D’VAR TORAH
Parashat Re’eh – Birkat HaHodesh
This week I read several colleagues’ Divrei Torah who all highlighted the theme of legislating servitude in ancient Israel. How could it be that we left Egypt and now we allow slaves?! This seems like an institution that we would have wanted to eradicate when we as a people prepared to create a society after being slaves in Egypt.
This week’s portion, Re’eh, does something startling. The people whose founding story is redemption from bondage are handed a law that does not abolish servitude altogether. But it does indeed regulate and humanize it. And in a way the policies make for protecting people who are in debt, by valuing their labor and not just their wealth to use for paying back debts owed.
Rabbi Zohar Atkins points out the radical nature of the shift in language between Exodus and Deuteronomy regarding the servitude the Torah presents as possible. Exodus 21 deals with what we might call an indentured servant and calls that person simply “a Hebrew slave.” On the same subject, Deuteronomy opens with אָחִיךָ — “your brother.” And when the seventh year arrives, and you release him, the Torah commands: לֹא תְשַׁלְּחֶנּוּ רֵיקָם — “you shall not send him away empty-handed.”
That rare word, רֵיקָם, is lifted almost verbatim from God’s promise at the burning bush: “when you go, you shall not go empty-handed” (Shemot 3:21). The master of the house or estate, the one to whom the debt is owed, must release the servant with gifts.
And the gift is no token. הַעֲנֵיק תַּעֲנִיק — furnish him from flock, threshing floor, and winepress: not portable coins but productive wealth, the start-up capital that begins a free life. As Chizkuni asks plainly, with what will he sustain himself if you give him nothing?
To remember Egypt is to recognize the miniature Egypt that arises wherever one person controls another’s future — and to answer it by sending the vulnerable person out with full hands. Today, we fellow community members or citizen with debt relief programs and tzedakah that defrays debt. This is a protection built into our free market which has its roots in the Tanakh’s approach to buidling the economy.
The Torah’s hope, I believe, is to move us away from debt-based servitude. But the institution was practiced and part of the Tanakh’s wisdom, so that we could answer the possible pitfall of continuing debtor imprisonment or indentured servitude into our future. Today the questions stand regarding how we help debtors responsibly manage their debts and in what ways fair and free marketplaces protect both those who can make the loans and borrow towards making a more promising tomorrow.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Bolton
