Parshat Behar introduces Yovel, the Jubilee year. Every fifty years the shofar is sounded and we are commanded, “U’krasem dror ba’aretz l’chol yoshveha” – “You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” (Vayikra 25:10). Those exact words are etched on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, the physical symbol of the American founding.
The Torah does not treat dror as a slogan. It is a recurring national reset – debts forgiven, land restored, families redeemed. It is the Torah’s great “no” to permanent servitude. The American experiment took the Liberty Bell’s verse seriously enough to enshrine “all men are created equal” in the Declaration and to fight a war that ended chattel slavery. That is dror – liberty proclaimed to all inhabitants.
What some voices now offer is the mirror image of the very Critical Race Theory they rightly criticize. Call it the Other CRT: Confederate Rehabilitation Theory. Matt Walsh’s recent project and Ben Shapiro’s related commentary try to launder the Confederacy as “states’ rights,” “brave soldiers,” and “noble Lee defending his home.” This is not American conservatism: it is Confederate ideology disguised in a pilfered Union uniform. It chooses an ostensible Torah concession – l’olam bahem ta’avodu, later in Chapter 25 – and makes it the moral and political Cornerstone, exactly as the Confederacy did. The American founding leaned toward dror; the Confederacy doubled down on permanent, race-based hierarchy.
In Yirmiyahu 34, during the Babylonian siege, King Zedekiah and the people of Judah made a covenant to free all Hebrew slaves – a dramatic, one-time Jubilee in extremis. They complied briefly, but then “changed their minds and took back the slaves they had freed and enslaved them again” (Yirmiyahu 34:11). God’s response is devastating: you re-enslaved your brothers; I will hand you over to the sword, pestilence, and famine. The re-enslavement becomes a proximate cause of the Churban.
David M. Goldenberg’s seminal The Curse of Ham (Princeton, 2003) explodes any claim that the Torah or rabbinic tradition ever provided a genuine biblical basis for racial chattel slavery. The Curse of Ham is a later graft – a medieval-to-modern invention born of linguistic error and cultural stereotyping. Early Jewish sources know nothing of a divine decree condemning anyone to perpetual servitude on purely racial grounds. Even l’olam bahem ta’avodu was never racialized in our tradition; that reading was an after-the-fact graft to justify economic and political power.
But the Daily Wire’s rehabilitation project doesn’t just fall on hashkafic grounds; its premises are repeatedly exploded by the historical record. Alexander Stephens’ Cornerstone Speech (1861) declares without euphemism that the Confederacy’s “foundations are laid… upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man” – the exact opposite of the Declaration and closer to l’olam bahem ta’avodu than to dror. The South pushed the original Thirteenth Amendment (Corwin Amendment) to enshrine slavery federally and forever, immune to repeal – a mockery of “states’ rights.” George Fitzhugh, their leading theorist, rejected capitalism as “white slavery” and praised slavery as the “beau ideal of Communism,” sounding more like a reactionary socialist than a limited-government conservative. Southern Democrats were the backbone of the New Deal – and made sure that Black workers were carved out.
Even the military narrative fails. Robert E. Lee captured John Brown at Harpers Ferry and saw him hanged for treason and inciting slave revolt – the very crime of seizing federal property. The Confederacy then stole every federal arsenal, fort, and warship in the South and fired on Fort Sumter with them. The Minutemen brought their own muskets; Lee fought with stolen arms on home turf against hesitant Northern generals. The real casus belli was the mass theft, not abstract states’ rights. Lee was not a hero fighting for his home state: he was exponentially guiltier of the ostensible crimes of terrorism and theft than John Brown was, in the service of a cause that by 1860 was already morally dubious at best.
Both versions of CRT – the 1619 left-wing version and the Other CRT of Confederate nostalgia – flatten history into racial grievance. Both reject the Torah’s nuanced tension and America’s universalist core. Both are ultimately anti-Jewish (denying the Jubilee’s dror as the moral north star) and anti-American (denying “all men are created equal”). Parshat Behar demands intellectual honesty: proclaim liberty to all inhabitants, call perpetual racial hierarchy by its name, and refuse any ideology that makes avdut – whether “equity” or “heritage” – the Cornerstone. Only dror can redeem us.
