Mishpatim: The Legal Debate That Changed Jewish History | Into The Verse Podcast

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Into The Verse | Season 2 | Episode 41

Mishpatim: The Legal Debate That Changed Jewish History

Parshat Mishpatim outlines the laws of indentured servants and maidservants, including servants going free in the seventh year, servants getting married while working, and a father making a deal for his daughter’s hand in marriage. This set of laws seems strikingly similar to an earlier story involving a worker and a father trying marrying off his daughters. Could these laws in Mishpatim actually be the Torah’s own commentary on the negotiations between Jacob and Laban back in Genesis?

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In This Episode

Parshat Mishpatim outlines the laws of indentured servants and maidservants, including servants going free in the seventh year, servants getting married while working, and a father making a deal for his daughter’s hand in marriage. This set of laws seems strikingly similar to an earlier story involving a worker and a father trying marrying off his daughters. Could these laws in Mishpatim actually be the Torah’s own commentary on the negotiations between Jacob and Laban back in Genesis?

Join Rabbi David Fohrman and Ari Levisohn as they discuss these surprising parallels and explore the relationship between the Torah's laws and its stories.

Into The Verse is taking a break for a little while. In the interim you can stay up-to-date on the parsha with last year’s episodes, which are available on https://www.alephbeta.org. And if you haven’t started the latest season of A Book Like No Other, you have to check it out. If you’re not a member…what are you waiting for? Go to alephbeta.org/subscribe and become a member to access the new season of A Book Like No Other, as well as our full library of over 1,000 videos and podcasts. Use coupon code BLNO2 for a 30 day free trial with a monthly membership OR $18 off an annual membership. Click here to subscribe.

Transcript

Ari Levisohn: Welcome to Into the Verse, the parsha podcast where we dive deep into the verses to share new and unexpected insights, illuminating the parsha like you’ve never seen before.

Rabbi David Fohrman: Hey, everybody. This is Rabbi Fohrman. I am back here with Ari Levison. Thank you for welcoming me, Ari, as a guest in your beautiful studio here in central Jerusalem.

Ari: Great to be with you here live.

Rabbi Fohrman: So Parshat Mishpatim begins with the laws of Hebrew servants. What I thought we'd do is just review the first two sets of laws in Parshat Mishpatim, and then what I want to show you is sort of the Torah's own drash on that. It's as if there's this simple meaning, but then there's this whole overlay of meaning which shades the simple meaning in all sorts of really interesting ways. So let's start with the simple stuff and we'll build off of that.

The Laws of Servants and Maidservants

We begin by talking about how servants go free. The first thing you hear about is not the responsibilities of a servant to the master. It is when the servant goes free. This is one of the great innovations of the Torah. When it comes to Hebrew servants, there's no such thing as perpetual slavery. כִּי תִקְנֶה עֶבֶד עִבְרִי שֵׁשׁ שָׁנִים יַעֲבֹד וּבַשְּׁבִעִת יֵצֵא לַחׇפְשִׁי חִנָּם. Seventh year, you're out of there (Exodus 21:2). 

And then we begin to hear these really interesting laws. We talk about the servant's family, the servant's wife. If he goes in single, he goes out single. If he goes in married, he goes out married. But what happens if the master gives him a wife during his term of service? Another servant girl, that the master owns, and they have children?

Well, it turns out that, in such a case, when it's time for him to leave but not time for her to leave, she stays behind along with the children and he goes out alone, which, as you can tell, creates a certain tension; the possibility for the servant to say, “I'm not so sure about this leaving thing,” right? Which is the next law.

What if the servant says: אָהַבְתִּי אֶת־אֲדֹנִי אֶת־אִשְׁתִּי וְאֶת־בָּנָי — I love my master, I love my wife, I love my children. I don't want to go free (Exodus 21:5).

At that point: וְהִגִּישׁוֹ אֲדֹנָיו אֶל־הָאֱלֹהִים — The master brings him to the judges, וְהִגִּישׁוֹ אֶל־הַדֶּלֶת — brings him to the doorpost of the master's home, pierces his ear with an awl, and he has to work for him forever (Exodus 21:6). The Torah Sh’Ba’al Peh (The Oral Torah) tells us it doesn't mean forever. It means he works for him until yovel (the Jubilee Year). So that's the first set of laws. 

The second set of laws has to do with a maidservant, and the laws of female servitude, in fact, have very little to do with servitude. What they are, actually, is a social engineering experiment, seemingly as a way of taking poor, destitute girls born to poor, destitute families and giving them a chance at another life.

So if you have a guy who's facing financial ruin; no chance he's going to be able to marry off his daughter, no chance that she is going to have a decent life. So what he can do is indenture her, so to speak, to a family of some nobility, but only when she's very young, so that she can grow up there, quote, “as a servant.” They can get to know her, and hopefully the master's kid takes a liking to her.

