Forget the pyramid on the dollar bill. Forget the eagle's talons
on the Great Seal. Forget the Zapruder film. The biggest "hide in
plain sight" American Mystery resides in Philadelphia, permanently
cast on our beloved Liberty Bell. Its well-known inscription from
Leviticus -- "proclaim liberty throughout the land and its
inhabitants thereof" -- sounds straightforward enough. But
isn't that how these hidden messages always seem to work?
For the first clue, we have to break a code. Any 18th century
New England clergy in the audience is invited to step up and give
us a hand. Apparently, there's a problem with how the original
Hebrew text describes "liberty." The bible uses the word
"dror," an obscure, multiple-meaning term, even though
there are several spot-on words that would denote political liberty
with far less ambiguity. This anomaly is a red flare, equivalent to
"why did the suspect take a different route to work the morning his
wife was murdered?"
Based on the other biblical appearances of dror, we
begin to see that this is not your average word. Ezekiel invokes
dror when referring to the return of landed property to
the original owners. Exodus employs the term as an adjective to
define a degree of ultimate purity in the spice myrrh. Psalm 84
identifies dror as a particular species of bird, a kind
that refuses to be tamed, making its nest as freely in human
habitation as in the fields or woods. What's going on here? Is the
Liberty Bell telling us to be as free as birds?
The 19th century linguistic genius Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch
straightens this out: he explains that each different appearance
use of dror is ultimately about the same concept, namely
"achieving the natural state" to which that person or object
integrally belongs. Freedom as described on the bell,
then, would seem to be the "default state" of mankind, a destiny if
not a social debt.
Every ancient mystery needs a secret number -- and ours is 50.
The Pennsylvania Assembly ordered the bell in 1751 to commemorate
the 50-year anniversary of William Penn's 1701 Charter of
Privileges. The liberty inscription was apt because the preceding
biblical verse discusses the Jubilee year, a culmination of seven
sets of seven years.
This Jubilee number, under-girded by the square of seven, is by
no means "natural." Unlike days, months or years, there is no
corresponding astronomical marker for what we know as the week. The
members of the Assembly no doubt understood the Jubilee to be a
celebration of a covenantal relationship between man and that
Creator who works in sevens.
Finally, a juicy generational conspiracy demands a dollop of the
paranormal -- and ours does not disappoint. Insightful as the
Assembly may have been, could they have seen the future? Could they
have known that on the other side of July 4, 1776 -- exactly fifty
years later, that jubilee would be consecrated by the return of
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson to their own ultimate natural
state? These great men had explicitly acknowledged that the first
test of the Republic would be for it to endure fifty years. Both
men lived to see that day, but not a day more. We arrive at a kind
of temporal (bell-curved) palindrome. This Liberty Bell --
inscribed with a verse that is a celebration of fifty -- itself
celebrates a past and future jubilee event. As Ben
Franklin might have said, how weird is that?
FINE -- WE HAVE BROKEN the code. But can we understand the message?
Let me take a crack.
The relationship between America and the Almighty was born in
ambiguity and remains so. We are a country explicitly without a
national religion, and yet our birth is soaked in religiosity. Our
Founders, each integrating rationalist enlightenment philosophy
into his own personal view of religion, often threw off mixed
messages with enough sound bites for both sides to claim them as
one of their own. This week's split decision on the Ten
Commandments is a perfect metaphor for our 239 years of
irresolution.
Into our own fallen world, the bell remains. To our legacy of
spiritual ambiguity, the bell functions like a pair of stereo-optic
glasses, revealing clarity where the naked eye sees only fuzz.
Liberty, it tells us, does not mean freedom from self-control.
Neither does it mean freedom from social sanction. When Leviticus
proclaims "dror" throughout the land and its inhabitants
thereof, the bell is making the ultimate "natural" argument for
human liberty -- but there's a catch. This "dror" is only as
"natural" as the 49-year count that preceded it. In other words,
the moral argument for freedom is based solely on a covenantal
relationship with the Almighty. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote
about men's "unalienable rights" being "endowed by their Creator."
We do not need to hear the bell toll for it to remind us that there
is no other way.
topics:
Religion
