Mishpatim - מִּשְׁפָּטִ֔ים Shemot ~ Exodus Making Torah Personal 21:1 – 24:18

Mishpatim describes 53 mitzvot that Moses tells to the Israelites: 23 positive & 30 prohibitions - most deal with civil

law, daily affairs, property rights, indentured servants, regulating business, and penalties (murder, kidnapping, assault, and theft, damages, and loans). Civil law and religious

laws are intertwined. Mishpatim ends with Moses going up to Mount Sinai for 40 days.

We will focus on selected verses in the parsha through the lens of Mussar, connecting the

weekly portion to our lived experience through the middah of Achrayut/Responsibility/ אחריות

The three-letter root word is Aleph-Chet-Resh [A-CH-R] אחר which has several meanings: Achar (After) or Acher (Other). This causes us to think about deeper messages: Are we responsible to others only after we take care of ourselves (think oxygen mask on an airplane Acharei / אחרי After me)? Or does our task go way beyond ourselves to generations in the future...creating a better world for those who come after us, becoming activists. When we focus on Acher (Other), we need to be concerned about 'the other' in society. Those who are marginalized, the ones who are easily forgotten, those who are out of our daily sight yet need us to pay attention. In this way, our attention is on the present, the immediate needs of the “other”. How do we juggle our personal and communal responsibilities? What value systems help guide us?

~Ruth Schapira, excerpted from The Hidden Meaning of Responsibility

Brief Summary:

• The first laws are for those who are enslaved.
• Responsibilities are outlined for God’s Messengers.
• Laws warn against mistreatment of foreigners; the observance of the seasonal festivals, offerings that are to be brought to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem; the prohibition against cooking meat with milk; the mitzvah of prayer.
• God promises to bring Am Yisrael to the Holy Land, warning them against assuming the pagan ways of the ones who live there.
• The people’s response: “We will do and we will hear all that God commands us.”
• Aaron and Hur are in charge of the camp while Moses ascends Mount Sinai.
• Moses remains there for forty days and forty nights to receive the Torah from God.

While the laws of other ancient people are divided between secular and religious matters, the Torah presents an "indiscriminate commingling and interweaving...of [ritual] topics and moral imperatives" for which there is "absolutely no analogy"

Nahum Sarna, Exploring Exodus, p.174

IF THOU BUY. Before I begin to explain *The ordinances. let me give you a general rule. Each ordinance or commandment is an independent unit. If we are able to find a reason that two ordinances or commandments are connected to each other, then we will expend all of our efforts to connect them. If we are not able to do so, we will conclude that the reason this cannot be done is our intellectual deficiency. There is nothing in the world more difficult for a human being to bear than to be under the control of another person like himself. Scripture therefore began with the law of the Hebrew servant. Our sages said that the Hebrew servant is an Israelite. The same applies to And if a man sell his daughter to be a maid-servant (v. 7).

The law that the Hebrew slave must be set free in the seventh year is reminiscent of the exodus from Egypt referred to in the first of the Ten Commandments. As the Torah says regarding the Hebrew slave: “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and G‑d redeemed you; therefore I command you this thing today” (Deuteronomy 15:15). It is also reminiscent of the work of creation, because like the Shabbat, the seventh year is when the Hebrew slave gains respite from serving his master. . . . All time cycles are ordained as cycles of seven—to refer to the seven-day cycle of creation. Thus it is fitting that this mitzvah should come first in our Parshah. ~Nachmanides

The whole Torah depends on justice; that is why the Holy One, Blessed be He, gave the civil laws after the Ten Commandments. ~ Midrash Rabbah on Shemot

The rabbis said that the command to love the stranger appears 36 times in the Torah. Jewish law is here confronting directly the fact that care for the stranger is not something for which we can rely on our normal moral resources of knowledge, empathy and rationality. ~Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Healing the Heart of Darkness

It is taught in a baraita: Rabbi Meir would say: An opponent may bring an argument against you and say to you: If your God loves the poor, for what reason does He not support them Himself? In such a case, say to him: He commands us to act as His agents in sustaining the poor, so that through them we will be credited with the performance of mitzvot and therefore be saved from the judgment of Gehenna. Talmud, Tractate Baba Batra, 10a

