60 | FEBRUARY 15 • 2024 

F

irst in Yitro there were 
the Aseret Hadibrot, the 
“Ten Utterances,
” the 
Ten Commandments, expressed 
as general principles. Now in 
Mishpatim come the details. 
Here is how they begin: 
“If you buy a 
Hebrew servant, 
he is to serve you 
for six years. But 
in the seventh 
year, he shall go 
free, without pay-
ing 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
There is an obvious question. 
Why begin here, with this law? 
There are 613 commandments. 
Why does Mishpatim — the 
first full law code in the Torah 
— begin where it does?

The answer is equally obvi-
ous. The Israelites have just 
endured slavery in Egypt. There 
must be a reason why this hap-
pened, for God knew it was 
going to happen. Evidently, He 
intended it to happen. Centuries 
before, He had already told 
Abraham it would happen:
“
As the sun was setting, 
Abram fell into a deep sleep, 
and a thick and dreadful dark-
ness came over him. Then the 
Lord said to him, ‘Know for 
certain that for 400 years your 
descendants will be strangers in 
a country that is not their own, 
and that they will be enslaved 
and mistreated there.
’” Gen. 
15:12-13
It seems that this was the 
necessary first experience of 
the Israelites as a nation. From 
the very start of the human 
story, the God of freedom 
sought the free worship of free 
human beings. But one after 
the other, people abused that 
freedom: first Adam and Eve, 
then Cain, then the generation 
of the Flood, then the builders 

of Babel.
God began again, this time 
not with all humanity, but 
with one man, one woman, 
one family who would become 
pioneers of freedom. Still, free-
dom is difficult. We each seek 
it for ourselves, but we deny it 
to others when their freedom 
conflicts with ours. So deeply is 
this true that within three gen-
erations of Abraham’s children, 
Joseph’s brothers were willing to 
sell him into slavery: a tragedy 
that did not end until Judah 
was prepared to forfeit his own 
freedom so that his brother 
Benjamin could go free.
It took the collective expe-
rience of the Israelites, their 
deep, intimate, personal, back-
breaking, bitter experience of 
slavery — a memory they were 
commanded never to forget 
— to turn them into a people 
who would no longer turn their 
brothers and sisters into slaves, 
a people capable of constructing 
a free society, the hardest of all 
achievements in the human 
realm.

So, it is no surprise that the 
first laws they were commanded 
after Sinai related to slavery. 
It would have been a surprise 
had they been about anything 
else. But now comes the real 
question. If God does not want 
slavery, if He regards it as an 
affront to the human condi-
tion, why did He not abolish 
it immediately? Why did He 
allow it to continue, albeit in a 
restricted and regulated way, 
as described in this week’s par-
shah? Is it conceivable that God, 
who can produce water from a 
rock, manna from heaven and 
turn sea into dry land, cannot 
call for this change to human 
behavior? Are there areas where 
the All-Powerful is, so to speak, 
powerless?
In 2008 economist Richard 
Thaler and law professor Cass 
Sunstein published a fascinating 
book called Nudge. In it they 
addressed a fundamental prob-
lem in the logic of freedom. On 
the one hand, freedom depends 
on not over-legislating. It means 
creating space within which 
people have the right to choose 
for themselves.
On the other hand, we know 
that people will not always 
make the right choices. The 
old model on which classical 
economics was based, that left 
to themselves people will make 
rational choices, turns out not 
to be true. 

WE ARE NOT 
RATIONAL PEOPLE
We are deeply irrational, a dis-
covery to which several Jewish 
academics made major con-
tributions. The psychologists 
Solomon Asch and Stanley 
Milgram showed how much 
we are influenced by the desire 
to conform, even when we 
know that other people have 
got it wrong. The Israeli econ-
omists, Daniel Kahneman and 
Amos Tversky, showed how 

Rabbi Lord 
Jonathan 
Sacks

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

God’s Nudge

