Ears and Awls: Mishpatim
I have to admit that last week I fell into a few moments of questioning and regret that I’d left my job five years ago to go to rabbinical school; even though I’m close to being finished, what’s ahead feels especially hard at the moment for a variety of reasons.
It was a scary thing to leave, and it’s still scary. I left behind people and things I loved, and jumped into this vast unknown.
In this week’s Torah reading we get a bunch more laws given by God to the Israelites on how to live an ethical life—good for ancient times, I might add, not so practical for today.
The first is what is to happen with a slave who is set free by his master, but chooses to stay back; his master must take an awl, pierce the slave’s ear to the doorway and the slave is his forevermore.
So much has been said about this: Why the awl? Why the ear? Why the doorway? (and, um, how long does he have to stand there? Is he standing or sitting? Which way is he facing: inside or out? I wonder…)
One commentary is that it punishes the inability of the slave to move on and be free. He is given a chance at freedom but doesn’t take it.
But the slave in question stays back because he loves his wife and children and doesn’t want to leave them. It seems more like Sophie’s Choice than a real choice (in the movie, she is literally forced to choose between sacrificing her son or her daughter to the nazis or she will lose both—and she chooses “wrong”).
The parsha ends with God telling Moses that he must ascend the mountain-—Mt. Sinai-—again, this time to receive the tablets of the commandments he had told him about before. There, God appears in a cloud again, though the people below see God as fire. There, Moses will remain for forty days.
Sometimes we are forced to make choices that don’t seem clear; we must leave behind people and things we love, and we don’t know what lies ahead. And there is a transition time that might seem very long, with lots of waiting.
Still, the push is there to walk out the door, to the unknown, into what feels like a cloud, or from afar it might even look like fire.
But walk through the door, we must, as a nation and as individuals; we might make the wrong choices along the way, but there has to be something better that urges us on, even if it takes a long time.
