Land, Law, and Freedom: Why Shavuot is THE Zionist Holiday

The Children of Israel’s achievement at Sinai—and the goals of the earliest Zionist thinkers.

Kibbutz Alumim, 2015 (Lehava Netivot via PikiWiki)

If freedom is impossible without responsibility and Zionism is defined by responsibility, then, for the Jewish people, true freedom comes only with Zionism.

Behind that syllogism lies a 3,000-year-old logic leading back to the foot of Mount Sinai, where the Children of Israel received the law. A mere fifty days before, they had been slaves in Egypt. Slavery is the total absence of responsibility. A slave does not have to decide what to wear in the morning, where to work, and when to eat. Apart from obeying his master, a slave makes no decisions whatsoever, and so is absolved of all responsibility.

Then, one spring day, the Exodus. Then sea, the Egyptians pursuing, and the Pillar guiding the newly emancipated forth. Then, finally the mountain where a covenant is born. The Children of Israel receive the law and, by doing so, guarantee their freedom.

But weren’t they already free? And by accepting the law, weren’t they forfeiting much of their freedom? So, logic would hold, but divine wisdom and the man who conveyed it, Moses, reasoned differently. They understood the fundamental requirements of a just and stable society. They understood that the sine qua non of such a society is law. They knew—inherently, incontrovertibly—that genuine freedom comes only with responsibility.

For freedom without law, without limits, and without people taking responsibility for their actions, is not freedom but anarchy. And law without decision-making, without the freedom to make choices and take responsibility for them, is totalitarianism. Ideally, freedom and the law are in constant balance, mutually reinforcing, and preserving.

Maintaining that equilibrium, though, necessitates a framework. To equitably apply the law and exercise freedom, a people needs a state. That is the message of much of the Torah after Exodus 20-23. Take, for example, Deuteronomy 16, in which the Children of Israel are told:

You must appoint judges and sheriffs for yourselves in all your cities that God, your God, is giving you, for each of your tribes. They must judge the people by rendering fair judgments… Justice, justice must you pursue, in order that you live and take possession of the land that God, your God, is giving you.

These words are not meant for nomads wandering the trackless desert but for a free people living as a sovereign nation. Only in such a framework can they decide who will best govern them and when and how to be just. Waging war, applying penal codes, designating cities of refuge—all are responsibilities that can only be fulfilled to the maximal extent in a situation of sovereignty. Freedom and responsibility are not only the products of sovereignty but also its perquisites.

For the Children of Israel, gaining freedom from Egypt and accepting the Law were insufficient. To fully relish the first and effectively enforce the latter, they needed to inherit the land. They needed to cease wandering, sink indigenous roots, and begin to take responsibility. In short, they had to be Zionists.

Associating the nineteenth-century word with a Late Bronze Age reality is, of course, wildly ahistorical. But is it? For Zionism reflects the ageless longing of the Jewish people for freedom in our ancestral homeland and our willingness to be responsible for its administration, welfare, and defense. Zionism expresses our commitment to circumscribe and thus preserve that freedom with law. Embracing that vision along with the joys and burdens of its realization was precisely the Children of Israel’s achievement at Sinai—and the goals of the earliest Zionist thinkers.

Take, for example, Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s writing on the responsibility of the future Jewish state to guarantee minority rights:

Democracy means freedom. Even a government of majority rule can negate freedom; and where there are no guarantees for freedom of the individual, there can be no democracy. These contradictions will have to be prevented. The Jewish State will have to be such, ensuring that the minority will not be rendered defenseless.

Yet not only Israel received Sinai’s gift. Two and a half centuries ago, the Founding Fathers of the United States drew on that legacy in forging their new republic. As John Adams, the second president wrote:

The Bible, contains the most profound Philosophy, the most perfect Morality, and the most refined Policy, that ever was conceived upon Earth. It is the most Republican Book in the World, and therefore I will still revere it. . . . [W]ithout national Morality, a Republican Government cannot be maintained.

On Shavuot, we commemorate our own founding as a free people bound to the land and girded by law. On Shavuot, we implicitly acknowledge the syllogistic bonds between freedom and responsibility, Zionism and responsibility, and freedom and Zionism. Only in Israel, the product of Zionism, can the Jewish people take complete responsibility for themselves as Jews—for their governance, their environment, their infrastructure, and defense. Only in Israel can a Jew, as a Jew, be fully responsible and free.