Tag Archives: Slavery

Bamidbar, Numbers 1:1-4:20

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/bamidbar

Naming Names

By Rabbi Eric Yoffie

The Children of Israel had recently escaped from slavery. How might a census have been a way of rehabilitating slaves and restoring to them a sense of their self-worth and pride?

This is perhaps the first census in human history. There is little to suggest that this was a common practice at the time. What was the purpose of the census?

If the purpose of the census had been purely administrative, wouldn’t estimates have been enough? Does the text suggest that these numbers were merely estimates?

Who ordered the census?

Why did God need a census? Did the God of the Burning Bush, the God who sent the plagues to Egypt, the God who parted the Sea of Reeds need someone to count the Israelites? Could not this God have produced an exact number?

For whose sake was the census conducted?

Why was it necessary for the census to have been organized according to families or clans rather than individual by individual?

Because of [Israel’s] love for God, God numbered them. (Rashi on Numbers 1:1)

Israel has been compared to a heap of wheat. As the measures of wheat are counted when carried into the barn, so, said the Holy One, blessed be He, shall Israel be numbered on all occasions. (Numbers Rabbah I:4)

“Take a census of the whole Israelite community…b’mis’par shemot”–literally, “according to the number of names.” What is the meaning of “according to the number of names?” Everyone said his name and wrote it in a book, and afterward they counted the names and knew how many people there were. (Malbim on Numbers 1:2)

“Take a census [S’u et rosh–literally, “Lift up the head”] of the whole Israelite community.” The words’u is only used when the intention is to indicate greatness [that is, holding high one’s head]. (Ramban on Numbers 1:2)

“According to the number of names…” For at that time, every one of that generation was designated by his name, which indicated and reflected stature and character. (Sforno on Numbers 1:2)

As Rashi indicates, the census was clearly done not for God’s sake but for the sake of the Children of Israel. In what way is the carrying out of a census a sign of God’s love for Israel?

The manner of conducting the census as described in the Torah and as further explained by Malbim is enormously cumbersome. Why have everyone write his name in a book rather than simply have all the people line up and do a count?

According to the Rambam, in what way does the census contribute to the “greatness,” that is, the self-esteem, of the people of Israel?

The first census in human history was ordered by God as a sign of God’s love and concern for the people of Israel and as an instrument for enhancing their confidence and feelings of self-worth. Not a single person was to be forgotten. A mass of oppressed slaves, who in Egypt had no individual worth whatever, were now to merit an individual count.

And why was the mechanism of counting to record their names in a book used? Because, according to Sforno, everyone from that generation would then be thought of by his name and thus by his own unique, personal qualities. And why was the count organized according to families? Because slaves are denied the security of family life, while for civilized people the family is the instrument for building identity, ethical commitment, and devotion to tradition.

Does this obsession to know the former slaves by their individual names seem excessive? Not at all. What is more important than being known by our right name? Is anything more connected to the depth of our being than our name? If you wish to connect to another person, what is the first important thing you do? You learn his or her name. And what do people expect of their synagogues and their synagogue leaders? That we know their names.

Note: The most trusted servant of God was Moses, and what did God say to Moses? “I have singled you out by name” (Exodus 33:17). What we should aspire to in our synagogues is that our members cease to be an undifferentiated mass and that just as God knew Moses, we know them–each and every one–by name.

Yoffie, Eric. "Naming Names." MyJewishLearning.com. (Viewed on May 24, 2014). http://www.myjewishlearning.com/texts/Bible/Weekly_Torah_Portion/bmidbar_uahc.shtml?p=0

Parashat Bamidbar 5774 

By Rabbi Joshua Rabin 

To the Burmese government, the Rohingya Muslims do not exist. This group of approximately 1.2 million people living in western Burma has been referred to by the United Nations as “one of the most persecuted minorities in the world.” The Rohingya consider themselves a distinct ethnic minority, but the Burmese government disputes this claim. In addition to refusing to recognize the group’s identity, the government has also inflicted widespread human rights violations against the Rohingya, including restricting marriage and child-bearing, depriving them of freedom of movement, and forcing them to live in deplorable conditions in internally displaced persons camps. The human rights organization, Fortify Rights, argues that the government intends “to make life so intolerable that they [the Rohingya] will leave the country.”

