One of the strangest rituals in the civil law is the piercing of a servant's ear. The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan renders it with bureaucratic precision. "His master shall bring him before the judges, and shall receive from them the power, and bring him to the door that hath posts; and his master shall pierce his right ear with an awl; and he shall be a servant to serve him until the jubela" (Exodus 21:6).
The Targum inserts a legal checkpoint the Hebrew only implies. The master cannot simply pierce the servant's ear at whim. He must go to the beth din, obtain a ruling, and receive the power — the formal authorization — to perform the act. Court oversight even here, at the most private-seeming ritual.
Then the procedure itself. The servant stands at the doorway — specifically the door that hath posts, the mezuzah-bearing entrance. The awl pierces the right ear. The Talmud (Kiddushin 22b) will later ask the famous question: why the ear? Because this is the ear that heard at Sinai they are My servants (Leviticus 25:55), meaning servants of God alone. An Israelite who has chosen to remain the servant of a human master has rejected what that ear once heard. So it is marked.
And the Targum's term for the endpoint — jubela, the Aramaic form of yovel, the Jubilee year — caps even this voluntary servitude. The fiftieth year trumps all contracts. At the blast of the Jubilee horn, every ear-pierced servant walks out free, no matter what agreement he once made at the doorpost.
The rabbis drew a sharp moral: you can choose servitude, but you cannot choose it forever. The Torah will always eventually pull you back to freedom.
The takeaway: in Jewish law, even the chains you choose have a release date.