The people of Israel were a nation of slaves who escaped slavery in Egypt. This is what the story of Exodus discusses.
Being a slave means being enslaved to the human ego, our innate desires to enjoy at the expense of others, which determines our every desire, thought and action. Escaping that slavery means running away from the ego’s orders and rising to a different level. On the new level, we solely wish to observe the quality of bestowal, that it will guide our every desire, thought and action from now on.
What does “observing the quality of bestowal” mean? It means thinking about how to do good to everyone. Therefore, the escape from slavery in Egypt, as with all of the Torah’s accounts, is no historic story, rather it discusses our future development. We thus read such texts in order to learn about our future, what we will have to undergo in order to understand where we are headed. And it is written that we are headed out of slavery to freedom.
What is freedom? Freedom means being outside of the enslavement to our egos, that we think and act beneficially to everyone. We truly need freedom because once our sole wish is to benefit others, then we turn ourselves into conduits of the positive forces dwelling in nature: they pass through us to others. We then send everything we receive from nature to everyone, connecting everyone to nature’s quality of bestowal.
That state is called being a “trustworthy servant.” While it might sound like another slave-like state, being a connector between nature and humanity is in fact the greatest role that exists in our reality. It frees us from ourselves. It lets us realize the two desires that exist in reality—our desire to receive and nature’s desire to bestow—and we then take from nature what it wants for us, and take humanity’s deficiencies, and connect the two.
Based on the video “Were Jews Ever Really Slaves?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Featured in Quora