Re-Hearing the Law
Revelation means Renewing Our Heritage
Then God said to Moses, “Come up to the Lord, with Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy elders of Israel, and bow low from afar. (Exodus 24:1)
THEN GOD SAID TO MOSES—This section was spoken before the Ten Commandments were given. (Rashi on Exodus 24:1)
God spoke all these words, saying: I the Lord am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage: (Exodus 20:1-2)
According to Rashi, the Torah is not written in chronological order. Sometimes, the narrative employs flashback, or, what amounts to the same, a montage. Thus, in this week’s parasha, Mishpatim, we get a bunch of ordinary laws about damages and civic life, and then we get a description of Moses’s ascent to the top of Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. Yet last week, in Yitro, the 10 commandments were already given, raising a confusion for us as readers—are the protocols of social life a continuation of Sinai or a prelude to it? What does Rashi intend to teach by claiming that the timing of the narrative is out of joint? Why, in Rashi’s telling does Exodus 24 appear after Exodus 20 even though it details events that precede it?
Smack in the middle of the time warp created by a re-arranged text are the laws of everyday life—the Mishpatim. If an ox gores, who is responsible? If a person falls into a pit who is responsible? What is the legal process for redeeming a slave? Are the Mishpatim divinely given laws or are they are human laws arrived at by reason? They seem like good common sense, not the kind of thing you would need God to tell you. But by sandwiching them between the giving of Ten Commandments and the description of Moses’s ascent to Sinai they take on a doubled quality. They are both the result of revelation and the precondition for revelation. They are both that which enables Revelation and that which Revelation enables. According to Avivah Zornberg, the Revelation changes the way we relate to the Mishpatim. These laws are ancient, pre-historic, but Revelation enables us to encounter them anew, to find a new frame for them. This is one possible meaning of “we will do and we will hear”—we will do the Mishpatim, the laws that are simply basic to a decent society, but we will hear them differently now. The creation of a good society will now be not just a matter of pragmatics but of holiness, not just a matter of convention but of mission. “We will hear” means: we will understand the bigger picture.
Many theologians and commentators focus on the experience of Revelation—what does it feel like to encounter the divine? What senses were activated by the great event? What message was communicated? How did God become present in the world? But a subtler point is often lost in this line of question—what does the experience of revelation do to our relationship to the past? Does Revelation require us to cast off our pre-Revelatory or roots or does it require us to recast them? By following Rashi, we find a beautiful suggestion: Revelation is a re-arrangement of one’s life, one’s narrative. Revelation allows us to hear the echos of our origins in a new way. But it doesn’t require us to renounce all aspects of our heritage. At its best, Revelation elevates our heritage. The same laws can be experienced as normal, standing outside of Sinai, and as profound, standing within it. What Revelation offers us, among other things, is a way of integrating all dimensions of our life. It is an offer of holism. Technically, the Mishpatim don’t need to be revealed, but ontologically they do. We need the Mishpatim to be re-organized within a Revelatory frame not just because we will take them more seriously if we treat them as sacred rather than instrumental, but because we need our sense of purpose to be embedded in daily life, and not just reserved for time-off. Revelation teaches us to attend to the phrases and leitmotifs that reverberate throughout our lives and beyond.
“When any party opens a pit (bor), or when any party digs a pit and does not cover it, and an ox or an ass falls into it the one responsible for the pit must make restitution…(Exodus 21:33-34)
Where have we hear of pits before? In the Joseph cycle, the word bor recurs. The brothers throw Joseph in a pit, the Midianites remove him from the pit. Joseph is imprisoned in a dungeon, also called a pit. The word is uncommon enough to suggest an allusion—the digging of a pit is foreboding, not just because it creates a liability, but because of its association with sabotage. Even the innocent pit digger must bear the weight of the pit’s history. It also means that the law an be understood as having both a practical dimension and an aspirational one. Practically, we want to make it less likely that a bad actor will weaponize something like a pit. Aspirationally, and through the frame of Sinai, the law becomes a way of making a tikkun, a rectification on the violence and betrayal conducted by a group against their brother. We are all in this together, so to speak. The law before Sinai tells us to avoid misconduct. The law after Sinai asks us to experience our kinship and shared condition. It creates the sense of social responsibility without which the laws on the books will be mere rules. The simple pit that is technically no threat and nobody’s fault becomes something for which I have to be extra sensitive if I am to belong to a sacred community. I can’t just say I’m off the hook, but must be pro-active in ensuring nobody falls. For that nobody is my brother, and my positive pro-activity is the needed corrective to the pre-Sinaitic world in which we proactively sold one another out.
The Exodus story is a story of ex-slaves receiving the law. But the first slave and ex-slave in the Torah is Joseph. The Mishpatim can be thought of as an attempt to repair the rift between Joseph and his brothers. We already did and do them, but now that we have received the Revelation, let us hear them anew.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins
For more on Joseph and his brothers, check out my conversation with Cynthia Haven.