Mishpatim: The Hebrew Servant and the Price of Freedom

Good evening, my friends. We are in Parashat Mishpatim. By way of introduction, let me read you the passage we are going to comment on. “And these are the ordinances that you shall set before them. If you acquire a Hebrew servant, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, without payment. If he came in alone, he shall go out alone; if he was a married man, his wife shall go out with him. If his master gave him a wife and she bore him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall belong to her master, and he shall go out alone. But if the servant says, ‘I love my master, my wife and my children; I will not go out free,’ his master shall bring him before the court, and shall bring him to the door or to the doorpost, and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl, and he shall serve him forever.” We are here in a chapter on servitude that follows the Ten Commandments, and which comes, alas, to correct the inequalities within a society. For while all the laws of nature were created, in a certain way, complementary and equal to themselves, it is not so with man. There the inequalities are such that there are rich people and poor people, healthy people and sick people, intelligent people and people who are less so. And the Holy One, blessed be He, arranged things in such a way that we might truly cultivate brotherhood and solidarity, and set in motion a movement toward equality among everyone. You will notice that the order is different: at first sight we will not be speaking of equality; we will speak first of all of brotherhood.

Of course, one may ask why this priority is given to the status of the servant. Our Sages have drawn out a threefold notion in this dependence of the human being. First, we are always subject in our existence to circumstances that oblige us to give away our time, to submit and to constrain ourselves to activities that are not always to our liking and that hardly allow us to flourish. Then there is duality, which tears us apart because there is our will and our desire, our aspirations and the realities of life — and so, very often, we yield rather to our desire, to our yetzer (our inclination), and we sacrifice our creative impulse, the impulse of the yotzer, of the creator, which would give a character of its own to our life, to what we truly are. And there is also the dependence of the human being that places him between the ephemeral and the lasting, the relative and the absolute — between the small man he is within this vast macrocosm, and that unequal relation between the eved (the servant) and the Adon (the Master), between the soul and the Master of the universe. And of course these three aspects come together: just as G-d breathed a breath into this being, formed out of all the elements of creation, and at once set him within the time of Shabbat — that is, within a time that generates time, in which he is no longer himself dependent on time, in which it is he who actually draws up the agenda of his life —

it is he who fills his time. In the same way, at the Exodus from Egypt, when this people was drawn out of the Egyptian clay, the Eternal, at the foot of Mount Sinai, breathed into it this spirit through the ten utterances of creation — the ten utterances, forgive me, of the revelation, which stand in parallel with the ten utterances of creation. That is to say, the ten utterances of creation brought the world into being in its materiality, and the ten utterances of the revelation gave a soul to that matter. And therefore a history becomes possible — on condition that one defines […] this relation of dependence of the divine breath with respect to matter, and of matter with respect to the divine breath.

Now the aim is to free man from all his constraints, and at the Exodus he had to be given the instruments to do so — but the people stands far off. The people washed its garments on leaving Egypt, but it did not remake its soul. It is still marked by a relative comfort of life, remaining assured in its daily existence of the basic necessities it needs in order to live. Yet man had at all costs to be taught to pull himself out of this dependence and to forge his own law — not out of his desires, but on the basis of his will. And on the basis of his will, the essential law is this: “I am the Eternal your G-d, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” The Exodus from Egypt is a way of tearing man away from every constraint, from every inclination. Now, how is this to be done? It does not come about overnight. We see the development of a child. At six it is not as at twelve; it is not as at eighteen; it is not as at forty. And as he confronts the problems of life and increases his knowledge, he sheds even this shell — a shell bordering, let us say, on the animal; bordering on the animal, I say. This holds even for the honoring of parents: the attachment a child may feel toward his parents simply out of gratitude, or the wish to place his parents beyond all […] — no, that is not what love of parents is. Moreover, the Torah commanded us neither to love our parents, nor to love our children, nor to love our wife. It spoke rather of respect. Respect is something else. It is more than understanding. It is more than grasping a set of many factors that combine to make us act one way or another. It lies beyond all comprehension. To honor one’s parents is to bring about a love that has broken the bonds of nature and clothed itself in a freedom that is loved. That is why the honoring of parents appears on the first tablet of the Ten Commandments, the one concerning the relations between man and his Creator.

