Truth and Peace

Leviticus 27 discusses votive offerings to the Sanctuary: animals, houses, land, crops, possessions and people - a person could even offer him or herself, that is to say, their market value based on age and gender. The Torah (vv. 3-7) offers the following monetary assessments for persons: Age Male value in shekels Female value in shekels 1 month - 5 years 5 3 5-20 years 20 10 20-60 years 50 30 60+ years 15 10 So for instance, if I make a vow to offer my 9-year-old son, I am pledging 20 shekels to the Sanctuary. If I vow to offer myself, I am pledging 50 shekels. What is the basis for these valuations? Jacob Milgrom ( Anchor Leviticus, Vol. III, pp. 2,370-2) cites the explanation that the amounts reflect the average that various individuals (based on age and gender) would fetch in the slave market. These figures are reflected in Assyria's tax of 50 shekel per Israelite landowner (2 Kings 15:20), and the 20 shekel price for which Joseph is sold (Gen 37:28) (G. J. Wen...

Protesting child slavery, 1909 labor parade, NYC The Torah portion opens with a set of laws about the treatment of Hebrew slaves: How long does a slave stay with you before he goes free? What happens if he's married when he comes into servitude? What if a man sells his daughter into slavery? (Ex 21:2-11) And further on: What happens to a slave-owner if he strikes his slave and the slave dies, or doesn't die? What if the slave's eye is blinded or tooth gets knocked out? (Ex 21:20-21, 26-27) This is all part of what scholars refer to as the Covenant Code, the laws given to Moses at Sinai. There are other collections of laws in the Torah pertaining to slavery. One is Lev 25:39-46, another is Deut 15:12-18. I'm not getting into the issue of comparing these codes. (If you're interested, here's one analysis .) Instead, I want to talk about the fact of the Torah containing laws about slavery at all. Though before I even go there, I might pose the question: Do w...

Moses assures his people they will be freed from slavery, extracted from Egypt with God's outstretched arm, and brought to the land of their ancestral inheritance. The people balk: וְלֹא שָׁמְעוּ אֶל מֹשֶׁה מִקֹּצֶר רוּחַ וּמֵעֲבֹדָה קָשָׁה "...but they did not listen to Moses, out of shortness of spirit and hard labor." (Ex 6:9) Rashi understands the phrase "they didn't listen to Moses" to mean: לא קבלו תנחומין "They did not accept [his] words of consolation." But is what Moses says really "consolation?" He essentially tells the people that everything is going to be okay. Which pretty much flies in the face of all conventional wisdom about how to offer consolation. When you go to a shiva house, you don't pronounce that everything is going to be okay. Because it's not "okay." Far better to simply be there with the mourner, listen to them. Something more along the lines of what God tells Moses just a few ver...