Rabbi Binyamin Yuhanan Parshat Mishpatim 1

good evening we are learning parat Mish we are on page 417 MIM comes right after parat and in parat we received the Torah and MIM already gives us the first installment of 54 commandments so the majority of these Commandments are between a man and his fellow interpersonal relations first section is about Jewish slaves chapter 21 these are the ordinances that you shall place before them if you buy a Jewish slave and there are two uh circumstances under which a Jew can become a slave one is if he is poor and he cannot support himself so he has an option to sell himself as a slave and uh the purchase money he can save for future when he becomes free he can start a business with it and um he works for six years and the master has to support his family as well so both the man and his family receive shelter and food for six years the family are free but they live um on the property of the master and uh the man works and the second um case is if a if a person steals if he was caught as a thief he must return turn the Lost um object or the money sometimes he has to pay double but what if he already used up the money or he sold the item and he used the money he cannot pay back and he is poor he doesn't have money so then the court sells him as a slave as a servant and the money from the purchase uh they give to the victim to compensate him for the Lost object so the Torah tells us that a Jewish slave shall work for six years and in the seventh he shall Go free for no charge and it gives us some additional laws if he's already if he is not married yet he shall if he shall arrive by himself he shall shall leave by himself then he leaves alone but if he is the husband of a woman which means if he came with his family then his wife shall leave with him when he goes out free his wife goes out with him from here we learn that until that time the wife and the children are supported by the master and in verse four tells us that also if he comes with his wife already his master has the option of giving him a a non-jewish maid servant a non-jewish slave woman to mate with and to produce children for the master who are going to be slaves verse four says if his master will give him a woman and she Bears him Sons or daughters the wife and her children shall belong to her master and he shall shall go out by himself now we're on page 419 we have to keep in mind that the Torah concept of slavery is not what we are familiar with from the African slaves from the unfortunate harsh conditions that they had to undergo on plantations in uh north north and south Americas and in Asia the cruel treatment and the beatings and the killings that that um they had to go through the the Torah concept of a slave is um a worker who is committed to work for a certain amount of time that is for Jewish uh slave a worker who committed himself to work for six full years um and therefore a Jewish worker should not sign any contracts that obligate him for a set um time period because that would would um put him in a category of a slave because the Jewish people are considered um Servants of God and therefore they should not be Servants of men and as such a Jew is allowed to stop work and leave his job whenever he wants the reason why we go to work is to provide uh us with resources to live and at any moment if a Jew feels I have enough to feed myself and my family and I don't need to spend time working anymore I would rather uh start living a Jewish worker can just quit at any moment he desires he doesn't have to give advanced warning he can leave in the middle of the day or he can just call his boss and say to tomorrow I'm not coming in and that's it the boss cannot have any complaints against him because when you hire a Jew you know that you're hiring him only as long as he needs money once he got the money that he needed he can quit he is allowed to quit however a Slave What differentiates a slave from a regular worker is that a slave is obligated to work for six years he cannot say oh that's it I Quit he is uh committing to work for six years and uh that's really it besides that you must treat your slave with the same respect that you would treat any other worker and we going to learn some of the laws as we go through the par and you will see that the Torah treats every human being with dignity even slaves even non-jewish slaves are treated with tremendous respect that the plantations never saw now that is why we find something very interesting on page 419 in verse 5 if the Slaves Shall say I love my master my wife and my children my wife and my children means the non-jewish slave woman that my master gave me and the children that were born from her I shall not go free I don't want to become free because I love it here too much they feed me here they shelter me here they treat me with respect I don't want to leave my slavery where did you hear such a thing that a slave doesn't want to run away from his master he wants to stay the master says go and the slave says can I please remain your slave a little longer and that is exactly for the reason that that we explained that we treat a slave with the same respect that we treat any other human being so again for the slave it doesn't matter if I am free or not I go to work and uh I enjoy my life with my family afterwards so the slave says my life in the Free World is too risky I already came here because for example I was poor and I couldn't make ends meat and I'm afraid of that can I please stay by you my master and I will continue enjoying the benefits or the slave might say I remember when I was free I had had a big desire to steal and I couldn't control it and I got into trouble because of it and I'm afraid if I go out into the world I might have that Temptation again instead of working honestly I might want to rob people so please I would rather be safe than sorry