Mishpatim 5772

I forgot to post this when I wrote it - realised it as I prepared the next drashah. So here it is in the form in which I read it out.

This is a difficult parashah. It is rich, complex and weighty. As such, it is possible that I may have got things wrong and I would like to ask anyone who has a different understanding please to speak up so that anything wrong may be corrected.

Mishpatim means laws, and indeed the first and main part of this parashah is all about laws. Chapter 21 + 22 + 23 until verse 19 – all laws. There is a lot to do with giving slaves their freedom, and it is always specified that the law is the same for a male or a female slave. Someone called Bernard S. Jackson has just written an entire book about this parashah and he says something interesting about the laws as they were considered in the days when Moses was alive: he says that early biblical law was significantly different from the way we see the law now, which is something like a set of rules to be argued over in Court – he says that many of the laws in the Covenant Code in Exodus should be viewed as "wisdom-laws." By this term, he means "self-executing" rules, the provisions of which permit their application without recourse to the law-courts or similar institutions. They thus conform to two tenets of the "wisdom tradition": that judicial dispute should be avoided, and that the law is a type of teaching, or "wisdom". And of course the word Torah means Teachings.

After the laws, there is a sudden change, where the text moves from practical every day issues, such as who owes what to whom to make up for which transgression, to a promise from God. God says: I shall send you an angel.
 
Coming upon those words suddenly – after the grimness of the last law, which is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth – suddenly there it is, I shall send you an angel.

This angel is to be obeyed and followed, the verses are full of threats and promises. And after 13 verses, there is another change in the topic of the text to a description of Moses going up on to Mt Sinai to receive the stone tables of the Law. “And he walked on a mosaic of sapphires and the sky above was entirely clear.” Everything was filled with light. This part of the parashah takes up exactly 18 verses, which in Hebrew spells Chai, meaning life.

To go back to the absolute beginning of the parashah: the first word is the word Ve which is represented by the one letter Vav and means And
 
- And these were the laws that were given…

According to Rashi, this indicates that what is in this parashah is linked to what was happening in the previous parashah –. The previous parashah was Ytro and the last bit of Ytro is the list of the the 10 commandments, as they were handed over to Moses. So this one little letter Vav indicates that the laws mentioned in the first part of the parashat Mishpatim were also handed down at Sinai. This is important for complicated reasons which I’ll touch upon later.

This use of the word And is important.

Some years back, some of you may remember, a famous and eminent American rabbi, Rabbi Schechter Shlomi came to Wellington and visited us. Rabbi Schechter Shelomi must be in his 90s by now. He is a great leader of Reform Judaism. The Rabbi at Temple Sinai at the time of his visit was Rabbi Johanna, and she was overjoyed at the honour accorded our congregation. It was very exciting. That Saturday everyone was here, the schul was full, bursting at the seams. The Rabbi looked at our Torah and said something nice about it. Then he went on to say that it made him think of a special kind of Torah, where the scribe managed to start every new column with the word a Ve. You know how the Torah is written down in columns of text? Well every one of them would start with the word Ve – the scribe would play around with the spacing and size of the letters, make them biger or smaller, so that the first word at the top of the column would always be Ve.

And then Rabbi Schechter told a story about the importance of the word And. He told us that one particular committee he belonged to had made it their practice to require that whenever anyone spoke, their first word had to be And.

He said the word And creates links, and these links overcome differences and create inclusiveness, and help us to be together and stay together. He gave as an example the colours in his Talit, which had a rainbow of beautiful stripes in it, so the rainbow represents the and of all the colours; he talked about the different religions of the world that are all necessary, he said, and which each perform a different function, like the various organs in the body…another and.

