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Needless to say, one as concerned with the concept of freedom as Erich Fromm
is quite intrigued with the narrative in the early Book of Exodus which describes
Moses's encounter with Pharaoh. Beginning in Escape From Freedom and expanding
his thought in You Shall Be As Gods, Fromm offers an extensive excursus on
that narrative as a model of human liberation. Pharaoh's confusion of worship
with laziness becomes a condemnation of all who do not recognize that productiveness
is intrinsic. [9] Like Jewish preachers throughout the ages, Fromm
is attentive to the nuances of Hebrew words. His favorite Hebrew word is
emunah (generally translated, "faith"), which Fromm interprets as denoting
the "certainty of the uncertain." [10] Fromm further notes that the word
emunah, in the Hebrew Bible, can mean "firmness," and can describe a character
trait rather than belief in something. [11] Here he uses Hebrew etymology
for the secularization of religious terminology. Fromm delights in
contrasting tikvak, the Hebrew word for "hope" with esperar, the Spanish
term for the same idea: the former, he declares, has the more dynamic connotation
of "tension," while the latter describes a state of waiting. [12] The Hebrew
words rahamim and ahabah are also frequently contrasted by Fromm in his discussions
of various kinds of love. The former, we are told, describes "motherly love"
and derives from the root rehem, "womb." The latter, employed to describe
erotic love, denotes "fusion and union." [13] These terms are explored in
greater detail by Fromm in The Art of Loving (1956), where he employs Hebrew
etymologies to illustrate his concepts of motherly and other kinds of love.
[14] Fromm turns to rabbinic as well as to biblical sources. Escape
From Freedom begins with Hillel's famous dictum in Ethics of the Fathers:
"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself,
what am I? And if not now, when?" And at the end of Man For Himself (whose
title certainly echoes Hillel's dictum), Fromm rephrases another famous dictum
of Hillel's, "Do not do to others what is hateful to you": "Whatever you
do to others you also do to yourself." Fromm elaborates: "The respect for
life, that of others as one's own, is the concomitant of the process of life
itself and a condition of psychic health." [15] Like Jewish homiletics
of all ages, Fromm's interpretations of Scripture range from brilliant insights
into the plain meaning of the Bible to shameless forcing of the biblical
text, in Fromm's case, to fit psychoanalytic dogmas. Among the ulterior uses
of the Bible in Fromm's work is his insistence, at the end of You Shall Be
As Gods, that we find in biblical literature a clear-cut evolution of the
God-concept from authoritarian ruler to constitutional monarch, from anthropomorphically-described
God to nameless God. The Jewish religion, Fromm editorializes, could "not
take the last logical step, to give up 'God' and to establish a concept of
man as a being who is alone in the world, but who can feel at home in it
if he achieves union with his fellow man and with nature." [16] But Fromm
did not prove that there are "logical steps" in the development if biblical
religion. An objective, critical scholar would suspect such pat stacking
of biblical epochs, since idolatry reasserted itself in some of the most
soph isticated periods, and powerful trends in religious progress could be
felt in some of the most degrading circumstances.
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