From Slavery to Empathy: Treating Strangers With Compassion Instead of Fear: (Mishpatim 5775)

What do Black History Month and the 1865 letter from a free person to his former slave master have to do with Torah?  Quite a bit this week!  As a 7th grade student once told me two of the most conflicting sentences in Torah come from this week's Torah portion -- and they are about slavery.  From these we draw a powerful lesson about receiving strangers with compassion.   

Israelite Slaves appox. 1400 BCE

On the one hand there is the lofty "Do not oppress a stranger. You know the soul of a stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." (Exodus 23:9)  On the other hand, there is the gritty, "A Jewish slave may work for [another Jew] for six years but must be set free in the seventh year."  (Exodus 21:2)  

"Seriously!?!" this seventh grader moaned, "did our ancestors forget so fast what it's like to be slaves they started taking their own as slaves right away!"  It was hard for her to hear Torah talking about the ways to hold slaves right after we being freed from slavery in Egypt. 

These slave/stranger bookend passages, however, seem to tell a different story: progress toward liberation through empathy.  The Torah does not outright prohibit slavery. Rather it sets a trajectory toward the elimination of it and creates concrete steps towards accomplishing that goal.  Those steps include counter-cultural treatment of slaves -- such as giving them a full Shabbat of rest (Deuteronomy 5:12-14)  -- and the exhortation that we develop personal and national empathy.  

One of the finest examples of empathy coming from a former slave comes from Jourdan Anderson, a freed slave living in Ohio in 1865.  Four months after the end of the Civil War, Jourdan's former master requested he come back to work on his farm in Tennessee.  Jourdan's reply excerpted below is classic example of clarity and empathy.  According to news reports at the time Jourdan dictated the following letter:    

August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. . . . Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living.

It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see [everyone] Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that [one of you] intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

. . . . I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month with food and clothing. . . . .  We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, "Them colored people were slaves" down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many [others] would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 . . . [Still, we would be afraid to go back] without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. 

[Jourdan then itemizes his back wages for the period he was a slave and asks these be paid as a sign of Colonel Anderson's justice] . . . If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. 

We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the [slaves] any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

. . . Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

Ultimately, the measure of any society's sense of justice is how it treats the most vulnerable.  That is why Torah urges us again and again to remember we were strangers, we were vulnerable, we were at the mercy of those with power. Torah wants us to develop empathy that will animate us to act with compassion for the dignity of everyone and to actively pursue justice for others.