You might try saying And yourself sometimes when you find yourself about to use a word which is less helpful, such as But … You know, someone makes a suggestion and you feel the word But come into your mind and in your mouth. It might be the birth of an argument, might it not? One might try – maybe not always successfully – to replace that But with the word And – of course you have to change what you were going to say next, at least a little - and that may be a good thing. Counsellors are taught this as a technique. It makes them more agreeable people. And some of them go on to teach this to their clients. You might say, this is all technique, it is not their true self, and maybe that is so to start with. It is possible that in due course, with practice, it might become their true self. And some of you here who are agreeable people in your own right probably have been doing this all your lives and don’t need this suggestion. Just common politeness you might say. It seems easy to say to those of us who are not so blessed that we should try to be ‘positive’ – well, this is actually one way of being positive, it appears like a trick, and the interesting thing about it is that it makes you more aware of what you are about to say, and gives you an opportunity for change. Trying new ways of doing things is always interesting.

There is an important event in this last part of parashat Mishpatim: this is from Rabbi Aviva Zornberg’s commentary: she points out that verse 4 of chapter 24 says And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord. According to Rashi, ‘All the words’ are the Torah – as far as the Bnei Israel knew at the time: it was the history of the world from the Creation from Bereshit, until the present moment, the moment of the giving of the Torah on Mt Sinai. The next verse, verse 5, talks about sacrifices on the special altar that Moses built. Moses divides the blood from the sacrifices into two separate parts. Now follows a sequence where the word taken VaYikach is mentioned three times: one part of the blood is taken and sprinkled on the altar walls; then the Book of the Covenant is taken and read by Moses “into the ears of the people”, who respond “We shall do and we shall hear!” in verse 7.

After the reading is concluded, the second bowl of blood is again taken and sprinkled – this time on the people themselves, which is something surprising and off-putting; Avivah Zornberg says that water always follows the blood, so presumably there was some washing, but that is not what this sequence is about..

If you think about it, you see that the taking and sprinkling of blood is on either side of the taking of the book, and that there is a link created by the words and he took - Va Ykach - between the altar, representing God, and the people. At the centre of this ritual is the Book, the link between the people and God.

What we do here during the service reflects those events: at the centre, the high point of our service, is the reading of the Book. Everything we do beforehand leads up to it, and then afterwards leads away from it. The reading is at the core, and so everyone who reads from the Torah can know that the first reader ever was Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses, our greatest teacher. And that is what the word Torah means, it means Teachings.

And the role of the people is to listen and to act accordingly. And that is not exactly what they say: they say it the other way round - we shall do and we shall listen, in other words they promise to act first. -The Lubavitcher Rebbe says that this represents the ultimate declaration of faith: Even before one has been told what to do, one promises to obey.

Here is the tricky bit regarding this parashah: it is based on Rashi’s interpretation. There is a break between what happened before Sinai and after Sinai. Before Bnei Israel hear the story of the Torah, they approach the mountain and experience what is known as the Revelation, seeing the clouds and lightening and hearing the voice of God. They are then exposed to a new narrative which tells the history of the world in a new and different way.

This parashah begins with Ve – which as you know, means And; so do most of the parashot, one linked to the other. One exception is of course the very first parashah, Bereshit, Bereshit bara elohim et ha shamyim ve et ha Aretz. Chapter 19, from the Parashah preceding Mishpatim, Parashat Ytro, which describes the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, does not start with a Ve either.

Rashi says that what is described in twelve verses of this parashah, , is a kind of flashback to Ytro – we are given here a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that was missing earlier – it has been separated from the other part., though it belongs with it in terms of the sequence. Why is this written in this way? Aviva Zornberg writes that Rashi is on the track of something elusive which cannot be articulated in any other way. The reading aloud of the text is placed firmly at the centre of the ritual enactment of the covenant.

Here is the bit that is complicated: what happens in these two days when Moses is on Mt Sinai, what happens between God and Bnei Israel, is qualitatively different from what happened in the previous parashah. What happens in Ytro is the creation of a contract – these are the laws and you must follow them. What happens in Mishpatim has to do with faith, it is the covenant.