Rejoice in Your Going Out (פרשת משפטים)

This week’s Torah portion, Mishpatim (משפטים, meaning “ordinances”), begins pointedly, as the Hebrew Bible translator Robert Alter notes, with “the regulation of slavery, addressed in the narrative situation to an audience of newly freed slaves.” A keyword that appears repeatedly in the first few verses (Exodus 21:2-4) caught my attention. That word is יצא (go out).

כִּי תִקְנֶה עֶבֶד עִבְרִי, שֵׁשׁ שָׁנִים יַעֲבֹד; וּבַשְּׁבִעִת--יֵצֵא לַחָפְשִׁי, חִנָּם
If thou buy a Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve; and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing.

אִם-בְּגַפּוֹ יָבֹא, בְּגַפּוֹ יֵצֵא; אִם-בַּעַל אִשָּׁה הוּא, וְיָצְאָה אִשְׁתּוֹ עִמּוֹ
If he come in by himself, he shall go out by himself; if he be married, then his wife shall go out with him.

 אִם-אֲדֹנָיו יִתֶּן-לוֹ אִשָּׁה, וְיָלְדָה-לוֹ בָנִים אוֹ בָנוֹת--הָאִשָּׁה וִילָדֶיהָ, תִּהְיֶה לַאדֹנֶיהָ, וְהוּא, יֵצֵא בְגַפּוֹ
If his master give him a wife, and she bear him sons or daughters; the wife and her children shall be her master's, and he shall go out by himself.

The word יצא caught my attention because of its appearance in other places. Earlier this week, I led a discussion with my students about Judah Leib Gordon’s 1866 poem הקיצה עמי (“Awake My People”), which includes this famous line:

היה אדם בצאתך ויהודי באהלך
Be a man in the streets [when you go out] and a Jew at home [in your tent]

Translated literally (be a human being when you go out and a Jew in your tent), it alludes to Deuteronomy 33:18, part of the blessing of Moses to the tribes of Israel:

וְלִזְבוּלֻן אָמַר, שְׂמַח זְבוּלֻן בְּצֵאתֶךָ; וְיִשָּׂשכָר, בְּאֹהָלֶיךָ
And of Zebulun he said: Rejoice, Zebulun, in thy going out, and, Issachar, in thy tents.

The great medieval Bible commentator Rashi interpreted the verse this way: “Zebulun and Issachar made a partnership. ‘Zebulun shall dwell by seashores’ [Genesis 49:13] and depart in ships to engage in commerce. He would earn profit, and put into the mouth of [i.e., provide financial support for] Issachar, and [the men of the tribe of Issachar] would sit and engage in [the study of] Torah. That is why [the younger] Zebulun is put ahead of Issachar, for Issachar’s Torah came about through Zebulun.” So Rashi understands the verse to mean “succeed [Zebulun] when you depart for trade,” and “succeed [Issachar] in sitting in your tents for Torah.”

According to Abarim Publications’ Biblical Dictionary:

The verb יצא is one of the most occurring verbs in the Bible. It means to go, and specifically to go out or forth (Genesis 31:33, 2 Samuel 11:8, Micah 4:10). Its opposite is the verb בוא meaning to come. The difference between these two verbs lies not simply in the direction of motion relative to the observer, but rather in a motion relative to either a focal point on one end or a state of dispersal on the other. The verb בוא (to come) is predominantly used to describe a motion away from being all over the place or considering various options, and toward one specific place or one final decision. The verb יצא (to go) is predominantly used to describe a motion away from the focal point (being perhaps a point of origin or pause) and towards the wide blue yonder where everything is possible (Genesis 24:50, 1 Kings 5:13, Isaiah 28:29).

This source adds that יצא is associated with the rising sun, which goes out in Hebrew (as in Psalm 19:6); the east (as in Psalm 75:6), the spatial point of origin from whence the sun goes out; and the past, the temporal point of origin from which one goes forth to the future. I’m reminded here of Werner Sombart’s line about Jewish migration: “Wie die Sonne geht Israel über Europa: wo es hinkommt, spriesst neues Leben empor.” (Israel passes over Europe like the sun: at its coming new life bursts forth.) In the Biblical Creation story, new life is brought forth (תּוֹצֵ֨א), a causative form of the word to go forth (יצא).

