Mishpatim (Exodus 21:1-24-18) February 13, 2021/1 Adar 5781

Last week, I told a story from the Talmud about Moses being shown the school of Rabbi Akiva and how he derived meaning from the individual letters in the Torah. This week, that's precisely what we are going to do. Parashat Mishpatim represents a break from the narrative of the Israelites journeying through the desert on their way to the Promised Land. Moses is still at the base of the mountain, preparing to ascend to receive the Torah and the physical Tablets (the appearance of the Ten Commandments in last week's reading is God speaking the commandments to the assembled nation. Moses will only come down with the tablets in a couple weeks), and God starts listing off civil laws which Moses is to teach the people.

The first letter in this parashah is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The letter vav, when used as a prefix, can play a lot of different roles in Biblical Hebrew. It can serve to change a verb from the perfect to the imperfect tense and vice versa, it can introduce an explanatory clause, it can serve as a disjunctive. In this case, however, the vav is playing its most common role, and the one it plays in Modern Hebrew, that of a conjunctive (that is, it means "and"). But it's a special kind of conjunctive.

"And these are the statutes which you shall set before them,” God begins. Now, sages and commentators through the ages have commented on that leading "and". Rashi explains that whenever a section begins, "these are…" whatever follows is being distinguished from and separated from whatever preceded. In contrast, when it begins with "and these are…" the intent is to show that both what precedes and what follows are connected. Here, the civil laws covering fairly mundane aspects of life like what happens if my ox gores your donkey, the proper treatment of slaves (the ethical issues of owning slaves in the first place notwithstanding), or how to deal with the situation of a thief stealing property that you are watching for me, are being tied in importance and in status as laws commanded by God to the grander, more spiritual laws in the Ten Commandments. We should not think that Shabbat or honoring our parents are more important than other mitzvot because they were in that first set of directly-revealed commandments. 

That one little vav can tell us a lot. It's hard to translate the word "mitzvah," because mitzvot are more than just "good deeds," but "commandments" carries a lot of baggage in English, making it feel like mitzvot should be high, lofty things and not things that we deal with every day. But mitzvot are both lofty and mundane, and neither is any more important than the other. We have to be mindful of the commandments dealing with our interactions with God, yes. Still, we also have to be mindful of the mitzvot between ourselves and our fellow humans, or between ourselves and society, because all of them are equally important parts of being Jewish. 

The practice of Judaism is not restricted to the synagogue, and practicing Judaism is not just contained in the ritual either. In the first chapter of Pirkei Avot, Shimon the Just says that "the world stands on three things: on Torah, on the Temple service, and on deeds of righteousness." While the performative ritual is important, the laws of the Torah and doing acts of righteousness are just as critical. He was writing in the Second Temple period, but a couple of centuries later, there was no Temple, and Judaism had to adapt, with prayer, "the service of the heart", replacing the sacrificial offices. Still, Judaism can be and is practiced without setting foot in a synagogue. You don't have to be a rabbi to study Torah, and you don't need to go to synagogue (or log on to a synagogue's Zoom) in order to do Jewish things. We can be Jewish by caring for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. It is a Jewish value to administer justice impartially and fairly. Ethical dealings in business transactions are part of Judaism, too - if you take someone's property as collateral for a defaulted loan, you have to return it to them when they need it.

When I talk about Judaism and engage with texts and laws with other non-Orthodox Jews, especially those of my parents' and grandparents' generations, they tend to have the reflexive response "you should go to rabbinical school," because, in their mind, deep engagement with Judaism is what rabbis do. While it's true that rabbis engage deeply with Judaism, it is neither true nor good for the future of Judaism that only rabbis do so. Torah, in the broad sense of the word: the laws and traditions and culture of the Jewish People, is our collective inheritance, and it is a great shame to see that inheritance denigrated by putting it on a pedestal behind glass, where it cannot be touched by the masses. Judaism is about God, and it's also about humans. It's about the ethereal and also the concrete. And we cannot forget that fact. One could even say that the vav which opens this parashah is the hook upon which Judaism hangs.