Worse than slavery

                Imagine a person throws a bucket of mud on you.  Before you are able to lash out at him, he says, ‘don’t worry, I have a one hundred dollar gift certificate to the dry cleaners, and that should take care of it.’ What do we say about such a person? Do we lavish him with his praises? No, at best, we refrain from revenge, and at worst, we still take revenge for the inconvenience.  However, it we look at Genesis 15:13, ‘And He said to Abram, ‘Know with certainty that your offspring shall be sojourners in a land not their own, they will enslave them and they will oppress them four hundred years’, we see just that. G-d decrees future enslavement, and then reassures that we’ll be saved and come out with riches. And not only are we supposed to be ok with this, but on Passover, we extol G-d for getting us out.  Therefore, it must be there is something great about the enslavement itself that we are grateful for.

                Slavery is the key to life.  To get a handle on this idea we just have to look at the secular New Year that just passed.  Aside from champagne and year in review shows, New Year’s is famous for resolutions. We decide that this is the year that we diet, study, change, exercise etc.  To be successful we need to place our self under the servitude of that ideal.  We have to treat it as an unshakable yoke that we are stuck with.  People who never place them self under the servitude of goals never accomplish, and like a cow grazing in a field, are left with a grassless field. On the contrary, a cow under the servitude of the yoke produces fields of food- its power is harnessed.

                Obviously, there is negative slavery. There are two reason why that is so.  First, the master is abusive and second a person loses all autonomy- he is a slave to somebody else’s dreams and not his own.  However, there are other situations when this happens as well. Any group- a company or a team- only functions properly when they bind together to one ideal even if it means giving up some of their own, and that is positive.  Real life starts with servitude- either to a personal commitment or to a greater cause.  There is no such thing as real freedom, and those who think there is, end up with nothing. That is why we are grateful to G-d for taking us out of Egypt, and even putting us in.  As a nation, we needed to internalize that life begins with slavery.