...in Yitro we find the commandment You shall not steal, (Exodus 20:13) marking an absolute prohibition on theft. However, in Mishpatim we find when a man steals or if the thief is seized while tunneling. (Exodus 22:1) In spite of the severe prohibition on theft, situations that deviate from the ideal lawful conduct still need to be addressed and dealt with. In this case – people steal. The Ten Commandments signify the ideal, the direction we are headed as a nation. The laws are a more complicated system, enabling us to deal with the details of reality in light of those values. Parashat Mishpatim deals with our lack of perfection as human beings. ~Rivka Wietchner, Yeshivat Maharat.

The way we act toward "others" is shaped by how we imagine them... This is true even when the person is a friend or acquaintance; the problem is further magnified with the person is a stranger or "foreigner."

Our injuring of others... results from our failure to know them... The human capacity to injure other people has always been much greater than its ability to imagine other people. Or perhaps we should say, the human capacity to injure other people is very great precisely because our capacity to imagine other people is very small.

~ Elaine Scarry, The Difficulty of Imagining Other People

It is taught in a baraita: Rabbi Meir would say: An opponent may bring an argument against you and say to you: If your God loves the poor, for what reason does He not support them Himself? In such a case, say to him: He commands us to act as His agents in sustaining the poor, so that through them we will be credited with the performance of mitzvot and therefore be saved from the judgment of Gehenna. Talmud, Tractate Baba Batra, 10a

The Hebrew for “donkey,” chamor, also means “material.” Thus, this verse also instructs us as to the proper attitude toward the body and physicality: “When you will see the chamor of your enemy”—initially you will see your material self as your enemy, as something that obstructs and hinders your spiritual growth.

“Collapsing under its burden”—in such a state of animosity between body and soul, that the body resists the Torah and its commandments, making them an unbearable burden for it . . .

One’s first inclination may be “to desist from helping him”—to shun the body, suppress its instincts and deny it its wants.

Says the Torah: “You shall surely help along with him.” Aid the material self with its “burden,” by training it to recognize that the Torah is the vehicle for its own refinement and elevation. ~Rabbi Israel, The Baal Shem Tov

This is the reason why our ancestors occupied themselves as shepherds like Jacob... and David. Moses our teacher was also a shepherd because he wanted to accustom himself to bear the burden even of the simple creatures and all the more so of fellow human beings...~Rabbi Simcha Zissel

This is but a small slice of a long list of statutes governing the life of the early Israelites...concern is with the powerless. the stranger, the poor, the widow and the orphan. It is the hallmark of our law that power is not the currency of society- justice is.

Torah forbids one to harm the stranger, and then it goes beyond the law and appeals to deeper emotions, to our memory of being strangers, and asks that we allow that memory to kindle our compassion for those who are strangers still. This was a very radical social innovation: a compassionate God. And we, created in his image, chosen to walk in his way as a light unto the nations, must ourselves be compassionate. Hitherto, societies were used to having their gods side with the powerful, here the Jewish God takes the side of the powerless.

The Torah is not satisfied with not harming the stranger, it wants us to identify with the stranger, to share in his or her strangeness. Through this identification will come an end to the stranger's status as stranger and a beginning of a new status as neighbor and perhaps friend. ~ Adapted, Rabbi Rami Shapiro, "Oppress Not the Stranger"

Avivah Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture p.303

At first sight, the idea of doing before hearing implies a kind of rashness, a lack of circumspection. Rashi, in fact, directly addresses this, when he observes that the Israelite response is different from that "of other servants who first listen to the command, to find out whether they are able to accept it or not. "

This very rashness, however, is called by God "the secret of the angels." Implicit in this description is the idea of a modality generally inaccessible to the human. Rather archly, God chides the people for making use of an esoteric order of things: "Who revealed this to you?" is, of course, a covert compliment to the angelic virtue within an apparent irrationality.

In saying "We shall do and we shall hear!", the Talmud implies, the people assume some of the virtuosity of the angels, who are capable precisely of such a brilliant power of action.

