Remembering the Exodus

A law in this week’s Torah portion, Re’eh reads:

If your brother, a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you, he shall serve you six years; and in the seventh year you shall send him away from you, free. (Deuteronomy 15:12)

The people whose founding story is redemption from bondage are here given a law not abolishing but regulating the slavery they will administer.

In the ancient world, a person could enter servitude through poverty; in rabbinic law, an unpaid theft could also lead a court to sell the offender’s labor. In both cases, the moral danger is the same: economic failure leading to one person asserting mastery over another person. The Torah builds the Exodus narrative into its laws, so that every Israelite household must periodically reenact, in miniature, the story of leaving Egypt.

Start with the word אָחִיךָ, “your brother.” The law could have said “a Hebrew slave,” and in fact its source text does. Deuteronomy is a book of repetition; the rabbis called it מִשְׁנֵה תוֹרָה, the “repetition of the Torah,” because so much of it restates earlier law with a difference. The earlier law here is Exodus 21, the first statute in the Torah’s first legal code, given at Sinai:

כִּי תִקְנֶה עֶבֶד עִבְרִי שֵׁשׁ שָׁנִים יַעֲבֹד וּבַשְּׁבִעִת יֵצֵא לַחָפְשִׁי חִנָּם

When you acquire a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years; and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing. (Exodus 21:2)

The shared skeleton is unmistakable: six years of freedom, the seventh a year of release, the word חָפְשִׁי, “free.” Devarim rewrites Shemot by adding “your brother” at the top. Exodus treats the female slave under separate and lesser rules; Deuteronomy folds her into the same sentence, הָעִבְרִי אוֹ הָעִבְרִיָּה, the Hebrew man or the Hebrew woman, and repeats at the end, “and also for your maidservant you shall do the same” (15:17). Exodus says, “when you acquire”; Deuteronomy speaks of a man who “is sold,” a brother going under, shifting the perspective from master to slave.

Then comes another addition with no precedent in Exodus 21:

וְכִי־תְשַׁלְּחֶנּוּ חָפְשִׁי מֵעִמָּךְ לֹא תְשַׁלְּחֶנּוּ רֵיקָם

And when you send him away from you, free, you shall not send him away empty-handed. (Deuteronomy 15:13)

The word רֵיקָם, “empty-handed,” is rare enough that a reader raised on the Torah’s Hebrew would hear the echo at once. It appears at the burning bush, in God’s first promise about how the slavery in Egypt will end:

וְהָיָה כִּי תֵלֵכוּן לֹא תֵלְכוּ רֵיקָם

And when you go, you shall not go empty-handed. (Exodus 3:21)

The promise is kept on the night of the departure itself, when the Israelites ask their Egyptian neighbors for objects of silver and gold and clothing, “and they stripped Egypt” (Exodus 12:36). Slaves who had built storehouses for Pharaoh walked out carrying wealth.

Deuteronomy has lifted God’s promise nearly word for word and turned it into a command, with the roles reassigned. In Exodus, Israel is the slave leaving and God guarantees the severance. In Deuteronomy, the one leaving is your servant, and the house he walks out of is yours. You are now likened to the Egyptian, as it were. If you fail to treat this person as your brother, you become Pharaoh.

The open question is which precedent the master will follow when the seventh year arrives: Egypt, which had to be stripped, or God, who commanded the stripping.

The earliest rabbinic interpretation heard precisely this exchange of roles. The Sifrei reads “you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt” as God saying: מה במצרים הענקתי לך ושניתי לך, אף אתה הענק לו ושנה לו; מה במצרים נתתי לך ברחוב יד, אף אתה תתן לו ברחוב יד — “Just as in Egypt I bestowed upon you, and bestowed upon you again, so you must bestow upon him; just as in Egypt I gave you lavishly, so you must give him lavishly” (Sifrei Devarim 120:1). The severance grant is not merely analogous to the spoils of Egypt. According to the Sifrei, it is their commanded repetition.

The next verse specifies what full hands mean:

הַעֲנֵיק תַּעֲנִיק לוֹ מִצֹּאנְךָ וּמִגָּרְנְךָ וּמִיִּקְבֶךָ אֲשֶׁר בֵּרַכְךָ ה׳ אֱלֹהֶיךָ תִּתֶּן־לוֹ

Furnish him, furnish him, from your flock, from your threshing floor, and from your winepress; as the Lord your God has blessed you, you shall give to him. (Deuteronomy 15:14)

The doubled verb, הַעֲנֵיק תַּעֲנִיק, is the Torah’s way of emphasizing a word. The Sifrei hears in it not a token parting gift but the lavishness of the Exodus: give with an expansive hand. Israel left Egypt with silver, gold, and garments, portable wealth. The freed servant of Deuteronomy receives flock, grain, and wine, productive wealth, the kind that starts a farm. He is being given a stake in the settled economy in which his six years of labor took place. The rabbis refuse, however, to make the gift contingent on proving that his labor enriched the household. Kiddushin 17a asks whether a house that was not blessed through the servant might be exempt, and answers from the emphatic הַעֲנֵיק תַּעֲנִיק: the gift is due מכל מקום, in every case. His right to leave with resources rests on his transition to freedom, not on an audit of how profitable he was.

