I really enjoy Passover. It is one of my favorite holidays on the Jewish calendar. I always find the seders (long, choreographed ceremonial meals specific to the holiday) to be festive and fun. I love the long conversations, the special foods, the meticulous rituals, and the traditional songs. I have a great time every year. However, this year the holiday left me a little uncomfortable as I pondered one of its main themes: freedom.
Passover focuses on the biblical story of Moses liberating the Jewish people out of bondage, under the guidance of God. This year I began to question that narrative. After leaving Egypt how free were the Jews really? Soon after the exodus, Moses brings the Jews to Mount Sinai, where God asks (or rather, coerces) them to submit themselves to his divine rules. The first of the famous Ten Commandments reads, “I am the Lord Your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” It seems like God is basically saying, “Hey, you owe me. I freed you so you should do what I say.” To me, trading in one set of broad, life-defining dictates for another does not sound like freedom, regardless of who is doing the dictating. As the story goes, the Jews accepted God’s offer, but the whole thing leaves me wondering: how can we say Passover is the holiday of freedom under these circumstances? This led me to a more basic question: what does it mean to be free?
Latvian-British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, helped me find satisfying answers. Berlin distinguishes between two types of freedom: a negative and positive kind. Negative freedom is freedom from interference. In your free time, you can decide whether to do homework, or go out to a bar, or stay at home, or binge watch "Breaking Bad," etc. In this scenario, your negative freedom is vast. You have a wide range of options available to you. If your options were to be reduced, then your negative freedom would be reduced. So if your roommate destroys your computer — because you binge watched "Breaking Bad" 27 times consecutively without headphones and Bryan Cranston’s voice now haunts his meth-themed nightmares — your roommate is limiting your negative freedom.
Meanwhile, positive freedom is the freedom to do something. Though you may have an array options available to you, internal obstacles may prevent you from living the way you desire. For instance, lets say want to do well on you final exams so you can attend medical school, become an orthopedic surgeon, and make your Jewish mother proud. However, instead of studying, you decide to go out to a party or to fix you computer to binge watch a new show 27 times. In this scenario, you had the opportunity to choose between a number of options, including working towards your ultimate goal of becoming an orthopedic surgeon, but you were seduced by the immediate gratification of partying and/or Netflix. In other words, you were negatively free because you had many options, but you were not positively free because your "lower" tendencies took control of you.
After musing over Berlin’s understanding of freedom, I arrived at a powerful and ironic realization. Limiting your negative freedom may be the best way to attain positive freedom. In other words, self-restriction can set you free to live the the way you desire. The more options you have — meaning the more negative freedom you have — the easier it is to be led astray from the path towards your true aspirations. By restricting yourself, you can eliminate the temptations to take an enticing but dangerous detour.
In this sense, God’s laws may have liberated the Jewish people. The divine boundaries limited the Jews' negative freedom, but they offered more positive freedom to pursue true fulfillment with less distraction. Self-placed restrictions can do the same for modern people. If you need to study for finals so you one day become a doctor with a proud mother, tell your friends that your not going out and shut off your phone. If you want to save money for a summer trip to Thailand, avoid malls and shopping websites. If you want to run the Boston Marathon with your lungs intact, do not buy junk food or make excuses for skipping the gym. Closing the door on those options is the only way to ensure you control your temptations instead of them controlling you. If you can do that then you will truly live freely.
