Rav Kook wrote:
‘Freedom (cherut) is the elevated spirit by which a person,
and the whole people,
are raised to become faithful to their independent inner selves,
to the image of God that is within them.’
A truly free person is one who succeeds in realizing their true essence,
in liberating themselves from the bonds of their impulses and material tendencies [which hold them back], and in connecting to the spiritual self which already exists within them.
This is hinted at in the way in which the Tablets were inscribed:
the Commandments were not written but engraved (charut).
The special quality inherent in engraving stone is that
the writing and the stone are not separate,
but form a single entity;
the letters become part of the stone.
The Torah is not external to humankind
but an inherent part of the human essence;
thus one who engages in Torah study
is automatically a truly free person.
This is why Moses is described as
‘the servant of God’.
