No Liberation Without Revelation: The Crisis of Moral Clarity in the Age of Campus Activism©

I want to begin with a quote and gauge how you all feel about it. Would you ‘like’ it if no one knew? On a base level, maybe you hope it's true, or perhaps you believe it wholeheartedly. 

“The liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand in hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other.”

There’s a word that has been used repeatedly, so much so you may hear it and take it for granted: liberation. I imagine you’ve heard the word ‘liberation’ used in ways you’ve never heard before. 

Liberation is not just a word, but a theology. Gustavo Gutiérrez is often credited as the founder of liberation theology. His 1971 book "A Theology of Liberation”, laid much of the foundation for the movement. He reinterpreted Christian theology through the lens of the poor and oppressed, emphasizing that theology should be lived out through action aimed at social justice. 

This idea is a part of Judaism; it’s baked into our liberation story, which became the model: the Exodus from Egypt. In liberation theology, God is not passive; God hears the cries of the poor and oppressed, and, in partnership with God, humanity hears those cries and saves them, or helps them save themselves. 

Now, this term ‘liberation’ is becoming part and parcel of the Pro-Palestinian movement, and some may say, the anti-Israel movement. Are they using the word liberation in the same way? 

The CUAD, the coalition of student organizations called the Columbia University Apartheid Divest, in their words, “see Palestine as the vanguard for our collective liberation.” They say, “We believe in liberation. All systems of oppression are interlinked: The fates of the peoples of Palestine, Kurdistan, Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Korea, Guam, Haiti, Hawai’i, Kashmir, Cuba, Turtle Island, and other colonized bodies are interconnected. We are committed to creating a multi-generational, intersectional, and accessible space dedicated to fighting for abolition, transnational feminism, anticapitalism, and decolonization, and also to combating anti-Blackness, queerphobia, Islamophobia, and antisemitism.” 

I want to return to the quote that I started out with, and read you the full quote:“As a Palestinian student and leader of the CUAD movement, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other…Our movement is a movement for social justice and freedom and equality for everyone.” This was said by detained student activist, Mahmoud Khalil. Unfortunately, the liberation he spoke of didn’t turn out well for Jews at Columbia. Because, on the first anniversary of the October 7th attacks, the CUAD released the following statement: “We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance. In the face of violence from the oppressor equipped with the most lethal military force on the planet, where you’ve exhausted all peaceful means of resolution, violence is the only path forward.”

If that’s the liberation you’re selling, you can keep it. But, please, tell me more about this liberation you are trying to sell me? 

Are the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people truly intertwined, and what does that even mean? 

That is not the type of ‘liberation’ Jews believe in. The stages of Jewish liberation are found in Exodus 6:5-7, four steps to freedom. God says: 

1. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage.

2. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary chastisements.

3. I will take you to be My people, and I will be your God

4. And you shall know that I, the LORD, am your God who freed you from the labors of the Egyptians. 

Sforno, a medieval Italian commentator, explains the verses in a literal sense according to the events of the Torah:  

1) והוצאתי אתכם מתחת סבלות מצרים there will be an immediate cessation of the Israelites performing slave labour for the Egyptians.

2) והצלתי, on the day the Israelites would depart from Ramses, when they would cross the border out of the land of Egypt.

3) וגאלתי, on the day the pursuing Egyptians would be drowned in the sea, as testified in Exodus 14,30 ויושע ה' ביום ההוא, “on that day the Lord orchestrated salvation, etc.” After the death of the ones who enslaved, the enslaved are free.

4) ולקחתי I will take you as My people- this will occur at the revelation at Mount Sinai.

According to this interpretation, God is foretelling how God will liberate the people. 

Sforno is laying out what liberation meant for the Israelites who were freed, but the fourth step includes us; for as the Midrash teaches, all Jewish souls, past, present, and future, were at Sinai. Sinai, the receiving of a law and a shared narrative, concludes the liberation process. Sinai introduces a different type of freedom: positive liberty. We read this explicitly in rabbinic literature, in the the Ethics of Our Fathers. Commenting on the word for engraven, Harut, the rabbis noticed it was almost identical to the word Herut, which means freedom. Therefore, we should read that freedom is engraved on the Tablets, because no person is free until they devote themselves to studying Torah, to devoting themselves to a unified system of law and morality.  

