THEY WENT UP AND SCOUTED THE LAND, FROM THE WILDERNESS OF

ZIN TO REHOV, AT LEVO-HAMAT… AT THE END OF FORTY DAYS THEY RETURNED FROM

SCOUTING THE LAND.

(Bamidbar 13: 21, 25)

They went up

and scouted the land – How did they do this? When they

entered a town, its dignitaries would be struck down by plague, and the

townspeople would be busy with their burial, so they [the scouts] could enter

without anyone noticing them. That is why they said the land we passed

through to scout out is a land that consumes its inhabitants – they used

the miracles that the Holy One blessed be He performed for their sake [as a

pretext] to defame the land.

(Yalkut Shimoni 743)

It appears that all of this [the sending of the scouts and

the forty-year delay in the wilderness] was planned by God, as the RaMBaM wrote (Guide of the Perplexed 2:32). He says that God's wisdom

arranged for them to wander around the desert until they became courageous,

since it is known that travel through the desert and the reduction of bodily

pleasures such as bathing give rise to courage. Also, [during those forty

years] people were born unaccustomed to humiliation and enslavement.

But I say that it was not God's intention that they gain

courage, for they would not inherit the land by their sword, and

their strength did not bring them victory. Rather, He arranged for them to tarry in the wilderness so

that they could study with Moses for many days. If Moses had brought them to

the land [directly], each of them would have dispersed to his own estate and

Moses would not have been able to teach them knowledge. They also would not

have been fed in a miraculous fashion, so that faith in Moses' Torah would not

have been set in their hearts for all the generations as it was by their staying

in the wilderness for forty years while Moses led and fed them with signs and

wonders and taught them the Lord's ways. This education, which was unique in all

the world – two million souls sitting by their teacher for forty years,

unbothered by the search for sustenance – this instilled faith in the hearts of

the Israelites, so that even while all of the inhabitants of the land erred

after false gods, Moses' pupils remained a unified and singular people in the

land, preserving the pure faith, which spread out from them for the good of all

humanity, and the earth shall become full with knowledge of the Lord.

(ShaDaL on Bamidbar 13:2)

The

Exodus, Service of God, and Human Freedom

Jonathan Chipman

At

the end of Parshat Shelah

Lekha we find the section concerning the wearing

of tzitzit (fringes), recited twice

daily within the framework of Keriat Shema. The final verse of this section (and of Keriat Shema as a

whole) reads: "I am the Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt to be your God… " (Num 15:41). It is interesting that, according

to a number of halakhic authorities, this verse enjoys

a special status, its recitation fulfilling a separate mitzvah to remember the

Exodus from Egypt, based on the verse "that you might remember the day you

went out of the land of Egypt all the days of your life" (Deut 16:3; and compare its use by R. Eleazar b. Azariah in Mishnah Berakhot 1.5).

Thus, for example, the Sha'agat Aryeh, an important 19^th century Talmudic

commentator, devotes an extensive discussion to this issue (§§8-13).

The Exodus from Egypt

is mentioned with similar wording in several places throughout the Torah, with

variations, as a justification for observing the mitzvot

or as theological statement: "for I am the Lord who takes you up out of

the land of Egypt to be your God; and you shall be

holy, for I am holy… " (Lev 11:45);

"I am the Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt; so you

shall observe all my statutes and all my laws and do them, I am the Lord" (Lev 19:36-37); "I am the Lord your God

who took you out of the land of Egypt from being their servants, and broke the

bar of their yoke, and led you upright" (Lev

26:13; and cf. Lev 20: 24-26; 25:38; ibid, 55; and elsewhere).

The centrality of the Exodus from Egypt underlies the significance of

Passover as the first of the festivals of the year, from which, in a certain

sense, all the other festivals and holy days derive. There is an interesting

Talmudic discussion regarding the question as to whether the axial events of

history occurred during the month of Tishrei or

Nissan:

Tanya (a teaching of

our Rabbis). Rabbi Eliezer said: In Tishrei the world was created; in Tishrei

the patriarchs were born; in Tishrei the patriarchs

died; on Passover Yitzhak was born; on Rosh Hashanah Sarah, Rachel and Hannah

were visited [i.e., told that they would bear child]; on Rosh Hashanah Yosef was freed from prison; on Rosh Hashanah our

forefather's servitude in Egypt was nullified; in Nissan they were redeemed, in

Tishrei they shall be redeemed in the future.

