Reflections on Freedom: Between Sinai and Independence Hall

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Two hundred and fifty years ago, this country’s founding fathers fought to secure our rights to these goods. These words from the Declaration of Independence remain deeply evocative for me, as they do for many American Jews, for both personal and Jewish reasons.

I am among the first in my family to be born in the United States. My ancestors were refugees who came here to escape Eastern Europe—a world where Jewish life was perpetually at risk. Whenever I read about events in Russia and Poland after World War I, I silently thank my forebears for the choices that made my life here possible.

Our Torah is described as a tree of life, a phrase we repeat as we return it to the ark, borrowing words from the Book of Proverbs. In the same breath, we proclaim the happiness of those who uphold the Torah’s values. But we say nothing about liberty. Indeed, the word cherut, used in the standard Hebrew translation of the Declaration of Independence, does not appear in the Bible at all. Its earliest known appearance, if I am not mistaken, is on coins from the Hasmonean era.

The ideological heirs of those who once warned Jews against migrating to the treyfe medinah do not now call on them to leave it.

Passover has long been called zman cheruteinu, the time of our freedom. But this freedom is the release from oppression—not the freedom to pursue whatever happiness one desires. For the Maccabees, too, cherut meant liberation from foreign rule. There is nothing un-Jewish about this kind of freedom. But the idea that a Jew might set aside the Torah in pursuit of a self-chosen happiness is not a Jewish one. As Pirkei Avot teaches, the person who truly possesses cherut is one who is engaged in Torah study. It is therefore unsurprising that some voices, past and present, have warned that modern freedom poses a grave threat to Jewish life.

Those voices, however, are few. The ideological heirs of those who once warned Jews against migrating to the treyfe medinah (“the nonkosher country”) do not now call on them to leave it. On the contrary, most recognize the United States as a malchut shel chesed, a country of kindness. The freedom America offers may not be an intrinsically Jewish value, but it is one that the vast majority of Jews have come to cherish—whether they favor immersion in the broader culture, wary accommodation, or something in between.

Nearly all of us feel fortunate to live in a country where, as George Washington wrote to the Jewish community of Newport in 1790, “all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.” That was true then, and it is even more true today. This is not to deny that serious threats to these conditions exist. But insofar as they do, they are not only anti-Jewish but anti-American, and they will remain so long as our centuries-old republic retains its authentic character.

Together with our non-Jewish fellow citizens, we can resist those threats—while continuing to use our freedom to preserve and strengthen our Jewish identities.

This article appears in the Spring-Summer 2026 issue of Lubavitch International, to subscribe to the magazine, click here.