shiny and easy, but it has a gravity to it that we do well not to forget. Parshat Bo implies this, for in the passage that precedes the aliyot we chanted today, we read:

וְהָיָה כִּי־תָבֹאוּ אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר יִתֵּן יי לָכֶם כַּאֲשֶׁר דִּבֵּר 
וּשְׁמַרְתֶּם אֶת־הָעֲבֹדָה הַזֹּאת
And when you come into the land which God is giving you as promised,
you must observe this avodah, this obligation.

The careful reader will recognize that the word avodah harkens back to our prior history of enslavement. When we sing Avadim Hayinu at Pesach, we are saying we were slaves. Yet our pasuk from Parshat Bo says that when we finally arrive in the promised land we are bound by a different avodah. Indeed when God tells Moses what to say to the Pharaoh, one repeating phrase is: שַׁלַּח אֶת־עַמִּי וְיַעַבְדֻנִי—send My people out so that they may serve me. Same root letters for the avdut of slavery and for the avodah that we are enjoined to, upon our release.

This passage teaches that when the Israelites finally reach their goal, when they are finally am chofshi b’artzeinu a free people in our land, then the real work of freedom begins. That’s when the multi generational task of preserving the story starts. We are told, we must keep Pesach, not because it’s fun and the food is great, but because we have a responsibility to retell the story to our children, so that they can tell it to their children, who can tell it to their children to follow, and so on, forever. Perhaps counterintuitively, we don’t tuck away our difficult history, saying, that’s all over now, everything is fine. Being free doesn’t release us from hard memories. Rather we keep these memories—enshrine them even—to remind us of what we’ve overcome and what it cost us, but most of all, to remind us that when we thought that the worst was upon us and that things could not possibly change, they did. 

Freedom, it turns out, is a big commitment: a privilege that requires us to be informed and responsible, and that demands our loyalty to higher ideals and principles. Freedom is not about being able to say or do whatever you want, but rather about being willing to acknowledge that ultimate power is not ours to have, and that when we receive the gift of more possibility, we owe it to ourselves and to our Creator to use that possibility in the service of something nobler, braver, and more consequential. 

Shabbat shalom!