Rabbi Yehoshua

said: In Nissan the world was created; in

Nissan the patriarchs were born; in Nissan the patriarchs died; on Passover

Yitzhak was born; on Rosh Hashanah Sarah, Rahel and

Hannah were visited [i.e., told that they would bear child]; on Rosh Hashanah Yosef was freed from prison; on Rosh Hashanah our

forefather's servitude in Egypt was nullified; in Nissan they were redeemed, in Nissan they shall be redeemed in the

future. (Rosh Hashanah 10b-11a)

What was the issue that really concerned these two tannaim? A friend of ours suggested the following

simple yet profound interpretation: in Tishrei God is

in the center, while in Nissan it is man. In Tishrei

we crown God as King; we engage in profound introspection and soul-searching,

focusing on the often tortuous process of repentance, trying to bring or

actions in line with the Torah, that represents the transcendent realm. In

Nissan, by contrast, we tell the story of the liberation of a group of human

beings, oppressed slaves, our remote forebears, who gained freedom in their own

land and thereby became a nation. While this may be history seen through

theological lenses, it is human history nevertheless. Thus, in this month,

according to Kabbalistic tradition, the Divine name

is "straight," because Nissan symbolizes the ideal state in which

there is no domination of one man over his fellow.

What is the connection, in terms of ideas, between the Exodus

and accepting the yoke of Heaven and serving the Creator? The underlying

assumption is simply this: that man cannot truly serve God unless He is free. A

person who is a slave, who is under the thumb – literal or metaphorical – of

another person, does not have the responsibility for his own self that is a

prerequisite of the moral and religious life. Rambam

devotes three entire chapters in the Laws of Repentance to the subject

of human free will (behirah hofshit or reshut),

which he describes as "a great principle and one of the pillars of the

Torah and the commandments" (Hilkhot Teshuvah 5.3;

and see Chapters 5-7 of this work as a whole). Thus a slave, whose

capacity for exercising free will and making his own decisions, has been denied

him, his own will being subjugated to that of others, cannot engage in moral

choice and thus cannot serve God.

Moreover: domination of one man by another is an affront,

an insult to the Divine image within man. But not only is the slave unable to

serve God truly, but the slave master is himself degraded by his domination of

another person, which of necessity means treating the Other as an object for

his own use and pleasure, rather than seeing him as a fellow human being, a

focus of consciousness in his own right, created in the Divine image. By

denying the divine image in the other, he loses his own sensitivity to the

holy.

There is a surprising statement in the book of Jeremiah. It

states there (34:13-14): "I made a

covenant with your ancestors on the day I took them out of the land of Egypt,

the house of bondage, saying: at the end of seven years you shall send away

your Hebrew brother… and send him free from you." The mitzvah itself is

a familiar one: it appears in Exodus 21:1-6, at the beginning of a series of

laws that appears immediately after the Sinai revelation. But why does the

prophet speak of it here as a covenantal act? Evidently, he wished to give it

the status of one of the fundaments of the Torah. The implication seems to be

that the permanent enslavement of one human being by another is antithetical to

the covenant; that it is somehow a distortion of the natural order of the

universe (or at least of the ideal vision of how things ought to be), in which

all are equal and all people are free.

And, thus it seems to me, just as the enslavement of one

individual by another blunts the master's religious sensitivity, so too is the

case among nations. Domination of one nation or people by another – however

well-intentioned and seemingly justified by worthwhile considerations, such as

the physical security of the majority – ultimately acts as a poison in the body

politic, subtly destroying human dignity and freedom (and it is important to

remember these things, specifically in times of distress and even of violent

death). Abraham Lincoln's famous epigram, "no nation can long endure half

slave and half free," is as true today as it was then.

We are living in an age of subtle but nevertheless crushing

forms of enslavement, often masked by high-sounding phrases, but which

nevertheless entail the subjugation of the "little man." Globalization,

privatization, "neo-liberalism," are all elaborate masks for a system

in which economic and property rights are given priority over the basic rights

of the less fortunate to a decent life, to health and education and an

unpolluted environment. Some social thinkers speak today of an era of "useless

people," of a culture based on less than full employment, in which those

unable to acquire the sophisticated skills and education needed by a society

based on information technology will increasingly find themselves marginal and

unnecessary – or exploited in brutal and dehumanizing ways.

Thus, "going out from enslavement to freedom" is

as vital and concrete an idea today as it was then, three millennia ago.

Rabbi Jonathan

Chipman is a professional translator, who specializes

in Jewish studies. He writes an English-language publication called

"Jonathan's Arrows." Those interested in subscribing or receiving a

sample copy may write to yonarand@internet-zahav.net

And if Moses had Sent Women to

Scout the Land?

He specifically mentioned [that]

men