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The Limmud Sugia Social Beit Midrash

Synopsis

House of bondage

House of bondage

Exodus Chapter 20, 1-3

(1) And God spoke all these words, saying:

(2) I am the LORD thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.

(3) Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth;

Exodus Chapter 20, 1-3
3
A chain around your neck

A chain around your neck

If you put a chain

around the neck of a slave,

the other end

fastens itself around your own.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
2
sources

Summary

Slavery continues TODAY. Millions of men, women and children around the world are forced to lead lives as slaves.

Although this exploitation is often not called slavery, the conditions are the same. People are sold like objects, forced to work for little or no pay and are at the mercy of their ‘employers’.

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The Edited Issue

  • Udi Lion

    Bereshit 27:26-29 Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra a0a Slavery is closer than you think  

    Bereshit 27:26-29

    Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra a0a

    Slavery is closer than you think

      (צפיה בדעה במקור)
  • David

    Hello everyone and welcome to this Sugia on "Avodah".  I'm David and will be facilitating this Sugia discussion.The material is inspired…

    Hello everyone and welcome to this Sugia on "Avodah".  I'm David and will be facilitating this Sugia discussion.

    The material is inspired and drawn from the work of the Limmud chavruta project and so I'd like to run the discussion on those lines - posing a few questions of my own to get started; and then answering and developing points with each of you as we progress.

     

    We are hopefully going to pose and answer 4 or 5 questions in this discussion - I'll introduce another one every couple of days depending on how our conversation goes. You can always go back to an earlier one by pressing "Reply" under an individual comment, or join the general discussion by writing in the box at the bottom of the page.

     

    Our opening question is: "Are we slaves? Are we free?" and I have a few different sources to draw out elements of this:

    1 - The story of the Exodus from Egypt and our freedom as a people from Egyptian slavery is hugely important to us -
    it's the opening of the ten commandments - see the source here.

    But did we just exchange one master for another?
    There are lots of times and places in the Tanach and Rabbinic literature where we are referred to as slaves to G-d himself -
    and this isn't just when we are obedient to his commandments - consider this example from Baba Batra 10a.

    What do you think the connection is between our freedom from physical slavery
    and our relationship to G-d's commandments?

     

    2 - Even if we are free people ourselves, how free can we call ourselves when our society is built on the slavery of the past?
    This was a central argument of the Communist Manifesto -
    that 19th century labour was if anything worse than the slavery of ancient history
    because the mechanism of free markets disassociated well-off people from the pain and toil that supported their comfortable lives
    Louis CK makes this point more strongly (but with some bad language).

    How can we be free in the present
    if we can't be free from the past?

     

    3 - Even if we do think that slavery is a thing of the past entirely, what can we learn from its impact on our sources and religious lives?
    We  have a lot of sources we can discuss later on this, but maybe start off with Rav Soloveitchik's reflections
    on the halachic (Jewish legal) implications of being free rather than a slave.

    Are free people more "time-conscious" than slaves?
    Is that one of the most important differences (as he seems to imply)?
    And does that ring true to us?

     

    Really looking forward to hearing what you all have to say on this -
    comment away below and I will be back this evening (EST) -
    in the meantime my co-organiser Ben will hopefully drop by and share his thoughts as well.

     

    (צפיה בדעה במקור)
  • Proof
    Eve Cartwright

    Although this is one hundred years old i think its just as true today. Engels wrote in 1874, less than… Although this is one hundred years old i think its just as true today. Engels wrote in 1874, less than ten years after the Civil War and slavery was a lived memory for many in America and a known fact about the way the world worked for Europeans. Its worth taking a minute to draw out the process of how this works for Engels. Like david said on the main discussion page, its the mechanism of the modern market that divorces production from consumption, and makes forexameple the sweatshops of the third world invisible to us when we by a pair of jeans. So its not so much the actions of individuals as the attitudes and structure of our current society that create it. This is what I think chumash means when it talks about "beit avadim" - "the house of slavery". We werent freed from being slaves, but from a slave system and a slave society. And if theres a moral duty for us to act against slavery or to oppose it, it should be against a system rather than against its consequences (צפיה בדעה במקור)
  • Sofia Howard

    I can see the quote from the parsha which he Limmud on one leg talked about, but can't see how… I can see the quote from the parsha which he Limmud on one leg talked about, but can't see how to comment on it? (צפיה בדעה במקור)
  • Proof
    Udi Lion

    I wish to give A Shabat gift with a thorn in it . I am refering to this clip of… I wish to give A Shabat gift with a thorn in it . I am refering to this clip of louis CK .' Can we , the first world survive without the third- world "slavery'  (what do you think the work conditions of millions of immigrants is going to be) ? an important question especially following the horrific events of this week Shabat Shalom (צפיה בדעה במקור)

Main Sources