Egypt: A House of Slavery

In her notebook on Parshat Yitro, Nechama Leibowitz comments on the commandment “I am the Lord Your God Who Brought You Out from the Land of Egypt, From the House of Slavery”. She explains* that although Egypt was considered the height of ancient civilization, that civilization had no worth in the eyes of the Torah, as long as it was based on slavery. Therefore, Egypt is no more than a “House of Slavery”.

Thinking about our political and economic situation today, we can say that we live at a peak of scientific and artistic achievement -but so much of our system is based upon cheap (and sometimes, slave-like) labor under oppressive circumstances.

There is a scene in “The Good Place” where the judge goes to hell because she buys a burrito. Turns out, the burrito’s ingredients required burning a lot of greenhouse gases in transportation, and the condition of the agricultural workers was atrocious -so she’s condemned for simply eating a sandwich. In the TV show, the point is how complicated it is, in today’s globalized manufactured economy, to make ethical choices. We can’t condemn people for living their daily lives. That is completely true, but also, it does behoove us as human beings to sometimes take a step back and look at the injustices in the system -and to think if and how there are things we can do, even if those things are small changes. This week’s parsha is one occasion to engage in that type of introspection.

When I think of the actions taken against migrants and the planned cuts in government welfare and health benefits in America, Nechama Leibowitz’s words especially ring true. America is the leader of the free world, but what is that worth if it is taking actions against those it relies on for cheap (and sometimes unfair) labor, and possibly denying basic life saving medical care to those who are left vulnerable in today’s economy. A country’s moral values, and its willingness to care for its most vulnerable members -just as God cared for the Jews, the slaves who were the most vulnerable members of Egyptian society – is how the Torah measures a country’s worth, not by its GDP.

This week’s parsha gives us a moment to take some national reckoning and ask ourselves what sort of structural injustices lie at the basis of our current economic, social, and political system, just as slavery lay at the basis of Egypt’s advanced cultural and economic status. That doesn’t mean we need to fix all the problems overnight. Sometimes, we are like the judge in “The Good Place”, eating the burrito: We are trying to live our daily lives and feel overwhelmed by choices, unable to trace the exact ethical provenance of every item we see in the supermarket. But being aware of the challenges and thinking about small ways we can act towards a better future is the small seed, that, like the Tu B’Shvat sapling, may one day grow into a great tree of social change whose branches provide shade for us and for the people around us.

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*based on Yaakov, son of the Shadal. For those unfamiliar, the Shadal, Rav Shmuel David Luzatto, is a popular commentary in Nechama Leibowitz’s notebooks. He lived in Italy on the 1800s. For more on him and other commentators, it’s worth checking out the book “Great Biblical Commentators” by Avigail Rock, z”l.