The Insecurity of Freedom (review)

“It is the beginning of wisdom to be amazed at the fact of our being free.”

(p. 18)

Freedom appears in much of contemporary public discourse as a conceptual placeholder in a larger arrangement of oppositions and dichotomies which are employed to relieve or deprive us of the difficulty associated with independent political reasoning. It would be no exaggeration to say that in many of our societies “freedom” is left sounding like little more than a hollow slogan for those who wish to avoid the trouble of understanding an infinitely complex world. Particularly for those of us living amongst the “coalition of the willing,” there certainly has been no shortage of opportunities to witness the deployment of “freedom” as an ideological silencer used to stifle debate and curtail dissent. There are friends of freedom, and there are enemies of freedom. Of course human circumstances will always fail to conform to such simplistic reductions, and therefore, out of necessity, the concept of freedom must be recaptured in all its difficulty and possibility. The lesson of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s theological discourse on freedom is that freedom is fatally misunderstood when conceptualized as “mere emancipation” or thought of as a license “to be or act as I desire” (p. 14). Therefore, freedom is not a category or simple attribute to which one may subscribe and use to determine the coordinates of the world by which one is surrounded. Instead, freedom requires the effort to learn to be responsive to the entirety of creation and the strength to bear the load of responsibility for all of humanity and heaven. “Freedom is a burden that God has thrust upon man” (pp. 13, 21).

The Insecurity of Freedom, a volume of collected essays written by Heschel between the late 1950s and mid 1960s, concerns how men may retain their humanity in the face of modern existence or “remain human in the skyscrapers” (p. 23). The method that Heschel advocates for the retention of our humanity is a vigorous defense of freedom intended to recapture the urgency of freedom as a practice in human responsibility for the salvation of the world (p. 21). That is to say that for Heschel the only way that mankind may retain its humanity is by means of the work of freedom, the very practice by which humanity transcends itself and its limitations (p. 14). Heschel’s work involves the intricate relation between concrete historical realities and the eternal truths of religious thinking. Therefore, Heschel concerns himself with not only with perennial questions of prayer or good and evil, but also with status of Soviet Jews and the American Civil Rights Movement. The interweaving of these two distinctive fields of attention is fundamental to Heschel’s argument that universal divine concern always lies within the field of particular human realities, and the work of concrete emancipation of mankind is always the work of realizing divine concern. Therefore, freedom is the difficult task to which mankind must awaken in order to show reverence for the world and for fellow men.

Heschel advocates a variety of means by which man may come to confront the challenge of freedom; chief amongst them is education. For if our freedom is precariously bound to our willingness to be responsive to the world, then we must learn how to listen. Accordingly, education is not a process of accumulating a set of facts and knowledge, but instead a process of attunement, of learning how to listen. “Let us remember that it is not enough to impart information. We must strive to awaken appreciation as well” (p. 236). Therefore, Heschel seeks to capture the essence of education, in the broadest sense, and specifically to articulate the features of an active and effectual religious education. The basic function of religious education is to “dedicate, to consecrate . . . the ability to experience the suffering of others, compassion and acts of kindness; sanctification of time, not the mere observance of customs and ceremonies; the joy of discipline, not the pleasures of conceit; sacrifice...