let me stay as a slave and enjoy the comfort of of your home so is that permitted and in in verse six Torah tells us then his master shall bring him to the court and they shall bore a hole through his ear with a special instrument a sharp thick needle they make a hole in his ear so a piercing for a man is a sign of slavery and he shall serve him forever forever that in Torah means for 50 years uh up to 50 years until the Jubilee year after seven cycles of seven years what we call shita uh which is 49 years seven time 7 we have the Jubilee year the 50th year is called y and uh in y every slave every Jewish slave must go free even though he is the one that asked for extension to stay as a slave longer we allowed until the Jubilee year once yil comes we force him out because okay fine you you were slave for 50 years what about your children and your grandchildren they were born while you were a slave we don't want your future generations to forget that they were once uh free let them go out wait one year and if you really want sell yourself as a slave again after the Jubilee year Jubilee year is also unique that uh all land that was sold in Israel The ancestral the original land that they received when they entered the land with yosua if you sell such land it's not really a sale it is only a lease for up to 50 years and in the Jubilee Year all land goes back to its original owners so every family receives another chance you might have been poor for the past 50 years and you had to sell your land and you had to sell yourself as slaves but at the end of the 50 years cycle we give you back your freedom we give you back your land and in another Torah portion we learn that when a master sends his slave for uh uh to Freedom he has to give him Severance uh package he has to give him a lot of gifts money food cattle clothing everything that he needs to start his life again and to start his own business again so the idea of slavery was for the benefit of the poor for the benefit of the unfortunate instead of them being in the street begging they had a option of honorably living by a a a a wealthy family being supported and uh working there for six years and then they had opportunity at the end of um six years to try their free life again with all the gifts that the master gave them now on page 419 verse 7 we read about another um kind of a slave and that is a Slave girl if a man will sell his daughter as a slave woman how's that possible why would a man sell his daughter and that is in a case when a family is poor again and the father sees that he cannot provide for his children unfortunately and there is a possibility that they will end up on the street so for the boys they already from the age of six can get a job to help out to carry some things to watch sheep and so on and so forth and they can at least get enough money for food and shelter however for a girl it's very dangerous a young girl 7 8 9 10 11 she cannot get married yet and nobody can provide for her what is she supposed to do if we allow her to go and get a job people will take advantage and she might end up becoming Shalom a prostitute we don't want that to happen so we give permission to the father to find a nice Jewish Family preferably uh where the man already has a wife and children and he has more resources and he wants to help out and such a nice young Jewish man from a wealthy family comes to the father and says I will provide for your daughter until she is ready to get married she will be like a servant in my household and then when she turns 12 either I will marry her as my my second wife or my son who is growing up maybe he will marry her there's nothing embarrassing in marrying a former slave girl because she comes from an honorable Jewish family descendants of Abraham is and yob just the circumstances forced the father to give her up to become a servant for a few years but she's still of pure blood of very honorable um descent so the the this young man offers the father some money and commits that when the girl turns 12 either he or his son are going to marry her and she will become a full-fledged wife so the the Torah says if a man will sell his daughter as a slave woman better to translate it as a servant she shall not leave like the Lea taking of the regular slaves which means she will not go out just at the end of uh six years but rather she will become free when she turns 12 which may be earlier than 6 years as well as as we're going to learn there are sometimes that non-jewish slaves go through for example if they injured and that doesn't apply to her now verse 8 and when she becomes 12 years old if she is displeasing in the eyes of her master who designated her for himself which means he wanted to marry her or he wanted his son to marry her but now that he sees how she works and he doesn't like her work and he doesn't want to marry her he shall assist in her Redemption he has to set her free he shall not have the power to sell her to a strange man for he had betrayed her he is not allowed to sell her as a slave to some other man because it's considered a betrayal that he promised to marry her and now he's not marrying her so if a father sells his daughter as a servant no one can sell her second time not the master and if she goes back to the Father the father can no longer sell her second time verse n if he had designated her for his son he shall deal with her according to the rights of the young women she will become a a a full-fledged wife of him or he his son he cannot treat her any less than anyone else and that's what verse 10 says if he shall take another wife in addition to her he shall not diminish her food her clothing or her marital relations just because she is a former slave does not give the right to her husband to treat her any less than a a regular wife and from here we also learn what are the obligations of the husband to