The idea is, it's the chance for her to marry into the family, but if it doesn't work out, that's fine, too. So basically, the way these laws work is: כִי־יִמְכֹּר אִישׁ אֶת־בִּתּוֹ לְאָמָה — When a man, quote, sells his little daughter into servitude as a maidservant, לֹא תֵצֵא כְּצֵאת הָעֲבָדִים — She doesn't go out the way male servants go (Exodus 21:7).

I think, in pshat, the simplest way to understand that is that in the last set of laws, Ari, think about what marriage was for the servant. If you were a servant and you got married during your term of servitude, is that good news for you when it comes to your freedom, or bad news?

Ari: That's the chain that holds you back, because if you want to keep your wife and family, you have to stay indentured.

Rabbi Fohrman: Exactly. But when it comes to the woman, it's exactly the reverse. For her, marriage isn't an obstacle to going out - it's the vehicle to going out, as we're about to see. There's this intention that, during her term of servitude, somebody in the household is going to say, “She's fantastic! Just marry her,” and then that's the end of servitude.

Now if that doesn't happen: אִם־רָעָה בְּעֵינֵי אֲדֹנֶיהָ — If she's so bad in the eyes of her master, אֲשֶׁר־לא יְעָדָהּ — that he doesn't designate her as a wife. So at that point: וְהֶפְדָּהּ — The father has a chance to redeem her and say, “Hey, this isn't working out. I'm taking her back.” The father has that right to redeem her.

In any case: לְעַם נׇכְרִי לֹא־יִמְשֹׁל לְמׇכְרָהּ בְּבִגְדוֹ־בָהּ — It literally means, to a gentile nation she cannot be sold. But the way the Torah Sh’Ba’al Peh understands it is that the master has no ability to sell her to anybody else. Anybody who would sell her would be the equivalent of selling her to a gentile nation. That's not his right. His right is to decide if he or his children want to marry her, and if not, the father can take her back.

וְאִם־לִבְנוֹ יִיעָדֶנָּה — If the master's son, in the end, designates her and marries her, כְּמִשְׁפַּט הַבָּנוֹת יַעֲשֶׂה־לָּהּ — he has to treat her as a completely equal wife. She can't be the little servant girl wife, right? In those days, you can marry more than one wife. אִם־אַחֶרֶת יִקַּח־לוֹ — If you ever choose to marry another woman, שְׁאֵרָהּ כְּסוּתָהּ וְעֹנָתָהּ לֹא יִגְרָע — he can't have the favored wife and the unfavored wife. The clothing that he gives her, the love that he gives her, the food that he gives her, none of it can be lessened in light of what he would give to an alternative wife (Exodus 21:8-10).

And, if in the end, the father can't redeem her and nobody marries her, she also goes free at the end of six years. The experiment failed. That's basically the idea. 

Ari: All right. So to recap, we have two sets of laws here, with the one of the male servant for whom, if he were to get married as part of his servitude, if he wants to stay with his family, he has to basically stay with his master forever.

And then the female servant, which is totally the opposite, whose father actually sold her into servitude as a way to help her get out of their socioeconomic rut. There's an opportunity for the master's son to marry her or for the master himself to marry her, in which case he has to treat her just as well as he would a wife from any other situation. And we get this law that neither he nor the father are able to just sell her - either the father to another nation or this new master can't resell her at any point.

Stories and Laws

Rabbi Fohrman: Exactly. Okay, so what I wanted to do is share with folks out there a find that I came upon, which I think is really astounding. If you've been around the block with Aleph Beta, you know that one of the general themes that we think are out there is that the stories of the Torah are not entirely separate from the laws of the Torah, and stories can become laws. Laws can have their antecedents in stories. 

This set of laws, I think, is a great example of that. There are stories back in Genesis that give birth, so to speak, to these laws, or the Torah's laws are a response to a story. Now, when there's a response to a story, that could be a couple things.

There could be something that worked out really well, so we want to emulate that and say, “Let's do that.” There could be a case where something worked out really badly, and we say, “Well, that was bad. Let's not do that.” And then there could be a hybrid where we'll take little bits and pieces from this, but we're going to sort of change it around.

But one way or the other, you can't really understand the whole texture of the laws, I think, without listening carefully to the text and listening to a story.

Ari: The laws in the Torah, they're not arbitrary laws that come out of nowhere, but they're really built on our history. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Yes, absolutely. So it occurred to me that something like is going on here, and I don't remember exactly what the big tip off was for me, Ari, but it may have had to do with these strange words that appear in these laws; that, “He shall not,” the master, “go and sell this girl into slavery to a gentile nation – לְעַם נׇכְרִי.”

It just kind of felt suggestive to me because there's this story back in Genesis where you have women specifically using this language to talk about what someone did to them. And of course, the story I'm talking about is the story of Lavan, his daughters, and Yaakov.