This past month, when the Burmese government conducted the first national census in thirty years, census takers were forbidden from allowing people to identify themselves as Rohingya. Given the systematic oppression of this group, exclusion from the census seems far from the most pressing issue; however, a census is not a mere counting of heads. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) argues that an accurate census helps countries monitor progress in achieving the UN’s Millennium Development Goals to eradicate poverty. The census also gives local communities access to data as a means of advocating on their own behalf, and helps individuals hold civil authorities accountable for how goods and services are allocated nationwide. Perhaps just as importantly, denying a group’s right to self-identification in a national census is tantamount to saying that the group does not exist at all. 

The Torah also understands the importance of getting an accurate count of people. At the very beginning of Sefer Bamidbar, God commands Moses to “Take a census of the whole Israelite community by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names, every male, head by head.” Our commentators offer a variety of explanations for why God commands Moses to take a second census of the Israelites in Parashat Bamidbar, as one was already taken inParashat Ki Tissa. Some commentators explain that a census was required for the practical realities of governing the Israelites, while the Rashbam, a medieval commentator, and Jacob Milgrom, a modern commentator, state that the census was necessary to know how many Israelites could be conscripted into military service when the nation enters Canaan. While the census from our parashah was far from a complete picture of the Israelite nation, as it completely excluded women, our commentators argue that it enabled the Israelites to form a functioning society. 

Taking a mystical approach, Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev, an 18th-century Hasidic Master, writes that the very act of ensuring that each Israelite is properly counted is a matter of cosmic significance, for each Israelite symbolizes each word of the Torah: 

God gave the Torah to Israel and the souls of Israel form the body of the Torah. There are 600,000 Jewish souls, parallel to the number of letters in the Torah. Israel, in other words, are the Torah. Each one of us constitutes one of Torah’s letters. By counting Israel, therefore, Moses was learning the Torah…


In Levi Yitzhak’s commentary, each time Moses counted an individual Israelite, he was reminded that every individual is precious to God, and is an essential representation of God’s clarion call to the Israelite nation and all of humanity. Far from the utilitarian purpose of military conscription or equitable resource allocation, our parshah recognizes that counting someone is a statement of a person’s existence and an affirmation that they matter. In contrast, when a person is excluded from a census—when who they are, what they need, and what their group represents remains unacknowledged—it is the ultimate affront to human dignity. 

In a speech about the exclusion of the Rohingya from the Burmese census, Wai Wai Nu, the director of Women Peace Network Arakhan, an organization working for the rights of Rohingya women, said that the government is sending the message that “Rohingyas are no longer regarded as human beings.” Parashat Bamidbar reminds us that ensuring that people are accurately counted not only enables the leaders of their nations to provide practical goods and services, but also attests that their dignity and humanity are respected. 

As Burma makes a challenging transition to democracy and peace, AJWS supports 28 grassroots organizations in the country that are working to hold the government accountable for its actions, particularly against women and oppressed minorities. Groups like Fortify Rights have worked to research and document human rights violations that continue to take place. While Fortify Rights and other critics of the census were not successful in ensuring that the census included all minority populations in Burma, they continue to advocate for an end to oppressive government policies against the Rohingya. We can support their efforts to ensure that, even in the absence of an accurate counting, every person in Burma truly counts. 

Rabin, Joshua. "Bamidbar 5774." American Jewish World Service. (Viewed on May 24, 2014). http://ajws.org/what_we_do/education/publications/dvar_tzedek/5774/bamidbar.html

Mishpatim, Exodus 21:1-24:18

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Link to Parsha: http://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/mishpatim

We Are The Narrative

By Rabbi Dianne Cohler-Esses

Every year at this time it happens: I become disappointed in the Torah.

Thunder and lightning and voices of revelation at Sinai are followed by the plodding specificity of the civil and religious laws of Mishpatim. The Torah goes from narrative to endless laws and detailed instructions for a good portion of the remainder of the five books.

Going from Yitro to Mishpatim we come down the mountain with a real thud. Gone are the salacious family stories of Genesis and the dramatic national birth story of Exodus. Starting with this week’s parashah, sitting in synagogue week after week, one can hear yawns all around. What happened to the joy of sheer story? Why do we move from aggadah (narrative) to halakhah (law)?

