God's nudge. First, in Yitro, there were the Asherita de Brut, the ten utterances, or general

principles. Now in Mishpatim come the details. Here is how they begin. If you buy a Hebrew

servant to serve you for six years, but in the seventh year he shall go free without paying

anything. But if the servant

declares, I love my master and my wife and children and don't want to go free, then his master

must take him before the judges. He shall take him to the door or the doorpost and pierce his ear

with an all. Then he will be his servant for life. Now there's an obvious question.

Why begin here? There are 613 commandments in the terror. Why does Mishpatim, the first law code,

begin where it does? The answer is equally obvious. The Israelites suggest endured slavery

in Egypt. There must be a reason why this happened.

For God knew it was going to happen. Evidently, he intended it to happen, because centuries

before he'd already told Abraham that it was going to happen. This is what we read in the 15th

chapter of Bureshita. As the sun was setting. Abraham fell into a deep sleep and a thick

and dreadful darkness came over him. Then the Lord said to him, no for certain that for 400 years

your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and

mistreated there. It seems that this was the necessary first experience of the

Israelites as a nation. From the very start of the human story, the God of freedom sought the free

worship of free human beings. But one after another, people abused that freedom. First Adam and Eve, then came, then the

generation of the flood, then the builders of Babel. God began again, this time not with all humanity,

but with one man, one woman, one family who would become pioneers of freedom. But freedom is

difficult. We each seek it for ourselves, but we deny it to

others when their freedom conflicts with ours. So deeply is this true that within three generations

...