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Mishpatim

by Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

This week in Temple we read the Torah portion of Mishpatim, a section that includes as many laws as nearly any part of the entire Torah.  To tell the truth, after the last few weeks of spectacularly dramatic Torah portions featuring some the highlights in the entirety of Jewish tradition—indeed, of all religious history—Mishpatim comes as a major let down. 

Last week, amid the smoke and thunder of Mt. Sinai, we received the Ten Commandments; the week before God parted the Sea for us and we miraculously crossed on dry land; and in the weeks before that 10 plagues struck the Egyptians, Pharaoh and Moses had their duel of wills in the desert, and we found freedom.

But this week’s portion of Mishpatim is nothing more than a collection of laws about how to interact with other human beings—civil legislation.  That what a misphat is, a law of human interaction.  How exciting… how to handle someone else’s property fairly.  How to assess punitive damages for a man who injures another person, or destroys someone else’s property.  How to act when someone puts his or her property in trust with you.  What to do if you find a lost object.  Laws of manslaughter and theft and damages and accidental injury.  Rules about interest on loans.  And on and on.

If the Torah is truly our fundamental moral text, this is an array of detailed legislation about human interaction that seems so trivial as not to belong here at all.  Shouldn’t this stuff be in some legal commentary somewhere, rather than here in the heart of the Torah?

So why do we have Mishpatim at all?

I believe that there is a profound lesson here about our essential nature.  For most of us really don’t much care for rules.  We like freedom, not rules.  Rules bind us and restrict us, prevent us from doing what we want to do when we want to do it, frustrate us and limit us in often arbitrary ways.  And the most specific and important kind of rules our society has is its code of laws.

So naturally, we human beings have no great love of law—or of its practitioners as a group.  Lawyer jokes would not be so popular if there wasn’t a profound ambivalence about the entire profession.  And you can make a case that the dismal reputation politicians have is in part attributable to the fact that most of them originally practiced law, and that their basic function is to create and administer laws.

Let’s face it: we don’t like laws.  But without them, and without enforcement of them, we fallible human beings wouldn’t function very well at all.  In fact, the Mishnah tells us, we would likely tear each other apart.  Where anarchy reigns, justice doesn’t.

And that’s where our Torah portion of Mishpatim comes in.  For we need law, and we need limits, although we might not like either one very much.  Judaism understands that if we are to be truly good, or truly free, then we must observe the laws and rules of human decency, embodied in the code of legislation that makes up Mishpatim.  Because before we can love another human being as we love ourselves, we must respect that human being’s property and person. 

If we can successfully do that, we will learn to treat one another with holiness.  And then, as Mishpatim ultimately teaches us, we can find God.

At the end of this week’s parshah, after all of these rules and laws, these torts and talionis’s, God actually reveals a glimpse of the Divine essence to Moses.  The lesson is clear: we can only glimpse real holiness when we begin by respecting our fellow men and women.  When we come to understand that we are all in this together, and that the way to God is actually through the ways we learn to work together, we will learn to trust one another, and so to create a world of holiness.

The American Jewish poet Adrienne Rich puts it very well indeed in her poem “On Memory”:

Freedom. It isn't once, to walk out

under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers

of light, the fields of dark--

freedom is daily, prose bound, routine

remembering. Putting together, inch by inch

the starry worlds.

Using these little Mishpatim to make this world truly free, and holy.