Circles of Obligation: Haftarat Mishpatim, Jeremiah 34: 8-22; 33:25-26

It’s hard enough to be an ethical person, but it’s even harder to figure out to whom owe our ethical duties. Where do we focus our energies? To the Jewish people? To our country? To the world as a whole?

Haftarat Mishpatim appears to tilt strongly toward Jewish particularism. Judah’s king, Zedekiah, makes a covenant with the people “that everyone should set free his Hebrew slaves, both male and female, and that no one should keep his fellow Judean enslaved.” Not all slaves: just Israelite ones. The people initially agree, but renege and re-enslave the freedmen. Through his prophet Jeremiah, the Holy One promises the destruction of the southern kingdom. It comes true. Zedekiah is the last king of Judah, and is led away blinded, in chains, to death in Babylon. The Haftarah’s plain text import is clear: Judah is destroyed because its populace refused to free Hebrew slaves.

Underneath this seemingly straightforward story, however, lurks an emerging universalism – one that shames modern Jewry’s own indifference toward slavery.

Consider King Zedekiah’s covenant to free all “Hebrew slaves.” That seems pretty straightforward. But it is actually quite strange. Using the word “Hebrews”, or ivrim, to signify Jews or Israelites is archaic in our Haftarah. It appears in the Torah, and a few times in the First Book of Samuel, but then it disappears for nearly half a millennium until this reference. Moreover, in the earlier sources ivrim is usually used to by others to refer to Bnai Yisrael; in First Samuel, the Philistines use it. If you want a modern comparison, it would be as if someone now insisted on calling Muslims “Musulmen” or “Mohammedans.” Even the most pernicious anti-Muslim modern demagogues don’t do that. 

Moreover, using it is quite strange. Consider again the passage: “everyone should set free his Hebrew slaves, both male and female, and no one should keep his fellow Judean enslaved.” If Hebrew here refers to slaves from Bnai Yisrael, then why introduce the redundancy of saying that one should not enslave a fellow Judean? Judeans, after all, were part of the people Israel. (And since the northern kingdom of Israel had been destroyed 150 years earlier, one cannot say that they were trying to distinguish northerners from southerners).

One might argue that the term ivrim arises to echo the rules in Exodus – from Parashat Mishpatim — about when Bnai Yisrael should free “Hebrew slaves.” That sounds sensible, but it doesn’t quite work. Exodus does not mandate general manumission of the kind Zedekiah wanted: it says only to free slaves after seven years, and even then, if the slave was married while in bondage and had children, the master gets to keep the family. (Exodus 21:2-4). Zedekiah is going above and beyond the terms of the Torah: if the Tanach uses ivrim to show how the King of Judah tried to fulfill the original covenant, this is a funny way to do it.

Instead, when ivri is found in Nevi’im, it is used as a verb, avar, which means “to pass”, “to traverse,” or “to wander.” This use of the word is found all over the prophetic literature. By the time of Jeremiah, then, God’s command to free “Hebrew” slaves could mean not simply Israelite slaves but also “wandering” slaves – slaves from foreign lands, what we would now call immigrants. This is why King Zedekiah has to make clear that all Judeans also needed to be manumitted: “free foreign slaves, and also your countrymen.”  

Don’t buy it? Well, consider now God’s criticism in Jeremiah chapter 34 verse 17, as translated by the Jewish Publication Society: “you would not obey Me and proclaim a release, each to his kinsman and countryman.” But the translation of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations reads, “you did not proclaim liberty for your kinfolk and your neighbors, and thereby refused to obey Me.” To whom is liberty owed, the JPS’ more particularistic “countrymen,” or the UAHC’s more inclusive “neighbors”?

Both translations have merit, because the key word here is the very equivocal word raiyaihu. Sometimes it can refer to close friends or even lovers; at other times, it can mean a casual acquaintance, or someone simply in the general vicinity. It virtually never connotes blood, ethnic, or tribal ties. And since it is preceded by your “kinfolk” or “kinsman,” it cannot refer to other Israelites, because that would create a redundancy: all of Israel, after all, was part of the same family. Raiyaihu here, then, must refer to non-Israelites: it makes little sense if it doesn’t.

In other words, despite the apparent particularism of our Haftarah, universalism cannot be kept out. Our obligations run to ourselves and the other. This dual commitment has ethically crucial present-day implications.

The Jewish community today rightfully feels under threat. The horrific terrorist attack at the Paris kosher restaurant and the almost-daily anti-Semitic incidents on the European continent naturally drive us to think of our own mishpacha first. This may be natural, but our Haftarah reminds us that we must look beyond our own immediate family, and that we cannot avoid our universal obligations.

Nowhere does this call apply more forcefully than with slavery – the very issue highlighted in Jeremiah. Recently, the “>Read the whole interview here.).

The Jewish community has responded to these outrages by doing…virtually nothing. Although the “>T'ruah have pioneered some important initiatives, no other Jewish organization – even those who claim to fight for human rights – has seen fit to address the issue, and most don’t even mention it. None of the major anti-slavery organizations has a significant Jewish component.