For if you wish to reach the recognition of the Creator from within yourself — and that is what is required — fear is not the way — fear can indeed give rise to sin; what is needed is love. One must not fear the law; one must love the law. And to love the law is to make it become the natural expression of oneself through a free act. This free act will then attest to man’s freedom, and it is this freedom that he establishes in a Shabbat repeated week after week, so that even the weekdays are lived in relation to Shabbat. It is this impulse of freedom — an affirmation of self comparable to that Anochi, “I am Hashem your G-d” — which then allows man to become the true interlocutor of G-d, the true partner of G-d in His creation. Our Sages have taught us that man’s true freedom lies in carrying out the law. “Do not read charut, engraved on the tablets, but cherut, freedom”: do not think of the laws as engraved upon the tablets — no, they are free upon the tablets. That is to say, the tablets can break, but the letters do not shatter. The letters fly away; they are weightless; they are there upon the tablets of the law, but at no moment do they bind their destiny to those tablets. So that even if an entire society were to abandon the law, in utter despair, it would suffice that there be ten people, ten righteous people, within that community to save the whole community, to save the whole of the law.

And this whole of the law is like creation, yesh me-ayin — being out of nothingness. The laws, the Ten Commandments, are likewise yesh me-ayin. Now, had the people truly possessed this height of elevation, had it not stood far off from the mountain, then we could have dispensed with Ve-eleh ha-mishpatim, “And these are the ordinances”; we could have dispensed with this detail of laws that place every person before his responsibilities toward himself, toward his Creator and toward his fellow. For we may be wise in our knowledge and just in our own lives, […] but in the way we serve the life of another, we must be more than just.

And this is what makes the difference with the law of the Bnei Noach, the principles of universal law. You know that among these universal principles — the seven laws — six are negative. The only positive law among the seven universal laws is the establishment of a judicial system that sets order in a society. But there the aim is to establish order in society at all costs, according to principles of justice that each society has forged for itself. For, be careful: the revelation did not come into a desert, onto neutral ground where there was no code at all. There was Sumer, there was Ashur, there was Egypt; there were various codes, there were various laws.

And there were, of course, correspondences between those laws and the ones set out in the Ten Commandments. But it is entirely different. That, indeed, is why, if we have to settle a matter before a rabbinical court or before a secular court, a court of the nations, it is better to give preference to the rabbinical court. Why? Because the notion of justice in the law of the Torah is joined to morality in the absolute. Morality is part of justice itself, and that is why, even when we might be in the right from a strictly legal standpoint, one must be able to yield a little of one’s rights — for the other must not simply chalk up his loss and come away utterly disheartened. This is called Ve-asita ha-yashar ve-ha-tov, “You shall do what is upright and good,” or Lema’an telech be-derech tovim, “So that you may walk in the way of the good” — because you are called to walk only in the way of the good: not the way that honors you alone, but the way that honors your parents, your forebears, the way that honors your Creator. And that is why the difference in this notion of eved, of servant, does not lie in the granting of cherut, of freedom. Cherut is what is found in the Ten Commandments. But these Ten Commandments — if everyone came to practice them in their full scope, then of course there would be no servants, of course there would be no thieves. For this servant is someone who sold himself because he had no money, or who stole and has nothing with which to repay. So rather than putting him in a prison from which, after a petty offense, he would come out a hardened highwayman, it is better to try to integrate him into a family where he can see how a life is lived. And, take note, the Sages teach: whoever acquires a servant for himself is as one who acquires a master for himself.