To complicate matters further: after all the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt, the very first laws of Mishpatim concern slave ownership. Not the prohibition of owning slaves, as one might want and expect, but the rules detailing the treatment of a slave, slavery an institution that is simply presumed by the text. After all that, after all those years enslaved, after witnessing the plagues, after passing through the red sea to escape slavery, why in the world are the Israelites permitted the ownership of other human beings?

One can understand this shift from Sinai to laws concerning slavery in two interrelated ways:

Misphatim begins with the following law: “When you acquire a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years; in the seventh year he shall go free.” (Exodus 21:2)

It’s almost as if they are given a law in which they are commanded to transform, to revolutionize their own consciousness. You can own a slave, but after seven years, you must set that slave free. You were a slave, and now you will be a master. And as a master you must liberate. As God liberated you, so must you set your slave free–a clear example of tzelem elokim (being created in the image of God), or to put it another words, imatatio dei (the imitation of God).

The shift from narrative to law begins to have meaning in the context of this same shift of power. Until this point in the text we are told a story. We are watching these events happen to others. But, where story becomes law we are told how to live our lives. We are supremely implicated.

The very first law captures the story that the Israelites had just experienced, and yet, at the same point tells them to take control of that narrative and perform it themselves–perform exodus, perform liberation. You may be masters, but you must become liberators. Every seven years.

Indeed, the narrative that frames and shapes these laws, the narrative that gives these legal details coherence, is the narrative of liberation.

Consider for example the following verses:

“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20) and “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9).

This is what happened to the narrative. It didn’t disappear. Rather, shifting from narrative to law shifts the very nature of the text’s address. Beforehand we were reading a story that happened to others in history. Now I read the text, and I am commanded to become an actor and to act in a certain way. A way that liberates.

If I become the subject of these laws, the story doesn’t end at all. It’s just that I, the reader, I, the one addressed by this sacred text, am now at the very center of the story. It’s supremely personal. For much of the rest of the Bible we can no longer escape into a good story, because that story has become all about us. There is no escape, only exodus. Exodus and liberation. And the endless multiplying of story.

Cohler-Esses, Dianne. "We Are the Narrative." My Jewish Learning. (Viewed on January 25, 2014). http://www.myjewishlearning.com/texts/Bible/Weekly_Torah_Portion/mishpatim_bronfman.shtml?p=0

The Slow End of Slavery

By Rabbi Jonathon Sacks

In parshat Mishpatim we witness one of the great stylistic features of the Torah, its transition from narrative to law. Until now the book of Exodus has been primarily narrative: the story of the enslavement of the Israelites and their journey to freedom. Now comes detailed legislation, the “constitution of liberty.”

This is not accidental but essential. In Judaism, law grows out of the historical experience of the people. Egypt was the Jewish people’s school of the soul; memory was its ongoing seminar in the art and craft of freedom. It taught them what it felt like to be on the wrong side of power. “You know what it feels like to be a stranger,” says a resonant phrase in this week’s parsha (23: 9). Jews were the people commanded never to forget the bitter taste of slavery so that they would never take freedom for granted. Those who do so, eventually lose it.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the opening of today’s parsha. We have been reading about the Israelites’ historic experience of slavery. So the social legislation of Mishpatim begins with slavery. What is fascinating is not only what it says but what it doesn’t say.

It doesn’t say: abolish slavery. Surely it should have done. Is that not the whole point of the story thus far? Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery. He, as the Egyptian viceroy Tzofenat Paneach, threatens them with slavery. Generations later, when a pharaoh arises who “knew not Joseph,” the entire Israelite people become Egypt’s slaves. Slavery, like vengeance, is a vicious circle that has no natural end. Why not, then, give it a supernatural end? Why did God not say: There shall be no more slavery?

The Torah has already given us an implicit answer. Change is possible in human nature but it takes time: time on a vast scale, centuries, even millennia. There is little doubt that in terms of the Torah’s value system the exercise of power by one person over another, without their consent, is a fundamental assault against human dignity. This is not just true of the relationship between master and slave. It is even true, according to many classic Jewish commentators, of the relationship between king and subjects, rulers and ruled. According to the sages it is even true of the relationship between God and human beings. The Talmud says that if God really did coerce the Jewish people to accept the Torah by “suspending the mountain over their heads” (Shabbat 88a) that would constitute an objection to the very terms of the covenant itself. We are God’s avadim, servants, only because our ancestors freely chose to be (see Joshua 24, where Joshua offers the people freedom, if they so chose, to walk away from the covenant then and there).

