Responsibility and Freedom - Elisha Shapira

A person is liberated when he sheds all external restraints. A person becomes free when he sets his own goals and their limitations. Freedom is not a situation where there are no boundaries. Freedom is a situation where you determine your own boundaries. The boundaries that you set for yourself are derived from your choices and from your responsibility for those choices. The Jewish nation was liberated when it left Egypt, and when it shed the chains of slavery, but it became a free people at Mount Sinai, when it chose between the golden calf and the Torah with all its commandments and restraints.

Responsibility – not only does not contradict freedom, it is the essence of freedom. 

Since human beings are social creatures and do not exist in a vacuum, the choice is really only between two options: the first is to be swept away and subjected to rules, regulations, and norms that others created for you, without you, and which serve, whether you are conscious of it or not, goals that you did not choose. The second is to take part in setting the goals, and affecting the rules and norms that result from these goals. Regarding this second option, it is important to mention that this does not mean that, in real life, at any given moment, your responsibility and your will are not going to contradict each other. You might even feel sometimes that your responsibilities are taking away your personal freedom.

I am trying to create a “comfortable” world without contradictions. But this kind of world does not exist, and it is definitely not in my power to create it. But I am trying to develop a system that takes into account the contradictions that exist between man and himself, between man and his environment, and the dynamic processes that we are all part of, and within all of this to strive to be true to a moral conscience.