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