So slavery is to be abolished, but it is a fundamental principle of God’s relationship with us that he does not force us to change faster than we are able to do so of our own free will. So Mishpatim does not abolish slavery but it sets in motion a series of fundamental laws that will lead people, albeit at their own pace, to abolish it of their own accord. Here are the laws:

“If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free, without paying anything . . . But if the servant declares, ‘I love my master and my wife and children and do not want to go free,’ then his master must take him before the judges. He shall take him to the door or the doorpost and pierce his ear with an awl. Then he will be his servant for life. (Ex. 21: 2-6)

What is being done in these laws? First, a fundamental change is taking place in the nature of slavery. No longer is it a permanent status; it is a temporary condition. A Hebrew slave goes free after seven years. He or she knows this. Liberty awaits the slave not at the whim of the master but by divine command. When you know that within a fixed time you are going to be free, you may be a slave in body but in your own mind you are a free human being who has temporarily lost his or her liberty. That in itself is revolutionary.

This alone, though, was not enough. Six years are a long time. Hence the institution of Shabbat, ordained so that one day in seven a slave could breathe free air: no one could command him to work:

Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you . . . nor your male or female servant . . . so that your male and female servants may rest, as you do. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. That is why the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day. (Deut. 5: 12-14)

But the Torah is acutely aware that not every slave wants liberty. This too emerges out of Israelite history. More than once in the wilderness the Israelites wanted to go back to Egypt. They say: “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost—also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic” (Num. 11: 5). As Rashi points out, the phrase “at no cost” [chinam] cannot be understood literally. They paid for it with their labour and their lives. “At no cost” means “free of mitzvot,” of commands, obligations, duties. Freedom carries a highest price, namely, moral responsibility. Many people have shown what Erich Fromm called “fear of freedom.” Rousseau spoke of “forcing people to be free” – a view that led in time to the reign of terror following the French revolution.

The Torah does not force people to be free but it does insist on a ritual of stigmatization. If a slave refuses to go free, his master “shall take him to the door or the doorpost and pierce his ear with an awl.” Rashi explains:

Why was the ear chosen to be pierced rather than all the other limbs of the body? Said Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai: …The ear that heard on Mount Sinai: “For to Me are the children of Israel servants” and he, nevertheless, went ahead and acquired a master for himself, should [have his ear] pierced! Rabbi Shimon expounded this verse in a beautiful manner: Why are the door and the doorpost different from other objects of the house? G-d, in effect, said: “The door and doorpost were witnesses in Egypt when I passed over the lintel and the two doorposts, and I said: ‘For to me are the children of Israel servants’ ” —they are My servants, not servants of servants, and this person went ahead and acquired a master for himself, he shall [have his ear] pierced in their presence.

A slave may stay a slave but not without being reminded that this is not what God wants for His people. The result of these laws was to create a dynamic that would in the end lead to an abolition of slavery, at a time of free human choosing.

And so it happened. The Quakers, Methodists and Evangelicals, most famous among them William Wilberforce, who led the campaign in Britain to abolish the slave trade were driven by religious conviction, inspired not least by the biblical narrative of the Exodus, and by the challenge of Isaiah “to proclaim freedom for captives and for prisoners, release from darkness” (Is. 61: 1).

Slavery was abolished in the United States only after a civil war, and there were those who cited the Bible in defence of slavery. As Abraham Lincoln put it in his second Inaugural: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.”

Yet slavery was abolished in the United States, not least because of the affirmation in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” and are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights, among them “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Jefferson, who wrote those words, was himself a slave-owner. Yet such is the latent power of ideals that eventually people see that by insisting on their right to freedom and dignity while denying it to others, they are living a contradiction. That is when change takes place, and it takes time.

If history tells us anything it is that God has patience, though it is often sorely tried. He wanted slavery abolished but he wanted it to be done by free human beings coming to see of their own accord the evil it is and the evil it does. The God of history, who taught us to study history, had faith that eventually we would learn the lesson of history: that freedom is indivisible. We must grant freedom to others if we truly seek it for ourselves.

Sacks, Jonathon. "The Slow End of Slavery." OU Torah. (Viewed on January 25, 2014). http://www.ou.org/torah/article/the_slow_end_of_slavery#.UuUIsdLFLDc