The writer, Isaiah Berlin, who fled the Russian Revolution in 1921, famously analyzed two kinds of liberty: negative liberty and positive liberty. Negative liberty is defined as freedom from–the freedom from restraint on one’s actions, enshrined in such concepts as human and civil rights. We hold by this in Judaism as well. In Judaism, it’s not just the freedom from something that we value, but the freedom to do something with it, to move us forward to a different place. Boundless freedom with no values, no thought for the future, is not liberation, but slavery in a different form. We see this in the words we read this morning, after the Song at the Sea, but we often don’t pay attention to the postscript. 

“And Miriam chanted for them:

Sing to the LORD, for He has triumphed gloriously;

Horse and driver He has hurled into the sea.

Then Moses caused Israel to set out from the Sea of Reeds. They went on into the wilderness of Shur; they traveled three days in the wilderness and found no water.

They came to Marah, but they could not drink the water of Marah because it was bitter; that is why it was named Marah.

And the people grumbled against Moses, saying, “What shall we drink?””

And then, 13 days later, we read: 

“Setting out from Elim, the whole Israelite community came to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after their departure from the land of Egypt. In the wilderness, the whole Israelite community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots, when we ate our fill of bread! For you have brought us out into this wilderness to starve this whole congregation to death.”

It took only fifteen days of liberation for the people to want to go back to their old ways. This is where Berlin’s ‘positive’ freedom comes in. Not just the freedom from oppression, but the freedom to be something better; to break the cycle of oppression because when you are freed, you may be in a situation where you could be the oppressor. That is why we are taught to care for the stranger, for we too were strangers, and that is why we are commanded not to hate the Egyptians in our hearts, one of the few legislations of feeling in the Torah. 

We are now seeing a renaissance of the word liberation—on campuses, in protest movements, on social media. It is used with passion and purpose. And often, with a sense of moral urgency that cannot be ignored.

But here's the challenge: many who evoke liberation today do so without defining its destination. They know what they are against—oppression, colonialism, inequality—but far fewer can articulate what they are for. What does the world look like after the revolution? What comes after the sea splits?

Judaism offers an authentic and proven liberation theology that is complicated and nuanced, as opposed to the binary system of the world as made up of oppressors and the oppressed. 

Liberation without revelation is dangerous. It may begin with the righteous cry of the oppressed, but without direction, covenant, or moral grounding, it can quickly devolve into destruction, vengeance, and new forms of oppression. This is not hypothetical. On the first evening of Passover, Governor Josh Shapiro, the most high-profile Jew in public office, and his family were attacked when their home was firebombed by a domestic terrorist who called the police after the attack and said that he firebombed Governor Shapiro and would have killed him with a hammer, “for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people; he added that he needs to ”stop having my friends killed, adding, that, “our people have been put through too much by that monster.” Josh Shapiro is the governor of a state in the U.S. What connection can he have to Israel? I wonder…

The phrase “by any means necessary” has allowed Antisemitism to be rationalized as anti-colonialism. 

Let’s be clear: Judaism believes in liberation. It is foundational to who we are. The Torah is the story of a God who hears the cry of the oppressed and brings them out with a mighty hand. But God doesn’t just liberate. God reveals. God gives law. God commands holiness.

We do not stop at the sea. We continue to Sinai.

The inheritors of liberation theology today have taken divinity out of the story; it’s no longer a theology, but a cult. By literally supporting Hamas, they choose to follow the greatest oppressor in the region, a group that has held Gaza hostage since 2006. Those who have used billions of dollars of aid and concrete to build a massive tunnel system rivaling subways of major cities instead of infrastructure above ground, and have treated dissenters with cruelty that is unspeakable from the bimah. 

Judaism doesn’t believe in ‘by any means necessary’ because it is an antithesis to the most radical claim Judaism has ever made: that true freedom is not doing whatever we want, but being bound in sacred obligation to what is right.

That is why we say: “Avadim hayinu lePharaoh b’Mitzrayim—We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt,” but we never say, “Now we are free to serve ourselves.” We say instead, “We are servants of the Holy One, Blessed be God.”

And so I ask those who say our liberation is tied together, while also leading us into danger: who are you serving? 

We serve the God who split the sea and gave us Torah.

The God who says, “Do not oppress the stranger, because you were strangers.”

The God who commands both justice and mercy.

The God who brought us out of Egypt—not so we could tear the world down,

but so we could lift it up.

So we must ask of any liberation movement—Jewish or otherwise: What are you liberating us from, and where are you claiming to take us? 

And please, share our answer with them.