Four Freedoms

By Adam Zemel

Parashat Eikev (Deuteronomy 7:12-11:25)

Parashat Eikev sees Moses continuing his long farewell address to the ancient Israelites before they enter the promised land. Moses, who midrash tells us was a hesitant public speaker at the beginning of his journey, speaks powerfully in the Book of Deuteronomy. FDR, one of the great orators in American political history, cited Parashat Eikev in his famous “Four Freedoms” speech, making the argument that modern democracies must stand for something more than the survival of their own citizens, but instead aspire to a vision of flourishing for all of humanity.

Deuteronomy 8:3:
וַיְעַנְּךָ, וַיַּרְעִבֶךָ, וַיַּאֲכִלְךָ אֶת-הַמָּן אֲשֶׁר לֹא-יָדַעְתָּ, וְלֹא יָדְעוּן אֲבֹתֶיךָ: לְמַעַן הוֹדִיעֲךָ, כִּי לֹא עַל-הַלֶּחֶם לְבַדּוֹ יִחְיֶה הָאָדָם–כִּי עַל-כָּל-מוֹצָא פִי-יְהוָה, יִחְיֶה הָאָדָם.

“[God] subjected you to the hardship of hunger and then gave you manna to eat, which neither you nor your ancestors had ever known, in order to teach you that a human being does not live on bread alone, but that one may live on anything that יהוה decrees.” (JPS 2006)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt evoked this verse in his 1941 State of the Union, now widely and informally known as the Four Freedoms speech. Roosevelt had just been elected to an unprecedented third term in response to the instability, chaos and destruction tearing through Europe and the rest of the world. The President used his State of the Union address to break from America’s long posture of non-interventionism and argue that the country had a role to play supporting those fighting for democracy abroad. FDR understood that this new foreign policy had to root itself in American values in order to bloom in American hearts: “As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone…The mighty action that we are calling for cannot be based on a disregard of all things worth fighting for.”

“Men do not live by bread alone.” Unlike the ancient Israelites, who heard in these words an invocation of God’s grace, FDR used his State of the Union to motivate human action.

Drawing from the Bill of Rights and the legacy of the enlightenment, FDR defined the “things worth fighting for” through the prism of four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. Roosevelt understood that, for a democracy, freedom must stand for more than subsistence and survival, but for the right of all people to flourish unimpeded by violence, lack, or enforced ideology. And he reached back to our ancient text in order to find the poetry that communicated this essential democratic belief, positioning the Americans of the middle-20th Century as inheritors of humankind’s most ancient aspirations.

Adam Zemel is senior story teller for the marketing department of Hebrew College. He holds an MFA in Fiction from UCRiverside, and his nonfiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Daily Beast, Hey Alma, and elsewhere. This drash is adapted from his work as a contributing writer to the American Scripture Project.

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