Mishpatim When, twenty-five years ago, I spent four months teaching Parshat Mishpatim to bright fifth graders at a Jewish day school, I became truly fed up with goring oxen and borrowed animals. I do not own a horned beast nor am I likely to. There is no temple, so there are no sacrifices, first fruits, etc. But then we come to this: And a stranger shalt thou not wrong, neither shalt thou oppress him; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. (JTS translation) We are similarly instructed not to harm widows or orphans, and are warned that if we do our wives will be widows and our children orphans. We may note that this does not, in fact, happen. The heads of banks who dispossess widows and orphans tend to live happily ever after. As to strangers, in Israel it is often the heads of religious parties who are most in favor of expelling them to a likely death. But the parsha also tells us some of the laws of kashrut and of the Sabbath. These are either pleasant (Sabbath) or easy (kashrut) so we keep them and assure ourselves that we are good Jews. Or we ignore them, placing them in the same category as the laws of goring oxen, and the whole set of commandments seems irrelevant. So we have religious Jews observing ritual law but not ethical law, and non-religious Jews looking elsewhere for guidance. To be sure, the text threatens us with terrible things if we are disobedient, but they do not happen right away, so we ignore these threats just as, today, we ignore the threats associated with global warming, because the danger is not imminent enough. I have a problem with laws that have, in fact, no enforcement mechanism. Here there are threats that we obviously don’t believe or our behavior would change. Widows, orphans, strangers and the poor would be much better off. Imagine speed limits and other traffic laws with no state police or attempts to collect income tax with no enforcement bodies. Halacha today is in fact voluntary. A law that cannot be enforced is more request than law. Halacha is commandment, but that is something else and, as I’ll argue in a later little essay, greatly involves love. Incidentally, I did publish an essay in “Judaism” 2002 on the last part of this essay. It is called “The Shattered Tablets of the Law.” Check it out.
Posted on: Thu, 23 Jan 2014 11:07:23 +0000
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