Mishpatim: 2015/5775
Law for Life
Try to picture ourselves as ranchers, owners of cattle
herds. One day, we allow our cattle to
wander into a neighbor’s field and the livestock graze the land until it is
bare.
We see a pack animal fall to the ground under its burden and
wonder what we will do – stop? Keep going by?
Or we are farmers, and our lands have been producing amazing
yields for six years straight. Now we
must stop planting our most productive field, and let it lie fallow.
As it happens, these situations, these realities, were as
unknown to the Israelites when God spoke to Moses and Moses shared them with
the people. Still standing at Sinai, we
all hear these laws, laws that will govern how we live in the Promised Land, many
laws that have very little to say about life out in the wilderness.
For our ancestors, they are laws for the future. For us, they sound like laws of the past.
How might we re-read and recreate these ancient teachings
for today?
Instead of cattle wandering into another field, maybe the
situation is that we send an email with a virus that infects other computers.
Instead of a pack animal that falls under its burden, we
notice someone whose car has broken down on the road, or someone who’s
groceries are dropping to the ground while they try to get kids in the car.
Instead of a field that needs to lie fallow, we think of the
ways that we overwork and overextend ourselves, do we need to unplug,
disconnect from the net, exercise and revive our bodies and spirits.
To understand the remainder of the Torah, especially the
generation of slaves who have just left Egypt, it is crucial for us to remember
that they have just come from living under another nation’s laws. They’ve not been responsible for their own
governance, and now they are. Rashi
emphasizes the way God sets up the laws for them but does not train them and
drill them in remembering and applying the laws at this moment. They first need to get used to the idea of
being responsible for their own actions and willing to submit to the way
another fellow Israelite will serve as judge and administer justice. For a former slave, this change in
circumstances could not be more radical or potentially unsettling.
Rabbi Alexander Zusia Friedman, the Avney Ezel, reminds us
that our parsha, the laws for the people comes right after material about
sacrifices at the end of the last parsha.
For the Jewish people, this juxtaposition shows how both our religious
and civil laws are holy. They both are
based in faith. Civil laws are as much mitzvoth
as holidays, Torah study, and lighting Shabbat candles.
Our ancestors know Rabbi Friedman’s teaching. Pharaoh was the law in Egypt, and Pharaoh was
thought to be a god. The law came from a
so-called divine source in Egypt.
The difference here is that our God is invisible, eternal,
and expects partnership. We fulfill our
end of the covenant and God fulfills God’s end.
There is mutual responsibility.
The people are not expendable resources.
On the contrary, each of us is of extreme and inestimable value.
When we study the laws this week, laws of property and how
to make fair judgments, laws of sensitivity to those who are weak and alienated
in society, it is up to us, when we notice that the laws as written no longer
apply exactly to our lives as they did to the lives of our ancestors, that we
recast the laws into our own terms.
By doing so, we fulfill the same promise our ancestors
fulfilled for their offspring who would one day enter the Holy Land. They, and we, create, and then hand down, a
world infused with the spirit of thoughtfulness and intentionality, a world of
striving for truth and fairness, a world of yearning for connection with the
Source of Creation, a world that challenges us to both remember when we were
slaves and to keep shaping the freedom that God gifted to us so long ago.
Shabbat Shalom.