This is actually what the daughters of Lavan, Rachel and Leah, will say to Yaakov: “Our father has treated us like this Gentile. He treated us as if we were strangers. He has sold us.” It was just a little too coincidental, that language. It felt like an echo.

So I started poking around to see if anything else here reminded me of Yaakov, Lavan, and his daughters, and it turned out that everything did. And that's what I want to try to go through with you now.

Ari: For those of you who can't see Rabbi Fohrman’s computer, it's like an entire text and just everything is highlighted. 

The Story Behind the Servitude Laws

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah. I can just turn around my computer over here and show you, but, you know, as best you can tell. So basically, here's the theory. I just looked at the beginning of these laws: If you should buy for yourself a Hebrew servant, he should work for six years, but in the seventh year, he should go free.

So Ari, if I would say to you, do we ever have a historical precedent of somebody who was a Hebrew, who was a servant, who was working for six years, and in the seventh year, he really should have gone free? Who would that be in the book of Genesis?

Ari: That would be Yaakov.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's Yaakov, right? Because Yaakov says, “Look, I'll work for you for seven years, but at the end of my seven years, I want to marry Rachel, your daughter.” So what should have happened in the seventh year? Should have been, “Okay, your term of service is up, and now you get the daughter,” right? Didn't work out that well for him, though.

Instead, she gets switched under the chuppah, and he says, “Well, you keep on working now. No time off,” right? The seventh year, which is supposed to be this year of freedom, just becomes a year of work. It becomes an eighth year and a ninth year and a second set of seven years. It keeps on going, and Yaakov just keeps on working and working for Lavan. 

So it's almost as if there's a commentary on the Yaakov story, which is that something didn't go right here. This is a sort of travesty, or a corruption of the way things should be.

Ari, if we go back to the Lavan story, talk to us a little bit about what happens at the very end of the Lavan story. 

Ari: Yeah, so Yaakov escapes in the middle of the night. Lavan is quite upset about this. He chases after Yaakov, catches up to him, because Yaakov is traveling with his whole family. Eventually they kind of reach an agreement and they decide to make a brit, a covenant.

Why Didn’t Jacob Give His Two Weeks Notice?

Rabbi Fohrman: By the way, I would just point out that, isn't it strange because the text in Hebrew is וַיִּבְרַח הוּא וְכׇל־אֲשֶׁר־לוֹ, which literally means…what did Yaakov do (Genesis 31:21)?

Ari: He escaped.

Rabbi Fohrman: He ran away, right? Like, why does he have to run away? I mean, if I'm working for you and I decide I want to stop working for you, I just say, “Ari, I’ve got other things to do. It's been nice.”

Ari: Hand in your two-week notice, walk off. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Here's my two-week notice and walk off, right? But no, instead, for some reason, he needs to run away. Strange kind of thing. And then Lavan runs after him as if he has some right to, like, recapture him or something. 

And then, lo and behold, once Lavan catches up to him, Lavan starts talking strangely, and says, “Why did you steal my heart? You treated my daughters like they were שְׁבֻיוֹת חָרֶב, like they were captives of the sword. Why did you sneak and run away like that? You didn't have to do that. You should have told me. I would have sent you out with happiness. All I wanted to do was kiss my daughters.” 

So it's almost like the reader's not sure what to make of this. Was Yaakov wrong in running away? Really Lavan just wanted to kiss his daughters, right? There's an ambivalence here. 

Ari: Yeah. And of course, Lavan is being duplicitous, and Yaakov tried to leave before. Lavan had been tricking him this whole time, and you understand from Yaakov's perspective why he felt like this was the only way out. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Yes, and Lavan has always been duplicitous with Yaakov, going back to the very beginning. It's interesting because that word, “you treated my daughters like captives,” in Hebrew, כִּשְׁבֻיוֹת חָרֶב, like the captives of the sword. But interestingly, that word שְׁבֻיוֹת, the shoresh, the root of it is sheiv. Interestingly, that was the actual word that Lavan duplicitously used to actually ensnare Jacob in a slavery-like situation in the first place. And also, that word had to do with the daughters.

Now, Lavan is twisting the word now. שְׁבֻיוֹת חָרֶב means “captives.” That's not quite the way Lavan used the word sheiv. He used it in a different kind of way. How did Lavan originally use the word sheiv?

When Jacob Needed a Lawyer

So let's go back to that story. That story brings us to the moment when Yaakov first sets eyes on Rachel and asks Lavan for her hand in marriage.

Genesis 29:18: וַיֶּאֱהַב יַעֲקֹב אֶת־רָחֵל וַיֹּאמֶר — Jacob loved Rachel, and he said, אֶעֱבׇדְךָ שֶׁבַע שָׁנִים בְּרָחֵל בִּתְּךָ הַקְּטַנָּה — I'll work seven years for you, for Rachel, your younger daughter.

