Just a couple of quick things on navigating the site:

– If you are seeing text mostly in Hebrew there's an "En" button in the top-left corner that will switch to an English format (you should only need to do this one)

– As well as the sources I mentioned there are about 20 others – you can see all of them by going to the "Resources" link on the right-hand side; and comment on individual sources as well as over here.

We also recommend that you see the opening page

Enjoy!

Hi David. For what you asked question 1, I would say a few things. It is uncomfortable to talk as modern privileged people about literally being slaves. This seems to me disrespectful to both people in the past who were slaves, and as you say people now who remain as slaves and continue to suffer.

I think that there is a difference between what the text talks about when Hashem says I took you out of egypt to serve me and the way we talk about going out of egypt today as being about freedom, and I don't think that's coincidence. In choosing to talk about and remember and teach about going out of egypt as a journey to freedom we are whether we want to admit it or not rejecting or at least standing in opposition to the idea you mention that we are "just exchange one master for another".

And I think that the quote from baba babra agrees with this. If avodah meant being in whatever sense "slaves" to Hashem then it would say "when they are obedient they called slaves, when they are disobenient they called something else". But its other way round where disobedience and not obedience is defining quality of slaves. These days I think we would call "the disobedience of slaves" moral agency and praise it.

Hi Francesca – David's based in New York so probably won't reply until late this evening; so in the meantime can I make a couple of challenges to test/strengthen your argument?

– your point about the vocabulary we use is a very important one and something we took very seriously in setting up this Sugia. Ultimately we felt that the sources and background of this discussion were so tied to the word and the concept of slavery that it would be dishonest as well as cumbersome to try to elide this.

– But do you think that this is linked to your next point? You make the point that we predominantly talk about the Exodus as a great example of  freedom, but the sources tell a more complex story than that. Perhaps the juxposition of freedom and slavery as such clear positive and negatives is concealing as much as it explains – do you agree, and do you think it's our discomfort with the concept of slavery itself that's leading this?

– The Bava Batra quote is I think very interesting indeed. You're quite right that slavery is not aligned to obedience but rather the reverse; but is the distinction as sharp as you're making it? Children we generally consider to have reduced moral agency, to obey specific adults, and to be subject to rules they don't have a say in making. So maybe the child/slave comparison is less about degrees of freedom and more about the attitude of the parent/master when they are obeyed or disobeyed?

Are you sure that the metaphor of children
relates to the young (kids)
rather than none aged g-d's children ?

I think I agree with Francesca mostly here, One of the other sources is from the haggadah – "a person should think that they theself was freed from Egypt". A person doesnt need to think that they were commanded to serve God personally at mount Sinai, or that they entered Israel – the most important thing is to remember that we were once slaves and that we were free.

This maybe answered David's second question too – we can become ree of the past by choosing to forget the bits of it which we don't like. Or by remembering and emphasising the bits that we want to. We arenot talking about history here but memory and what we as a faith, and a culture think is worthly not of preservation (which it all is!) but of promotion. And that's just as true for the pyramids and the classical cities that Louis CK talks about as it is for our own past – we are Jews because we choose to be, and that means we get to choose what that means for us.

Hi Emily – David's based in New York so probably won't reply until late this evening; so in the meantime can I just add a couple of comments?

– The consequences of what you're saying are really interesting and radical. The history of selecting what to remember and what to forget is of course a very long one (Benedict Anderson I think once defined a nation in that way: "A nation is a group that has agreed to remember some things and forget a great many others") . But that's usually understood as the manifestation of other trends and power dynamics within a community. The more explicit and open the process is the more it just becomes a tool of politics and even control – think about debates about what should be taught in schools, or be included in a national curriculum. Is that really freedom from the past? I could argue that the holding and withholding is actually a continuation of a process of control; even in a good cause.

We included it for comedic effect as much as anything else, but the Ask a Slave sketch I think makes this point in a different way – when we learn history through popular culture and a decentralised eduction process we run the risk of not just having a selective understanding but a distorted and even offensive perspective. Where do you think we can draw the line on this issue?

Hi Eve – David’s based in New York so probably won’t add comments on this until later this evening. But pending that I'll say that I think you're spot on here. Marx in Kapital talks about what he calls "commodity fetishism" – that interactions between people in a capitalist system are reduced/elevated (& perspective is everything here!) into relationships between money and objects. In conventional economic theory this is why capitalism works so well – a mechanism of free exchange is much for efficient and flexible than a barter system or central allocation – and/but by necessity it removes the human element from the equation for both good and bad.

Did you read the source from Rav Kook about "A truly free person"? I think it draws from some of the ideas in this source & would be interested to hear your thoughts…

On each page you can find the Resources button – if you click on it you should arrive to this page.

Open the Biblical sources category and when you find the Parsha source

if you scroll down to the end of the page you will see a replying box you can comment in .

Waiting eagerly for your comments…