Originally published in the Jewish Journal · Table for Five
For the children of Israel are servants to Me; they are My servants, whom I took out of the land of Egypt. I am the Lord, your God.
-Lev. 25:55
Longer manuscript version.
Creation was a good trick. Erasing the world with a universal flood and starting all over was an impressive second act. But the Exodus is really our origin story. Looking beyond the cinematic miracles, let’s appreciate the realpolitik genius of God’s move here. He forces a ruler to let go his slaves. It has no parallel in history. Nothing rivals the intimacy and socio-political genius of this freeing a nation of slaves. It forged a grateful new nation that is singularly ready to trade one slavery to bricks and mortar for another: to God’s gleaming world where everything and every instant is imbued with holiness.
God knew exactly what would be needed. The way for the Exodus is paved by that other singularity, the invention of the phonetic alphabet. That also only happened once in all history as honest epigraphers will attest. The first alphabetic inscriptions emerged among slaves working Pharaoh’s mines in Sinai in the 14th c BCE. The Torah was given in 1313 BCE. The Torah suggests God revealed the alphabet to Moses at the same first meeting on Sinai where He reveals His Name as four letters. God sends him back to Egypt to “teach the elders of Israel these signs.” The result is the creation of a nation of literate slaves amid owners where literacy was reserved for the priest wizards, the chartumeim, hieroglyphic scribes attached to Pharaoh. It took a whole career to learn the 900 hieroglyphs. Hebrew has 22 signs that you can learn in a two days. Talk about disrupting the media. It was like giving smartphones to American slaves in the antebellum South. Maybe this is why Pharaoh, against every instinct in his heart, eventually calculates it’s better to let those Hebrews go.
So the Torah, the first text written in this new communications medium, chronicles our liberation story and writes an account of its own birth, an autobiography, and details the particulars of the new deal, the contract, that undergirds the whole relationship between God and the Hebrews. Our verse today captures its essence: we are His slaves. From this moment on every instant of our existence is to be an avodah, service, worship and acknowledgement of Him. Worldly slavery is just a temporary economic accommodation. You can’t really belong to someone else when God owns you. As Or HaChaim wrote, “They are My slaves since they are of sacred origin, their souls and their bodies are intrinsically holy.” The Exodus, he writes, only obligated them to extrinsically accept the contract which spelled out the way things always were. Intrinsically holy.
Every day in every prayer service, more than the God of Creation, we acknowledge God the Liberator, “Who took you out of Egypt” as befits our status: willingly, gratefully enslaved to a completely new cosmic reality.