Avivah Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture p.311-312

These two dimensions of na'aseh and nishma are to be found at every level and in all worlds. Moving from one level to another, one's previous nishma, area of hiddenness, becomes one's new na'aseh, area of fulfillment: and one acquires a new area of nishma, of hiddenness.

In this difficult passage, R. Nahman maps the world as consisting of nuclei of commandments, of required acts, surrounded by aureoles of words that Tease us out of thought." These aureoles-the language is explicitly circular pass one's understanding; yet clearly they are part of the field of consciousness. They form a kind of horizon, a sense of presence, of the not-yet-known.

[N]a’aseh venishma means, “We will do and we will understand.” From this they derive the conclusion that we can only understand Judaism by doing it, by performing the commands and living a Jewish life. In the beginning is the deed. Only then comes the grasp, the insight, the comprehension. This is a signal and substantive point. The modern Western mind tends to put things in the opposite order. We seek to understand what we are committing ourselves to before making the commitment. That is fine when what is at stake is signing a contract, buying a new mobile phone, or purchasing a subscription, but not when making a deep existential commitment. The only way to understand leadership is to lead. The only way to understand marriage is to get married. The only way to understand whether a certain career path is right for you is to actually try it for an extended period. Those who hover on the edge of a commitment, reluctant to make a decision until all the facts are in, will eventually find that life has passed them by. The only way to understand a way of life is to take the risk of living it. So: na’aseh venishma, “We will do and eventually, through extended practice and long exposure, we will understand.”~ Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Doing and Hearing , Mishpatim

My mind returns to Moses, as he writes out each letter by hand—stroke by tedious stroke. Why was this really necessary? Prior to writing down God’s words, Moses transmitted them to the people orally. He instructed them about all the laws and commandments that God had told to him directly, and the people respond “Na-a-say” (“we will do”). Based on this, the people fully expected that they would act in accordance with what God wanted on account of what they heard from Moses, so it seems somewhat extraneous to then go and write down these same words to give to the people again, as Moses does just a few verses later. Yet, when he does this, the people respond differently: “Na-a-say v’nish-ma” (typically translated as “we will do and we will listen/obey”).

I want to suggest that the act of writing down the Torah has a transformational affect on the people’s relationship to it.

See, “nish-ma” can also be understood not just at “we will listen/obey” but also as “we will pay attention,” and I like to believe that the painstaking attention Moses gave to writing each letter of the Torah modeled for the people their call—our call—to take it seriously in our lives, to pay attention to the Sacred that surrounds us in every moment, in every stoke of the quill. We’re not just expected to live out the commandments blindly—doing them exactly as we’ve been instructed—but rather we’re called to pay close attention to their role in our lives and the value of these ritual actions...

In an age when we could easily photocopy or print off the text of the Torah in minutes, instead we continue to rely on the handwritten work and careful attention of scribes—taking a year to a year and a half to complete a single scroll. We do this in part to remind us of our commitment not only to do (na-a-say), but also to pay attention (nish-ma), to every stroke of every letter of our lives.

May this tedious and focused work transform our experience, evoking for us new opportunities to connect with that which is Sacred. May the intentionality we bring to our actions elevate them to invite Divine encounter. And may we strive to appreciate even the smallest strokes of the quill that leaves a mark on our lives and the lives of those around us. ~Rabbi Elizabeth Bonney-Cohen Mishpatim: Our Call to Pay Attention

I am required to support the entire world, as the verse says (Proverbs 10:25), “The righteous are the foundation of the world… I am responsible for everything that happens in the world because I was created to fix the world. Even if others neglect their duty, as each person is required to fix the world, I must act as if there is nobody else beside me [to do it].

~Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler writing about himself, as quoted in Michtav M’Eliyahu, volume 3, p. 292

ה. יֵשׁ כּחַ בְּיַד הַיָּחִיד לִפְרק על שָׁמַיִם, וְאֵין בְּיַד הָרַבִּים לִפְרק על שָׁמַיִם.

An individual has the ability to throw off the yoke of Heaven; a community does not.

Sefer HaMiddot, Fear of God, Yirah Part II:5