Re'eh: Nationhood

One of the central themes of the parsha is nationhood, actions that unify tribes and people into a unit. A common capital, a common economic policy , common enemies

Israel is unified around the shared idea of miraculous liberation from the slavery of Egypt. Many times in the parsha we are told to remember how Gd redeemed us from the Egyptian slavery, often in the context of commandments involving feeding and supporting others ( the Levite, proselyte, impoverished, etc.)  It casts the idea of slavery as an evil from which the nation was rescued.

Slavery can be understood over a spectrum . It is the loss of what we now call human rights.

 There is a strong nationalistic component to slavery.  In thins weeks parsha, we are reminded of the limited term (7 years) that a salve serves. ( Elsewhere we are told to distinguish between the Israelite slave, whose term is ( generally) restricted and the Canaanite slave, who is never freed.)   In this weeks parsha, we are told to be generous with the slave at the end of his/her 7 year term .  The slavery of the Israelite national is limited and ends in kindness.  A nations does not enslave its own, captives are enslaved.

My father spent some time as a slave in Treblinka.  I heard the holocaust story of a man who who voluntarily went to a concentration camp so that he could be salve and thus eat. Slavery beats starvation.

The slavery of the Nazis was extreme. It was the fulfillment of the curse  ; וְהִתְמַכַּרְתֶּם שָׁם לְאֹיְבֶיךָ לַעֲבָדִים וְלִשְׁפָחוֹת, וְאֵין קֹנֶה   and there ye shall sell yourselves unto your enemies for bondmen and for bondwoman, and no man shall buy you. They enslaved Jews and others with an exaggerated sense of foreignness. The idea that the enslaved are a different people, a different species, allows the dehumanizing behavior of the masters

I am reading Capital in the Twenty First Century.by Thomas Picketty.  In that book there is a much about the stratification of society and the increasing inaccessibility of wealth and  the rewards of  capital to more and more people.  Is this a kind of bondage? (actually that is a pun: Government bonds are a method for the rich to lend money to the public and profit thereby, instead of paying taxes)  The shmita  is a respite from  the advantage of capital: land is useless and loans are forgiven. Elsewhere in the Torah, the durability of capital is reinforced through the return of lands in the Yovel.  But that is a different parsha...