With Liberty and Justice: The Fifty-Day Journey from Egypt to Sinai by Senator Joe Lieberman with Rabbi Ari D. Kahn, Maggid Books and OU Press, New Milford, CT, © 2018, ISBN 978-1-59264-501-5, p. 165, $24.95
By Fred Reiss, Ed.D.
WINCHESTER, California – An ancient midrash explains that just after the Israelites left Egypt, Moses told them they would receive the law, the Torah, from God in seven weeks. So excited were they to hear the news they started counting the days. That holiday, the receiving of the law from God on Mt. Sinai, known in Hebrew as Shavuot, is the Festival of Weeks. Yet, somehow the excitement of counting and the thrill of receiving has been lost: Families gather around the Seder table to retell the Exodus story and celebrate God’s miracles and their release from slavery, but Shavuot, just fifty days into the future, is an orphan.
What better person than former Senator Joe Lieberman, lawyer, lawmaker, law enforcer, as Attorney General of Connecticut, and committed Jew to resuscitate the importance of this sacred holiday. Lieberman perceives the two holidays, Passover and Shavuot, to be bound together, part and parcel of a fifty-day count, recalling Israelites physical and spiritual journey from liberation to law, and he validates this belief in his newest book With Liberty and Justice.
Lieberman organizes With Liberty and Justice, into five sections containing a total of fifty stories analogous to the fifty days of counting. The first section, recognizing fundamental difference among Jewish practices, presents essays calling for commonality among the faithful. Noting that Hillel and Shammai stood at opposite ends of the interpretive spectrum, Lieberman writes, “We may not pray together, but we can study the law and its values together…. The miracle of Jewish survival is the transmission of values through both Hillel and Shammai.”
The second section focuses on the law before Sinai. In one example, Lieberman points out that laws existed as far back as the Garden of Eden, and not just the ones covering the trees of life and knowledge. The Bible tells us that God required Adam to cultivate and protect the garden, and so the Environmental Movement in all its forms is just a continuation of God’s requirement to protect the earth.
Essays on the individual Ten Commandments are given in section three. In these essays, Lieberman emphasizes, for instance, that the First Commandment stresses God’s acts to liberate “the Israelites from slavery [changing] the First Commandment from a statement of divine self-identification alone to a moral imperative to act.” Here Lieberman underscores the ethical and moral importance of Judaism.
The fourth section ties together Judaism and American jurisprudence and culture. Just as past and present rabbis and scholars interpret the Torah to fit society’s ever-changing needs within the moral and ethical values of traditional Judaism, so too do judges interpret the Constitution to fit modern America, while keeping the underlying message of the nation’s founders alive. Lieberman praises Washington and the other founders for distinguishing “between limited governmental law and expansive religious law [explaining] why America’s founders protected freedom of religion… [and declaring] in Article Six of the Constitution that ‘no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.’”
The final section celebrates Shavuot and the law through personal anecdotes, including one about his love for cheese cake, particularly apt since there is a tradition that only dairy should be eaten on the holiday. But, he also stresses his love for learning in a more modern custom of staying up the evening of Shavuot, known as Tikkun Leil Shavuot, to study.
Joe Lieberman’s personal reflections and reveries are woven throughout With Liberty and Justice. Each brief essay reminds us of his love for the law, and why not? Judaism, after all, with its 613 biblical commandments, is a religion of laws. With Liberty and Justice rejoices in the value of American and Jewish law and shows how the laws bind Americans to the nation, the people of Israel to God, and the two into a mutual bond of commonality.
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Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. His newest works are The Comprehensive Jewish and Civil Calendars: 2001 to 2240 and The Jewish Calendar: History and Inner Workings. The author may be contacted via fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com.