Shabbat B'har-B'chukkotai

Written by Rabbi Professor Marc Saperstein Thursday, 10 May 2007

Many Americans from evangelical Christians Churches know the English Bible well enough to cite a considerable number of verses. But for many other Americans, the first of this week’s twin-parashiyot contains one of the very few biblical verses they know. In the King James translation: ‘Proclaim liberty throughout the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof’. It is inscribed on the ‘Liberty Bell’ in Philadelphia, bearing a message associated with political independence from the mother country across the ocean.

The original Hebrew verse is more compact than its translation, its five words replacing the ten in English:

וקראתם דרור בארץ לכל יושביה

It is about individual liberty rather than political independence. Its context is the jubilee, the fiftieth year in which land that has been alienated from ancestral holdings returns to its original owners, and individuals sold into indentured servitude return to their families in freedom.

I would like to focus on the single word translated ‘liberty’—the Hebrew word deror. It is a somewhat unusual word in Hebrew: we generally think of hofesh and herut as the common expressions for the concept of freedom. The classical commentators are not at all certain of the etymology of this word, and their suggestions indicate various aspects of what freedom meant to them. Rashi, based on the Talmud (RH 8b, Sifra), writes that it comes from the root la-dur, to live, from which we get the modern Hebrew word dirah, apartment, explaining:

שדר בכל מקום שהוא רוצה ואינו ברשות אחרים

‘That he may live in whatever place he desires, and is not in the possession of others’. This quality was critical in determining the status of individuals in the Middle Ages, for the serfs were bound to the land and did not have this right, while Jews and burghers did.

Abraham Ibn Ezra proposes a different etymology: that it is derived from deror as the name of the bird (see Ps. 84:4). Now the connection between biblical names of birds and our current terminology is notoriously difficult; let’s use the word ‘swallow’. Here is what Ibn Ezra writes:

 עוף קטן מנגן כשהוא ברשותו ואם הוא ברשות אדם לא יאכל עד שימות

‘A small bird that sings when it is on its own, but when it is in the possession of a human being, it refuses to eat until it dies.’ In this conception, freedom is necessary for the flourishing of life as expressed in its songs, its cultural expression.Finally, Ramban in the thirteenth century give yet another suggestion:

 ועל דרך האמת דרור מלשון דור הולך ודור בא

‘In the way of truth, the word deror comes from the word dor, generation, as in the verse, “One generation goes and another comes” (Eccles. 12:4)’. He may be alluding to an esoteric Kabbalistic meaning here, but it seems simply to suggest the continuity of the generations: freedom means being able to bring a new generation into the world without interference.

Here we have three etymologies of the ‘liberty’ in our verse, suggesting three aspects freedom: the right to travel and live where one wants, the right to sing one’s own song, the right to bring new life into the world and transmit a heritage from generation to generation. All of these might be applied to Jewish historical experience, or to the various kinds of enslavement that persist in the world today. But that would be not just a d’var torah but a full sermon.