Now Ari, if you are Lavan, right, and I'm Yaakov, and I made you this offer - I'll work seven years for Rachel, your daughter - do we have a deal? So seemingly, there's only two answers, and those are…?

Ari: Yes and no. 

Rabbi Fohrman: But Lavan finds a third answer.

Ari: Leave it to Lavan. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Leave it to Lavan. I think that's a great title for this episode, “Leave It To Lavan.”

Lavan finds the third option, which is neither yes nor no. Lavan is the king of intentional ambiguity. And so, here's what he says: “Well, I guess it's better to give her to you than to give her to someone else. שְׁבָה עִמָּדִי, stay with me.”

Ari: There's that language.

Rabbi Fohrman: Just think about that. First of all, there's that language, שְׁבָה, which later on comes to mean “captives.” The duplicitousness of the language is almost like this is Lavan's way of capturing Yaakov, but literally just means “sit with me;” like, “Stay with me for a while.”

Now, what's that about? Was that deal or was that no deal? “Well, I guess it's better to give her to you than to give it somewhere else.” So you're giving her to me, right? You never said yes. Also, what about the time period? I said seven years. What did you say? שְׁבָה עִמָּדִי? Was that “yes” to the seven years? Or just like, “Why don't you stay with me?”

Ari: Right. If Yaakov had a good lawyer with him, he would've made Lavan write out, “I, agreed to have Yaakov serve me for seven years, and I'll give him my daughter.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right. So now the question is, what was going on in Lavan's head at this time? You could see how Lavan might have sort of intentionally not said either yes or no, entertaining an entirely different fantasy of what's going on.

“I never agreed to give you my daughter for seven years of service. I said, you want my daughter? I could see giving you my daughter, maybe. Better giving her to you than someone. Why don't you come sit with me for a while?” 

You know, Ari, every evil, every craziness has a backstory, and Lavan's craziness has a backstory too. He has a way of actually seeing things. His way of seeing things is that, “I never treated Yaakov like a worker who had a deal and I made a deal with him. I treated Yaakov as a slave. He came penniless. I brought him into my house, and I made the bargain that every master makes with a slave, which is, I'll give you the security of a roof over your head, I'll give you the security of food to eat, and in return, you give me service without an end date.”

“Now, it might be in my interest to keep you happy, so I'll lend you my daughters. You're going to hang out with them, even build a family with them. But are they yours? No, you're hanging out with my daughters. You're building a family that ultimately is my family.”

And this is the backstory that Lavan has in his mind when it's like, שְׁבָה עִמָּדִי, stay for the night. Now, later on, he'll complain, “What'd you do treating my daughters -” shav, he'll use that word again, כִּשְׁבֻיוֹת חָרֶב - “as if you've captured them?”

But the truth is, Yaakov is the one who's captured by Lavan himself in the story.

Now, what happens is that, later on, all of this comes to a head. When Yaakov leaves, Yaakov feels the need to run away, almost giving in to Lavan's view of him, because that's not Yaakov's view. Yaakov's view is, “I wasn't a servant. I was giving you work for hire, and I married these girls as my just compensation.”

But then he runs away, sort of giving into Lavan's paradigm. Lavan runs after him, says, “Well, it was my daughters. I love them so much, and how come you ran away?”

In chapter 31, verse 43: הַבָּנוֹת בְּנֹתַי — the daughters are mine, הַבָּנִים בָּנַי — the grandchildren are mine, הַצֹּאן צֹאנִי — all of the sheep are mine. Everything of yours is mine.”

He's like the villain, you know, who says, “It's mine, it's mine!” But in his world, Yaakov was a slave and therefore everything is just really part of greater love and conglomerates.

Does God Ever Resolve the Dispute Between Jacob and Laban?

At this point, though, he says, “But let's make a deal.” And what is that deal? He says, “I don't want you to mistreat my daughters. You can't take any other wives beside them.” At the very end of this, he says: אֱלֹקי אַבְרָהָם וֵאלֹקי נָחוֹר יִשְׁפְּטוּ בֵינֵינוּ. “There's unresolved differences,” Lavan says, “between me and you. So let the God of your father, Abraham, and let the God of my father, Nachor, who ultimately is the same God, יִשְׁפְּטוּ בֵינֵינוּ. Let that God judge which one of us is right.

And you know, I always kind of wondered, did that ever happen? Was there ever a moment where God comes out of the clouds and does what Lavan asks Him to do, which is judge between Yaakov and Lavan? That's the question.

In fact, I think he does, bringing us to the introduction to these laws. “These are the laws that you should put before him – אֵלֶּה הַמִּשְׁפָּטִים אֲשֶׁר תָּשִׂים לִפְנֵיהֶם (Exodus 21:1)”

Ari: Just to spell out what Rabbi Fohrman is pointing to here: The word mishpatim means laws, but we could also translate it as "judgments." It's from the same root as that word Lavan used; יִשְׁפְּטוּ — May God judge between me and you.