The aim is not simply to compensate the person who was robbed, or to provide for the well-being of someone who cannot meet his own needs. This man had to be taught to taste the savor of freedom. He had to be brought, at the end of six years — as at the end of the six days of creation — to go out with the will to take charge of his own life in complete freedom. In the absolute, one is accountable only to one’s Creator; but, once again, with respect to his Creator, if he is an eved, a servant, servitude here is a form of total freedom, because in the absolute there is no relationship of Adon and eved, of master and servant, with G-d. In the absolute, there is a relationship of Av and Ben, of Father and Son.

Sometimes, at the lower stages, it passes through the relationship of master and servant, but the ideal is to inscribe it within the relationship of avot u-vanim, of fathers and children. So how did our Sages frame this chapter on the liberation of man? He is not given work that is open-ended. He is not told to keep at such-and-such a task “until I come back.” He is not given useless tasks. He is not given tasks that demean him. He is not fed differently — not leftovers, not fizzy water: if the employer, if the master drinks wine, he must share his wine with him. If he has a comfortable bed, he must give him a similar bed, and so on.

So much so that one would think twice before taking a Hebrew servant. No one did so except volunteers within the people, who devoted themselves to reclaiming those whom fate had ill served, or who had not been able to master their lo tachmod — their covetousness. And this weakness was already evident in man at his creation, since he yielded to the temptation of the tree of da’at, of knowledge, but made of it a consumer product. And thereby he reduced all his knowledge, all his learning, to the satisfaction of his cravings, to the needs of immediate consumption. It had to be G-d who drew man out of his dependencies — as He did for Avraham, drawing him out of the fiery furnace and giving him a breath of heh, the letter heh that He gave to Avraham and Sarah. In the same way He brought the Jewish people out of Egypt,

and gave it the breath of the Ten Commandments. And within this breath of the Ten Commandments there is Shabbat. Just as man was created on the eve of Shabbat, so the Jewish people, as soon as it left Egypt, celebrates its freedom — in remembrance of the creation of the world and in remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt. Now this freedom has a name: the word cherut, which, as I told you, was drawn from the engraving of the tablets of the law. But the word that appears in the Torah here is chofshi, “free.” Or else, in the fiftieth year, the Jubilee year, when each person has recovered his lands and recovered his property, another word is used there: dror.

Dror — what is it? We find three definitions in the word dror. Dror, which means pure of all adulteration: for the ketoret, the incense, one took mor dror, myrrh that was unadulterated, untampered with. There is a notion of purity. There is a second notion: that of proclaiming freedom. But this freedom was proclaimed by means of the shofar — a shofar teru’ah. This shofar has its first origins in the horn of Yitzchak’s ram — Yitzchak, who was torn away from the dependence on death, which is at the origin of all impurity, of all despair in man, of all rupture. And this notion of death had at all costs to be driven out, for the sake of life. And there is a third meaning. The third meaning is that there is a bird called dror: “Even the sparrow has found a house, and the dror a nest for herself.” It longs only for a nest. What is the difference between a house and a nest?

A house has a roof; a nest has no roof. Now the Holy of Holies — forgive me, the Sanctuary — was without a roof, without a roof because there was to be no mechitzah, no separation, no partition between the lower world and the upper world. And therefore, “the rains did not extinguish the fire” of the altar, and the wind could not shift the column of smoke rising from the altar of the ketoret, of the incense, because there was no longer this dependence on the laws of nature. Freedom — dror — did without that roof, did without that separation; and with it came the capacity

not to be forever caught in an endless chain of logic that locks man within fixed categories of thought. Within free thought, one must proceed by mutation. And in this Parashat Mishpatim there are fifty-three laws, and the commentators asked themselves about their inner logic, about what connects them, what binds them together. They did not find it, but they said — they declared — that if ever we could enter into the logic of these laws, we would have gone very far in understanding the divine will. But we are still very far, very far from such an approach, because we are enclosed in a way of thinking that remains limited by our da’at, by our knowledge; we do not know how to proceed by mutation, by leaps.

