Us and . . . Us

Parashat Mishpatim, Exodus 21:1-24:18

By Dave Nichol, Ruach Israel, Needham, MA

Parashat Mishpatim starts with the pedestrian (“when you acquire a Hebrew slave, he shall serve you six years”) and ends with the transcendent (“Now the Presence of the Lord appeared in the sight of the Israelites as a consuming fire on the top of the mountain”). It consists of a series of commandments and ordinances Moses is to set before the people of Israel. At first glance the commandments seem arbitrary and random. Treatment of slaves, violent crime, giving of loans, and how to eat animals all warrant mention in our parasha. Even rogue oxen have their fifteen minutes of fame.

The commentator R. Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089-1164) manages to find an order to this string of commandments (and adds, “Whenever we cannot find one, we shall blame the deficiency on ourselves”). He writes:

The essential principle is that no one shall compel by violence one who is less powerful than he. The rules begin with the violence exerted on the body by enslavement, and continue with various rules that stem from this subject.

This interpretation of Torah is consonant with values broadly espoused in today’s world. It is widely agreed that the rich should not get special treatment, that the powerful must be prevented from taking advantage of the poor, and that even animals deserve better than cruelty. That justice is so universally valued (if not always achieved) is a beautiful thing about the current zeitgeist in the world. Maybe Torah is finally infusing our world? Of course, the distance between intention and achievement can feel insurmountable for an individual; how much more for a civilization?

But there is another subtle message in our parasha that is less comprehensible to modern ears, which our world nevertheless needs to hear. The first hint is where the text discusses a “Hebrew slave” (21:2), leaving open the question of slaves that are not Hebrews. Later God forbids the charging of interest, but not universally: “If you lend money to my people, to the poor among you, do not act toward them as a creditor; exact no interest from them” (22:24; see Deut 23:21, which allows charging interest to foreigners, for contrast). 

And, further on, we come across this unexpected phrasing: “You shall not subvert the rights of your needy in their disputes” (23:6). Why “your needy''? Does this not apply to anyone who is needy?

These wordings hint at something that was likely assumed by the original readers of the text, but that is quite passé, even heretical, in our times: the idea that your ethical obligations to your tribe or people differ from—even exceed—your obligations to outsiders.

Writing on the commandment, “and you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18), Rabbi Carl Kinbar argues that our “neighbor” refers to a fellow Israelite, as opposed to, say whoever lives next door:

When “neighbor” is defined as “[whoever happens to be] our neighbor,” or “all humanity,” we fail to account for the reciprocity that exists between members of the Jewish people. In the Torah, love is a responsibility, a benefit, and in a sense the glue that binds the community together. Love, as envisioned by the Torah, functions fully only within a community of mutual obligation.  (“First Steps in Messianic Jewish Ethics: Understanding ethics through our obligation to love,” Hashivenu Forum 2013)

Rav Kinbar goes on to examine Yeshua’s teaching on this commandment, and the frequent commands to “love one another” throughout the apostolic writings, and makes a compelling case that in a sound Messianic Jewish ethics, we are first and foremost responsible for other members of the covenant community. 

Practically speaking, most of us understand that it’s natural to care more for your own children than for other peoples’ children, for example. But this concept of a hierarchy of ethical obligation has been lost to the contemporary politico-moral discourse, so that some people truly don’t believe they have the right to show favoritism in their charitable donations, or (to use a more politically charged example) the right to favor citizens of their country over non-citizens for various benefits. In our own communities, we have sometimes forgotten that our primary obligations are to fellow Jews.

To this point, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks zt”l wrote eloquently on the importance of particularism, against a platonic ideal of universality, in his book The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations. He points out that the Bible sees the beginning of God’s work of redemption in his relationship with one flesh-and-blood family, that of Abraham:

The universality of moral concern is not something we learn by being universal but by being particular. Because we know what it is to be a parent, loving our children, not children in general, we understand what it is for someone else, somewhere else, to be a parent, loving his or her children, not ours. There is no road to human solidarity that does not begin with moral particularity—by coming to know what it means to be a child, a parent, a neighbor, a friend. We learn to love humanity by loving specific human beings. There is no short-cut.

That certainly does not mean that we have no moral obligation to outsiders. Far from it! Rabbi Sacks continues by quoting our parasha: “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of the stranger—you yourselves were strangers in the land of Egypt'' (23:9). The Torah goes even further elsewhere (Lev. 19:34, Deut. 10:19), commanding us to love the stranger! But in the end, mitzvot, commandments, or any ethical obligations, need a community to function properly, and they in turn hold that community together. Hence the word mitzvah is said to be related to the word tsavta, meaning bond or connection.

Though our contemporary society might have a passion for ethics, without an understanding of the social dimension of human life—that we are not simply individuals, but that our families, communities, and nation make up part of our core identities—we have lost a key ingredient for making ethics comprehensible. This has led to deep pathologies in our ability to have political conversations. It has also, in my opinion, caused widespread feelings both of impotence and guilt among well-intentioned people (one example here) who feel unable to navigate the web of competing ethical demands.

Another way to put this might be: our well-intentioned desire to eliminate differences is destined to fail because it goes against the grain of human life. 

What our world needs to hear from Parashat Mishpatim is not just what it says—important as those things are for building a just society—but what it assumes. That is, that the society we are building is made up of people mutually obligated to each other. If that is not the case, the rest may be for naught.

Rabbi Sacks, in his more recent book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, summed it up:

Tip O’Neill used to say, “All politics is local.” Morality is likewise. That, at any rate, is where it begins, among families and friends and neighbors. Morality places a limit on individualism. . . . Morality, at its core, is about strengthening the bonds between us, helping others, engaging in reciprocal altruism, and understanding the demands of group loyalty, which are the price of group belonging.

May this be an encouragement to us to redouble our efforts toward building strong communities of mutual love and commitment. You can’t make stew without a pot! Our primary ethical obligations— those communal and local— must be observed before we are prepared to offer anything to the stranger and outsider. Only by loving our neighbor can we fulfill the commandment in our parasha that sums up all the others: “You shall be a holy people to me” (22:30).

Quote from Ibn Ezra is from The Commentator’s Bible (JPS). Translations from Tanakh are JPS.