Isaiah Berlin famously distinguished between two concepts of liberty: “freedom from” (negative liberty) and “freedom to” (positive liberty). Negative liberty is the absence of external constraints or interference that prevents an individual from acting as they choose. He wrote:

liberty in the negative sense involves an answer to the question: ‘What is the area within which the subject—a person or group of persons—is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?’

Positive liberty, on the other hand, is the freedom to be one’s own master, to act in accordance with one’s rational self-interest and to achieve self-realization. He wrote:

is involved in the answer to the question ‘What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?’

On July 4th we celebrate this idea of negative liberty. Today is 249 years since the Declaration of Independence from England. Like Tocqueville, Constant, Montesquieu, John Locke, David Hume and John Stuart Mill, today is a commemoration of our freedom from the constraint and discipline. But that is clearly not enough. We must also seek Berlin’s concept of positive liberty. It is not enough that we are free from England, what are we free to do now? What is our mandate as a country?

This idea of two concepts of liberty got me thinking about one of my favorite mishnayot in Perkei Avot. There we read:

Rabbi  Yehoshua ben Levi said: every day a bat kol (a heavenly voice) goes forth from Mount Horev (Sinai)… And it says, “And the tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tablets” (Exodus 32:16). Read not haruth [‘graven’] but heruth [‘freedom’]. For there is no free man but one that occupies himself with the study of the Torah.( Avot 6:2)

As slaves freed from Egypt we had a clear negative liberty, but that was not enough. We were brought to Mount Horev to hear the heavenly voice of the Torah as profound positive liberty. Does this positive liberty do away with the negative liberty? We used to be slaves to Egypt, but now we are slaves to God. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi has this incredibly imaginative reading of haruth- chiseled out of stone to mean heruth-freedom. We achieve true freedom in our positive liberty.

Far too often our public discourse is stuck on the level of Berlin’s negative liberty. What is our collective positive liberty? What is mandate as a society to work toward together? The best part is that Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi’s lesson is that this is not something of the long forgotten past, but rather something we need to revisit every day. The heavenly voice of two liberties goes out every day not, just on July 4th.