Rabbi Fohrman: I think there's a whole midrashic layer to this thing. We talked before about the simple layer of the text. It's almost like this is the midrashic layer of the text, where, at some level, there is a version of stories becoming our laws here; that the story of Lavan and Yaakov, and whether Yaakov did right by Lavan or not, was left unresolved.

God was called in to be a Judge, and everything that happens now can be seen as a kind of judgment that God is making on that story. So let's kind of watch how that evolves. 

Judgment Number One: כִּי תִקְנֶה עֶבֶד עִבְרִי — When you buy for yourself an עֶבֶד עִבְרִי, a Hebrew servant, שֵׁשׁ שָׁנִים יַעֲבֹד — he should work for six years but in the seventh year he should go free.

So Ari, where is that coming off in our narrative? Who is the עֶבֶד עִבְרִי and who, so to speak, buys him?

Ari: Yeah, so Yaakov is the עֶבֶד עִבְרִי. It is Lavan who appears to buy him, when he turns into basically a slave.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right. And how long does he end up working for? Does he go free after seven years?

Ari: So that's the big difference between these laws and Lavan, which is after the seventh year, Yaakov is still working. 

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right, and he gets captured, essentially, as this servant. So, law number one is, there's no such thing as doing that. If you've got yourself an עֶבֶד עִבְרִי, even if it's clear that he's an עֶבֶד עִבְרִי, a servant, there's no such thing as working for seven years then not really going free and then continuing and never, ever getting a rest. No, term of servitude is always six years, and then seventh year you go free. 

The next law has to do with a wife, a wife that you would marry during a term of service. And of course, who does that remind us of in our Yaakov and Lavan story?

Ari: Rachel and Leah, who he marries while he's working. 

Rabbi Fohrman: אִם־אֲדֹנָיו יִתֶּן־לוֹ אִשָּׁה — If a master would give a wife to him during his term of service. Tragically, if he in fact is a servant, then it's true. The wife and children are left behind because they really belong to the master. And this is Lavan's view of it; it's not Yaakov's view of it. And unfortunately, as I think you said before, Yaakov didn't have a good lawyer with him when he negotiated this because there was that very ambiguous שְׁבָה עִמָּדִי from Lavan, in which Lavan says neither yes nor no to the proposal that I'll work for seven years for Rachel.

Instead, there's just, “Well, you know, stay with me for a while,” allowing Lavan to have one story and Yaakov to have another story. Yaakov's story is, “Hey, I was a regular worker. This is the repayment for my work. I get this wife, but you know, I'm not your servant.” Whereas Lavan is like, “Look, you're a penniless guy. You made this proposal. I never accepted it. I just said ‘Stay with me for a while,’ and definitely you're my servant.”

So God almost seems to not be taking a position on that, right? But saying that, well, if you are an עֶבֶד עִבְרִי, Lavan would be wrong. Even if you were an עֶבֶד עִבְרִי, there's no such thing as working for more than six years. But Lavan would be right if you were an עֶבֶד עִבְרִי when it comes to the issue of who the wife and children belong to.

Ari: But, I mean, what we said before, on the one hand, there is no working for more than six years as an עֶבֶד עִבְרִי, but there is one exception; which is, if you love your wife and children and master, and you don't want to leave them.

I Love My Master

Rabbi Fohrman: And that brings us to the next set of laws. So, the next set of laws is: וְאִם־אָמֹר יֹאמַר הָעֶבֶד אָהַבְתִּי אֶת־אֲדֹנִי — What if the servant says, “I love my master. I love my wife. I love my children. I don't want to go free.” Now, when you read this, it strikes you as bizarre, because you can understand a slave saying, “I love my wife, I love my children, I don't want to go free,” but what does the master have to do with this?

But strangely, Ari, it's not just in the text here in Exodus that the reader finds it strange that for some reason the servant is attracted not just to his wife but to the master, and for that wants to stay.

In the Yaakov story in Genesis, we have the same weird thing, and it happens when Yaakov first lays eyes on Rachel; arguably one of the most romantic moments in the entire Torah. Here he sees Rachel; she dazzles him, the girl of his dreams.

Ari: Love at first sight.

Rabbi Fohrman: Love at first sight. There's this huge boulder that nobody can undo. He rolls off the boulder. He's Mr. Superman. She falls in love with him. What better moment than for him to ride off into the sunset and elope? But instead, it’s all about the father-in-law, right? And how is that so? So let’s go back to that text over there.

Ari: Yeah, so we're in Genesis chapter 29, starting in verse 10. וַיְהִי כַּאֲשֶׁר רָאָה יַעֲקֹב אֶת־רָחֵל בַּת־לָבָן אֲחִי אִמּוֹ — So when Yaakov saw Rachel, the daughter of Lavan, the brother of his mother, וְאֶת־צֹאן לָבָן אֲחִי אִמּוֹ — and also the sheep of Lavan, the brother of his mother.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's a lot of love of the brother of his mother there.