his wife the husband is obligated to provide his wife with food with clothing and with marital relations surprisingly marital relations are not his right but rather marital relations are the right of the woman to receive and the man is the obligated party in this case now we go to page 421 the next case is intentional murder one who strikes a man so that he dies shall surely be put to death the next verse is about unintentional murder but for one who had not laay in Ambush and God had caused it to come to his hand I shall provide you a place to which he shall flee this is a brief introduction to laws that are going to be explained later that someone who who threw an accident or without malicious intent killed another Jew he's not put to death because it was uh unintentional but he does need need to go to a City of Refuge and stay there until kohen gadul dies this serves as a as a punishment for him for being not careful as well as protection from the family of the deceased man so that they shouldn't uh try to take revenge on him verse 14 if a man shall act intentionally against his fellow to murder him with G from my altar shall you take him to die even if he is a Coen serving in bet mikdash we still escort him out and we conduct a court case and if there are two witnesses we kill him we kill the murder now verse 15 about heing one one's parents one who strikes his father or mother shall surely be put to death and here this is applicable only if a man hits his father or mother and causes blood to come out or a bruise with any other person you just have to pay for the damages the five damages that we're going to learn uh on on the bottom of this page however if it's the father or the mother there is death penalty for injuring them now verse 16 about kidnapping one who kidnaps a man and sells him or enslaves him shall surely be put to death kidnapping is considered very serious because taking freedom from a person against his will is like murdering him you're taking away his life his ability to decide um therefore if a man decides to sell himself as a slave that is okay but you cannot kidnap someone else and therefore we're very careful um not to limit someone's Freedom which means as parents we cannot forbid our adult children to do things that they think are right just because we disagree with them we have to be careful not to put emotional harm on a person that would limit them because that would also be considered kidnapping when you threaten or scare a child and leave him with that fear for the rest of his life that will not allow him to do things that normal people do that would be a partial kidnapping of his um mind now verse 17 speaks about cursing parents one who curses his father or mother shall surely be put to death here we're speaking about cursing with the name of God verse 18 if one man damages another man if man quarrel and one strikes his fellow and he doesn't die but becomes uh sick if he gets up and goes about outside under his own power the one who struck him is absolved from Death he doesn't need to die only for his lost time he shall pay and he shall provide his healing so the Torah tells us that for injury to a human being you have to pay for lost time from work and ductor bills and for medicine for healing elsewhere the Torah tells us that there are three more p payments that damager must make and they are causing for causing pain for causing shame and the market value of the injury so total there are five payments uh potentially that that um the victim receives now we have a very moral law about treating your non-jewish slaves properly verse 20 if a man shall strike his non-jewish slave or his non-jewish maid servant with the rod and he shall die under his hand he shall surely be Avenged and our sages say that that means death penalty with decapitation imagine a man is uh beating his slave for not fulfilling his duties and he's too harsh and he kills him that man is killed himself so we see that there is death penalty for killing your own slave that is very important because as we see that without these laws Masters would abuse their uh slaves and they would injure them them and they would even kill them now we're on page 423 some more laws of bodily injury uh verse 22 if if man shall fight and they collide with a pregnant woman and she miscarries so if there is no fatality if the woman um doesn't die only she uh um miscarries then he shall pay by the order of Judges which means um we evaluate how much what is the market value of losing a pregnancy and the the one that struck her must pay however if there shall be a fatal ity if the woman will die then you shall award a life for a life um now in verse 24 the Torah tells us an interesting idea an ie for an eye a tooth for a tooth a hand for hand a foot for a foot a burn for a burn a wound for a wound a bruise for bruise from here our sages tell us that this does not mean that you have to knock out the eye of the attacker just like he knocked out the eye of the victim and similarly you don't have to knock out his tooth or cut off his hand or foot or give him a burn or wound him or bruise him that's not what it means what it means is you have to give the monetary value of an eye for an eye you have to give the monetary value of a tooth for a tooth and so on we evaluate the damage financially and the money goes to the victim and uh that makes sense for two reasons number one if we injure the attacker what is the victim going to get from it now he doesn't have an eye and now the attacker doesn't have an eye now both of them don't have an eye and uh he doesn't have an eye and he doesn't have any compensation rather we force the attacker to pay this way the attacker feels the pain of having to lose money and the victim gets um money for the pain that he suffered for the loss of income for the monetary value of his limb for the shame and so on and um