So what are we to make of all this? Gordon is clearly urging his readers to do more than go out into the world to earn a living through commerce (Rashi’s interpretation of Zebulun). Gordon’s line is typically understood to mean that Jews should abandon public expressions of Jewishness and instead privatize Judaism in the home. As Karl Marx had put it two decades earlier in his essay “Zur Judenfrage”: “Man emancipates himself politically from religion by expelling it from the sphere of public law to that of private law.” And as Marx went on to argue, this kind of bifurcation divides man against himself. But perhaps the appearance of יצא in this week’s portion, where it is linked to emancipation and freedom, lends the word another meaning in Gordon’s poem. It’s noteworthy that in our portion the Hebrew servant goes out after six years of service—a clear parallel to the seventh day of Creation on which God rested (Genesis 2:2), the seventh year in which the land rested (Leviticus 25:2-4), and the cancellation of debts every seven years (Deuteronomy 15). When Gordon urges the reader to be a human being when he goes out, maybe he is calling on Jews to emancipate themselves from servitude and embrace the wide open possibilities of freedom that he saw (however mistakenly in his time and place) bursting forth like the rising sun.

Agent and Principal (פרשת משפטים)

Last week’s Torah portion, Mishpatim (משפטים), includes an intriguing reference to a mysterious agent sent by God to assist the Jewish people in its journey to the Promised Land:

הִנֵּה אָנֹכִי שֹׁלֵחַ מַלְאָךְ, לְפָנֶיךָ, לִשְׁמָרְךָ, בַּדָּרֶךְ; וְלַהֲבִיאֲךָ, אֶל-הַמָּקוֹם אֲשֶׁר הֲכִנֹתִי. הִשָּׁמֶר מִפָּנָיו וּשְׁמַע בְּקֹלוֹ, אַל-תַּמֵּר בּוֹ:  כִּי לֹא יִשָּׂא לְפִשְׁעֲכֶם, כִּי שְׁמִי בְּקִרְבּוֹ.

Robert Alter translates the passage this way:

Look, I am about to send a messenger before you to guard you on the way and bring you to the place that I made ready. Watch yourself with him and heed his voice, do not defy him, for he will not pardon your trespass, for My name is within him (Exodus 23:20-21).

Alter comments that “the frankly mythological terms of the preceding narrative—the pillars of cloud and fire, the Destroyer in Egypt—invite us to imagine the messenger as a fearsome agent of God, perhaps human in form like the divine messengers in Genesis, leading the people through the wilderness.”

The 1985 JPS translation, the Sapirstein translation, and my grandmother’s 1957-1960 Menorah Press translation render the passage similarly except, in contrast to Alter’s more literal translation, they translate the Hebrew word מלאך as angel rather than messenger. The English word angel is derived from the Greek angelos, which literally means messenger or envoy.

Rashi explains that the messenger or angel is none other than Metatron (מטטרון), “whose name is like the Name of his Master,” meaning that its numerical value is equal to שדי (Shaddai, the Almighty). For Rashi, this is the meaning of “My name is within him,” though I am reminded of the much later legends about the golem, in some versions of which the clay creature is animated by placing a slip of paper or a tablet inscribed with the name of God under its tongue. Rashi adds that Metatron will not pardon trespass for two reasons: first, as an angel who is free of the evil inclination (יצר הרע) and does not sin, he is unaccustomed to forgiving; and second, “he is only an emissary [שליח] and does nothing but fulfill his mission.”

What else do we know about Metatron? Gershom Scholem, the great Israeli scholar of Jewish mysticism, noted that the Talmud mentions Metatron in the context of its polemics against Jewish heretics like Elisha ben Abuyah. He writes:

Elisha b. Avuyah saw Metatron seated [in a vision] and said, “perhaps there are two powers,” as though indicating Metatron himself as a second deity. The Talmud explains that Metatron was given permission to be seated only because he was the heavenly scribe recording the good deeds of Israel. Apart from this, the Talmud states, it was proved to Elisha that Metatron could not be a second deity by the fact that Metatron received 60 blows with fiery rods to demonstrate that Metatron was not a god, but an angel, and could be punished…. It is however thought that the appearance of Metatron to Elisha b. Avuyah led him to a belief in dualism.

Scholem’s discussion thus leads us to the Jewish heretic Elisha ben Abuyah, also called Akher (the Stranger), who became the model for Isaac Deutscher’s conception of the “non-Jewish Jew.” As Deutscher explained in his famous 1958 essay:

The Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition. You may, if you like, see Akher as a prototype of those great revolutionaries of modern thought: Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Freud. You may, if you wish to, place them within a Jewish tradition. They all went beyond the boundaries of Jewry. They all found Jewry too narrow, too archaic and too constricting. They all looked for ideals and fulfillment beyond it…. It was this that enabled them to rise in thought above their societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future.

Now, Deutscher may be right that the Jewish heretic is the more farsighted individual with the wider horizon. But isn’t there a corresponding danger for the heretic that he will mistake, from his detached viewpoint, the agent—an agent without mercy—for the principal?