Ari: Right.

Rabbi Fohrman: It's all about Lavan. It's almost like he loves Rachel partially because of who she is with respect to her father. Lavan is this relative and he's so dying for a relative after being away from his mother that it's just, like, anything that has to do with Lavan, I'll take. And he sort of falls in love not just with this girl, but with this father-in-law who's going to indenture him, and that's part of what inspires him to just roll that rock off of the well.

So what happens is that, tragically, Yaakov's loneliness, his pining for anything that reminds him of home - Rachel, the daughter of Lavan, the brother of his mother - that pining for home ends up indenturing Yakov, unbeknownst to him. Because here, it looks like who could be more free than this really, you know, muscular superman who rolls the rock off the well?

But at the very moment, Lavan comes out and Lavan's like, “Let's go talk this over in the house,” and he brings him home to the house, and that's when Lavan says these fateful words: “So what can I give you for all your work?”

And it's like, “Seven years for רָחֵל בִּתְּךָ הַקְּטַנָּה,” and that's when Lavan says neither yes nor no, but, “Eh, stick around a while. שְׁבָה עִמָּדִי.” And that becomes the beginning of what ends up being a kind of eternal servitude, at least in Lavan's view.

Which becomes, I think, the antecedent for these laws: וְאִם־אָמֹר יֹאמַר הָעֶבֶד — If the servant says, אָהַבְתִּי אֶת־אֲדֹנִי — I love my master, I love my wife, I love my children; I don't want to go free, I want to just serve forever. Which really was Yaakov's lot as he falls in love with Lavan.

Ari: And that love, by the way, it's all the same. It's like it's the same type of love that he has for his master and his wife, which is a crazy thing to think about. But that was for Yaakov. He loved them all as, like, his mother's family.

Rabbi Fohrman: Strange, by the way, that Lavan, when he says, you know, “You should work for me for a while,” he says: אַךְ עַצְמִי וּבְשָׂרִי אָתָּה — You know, you are my own flesh and blood; you are my own essence and blood. But that word, עַצְמִי וּבְשָׂרִי, Ari, we were talking about that. What does that remind you of earlier?

Ari: It reminds you of how, when Adam meets Chava for the first time - that's the very first marriage in the Torah - he says, “You're my flesh, you're my blood.”

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right, and so Lavan is using those words to talk about Yaakov. Sounds pretty weird, right? As if, like, there's this romance between Lavan and Yaakov, and at some level there is. This is the אָהַבְתִּי אֶת־אֲדֹנִי. I love this person who's going to be my master.

And by the way, this next word which appears in Exodus is very significant: וְהִגִּישׁוֹ אֲדֹנָיו אֶל־הָאֱלֹהִים. So what do you do in that situation? The master takes him to the judges. The master takes him to the doorpost and pierces his ear. Well, it turns out that it pierces his ear and causes blood to flow. It turns out that that word, וְהִגִּישׁוֹ, appears back at the same scene in Genesis.

In Genesis, what happens? וַיִּגַּשׁ יַעֲקֹב — Yaakov goes and, thinking about Lavan, how much he loves Lavan, and thinking about Rachel, he goes to this rock (Genesis 29:10). He uses his strength - much as the master is going to use his strength to pierce his ear - he uses his strength to take this rock off the well, allowing water to burst forth. The master is going to use his strength, in Exodus, to hammer the ear of the servant, allowing blood to burst forth.

 And where does it all happen? At the doorpost of the master's home - exactly where Lavan absconds with Yaakov, taking him away from the scene of וַיִּגַּשׁ יַעֲקֹב, when Yaakov comes to the well, and taking him to his own territory, to the house, where Yaakov is going to be indentured. That's the last free moment that Yaakov has from then on. He's deceptively brought into this world of servitude.

Ari: And it's all with that word, וַיִּגַּשׁ יַעֲקֹב. It's almost like he walks into it himself.

Rabbi Fohrman: He walks into that trap. And so, what the Torah is doing is taking this tragic story in which Yaakov is exploited, really, into becoming a servant and is saying, “Okay, here are the non-exploitation roles for a servant,” right? “Here are the rules, just so you know.”

And so, you can't exploit a servant by making him work forever. Now, there's a six year term. You can't pull a “Lavan” on him and make him do seven years and then seven years, seven years. But the servant should walk in with eyes wide open. It's a dangerous thing to get married during your term of service, right, because you can end up sticking around in a way which you don't want to. And that also emerges out of the Lavan story. 

So again, it's as if the Torah is not really taking a position on whether Yaakov was an עֶבֶד עִבְרִי, as Lavan thinks he was, or whether Yaakov was a hired hand who was just to be paid for his labor, as Yaakov thinks he was. But it's saying that if there is this thing called servitude, it still only lasts for six years and the servant should be forewarned about the risks of marrying during her term of servitude. That's a way of creating an eternal bond of servitude, almost something that Lavan knew.

