LEV959 In Jewish terms, there are three words to describe different kinds of freedom.  The first word is chofesh.  This is the lowest form of freedom.  In modern Hebrew, this word means vacation.  Like the modern meaning, the Torah uses this word to mean a stoppage of physical work.  When a servant went free, the Torah called this chofesh (Exodus 21:2) Thus, all that chofesh implies is a cessation of physical toil, which has nothing to do with morality and spirituality.   The second Torah reference to freedom is the word dror.  This word is also the name for a bird.  Like the bird who is free and migrates to a warmer climate in winter and returns in summer, this type of freedom refers to a return to a freer status.  That is why the context for this type of freedom is the Jubilee year when all people return to their land at the end of the fifty-year period [this verse]. … The highest type of freedom is Judaism is cherut.  This implies spiritual freedom, not merely a cessation from work or a chance to start over, but a feeling of freedom and a higher purpose of life.  … this is why Passover is called Zeman Cherutainu, the holiday of freedom.  This is not merely the freedom from the bondage of Egypt … but the Jewish people becoming a people…a nation with its own culture and religion.  Pesach is a celebration of spiritual freedom not mere physical freedom. …  Only on Shavuot did the Jews truly become free.  By accepting a new lifestyle (Exodus 24:7) that gave them a moral set of laws to live by, they achieved cherut, true freedom …. To understand this phenomenon with the Jews, one has only to look at the history of the black people in the United States.  In the 1860s they received their legal freedom through Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.  The fourteenth amendment to the Constitution gave blacks the legal right to vote.  But that did not make the black Americans feel free.  They began to feel free only in the 1960s when the marches and leaders inspired black pride, black studies, and a feeling of belonging to something special.  This is the freedom that approximates cherut.