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The Message of Freedom

I can hardly believe that this is VNN ...

by Larry Domnitch
The holiday of Shavuot celebrates the giving of the Torah. Shavuot also celebrates freedom, but not in the political sense of the term. The freedom granted the Israelites on Shavuot was an inner freedom of the conscious and soul that could not be taken away.

Over three thousand years after Mount Sinai, the Jews of Europe reveled in a different kind of freedom. An era of enlightenment arose in France and other corners of Western Europe and the notion of freedom took hold. After centuries of persecution and forced seclusion, Jews were offered rights of emancipation. The very term emancipation signified an end to the divisions that separated Jews from society at large, and appeared to many Jews as rays of light amidst centuries of darkness. Emancipation also had other effects it shook many Jews from their traditionalist foundations that they had tenaciously clung to for millennium.

One of the catalysts behind the movement for Jewish emancipation was German Jewish philosopher and leader in the movement for emancipation, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) who advocated civic emancipation along with fidelity to Judaism. He urged Jews to absorb themselves into the "culture of nations" while privately remaining observant Jews.

After the storming of the Bastille and the French revolution, the French followed the American example of declaring freedom and equality in 1789, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Two years later, after some additional struggle and debate, emancipation was granted to the Jews of France. Exuberant Jews celebrated, comparing the new laws to those given at Mount Sinai. Some called for the cessation of their observance.