I wonder if part of what the Torah is suggesting is that, what may be have been part of Lavan's mindset? Why was Lavan only too happy to give his daughter to Yaakov? What better way to keep your servant hanging around and never running away than to have him married to your kid, right? Can you imagine how incensed Lavan must have been, then, when Yaakov ran away with the girl? The whole point was, she was supposed to keep you around!

Ari: Right? I mean, it's like if you chain a dog to the tree, and all of a sudden you come there and you see the dog running around with a branch still chained to it, right? Like, the very thing that was supposed to keep him there, he took that with him.

Rabbi Fohrman: Exactly.

What About Rachel and Leah’s Perspective?

Anyways, speaking of the girls, you know, the daughters are an important part of this picture. Right now, we were talking about this from the perspective of Lavan, from the perspective of Yaakov.

But what I want to suggest is that in the next verse in Exodus, verse 7: וְכִי־יִמְכֹּר אִישׁ אֶת־בִּתּוֹ לְאָמָה — When a man will sell his daughter as a maidservant. The Torah switches and gives us the perspective of the daughters.

Well, let's go back to the story that all these laws are based out of. So, who's a man who sells his daughter as a maidservant in this Genesis story? It's got to be Lavan, because he says, you know, “The payment for your work for seven years is going to be you, Rachel.”

So Rachel, in a way, gets sold, but it's strange because the midrashic take on that is almost as if she's being sold as a servant herself. In other words, it's not that she's been given her hand in marriage. It's that she goes from being a free person into an indentured servant, because if you're sold to a servant, who must you be?

Ari: A servant.

Rabbi Fohrman: Another servant. And so, Rachel intuits that she's been exploited. She's marrying someone my father has dominated and turned into a servant.

וְכִי־יִמְכֹּר אִישׁ אֶת־בִּתּוֹ לְאָמָה — When a man sells his daughter as a maidservant, לֹא תֵצֵא כְּצֵאת הָעֲבָדִים — She doesn't go out the way he would go out. She goes out through marriage.

But then we get this sort of interesting, almost sarcastic take on what Lavan did to her: אִם־רָעָה בְּעֵינֵי אֲדֹנֶיהָ אֲשֶׁר־לא יְעָדָהּ וְהֶפְדָּהּ. Now before, Ari, we had talked about the simple meaning of those words, but I'm not even going to repeat it now because the midrashic reading is so at variance with the simple meaning that it would almost confuse you. So just listen to this new meaning:

אִם־רָעָה — She's so bad, so disgusting, בְּעֵינֵי אֲדֹנֶיהָ — in the eyes of her master. Well, who would Rachel's master be? Her husband is going to be Yaakov, but who's her master?

Ari: Yeah, it would be her father.

Rabbi Fohrman: If she's a servant like he's a servant, then she, like Yaakov, are both indentured to a master. So Lavan occupies a dual role for her; not just father, but also master. She's so disgusting, so evil, so reprehensible in the eyes of her master, Lavan, אֲשֶׁר־לא יְעָדָהּ — that he didn't even bother designating her, וְהֶפְדָּהּ — and convened to redeem, or to switch out.

Well, who was not designated in marriage and then switched out?

Ari: Yeah, it was Rachel. 

Rabbi Fohrman: That's Rachel. I mean, think how bad it must feel to be Rachel. My father was so disgusted in me, אִם־רָעָה בְּעֵינֵי אֲדֹנֶיהָ, that he wasn't even just a father, he was like a master. And the master exploited me for money and didn't even bother designating me to a real particular person, just left it ambiguous. “Oh, yeah, good idea. Maybe you, Yaakov and Rachel…” and then sort of left hanging for a while, right?

שְׁבָה עִמָּדִי, hang around a while. We'll see what happens. וְהֶפְדָּהּ, at the last moment I got switched out for Leah. What greater betrayal is there than that, right? Leading to how Rachel and Leah will both see this at the end, because when Yaakov comes to them and says, “It's time to leave,” they're like, “Yeah, because Dad was never a dad to us. He exploited us.”

נׇכְרִיּוֹת נֶחְשַׁבְנוּ — He treated us like strangers. כִּי מְכָרָנוּ — He sold us. וַיֹּאכַל גַּם־אָכוֹל אֶת־כַּסְפֵּנוּ — He didn't even give us the money. All the profits that he made went to him (Genesis 31:15).

That same language becomes לְעַם נׇכְרִי לֹא־יִמְשֹׁל לְמׇכְרָהּ בְּבִגְדוֹ־בָהּ. The master can't exploit these girls. He certainly can't sell her to anyone else.

