The voluntary bondservant
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… If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master, and only the man shall go free.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.
(Parshat Mishpatim, Exodus 21.2-6)
Like many of the laws set out in the Torah, this one has long seemed strange to me. The bondservant is forced to make what appears to be an impossible choice. If he values his freedom and wants to enjoy the reward of his years of labour, he must abandon his wife and young children. If he cannot bear to be parted from his family, he must give up his freedom for good. He is to declare that he loves his master, but suppose his love for his family is so deep that he cannot bring himself to leave them despite his master?
Is liberty to be valued even more highly than family? Or is family so precious that it is worth the price of liberty? According to Jewish tradition, the servant who gives up his freedom has chosen a human master over God, and the piercing of his ear is a sign that he has lowered himself in this way. But in the Christian tradition, the servant who devotes himself to master and family is commended and his devotion is seen as foreshadowing Jesus’ devotion to God.
Recently it occurred to me that my own situation is in some ways parallel to that of the Hebrew bondservant. In finally coming to terms with my sexuality and fully accepting myself for who I am, I have experienced a strong sense of liberation. More and more, I feel free from the oppression of shame and self-condemnation. But long before I began to approach that point, I married a wonderful woman and we had two beautiful children. So how can I reconcile my love for my family with my new-found freedom and self-acceptance? Can I fully embrace that freedom and still have my earlobe nailed to the doorpost?
posted by Aaron at 7:34 PM
2 Comments:
Glad I found you. Maybe we have similiar stories.
erodoux
http://lifeajar.wordpress.com
Aaron:
let me do my usual knee-jerk defense of the Hebrews thing:
what the Exodus passage sets out is the opening of a door whereby the freed slave could eventually purchase the freedom of his family. If you look at the history of slavery in the US, even in NY, as Nell Painter has shown in her biography of Sojourner Truth, slaves were often the only "capital" a slave-owner possessed, and the wholesale liberation without compensation was a political nightmare for everyone involved; so there were some [not always sensible] compromises made, and I would say that the delicacy of the problem, and the difficulty of the solution, is shown to be at least three thousand years old...
Find me another law, up to the Civil War, that promises more than Moses, and I will eat my [figurative] hat. The sabbatical term of slavery was one of the great achievements of Judaism -- the first time-limitation I am aware of, though throughout the ancient world slaves were "free" to purchase their freedom. What Moses does here is declare that servitude of a Jew cannot become permanent; the owner of this capital is promised some return for giving his investment a wife, and protected against losing his "return" within seven years.
It's not pretty, but it is an early and acceptable compromise, footnoted to the incredible statement that slavery was limited by God's own time.
Enough of that. I would like to think that when we walk away free, we too will be able to work to regain our families, but then, as a cynic, I am nothing but a disappointed romantic.
yr
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