Sermon: Choosing Slavery

Written by Rabbi Nicola Feuchtwang — 22 February 2025

You probably haven’t noticed, or don’t care anyway, but I am wearing earrings today. I only wear earrings on Shabbat and special occasions because after a couple of hours, my ear lobes start to hurt. You see, I don’t have pierced ears, so I can only wear earrings that fasten with clips or screws. This is definitely not because of needle phobia. I must have given hundreds if not thousands of jabs in my previous life as a paediatrician, and I have been on the receiving end of my own fair share of injections.

I blame my lack of earholes on a former rabbi of this synagogue, and the sermon he gave on this parasha Mishpatim when I was still in my teens. We had read the same passage that one of our bnei mitzvah read for us this morning, about the ‘eved Ivri’ (usually translated as Hebrew slave) who loves his wife and children, and does not want to leave the household if he cannot take them with him, and whose master or owner must take him to the doorway of the house and ‘pierce their ear with an awl’.

Rabbi Marmur commented that as far as he was concerned, pierced ears were a sign of voluntary enslavement to the status quo. Everyone laughed and knew he was speaking ‘tongue in cheek’, because it was common knowledge in the community that members of his own family had very recently had their ears pierced. Nevertheless it made me think, and I have never been able to get over it!

But what is really going on in this parasha?

Let’s look at context first:

Only last week in our Torah reading, we were standing at Sinai, experiencing an overwhelming revelation, hearing the ideals and general principles which are to underpin our society in the future. The ‘mission statement’ is clear, although somewhat abstract. But we Israelites are a rabble of recently freed slaves who have been victims of a harsh regime for several generations. Think about how we are described in Egypt before the Exodus: we lack trust, we have a tendency to quarrel violently. Not very auspicious ingredients for a civil society. How can it work in practice?

The process has to start immediately, and it does so in this week’s parasha, Mishpatim. The verses we read this morning are just the beginning – there are another 3 ½ chapters of text, consisting principally of rules about how we are to behave to each other and to God.

One of the 10 Commandments is “Do Not Steal”. Mishpatim expands this not only into what to do about a thief who is caught, but a whole legal structure for proportionate fines and damages, and guidelines about how we must relate to other people’s property.
“Do Not Murder” sounds like a sensible commandment, but what counts as murder? This week’s portion goes into more detail about how capital offences will be defined, and we are given rules about how the community must respond to other violence.
The commandment about Shabbat is also elucidated a little, and we are instructed about the pilgrim festivals and the sabbatical year.

That is not, however how the parasha begins. The first rules we given are in fact about slavery, the very situation we hope to have left behind us. It seems that at the time of the Exodus, and indeed the time when our texts were written, our ancestors and their neighbours throughout the Ancient Near East could not conceive of a society without slaves. What could be more natural than for us as recent slaves to look forward to controlling our own lives, perhaps at the expense of others weaker than ourselves.

And so the very first instructions in our own code of law and ethics teach us that slavery is not a desirable option for Israelites, that slavery must be limited, that even slaves have rights. If and when we have power over others, there will be laws about how we treat them and sanctions if we overstep the mark – unlike our own past experience. The instructions will go on to include the treatment of other disadvantaged groups in society: widows, orphans, people in poverty, strangers and even enemies. This will become a recurrent theme throughout Torah.

Torah recognises the risk that victim can become perpetrator, and that legacy feelings of impotence and humiliation may be expressed in harsh treatment of the most vulnerable people within our own society. The text is explicit both here and in over 30 other places within Torah:

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

So why must the willing slave have his ear pierced – and why don’t I have holes in mine? Because freedom from slavery in the widest sense is at the core of our being as a Jewish people, and (I think) Torah wants to discourage us from seeing ourselves only as victims, perhaps entitled to vengeance.

The psychotherapist Alice Miller wrote mainly about childhood experiences of adversity, but I think her wisdom may be helpful to all of us:

“The damage done to us cannot be undone, since we cannot change anything in our past… We become free by transforming ourselves from unaware victims of the past into responsible individuals in the present …

…The strong person … does not need to demonstrate strength through contempt.[1]”

I believe this message is relevant not only to the freed slave or the child who has been bullied. It should speak to any of us, as individuals but also as societies and nations, who have come through difficult times and now find ourselves in a stronger position. It isn’t easy, but the moral imperative is to grow from our experience, not to impose it on others.

Shabbat Shalom.

(Parts of this sermon were also included in a Dvar Torah I wrote for the website of Leo Baeck College, February 2020)

[1] Miller, Alice. The Drama of Being a Child : The Search for the True Self ; Completely Revised and Updated. London, Virago, 2008.