And then finally: וְאִם־לִבְנוֹ יִיעָדֶנָּה — If the master or the master's son ends up marrying the girls, כְּמִשְׁפַּט הַבָּנוֹת יַעֲשֶׂה־לָּהּ — he has to treat them with true equality. Such that, and now we hear words again borrowed from Lavan: אִם־אַחֶרֶת יִקַּח־לוֹ — If the master's son should decide to take yet another wife beside this maidservant, he can't have his high-class wife and his low-class wife. No, the maidservant who comes from poverty, שְׁאֵרָהּ כְּסוּתָהּ וְעֹנָתָהּ לֹא יִגְרָע — he can't lessen any privileges from her. All that language comes from Lavan, Lavan's hypocrisy.

At the very end of the story, this is what Lavan's going to say. “You have to promise me you'll never take another wife in addition to my two daughters, and never oppress them.” Well, who's the greatest oppressor of his daughters?

Ari: That's Lavan himself, who made Yaakov do exactly that. He forced Yakov into the situation of having to have two wives. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Having one wife, and then…

Ari: Taking another one, yeah.

Rabbi Fohrman: Which is literally the sisters themselves.

Redeeming the Laban Story Through Law

So what the Torah is doing is sort of taking this trainwreck of a story, which is Lavan and Yaakov, Lavan's utter exploitation of his daughters, and building something redemptive. The history was, there was a father who was so exploitative of his daughters that he himself became their master and ended up selling them for money and not treating them as daughters and switching them out and doing all these terrible things, right?

So out of that, we make a new law, which is, instead of rich man Lavan exploiting his daughters for yet even more money, the law is that there's a poor man who wants to give his daughters a second chance and actually marry into society. Instead of marriage being how Lavan sees it, I will use marriage as a tool to get my slave to stay here for longer, to get him to give me his service for all of her work. Instead, marriage becomes the end and not the means, right?

So what do I do? I can sell her as a maidservant, but she's going to end up being married and swept away, off into the castle by some prince who's going to get a chance to see her and decide to take her in.

And there's an expectation that the master, who is separate from the father, a separate master, has this protective feeling towards this girl; an understanding that he would marry her, and if he doesn't, אֲשֶׁר־לא יְעָדָהּ וְהֶפְדָּהּ, then the father has to have the chance to redeem her, instead of the father switching her out and destroying her wedding day.

It's like, if the wedding day doesn't take place because the other man didn't do right by her, then the father, who's the good guy, can sweep back in and redeem her and say, “Come back to my house,” and protect her. They have to become the ultimate of father-protectiveness instead of the father-exploitativeness of Lavan.

Ari: Instead of forcing the wrong daughter on someone like he does, right?

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right. Instead, I'll take you back and we'll find the right husband for you. So, literally all of these laws are an attempt to redeem the evil of Lavan, a man whose name suggests whiteness and purity. Everything he does is only pure in his own eyes, but he's blind to the exploitation which the Torah just calls out as evil. אִם־רָעָה בְּעֵינֵי אֲדֹנֶיהָ — She's so evil, so disgusting, right? Naming the sort of pain that Lavan inflicts upon Rachel without even being able to see it. And it's like, I just wanted to kiss my daughter's goodbye. They're so wonderful when they don't want to have anything to do with this man who's really ruined their lives. 

So I think it's a beautiful example of how, you know, stories become our laws. It's not always that a story is emulated when it comes to laws. Here, the story becomes a model of what not to do, and the laws have to pick up on that and change it.

Ari: It kind of goes into the story with a scalpel, and says, like, “This is what he could have done, but this is what he actually did.”

Rabbi Fohrman: And here's where it really went off the rails.

Ari: And, you know, what this makes me think of is one of the things psychologists talk about; is how, like, we all want to be the hero of our own story and none of us want to see ourselves as the bad guy.

We weave these brilliantly creative tales in order to justify our own actions, and I think what Parshat Mishpatim seems to be doing so brilliantly here is giving us this incredibly precise commentary on the Yaakov-Lavan story; saying, “Here's what Yaakov thought was happening, and here's what Lavan thought was happening,” and here is how he saw himself as doing a moral, maybe even altruistic thing. But here's exactly where he went wrong.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yep. Beautiful, Ari. Thank you so much. Always great to hang out with you, and thank you for inviting me into your palace - speaking of the house, right? 

Ari: If you want to marry my daughter, you can stay longer.

Rabbi Fohrman: I’ve got a while to wait to marry your daughter.

Ari: Okay, thank you. This was cool.

Credits

This episode was recorded by: Rabbi David Fohrman together with Ari Levisohn.

This episode was produced by Sarah Penso.

Our audio editor is Hillary Guttman.

Our production manager is Adina Blaustein.

As a reminder, Into The Verse is taking a break for a little while. In the interim you can stay up-to-date on the parsha with last year’s episodes which are available on AlephBeta.org, and if you haven’t started the latest season of A Book Like No Other, I highly recommend it. You can find that on our website too. Thank you so much for listening.