Now, these mutations come about only through love — a free love, a love consented to […]. But to remain dependent on this love of a woman at the risk of sacrificing one’s freedom — that is not admissible. That is not admissible. We are told: “His master shall pierce his ear with an awl, and he shall serve him forever.” The man who comes and says, “No, I have become attached to my wife, to my children” — it is in fact a Canaanite woman, Canaanite children, whom the master gave him so as, in a sense, not to leave him in a state of utter frustration. And that is at once a punishment and a consolation. But he must at all costs not say, Ahavti et ishti ve-et banai, “I love my wife and my children” — at the risk of sacrificing my freedom.

That is inconceivable, because at that moment man becomes the slave of the human product he has fashioned for himself. Now, we know very well that piercing the ear was a way of marking a person’s servitude. Why the ear alone? Our Sages answered: the ear that heard at Mount Sinai, “For the children of Israel are servants to Me” — My servants, and not servants of others — and yet this one consents to become the servant of another: let it be pierced, let it be pierced. Why the ear? Because where does the word ozen come from — or rather, what word derives from the word ozen, ear?

Ozen yields izun, balance; moznayim, the scales — to ensure an equilibrium. A person whose hearing is afflicted has difficulty keeping his balance, walking. He has lost his center of gravity through his hearing. Now for us, the supreme expression of faith lies in the words Shema Yisrael, “Hear, O Israel” — it lies in listening. It is only through listening that you can truly reach this understanding of the oneness of G-d. And the Shema is kabbalat ol malchut shamayim, the acceptance of the yoke of the kingdom of Heaven. So this man has, in sum, walled himself up in his own understanding of things, so that he no longer hears. You know, there is something particular about the ear: it receives all information, but it cannot itself emit anything.

With the eye, for instance, the eye receives information, but I can express something with a wink, with a mere glance. I can express nothing through my ear. My ear remains, in a way, impassive. Yet it is the ear that records everything; it is through it that I have an inner voice which grasps, by way of sound, of the sounds that are uttered, this presence of G-d in the world — these words that came to us through sounds and lights. The man who has renounced this freedom, acquired through the blood with which the doors of the Jewish houses in Egypt were daubed before they went out, so as to keep the angel of death from entering those houses —

those doors that marked the doors of freedom for the Jewish people — this man has refused it. That is where he will present himself and have his ear pierced. He will bear the mark — but, take note, le-olam, “forever,” means until the Jubilee, not for eternity. It may be in twenty years, it may be in thirty; it all depends on which year of the Jubilee cycle we find ourselves in. And at that moment he will be freed by obligation, because we always proceed by this holy cycle, this sabbatical cycle, since everything is nourished by Shabbat — even […] is sustained by the blessing of Shabbat. And consequently, seven times seven, the Shabbat of the seven-year cycles: when it is completed, when it reaches its fulfillment, then the servant is set free. And this, in sum, is the first teaching the Torah gives in the education of every person who would avoid the four dangers of falling.

There are four sources of damage. There is the shen, the tooth — the craving for food. There is carnal desire. There is fire — uncontrolled enthusiasm. And there is the bor, the pit — the pitfalls of life, when a person lets himself fall, when he gives way in his moments of weakness and stumbles, when he no longer controls his step. So the aim is first of all to set him firmly on the path he must follow: that of freeing himself, of freeing himself from all […]. And that is why, in this chapter of laws — which are, in a way, a means of giving an ample reading to the Ten Commandments — with what do they conclude?

They conclude with the observance of Shabbat and the observance of the festivals. The way for man truly to free himself is to seek to renew himself every week through Shabbat, and three times a year through this time composed by himself, this time he has sanctified himself. For Shabbat is given to him, whereas the festivals are what he offers; he is the one who marks the time of the festivals. And so these three times — that of aviv, of katzir, of asif, spring, harvest and ingathering — he must be able to give them a place in the course of his life. So much for these few verses of the Torah.