The freedom of limits: A Rosh Hashanah meditation

Recently Oren wrote about what he called the "freedom-limit paradox" — the thesis that freedom is meaningful only when contained within law, and creativity only when disciplined by constraint. That idea first occurred to him as a 12-year-old when, sitting down to write a poem, he "suddenly discovered freedom." It dawned on him that while he could write whatever he wished, his poem had to be more than just unbounded self-expression; it had to adhere to the rules of rhyme and meter. Real freedom, he realized, was attainable only through limits.

Poets, of course, have always known that. The strict rules of the sonnet — 14 lines in iambic pentameter, with prescribed rhyme schemes — have given rise to some of the most sublime verse in the English language, for example, while the five-line limerick, with its jaunty rhythm and rhyme, has been the vehicle for wit and wordplay for centuries.

Robert Frost observed more than once that "writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down." Claudio, in William Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure," remarks after being arrested that his imprisonment has come "from too much liberty," adding ruefully that "every scope by the immoderate use turns to restraint."

The same symbiosis of order and freedom is evident throughout the arts.

Bach's "Goldberg Variations" are so dazzling precisely because their vast emotional panorama unfolds within the iron rules of counterpoint and harmony. Beethoven fashioned his mighty Fifth Symphony out of an almost childishly simple four-note motif (the "dot dot dot dash" theme that everyone recognizes) — a brilliant demonstration of how self-imposed limits can unleash extraordinary power and beauty. In dance, the rigid vocabulary of ballet — the five basic positions, the prescribed angles and lines — has produced works of astonishing lyricism, like "Swan Lake" and "Appalachian Spring."

Even in film, masterpieces like Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window," which is confined almost entirely to a single apartment courtyard, and Sidney Lumet's "Twelve Angry Men," which never leaves a jury room, show how constraint can intensify artistic freedom. Again and again, structure proves to be not the enemy of freedom but the condition of its flowering. "The enemy of art," Orson Welles observed, "is the absence of limitations."

What holds true in the fine arts holds true in brick and mortar as well. As I read Oren's essay I was reminded of something my late colleague Robert Campbell, the Globe's longtime architecture critic, explained about Boston's Back Bay. The harmony and graceful lines for which the neighborhood is famous, Campbell wrote in "Cityscapes of Boston," were deliberately engineered by means of "amazingly sophisticated controls" put in place before a single home was constructed. Anyone wishing to build in the new neighborhood was required to abide by a host of details — building heights, setbacks, materials, projections. Yet within those tight boundaries, there was room for individuality. Builders could distinguish their houses through ornamentation, bay windows, porticoes, or carved stonework. The result? "In the Back Bay almost every house looks different," Campbell wrote. "The neighborhood is an explosion of individuality and personal display. Yet because of the commissioners' wise controls, there is also a sense of public consensus."

Why is it that in so many domains of human endeavor, freedom depends on discipline, and creativity on constraint? The answer, I think, lies in the nature of freedom itself. Untethered from structure, liberty inevitably collapses into chaos, just as a game without rules — think of Calvin and Hobbes's "Calvinball" — becomes unplayable. That was why John Locke, the English philosopher whose writing so profoundly influenced America's founders, argued that laws are not the antithesis of liberty but its guarantee: The purpose of law, he wrote, "is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom: for ... where there is no law, there is no freedom." Only by binding ourselves to rules that restrain arbitrary authority can we live securely as free people.

The Founders often made the same point. Thomas Jefferson defined "rightful liberty" as inseparable from "limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others." John Adams, warning that liberty without law becomes mere license, insisted that freedom be understood as "a power to do as we would be done by."

In art and music, in the architecture of our cities, in the design of our laws, the paradox repeatedly surfaces: Without limits, freedom dies and creativity grows corrupt. That message is also embedded in the Jewish calendar. As the High Holy Days begin this week, we are reminded that liberty and order are not adversaries but partners. To quote the late Jonathan Sacks, for many years Britain's chief rabbi and a member of the House of Lords, "a society in which everyone is free to do what they choose is not a free society. It is anarchy."

The Hebrew Bible dramatizes the point. When freedom without order prevailed, what resulted, according to Genesis, was "a world filled with violence" — a war of all against all. And wherever there has been order without freedom, the price has been paid in tyranny and crushed human lives. The biblical alternative — the one Judaism bequeathed to Western civilization — is a covenantal society in which there is both freedom and regulation, a society of law-governed liberty.

That is the challenge to which the Days of Awe call us each year: to affirm freedom but also to embrace the self-discipline and moral law that alone make freedom last. When Michael Oren intuited, as a 12-year-old with pen and paper, that freedom is only real when it is held within bounds, he stumbled on a truth older than Sinai and as urgent as today's news. The High Holy Days are an annual reminder that we must bind freedom with order, so that we may flourish together, in happiness and peace.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.

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