This Passover season, I've been thinking about what the laws and traditions surrounding the holiday have to say about what it means to be, or rather to become free. If we closely examine God's commands and messages to the Children of Israel before the Exodus, I believe the Torah conveys a powerful and consistent vision of what constitutes the basis of a free society.
In that vein, let us consider how the Torah describes God's command to the nascent Jewish people for the first paschal sacrifice, given shortly before He rescued us from slavery in Egypt. (I draw heavily in what follows on R. Samson Raphael Hirsch's Torah commentary.)
In Exodus 12:3-6, God tells Moses and Aaron:
There are a number of odd and apparently unnecessarily verbose phrasings in this passage that demand explanation.
First, why is the command to take a lamb phrased in a roundabout and repetitive way, "they shall take for them, every man a lamb," instead of simply saying, "take a lamb"?
Second, while we can understand that the command must single out the "house", due to the (later) command to paint the blood on the doorpost of the house, why the repetition of "parental house ... each house"?
Third, why the detail in verse 4 of what to do if a household doesn't have enough people to consume an entire lamb? Isn't this just a practical issue of how to implement the command?
Fourth, why the seeming redundancy of "neighbor" and "close to his house"?
Fifth, why the command to take the lamb on the tenth of the month and keep it until the fourteenth of the month - why not more simply say to take the lamb before the fourteenth (to have it ready) and then slaughter it on the fourteenth? And why the phrase "keep it safeguarded," which implies that the keeping is not merely instrumental, but itself constitutes an essential part of the command?
All in all, an oddly worded and strangely verbose passage. On the face of it, the Torah could have more simply said:
In fact, if we see this passage as more than just a sacrificial command, but rather as setting the foundations for a polity of free people, it all falls into place.
The command to make the paschal sacrifice begins by addressing the people as a whole, but quickly shifts the command to the individual, who is referred to as an "אִישׁ", a term that, in the Tanakh, refers to a person of dignity and stature. At this seminal moment, when the family of Jacob, after many generations, is about to become a free people, the entire congregation is told that the fundamental unit of the nation is the individual. Not a glorious leader, not an august council of noblemen, not an all-powerful administrative State. But each and every person, from the highest to the lowest. Each and every person, with their own inherent dignity and importance.
The individual is not subservient to the nation or the king, as every developed society of the time would claim, but the nation is a collection of free persons, whose individual freedom is the basis for the freedom of the people as a whole.
Each of these free persons is also to have the ability to own personal property - "וְיִקְחוּ לָהֶם", they shall take for themselves a lamb. The lamb will be each person's personal property. Heretofore, these slaves had no ability to own anything; even their very bodies were not their own property. With this command, God returned each and every one of them the essential human dignity that comes from the ability to acquire and possess personal property.
And yet, the vision is not of an atomized society which is a mere collection of self-sufficient self-seeking individuals in an ur-libertarian dream. Each upright, dignified individual is to be part of a "בֵית-אָבֹת", an ancestral/familial house, a group of related people caring for each other. There are to be connections and associations between people that are lasting, that are more than merely transactional and of the moment - the term "אָבֹת" denotes one's ancestors, a connection to one's history. Society is to be made up of historically-rooted families, each with a sense of continuity and of tradition.
So does the Torah seek to design a society which is a mere federation of (probably) rival clans? A tribal society where family loyalties trump all else? Certainly not! Each family unit is also to share with its neighbors, those close to it. The term "שְׁכֵנוֹ", his neighbor, refers to others who live nearby, in spatial proximity, regardless of how similar or different they may be. The other phrase, "הַקָּרֹב אֶל-בֵּיתוֹ", near to his household, to not be redundant must refer to a personal closeness and affinity. Hence we see two great principles of association - we are to be connected to and concerned with the welfare of our neighbors and our locality, and at the same time, to be free to associate with those with whom we ourselves feel close, regardless of what the rest of society may have to say. These principles, of seeking the welfare of one's community, and of freedom of association, are, together with the basic family unit, the foundations of what is known as civil society, that set of local and often informal institutions and associations that mediate between the individual and the state.
And just as individualism is paramount and yet not absolute, so too personal property. The command was to take a lamb, invent (from the slave's perspective) personal property, several days before its commanded use, and then also to care for, preserve, and protect it. We were to be instilled from the very beginning with an ethic of property. Ownership is not the right to do anything one wants, willy-nilly, with one's property, but also entails responsibilities. Ownership is stewardship, a responsibility for proper care and guardianship (מִשְׁמֶרֶת) of the property, so that it can be used for proper and productive ends.
Thus we see how God's command to sacrifice a lamb on the eve of redemption, is not a mere ritual. It establishes a foundational ethic for a new kind of society, one based on the sanctity of the individual, the household, private property, and human relationships. Some three millennia before the birth of John Locke, the Torah set forth inviolable principles for establishing a free society - the protection of life, liberty, and property, and the freedom of association.
