Good Old Slavery?
This week’s reading includes a number of laws concerning the institution of slavery. Nowadays, the word slavery inspires justifiable horror, but in ancient times it was a common practice in many societies (ancient Israel and ancient Greece are but two examples). There were certain obvious advantages in being a slave in bad economic times, when starvation threatened: after all, the slave’s master had every interest in taking decent care of his property, feeding and otherwise providing for his or her needs.
Nevertheless, it is striking that in this week’s reading, the Torah seeks to eliminate or at least modify the status of an Israelite slave:
If your brother [Israelite] falls on hard times and is sold to you [as a slave], do not have him work as a slave laborer. Let him stay with you as a hired hand or a contracted laborer—and let him work [only] until the jubilee year. Then he and his children will go free and return to his clan and to his ancestral holding. (Lev 25:39-41)
In other words, slavery is bad, at least for Israelites. You may think you’ve purchased a slave, the Torah says, but he’s really more like a hireling, and in any case, the jubilee year will set him free of any further obligation.
It is surprising, therefore, to see the very next sentence following this passage: “For they are My slaves,” God says. “I am the one who took them out of the land of Egypt.” Strikingly, nearly the same sentence appears at the end of this week’s reading: “For the Israelites are enslaved to Me. They are My slaves; I took them out of the land of Egypt” (Lev 25:55).
The obvious question is: if ordinary slavery is so strictly limited and clearly a bad thing (at least for Israelites), why should God have so readily adopted slavery as a model for the relationship between Him and His people?
This is related to something our Rabbis said about a law in the book of Exodus. The law appears right after the promulgation of the Ten Commandments in chapter 20. Chapter 21 begins with the “law of the Hebrew slave”: he is to serve for six years and go free in the seventh. If, however, his master has provided him with a wife, he may decide to declare, “I love my master, my wife, and my children; I do not wish to go free.” In that case, his master is to “take him to the door or the doorpost and pierce his ear with an awl; then he will be his slave forever” (Exod 21:6).
The slave’s declaration is clear enough: “I want to continue being your slave.” But why should his master then have to bore a hole in the slave’s ear? R. Yohanan ben Zakkai provided an answer: God must have said, “The ear that heard my voice on Mount Sinai when I said, ‘For they are My slaves,’ and not the slaves of slaves [that is, of other Jews]—yet this man went and acquired a master for himself. Let his ear be pierced” (b. Kiddushin 22b).
(In fact, R. Yohanan might have put it slightly differently: “The ear that just now heard my voice on Mount Sinai when I was saying, ‘I am the Lord your God, who took you out of the land of Egypt, the place of slavery’]—yet this man still wants to be a slave? Let his ear be pierced.”)
Either way, the message is clear: being a slave to other human beings is bad; being a slave to God is good. In other words, it all depends on who your employer is. But I think to explain the text in this fashion is to miss an important point, indeed, the whole point of God’s declaration, ‘For they are My slaves.’ It all has to do with the verbal root ‘avad. This is the normal Hebrew word for work, from which the word for slave (‘eved) is derived. But the same verb work is used in Hebrew (and other languages) in the sense of worship, when speaking of a deity. In other words, to be God’s slave is another way of saying to be God’s worshiper. This puts a rather different slant on “For they are My slaves.”
One further point: In other religions, a person worships the gods by offering animal sacrifices on their altars. The verb ‘avad can mean this in the Torah as well, but sometimes to serve God has a far broader meaning, “to keep His commandments and His laws” (Deut 10:12). It is in this sense that Jews are to be God’s “slaves”; worship (‘avodah) in Judaism is not merely a matter of sacrificing animals, but a fulltime job.
Shabbat shalom!
Weekly Torah Reading (outside Israel): Emor, May 21, 2016
Why Do We Count the ‘Omer?
In this week’s reading, the Torah commands the people of Israel to bring the first sheaf (‘omer) of the new grain harvest to the Temple. This is to be done, the Torah says, “on the day after the Sabbath”—which, in our tradition, refers to the day after the start of the Passover festival. This week’s reading then further commands that, starting from that day, we are to count off seven weeks (Lev 23:15). On the day after this counting is complete, another festival is to occur, appropriately called Shavu‘ot (“weeks” in Hebrew).
Regular readers of this column will have heard of the ancient book of Jubilees, an anonymous work written in the second century BCE—and one that reveals a lot about what was on the minds of Jews in that turbulent century. One of the more surprising aspects of Jubilees is how it handles the whole matter of counting off those seven weeks between Passover and Shavu‘ot.
In Jubilees, there is no mention of counting weeks or days. The book implies that this is all a huge misunderstanding. Instead, after recounting the great flood in the time of Noah, Jubilees invents an incident not found in Genesis: Noah and his descendants all swore oaths never to consume the blood of sacrificial animals. A sacred day was established to commemorate those oaths, Shevu‘ot. This word is spelled slightly differently in English from “weeks,” Shavu‘ot, but in Hebrew the spelling is the same. So, Jubilees argues, people who think the name of this festival is “Weeks” are just wrong. It’s really the “Festival of Oaths,” and there is no counting off of weeks at all.
Why was this book out to eliminate the counting? Actually, this was very consistent with the overall ideological stand found in Jubilees—and frankly, among some Jews today as well. Jubilees did not like the idea of any human role in things sacred, not only in determining the date of Shavu‘ot, but in other matters as well. So, for the same reason, Jubilees warns against people who “will carefully examine the moon” and use it to determine the months—as we do with the Hebrew calendar—since this also required human intervention, first in having human witnesses spot the new moon and then having other humans—a rabbinical court—use their testimony to officially establish the start of each month and publicize it. The Hebrew calendar’s luni-solar nature also required human authorities to add a second month of Adar from time to time, at irregular intervals. “How awful!” one can almost hear Jubilees say. Instead, the book championed a sun-based calendar that was virtually automatic—no human meddling involved.
Our rabbis, on the contrary, gloried in this handoff from the divine to the human. The Torah, they said (appropriately reinterpreting Deut 30:12), is no longer in heaven, where it began: it is now in the hands of our greatest sages to interpret and put into practice. This of course doesn’t mean that Judaism is a do-it-yourself religion, given to revision by whoever wants to change it; we depend on past rulings and established practice. What it does mean is that ultimately, at some stage or other, what came from God must always be given over to mere human beings, to make the best of it that they can.
So in the same spirit, we thank God on the first day of every lunar month for having sanctified the people of Israel and thereby given us the role of establishing when each new month begins. This hands off to us, in the process, the authority to determine as well when each festival will occur, in fact, even when the Day of Atonement will occur. So, as it also says in this week’s reading, “These are the Lord’s festivals, sacred occasions that you will proclaim” (Lev 23:4).
Shabbat shalom!