וְזָכַרְתָּ כִּי עֶבֶד הָיִיתָ בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם וַיִּפְדְּךָ ה׳ אֱלֹהֶיךָ עַל־כֵּן אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ אֶת־הַדָּבָר הַזֶּה הַיּוֹם

And you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you; therefore I command you this thing today. (Deuteronomy 15:15)

Everyone addressed by this verse already knows the story. So what work is “remember” doing? In Deuteronomy, memory requires action, not just a mental excercise. The same formula governs Shabbat in this book’s version of the Ten Commandments: your male and female servants must rest “as you do,” because “you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 5:14–15). It returns again over the laws protecting the stranger, the orphan, and the widow (Deuteronomy 24:18, 24:22). Every time Deuteronomy invokes the memory of Egypt, the sentence ends in a transfer: of rest, of grain, of freedom, of goods. You remember being redeemed by redeeming others.

The release of slaves appears in the same chapter that opens with the שְׁמִטָּה (shemittah, the seventh-year release), in which every creditor must let go of what his neighbor owes him: “at the end of seven years you shall make a release” (Deuteronomy 15:1). Debt forgiven in the seventh year, servants freed in the seventh year, servants resting on the seventh day. Leviticus 25 extends the same architecture to the fiftieth year, the Jubilee, when ancestral land returns to the families that lost it. Biblical sacred time is a set of interruptions, timed detonations placed under every arrangement by which one Israelite’s bad year could become his permanent condition. The week interrupts the master’s claim on labor. The seventh year interrupts the creditor’s claim on the future. The Jubilee interrupts the buyer’s claim on the land. Whatever accumulates, the calendar is there ahead of it, with a date already fixed for letting go.

Leviticus states the principle beneath the architecture. Its version of this law begins with the same falling man, “if your brother becomes poor beside you and is sold to you” (Leviticus 25:39), forbids working him as a slave, and then gives the reason:

כִּי־עֲבָדַי הֵם אֲשֶׁר־הוֹצֵאתִי אֹתָם מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם לֹא יִמָּכְרוּ מִמְכֶּרֶת עָבֶד

For they are My servants, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves are sold. (Leviticus 25:42)

The rabbis push the limitation on mastery further. They read כי טוב לו עמך, “because it is good for him with you,” as a legal standard: עמך במאכל, עמך במשתה, with you in food and with you in drink. The owner may not eat fine bread while giving the servant coarse bread, drink aged wine while giving him new wine, or sleep on bedding while placing him on straw. Hence their deliberately destabilizing conclusion: כל הקונה עבד עברי כקונה אדון לעצמו — whoever acquires a Hebrew servant is as though he acquired a master for himself (Kiddushin 20a; 22a).

Acquisition creates a human being whose claims upon you reverse the ordinary direction of ownership. The same sugya derives that the master must support the servant’s wife and children during his term: the household may acquire his labor, but it must not make his dependents bear the cost.

Then the law pauses to consider the servant who does not want to go.

וְהָיָה כִּי־יֹאמַר אֵלֶיךָ לֹא אֵצֵא מֵעִמָּךְ כִּי אֲהֵבְךָ וְאֶת־בֵּיתֶךָ כִּי־טוֹב לוֹ עִמָּךְ

And if he says to you, I will not go out from you, because he loves you and your household, because it is good for him with you (Deuteronomy 15:16), then you shall take the awl and put it through his ear and into the door, and he shall be your servant forever. (15:17)

Here too Deuteronomy is rewriting Exodus. Exodus 21 imagines one especially painful case: the master has paired the servant with a woman who remains the master’s property, and the children born to them remain with her. In that case his declaration, “I love my master, my wife, and my children” (Exodus 21:5), may be entangled with the cost of leaving his family behind. This is not the rule for a wife he had before entering service; Exodus says that such a wife leaves with him, and Chazal require the master to support her and the children during the term. Deuteronomy does not repeat the master-given-wife circumstance. Its servant loves “you and your household,” and the text adds its own audit: because it is good for him with you.

Permanent service is conceivable only in a house where staying is the slave’s best option. Yet the Torah compels the master to offer to fund the servant’s exit before it lets him accept the servant’s devotion.

