The week ends.
Look back on it and there are so many and so few hours. Spent in service of so many different things. Hours that went by quickly. Hours that dragged on.
The best hours of the week.
The hardest hours of the week.
There are times when the span of an hour feels interminable and other hours that just seem to disappear. What is our time in service of?
That idea of service—that our hours are in service of something, that we serve something with our time… In Torah, the word for serving, for “working for,” is being avadim. The word avadim in Hebrew doesn’t have a direct English translation.
It is sometimes translated as: worker, servant, slave, worshipper.
Many of us who are familiar with this term know it from the Passover seder:
avadim hayinu, ata b’nei chorin (we were slaves; now we are free people).
But, in this week’s Torah portion, B’har, which we’ll read tomorrow morning, it’s not as simple as that.
כִּֽי־לִ֤י בְנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵל֙ עֲבָדִ֔ים
says God. “For it is to Me that the Israelites are avadim.
עֲבָדַ֣י הֵ֔ם אֲשֶׁר־הוֹצֵ֥אתִי אוֹתָ֖ם מֵאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרָ֑יִם אֲנִ֖י יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֵיכֶֽם׃
“They are My avadim, whom I freed from the land of Egypt: I, Adonai, your God.”
So, the Israelites were freed from slavery but freed in order to serve a different master.
In all the ancient and contemporary metaphors that we use for God in our siddur, Master is one that we don’t use very often these days. In our day, in our America of freedom, we are mostly used to thinking that we are nobody’s servants, and certainly nobody’s slaves—and we don’t tend to like the idea of having a master of any kind. We may have a boss, but most of us don’t want to think that anything else has power over us.
Yet, we work in service of so many things. Ourselves and our communities, our workplaces, our families and friends. Each other.
I think that most of us would not easily say that we are servants of God.
And yet, the things we serve speak to the higher ideals we are striving for: holy things. Godly things.
If I serve hours of my week in service of my company or organization, it may be because I believe in the mission of the organization and I am working in service of that. Or, it may be because I have the aim of providing for myself and my family, and I am working in service of the ideal of a sense of safety and security, and maybe even of bounty, in my home.
If I serve hours of my week in service of my spouse or children or my aging parents, or members of my community, I might be working in service of the ideal of sh’lom bayit (peace in the home and a sense of wholeness), or in the service of an ideal of health and comfort. I might be working in service of my belief that each person in my family is a whole full amazing other human being who needs what they need in order to thrive. I might be working in service of my belief in dignity or making the world a kinder, more chesed-filled, or more just place.
Even when I’m doing something that is using an hour “badly” in some way, for instance playing on my phone, I’m doing it in service of something: self-care, for instance. I just may not have actively chosen the actual best way to work toward that ideal. If I spend an hour gossiping or cheating or something else that I now goes against my best morals—I’m still on some level doing it for an ideal somewhere inside myself—I just should probably have made a better choice as to how to get there.
We can’t live our lives in constant awareness of the ideals we work in service of, but they are there. Even at our worst moments, we are working in service of something. And, if we stop and evaluate and see that the hours we are spending are not in service of what we want them to be in service of: we have the chance to extract ourselves and make different choices. That is the seizing the freedom to go and serve a different master.
Goodness knows, in our busy world, we can’t make these choices all the time, but we can ask ourselves:
What have I worked for this week?
Who have I worked in service of?
What were my hours in service to?
Rabbis Jocee Hudson and Tamara Cohn Eskanazi write that “in the Torah, the difference between servitude and freedom depends on whom one serves.” We are here to help each other to serve the masters we want to be serving, in service of each other, ourselves, and what we know is holy.
