Freedom Is Noisy Dr.

Aron Tugendhaft '95

Among the many cuneiform tablets discovered in Ashurbanipal’s Library in the nineteenth century, there are ones that relate the story of a mighty flood sent by the gods to destroy humankind. Or, at least, to keep humankind in their proper place—for they were getting too noisy. That disturbing raucousness was the price the gods had to pay for their leisure. There had been a time, as the very first lines of the poem relate, “when the gods like men bore the work and suffered the toil.” The gods then created humans to do the work instead, so that they, the gods, could rest. Humans work while gods rest. That, the poem seems to say, is how things ought to be—if only humans weren’t so noisy.

Sefer Shemot opens with a similar contrast between work and rest. The text describes how the Israelites toiled for the Egyptians in language that resembles the Babylonian poem’s. The Torah tells us that “the Egyptians put the Israelites to work at crushing labor, and they made their lives bitter with hard work with mortar and bricks and every work in the field—all their crushing work that they performed.” In the words of the Akkadian poem: “The work was heavy, the distress was much” (dulum kabit ma’ad shapshaqum). In Sefer Shemot, Pharaoh tries to behave like a god by having the Israelites work for him. By the end of the story, with the death of his own son from the final plague, Pharaoh is forced to recognize that he is merely mortal.

Pharaoh’s enslavement of other humans, whereby he inappropriately lays claim to a divine position for himself, cuts against the order of things. Hashem makes this clear by means of the plagues. Not merely punishments, the plagues are signs (otot) by which Hashem demonstrates that He and He alone is lord of creation. Pharaoh is an imposter.

With Pharaoh down for the count, what’s to become of the Israelite slaves? Interestingly, the word “freedom” doesn’t appear anywhere in the biblical story. (By contrast, it does appear in what is arguably the first law received at Sinai; see Ex. 22:2.) Though we often think of the story in Sefer Shemot as describing a transition from slavery to freedom (me-avdut le-cherut) the text itself suggests something else. In the pasuk quoted above (Ex. 1:14), the Hebrew root ayin-bet-daled appears five times to describe the Israelites’ activity in Egypt. Shortly thereafter, we learn that Hashem plans to have the Israelites oved Him at Mt. Sinai (Ex. 3:12). The story begins with the Israelites performing avodah for the Egyptians and ends with them performing avodah to Hashem.

This isn’t a story about the transition from slavery to freedom so much as the transition from (improper) service to (proper) service. The Israelites continue to work—only the recipient of that work has changed. First Pharaoh, then Hashem. Resting from the work of creation, Hashem finally acquires a people to work for Him—not so unlike the way all humankind work so that the gods can rest in the Babylonian story. What does this work consist of?

In the Babylonian story, we are told that the human work consists of digging canals and building shrines. The canals are necessary to irrigate the land and thereby grow the produce and livestock that will feed the gods as sacrifices offered in the shrine. (When the flood briefly wipes out humankind, the gods begin to go hungry because there is no one to offer sacrifices; they eventually learn to accept human raucousness as a necessary evil if they want to eat.) In Sefer Shemot, the work similarly consists of building a shrine—the Mishkan, a place in which Hashem can rest. (On why the Israelites are not tasked with digging canals, consider Deut. 11:10-12.)

In becoming servants of Hashem at Sinai, however, the Israelites take on more than the task of building a shrine. They accept responsibility in following a law. It is in this acceptance of law that the rabbis saw a glimmer of freedom that remains otherwise unexpressed in the biblical account. Regarding the inscribed tablets that Moshe brought down from Sinai (Ex. 32:16), the rabbis famously comment: “Do not read inscribed (charut), but rather freedom (cherut), since one is not free unless he engages in the study of Torah.” As Jews, our active engagement with the law constitutes our freedom. And as anyone who has visited a proper beit midrash knows, the study of Torah can be loud, even raucous. Unlike the gods of Babylon, Hashem takes pleasure in this human noise.