“I Will Walk About in Your Midst”
This week’s reading is known in Hebrew as the tokhaḥah (“warning”), because it contains a detailed list of all the evils that will strike Israel if it fails to keep God’s laws and statutes. The list of ills is indeed frightening—diseases and famine, war and desolation and yet more will be Israel’s lot if it fails to heed God’s words.
This list of punishments is preceded by a somewhat shorter list of blessings that will be Israel’s if it keeps God’s commandments. I suppose some people regard this section as a kind of opening sop, the little carrot that comes before the big stick. And indeed, that is how things start out, mentioning various worldly blessings: agricultural plenty, peace and the ability to fight off attackers, fertility and increase. But this section ends on a somewhat different note:
And I will put my dwelling in your midst, and I will not shrink from you. And I will walk about in your midst, and I will be for you as a God, and you will be to Me as a people. I am the Lord your God, who took you out of the land of Egypt… (Lev 26:11-13)
In these verses, the biblical text switches from material to spiritual blessings. “I will put my dwelling (mishkan) in your midst” seems to refer to the tabernacle (that is, the moveable sanctuary that is indeed called the mishkan in Hebrew), which the Israelites constructed during their wanderings.
The wording of this passage apparently struck our Rabbis as a bit strange. To begin with, God’s promise to put the mishkan in Israel’s midst had already been made in the book of Exodus: “Let them build me a sanctuary and I will dwell in their midst” (Exod 25:8), and this mishkan was indeed about to be put into service. Perhaps for this reason, an ancient midrashist explained these verses differently.
On the words “I will walk about in your midst,” the midrashic commentary Sifra notes: “A parable was used to explain this matter. A king went out to stroll with his tenant farmer in a garden, but the tenant farmer hid himself from him. The king said to the tenant farmer: ‘Why are you hiding from me? I’m just like you!’ So will the Holy One stroll about with the righteous in the Garden of Eden in the world to come, and the righteous, when they see Him, will be terrified before Him; [He will say] ‘But I’m just like you!’”
In other words, the midrashist understands the biblical passage as referring to what will happen in the eschatological future, when the righteous will be in the Garden of Eden. It is only there, the midrashist seems to be saying, that God will truly be able to “walk about in your midst.”
One would think that this would be an occasion of humanity’s greatest intimacy with divine, when God Himself will walk shoulder to shoulder with the righteous. Yet that is not so: the righteous, like the tenant farmer in the parable, are terrified of being so close to God. The words that God then uses to reassure them are altogether strange. Hareni kayyotze bakh is hard to translate: “I am similar to you,” “You and I are of the same substance/class,” “We are in the same situation”—any of these is possible. “I’m just like you” may be a bit strong, but I think it best captures the strangeness of the parable.
What does it mean? Humans are in some ways “just like” God: they are created in His image and likeness (Gen 1:26), and they have been given the highest capacity of cognition among God’s creatures. Once before, God was said to walk about in the midst of the Garden of Eden (Gen 3:8), and that time, too, the human beings involved (Adam and Eve) were terrified and hid themselves. But that was in the past. Here, in the future, God will reassure the righteous with the strangest affirmation: “Don’t be afraid! You and I are really not so different.” What could that mean? Any answers will be appreciated.
Shabbat shalom!
Weekly Torah Reading (outside Israel): BeHar, May 28, 2016
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.” Now that they’re worshiping (using the verb ‘avad) Me, they can’t be slaving (again, ‘avad) for someone else.
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!