The ceremony for staying is performed at the door. The awl passes through the ear and into the דֶּלֶת, at the exact threshold the servant has declined to cross. The rabbis make the threshold’s memory explicit. Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai says that the ear is pierced because it heard at Sinai, כי לי בני ישראל עבדים — the children of Israel are servants to Me, and not servants to servants — yet chose another master. Rabbi Shimon bar Rabbi says that the door and doorpost are selected because they witnessed the night in Egypt when God passed over Israel’s entrances and brought the nation מעבדות לחירות, from slavery to freedom (Kiddushin 22b). The ceremony is therefore held before two witnesses against permanent human mastery: the ear that heard Sinai and the threshold that saw the Exodus. The body that heard freedom is pinned to the object that witnessed freedom.

If the law seems to be guarding against a danger too remote to legislate, the rest of the Torah supplies further evidence. A widow of one of the prophets’ disciples cries out to the prophet Elisha: her husband is dead, “and the creditor has come to take my two children for himself as slaves” (2 Kings 4:1). Centuries later, under Persian rule, the Judeans who returned from exile to rebuild Jerusalem come to the governor Nehemiah with the same cry at scale: we have mortgaged our fields and vineyards to pay the king’s tax, “and here we are subjecting our sons and our daughters as slaves, and some of our daughters are subjected already, and there is nothing in our power to do, and our fields and vineyards belong to others” (Nehemiah 5:5). This is the undertow the seventh year exists to break.

Nehemiah makes the nobles swear to return the fields, the vineyards, the olive groves, the houses, and the interest. Freedom without the field is a short walk back into slavery. Chizkuni puts the problem without ornament: the released man has nothing;

And once, the whole machinery was tested at national scale, in the last days of the kingdom of Judah. The year is 588 BCE and Nebuchadnezzar’s army is around Jerusalem. King Zedekiah cuts a covenant with the people in the Temple, and the slaveholders of the city proclaim דְּרוֹר, “release,” and free their Hebrew slaves, men and women (Jeremiah 34:8–10). Under siege, with Egypt’s memory suddenly vivid, they perform another Exodus. Then Pharaoh’s army marches out of Egypt, of all places, and the Babylonians lift the siege to meet it. The pressure comes off. And the masters of Jerusalem take their freed slaves back.

The prophet Jeremiah delivers God’s response, and it begins by quoting the very law in Re’eh, six years, the seventh, your Hebrew brother, “you shall send him away from you, free” (Jeremiah 34:14), the covenant made “on the day I brought your fathers out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slaves” (34:13). Then the verse turns on its own key word:

אַתֶּם לֹא־שְׁמַעְתֶּם אֵלַי לִקְרֹא דְרוֹר אִישׁ לְאָחִיו... הִנְנִי קֹרֵא לָכֶם דְּרוֹר נְאֻם־ה׳ אֶל־הַחֶרֶב אֶל־הַדֶּבֶר וְאֶל־הָרָעָב

You did not listen to Me, to proclaim release, each man to his brother... behold, I proclaim for you a release, declares the Lord: to the sword, to pestilence, and to famine. (Jeremiah 34:17)

You would not release, so I release you: from My protection.

Isaiah, asked why God ignores the fasts of the pious, answers with the vocabulary of this statute: the fast God chooses is “to unlock the fetters of wickedness, to untie the cords of the yoke, וְשַׁלַּח רְצוּצִים חָפְשִׁים, to send the crushed away free” (Isaiah 58:6), and to share bread, house the poor, and cover the naked. The verbs of the slave release have become the definition of worship. A liturgy addressed to the God who frees slaves is tested against the bound labor in the worshipper’s own house.

The Zohar reads the law once more, on another register. Opening its treatment of the Hebrew servant, it announces כמה רזין טמירין דגלגולא, “many hidden mysteries of reincarnation.” The servant becomes the soul returning through embodied existence to complete what it left unfinished. Six belongs to the differentiated world of labor; the seventh corresponds to Shekhinah, where, the Zohar says, לית בה מלאכה, לית בה שעבודא — there is no labor and therefore no subjugation (Zohar, Mishpatim 2). The mystical reading must not displace the vulnerable worker standing in the law. It does, however, disclose the metaphysical conviction beneath the institution: servitude may occupy a chapter of existence, but it cannot name the soul’s ultimate condition. Freedom is the level to which the soul ultimately belongs.

Re’eh closes the statute by entering the master’s head at exactly that moment. “Let it not be hard in your eyes when you send him away from you, free” (Deuteronomy 15:18); the Torah knows precisely how the release will feel on the morning it stops being a story about Egypt and starts being a subtraction from your own barn.

Six years of labor walking out the gate, and driving off some of your flock, and carrying sacks of your grain, and your wine. Standing in the doorway watching him go, hands full, you are enacting one of the two roles the old story offers, and for a moment the house on the far side of the door is Egypt on the morning after Pesach, emptied and blinking.

The Torah does not permit Israel to keep the Exodus safely in the past.

To remember Egypt is to recognize the miniature Egypt that can arise wherever one person controls another’s future. To remember redemption is to send the vulnerable person free, and give them a the start-up capital needed to pursue a life of freedom.

Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar (Etz Hasadeh)

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