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Rabbi Jonathan Miller
Temple Emanu-El
Birmingham, Alabama
Sermon on Mishpatim
February 16, 2007
Am Yisrael stood at Sinai and heard the commanding voice of God. Last week, I shared that each heard God with the sound of the Aleph, the silent sound, the beginning of speech, the first letter that makes all other letters possible. The people at Sinai were unnerved by the experience. The sights and sounds and meaning of experiencing God so directly was beyond their imagination and their comprehension. While our ancestors themselves knew that they were experiencing God directly, they, in one voice, asked for the experience to end. “All the people witnessed the thunder and lightening, the blare of the horn and the mountain shaking, and when the people saw it, they fell back and stood at a distance. ‘You speak to us,’ they said to Moses, ‘and we will obey; but let not God speak to us, lest we die.’”
From this point on, God never again spoke directly to the people. God’s speech was more than they or we can comprehend. From this point on, God speaks to us through the prophets of Israel, the sages of our people, and the texts of our tradition. No longer do we hear God’s voice directly. Instead, we now ponder God’s will. We ask ourselves, “What is it that God demands of us?” This is the question that every religious person asks, “What is it that God demands of us?”
This week’s Torah portion provides us with the beginning of an answer:
V’eyleh haMishpatim Asher tasim lifneichem, “These are the mishpatim, the statutes that you shall place before them.” God, speaking through Moses, now has a plan to make God’s will known through Moses. Here’s how. God provides Moses with a list of mishpatim, a list of behaviors that are expected of his covenanted people. God is concerned with how we treat each other across our social boundaries. God is concerned with the rights of slaves and their proper treatment, how we treat each other within our families, public safety, proper restitution for physical harm or loss of property, communal responsibility for the maintenance of common property, the religious well being and obligations of the Israelites, the proper treatment of the poor and the powerless, the stranger, the widow and the orphan, the proper treatment of day workers--and the list goes on and on.
This list of behaviors is revolutionary in human history. Why is that? For the first time in human history, our God, the God of the Israelites is the first god that demands more than obeisance, and more than fealty, and more than awe, fear and trembling. For the first time in human history, the god of a single group of people lays out what He considers to be right and just behavior, and demands that that behavior be lived properly as the primary condition of God’s covenant. Prior to that Torah—Sinai moment, the gods of the peoples of the earth were only concerned with people’s behaviors that would impact them. Before the Israelites at Sinai, people imagined that their gods were concerned with these questions: Were the people loyal enough? Did they sacrifice enough? Did they fear enough? Did they hold this one particular god in the proper esteem in relationship to the other gods in this pagan pantheon of many many gods? Human beings were running their lives based on their projections of what their gods demanded of them. If I give to the goddess of fertility, how will that impact the god of war? What is the relationship between the god of the sun and the god of the moon and the god of rain and the god of thunder? How do I keep all of my obligations to all these gods current so that they do not smite me or hurt me or withhold from me that which is in their province to bestow or punish. The pagan world was a world of constant fear and uncertainty.
Then the God of Israel reveals Himself at Sinai, and the whole of human history is changed forever. From this moment forward, there is only one God, the God of Israel, Who is also the only God of the universe. From this moment on, there is only one God, the God of Israel, and this God demands from us that we treat others properly. All of religion, with its obligations for sacrifice, for worship, and for discipline is prescribed for us so that we might live properly in God’s sight, and properly means first and foremost that we treat each other the way God wants us to behave. From this moment on, the worth of an individual is judged not by his or her wealth or physical power, but rather by the way they treat other people. Before Sinai, people could enslave others unjustly, take away their lives, property and liberty, and there were none for the weak and trod upon to complain to. The rule of the jungle ruled in the pagan world. In every society, the weak were subjected to the strong, and justice and righteousness were measured strictly in terms of physical power and its prerogatives. After Sinai, human beings were told to behave themselves and to curtail their basest instincts. If we want to find favor with God, we must treat others as God commands us to do. “Right” now trumps “might and power”, and the source of the right are these rules and others to follow, which emanate only from God.
And while the Torah projects ethical behavior as the singular relationship between God and the Israelites, Judaism takes this revolutionary idea one step further. In Judaism, God demands ethical and righteous behavior not just from the Israelites with whom a covenant is established, but God also demands ethical and righteous behavior from the gentile nations. While the gentile nations are not subject to the strictures or the benefits of our covenant with God, God too notices their actions and they will be rewarded for their obedience to God’s moral law. And likewise, they will be punished for violating God’s commandments, those that apply to them.
Without this structure of law and ethics and covenant, which turned ancient religion on its head, we would be in a much poorer condition as a human species today. Our sister religions, Christianity and Islam and their offshoots, at their best, have also adopted this concept that God demands morality from us. Think how differently we might make decisions today concerning our treatment of the poor, the elderly, the infirm, the children or the widows, or in the workplace or in the environment—think how we might pervert justice were it not for this concept of a Divine unseeing power Who is uncompromising in His demands for justice. This power is the power that is the source of the concept of ethics. Without the concept of a God demanding adherence to a universal morality, we would not have the discipline of ethics nor could we demand, even in the secular world, that people behave properly.
Our religious tradition has handed down two religious principles by which we can further determine ethical behavior. One principle is that all people are created b’tselem elohim, that all people are created in the image of God. All people, even those who are disfigured, even those who are not able to function as we do in our world, even our enemies, even our criminals, all people are created b’tselem elohim, in the image of the singular God. We have to treat those most distant from us with the same human respect and dignity that we treat those closest to us. All of us are created in God’s image. The second principle is that we are meant to act as imitators of God, in the way that we understand God to act. As God demands justice, we are to demand justice. As God extends mercy, we are to extend mercy. Without these principles, and God’s demanding nature, we could well view the behavior of the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge and the Hutus and the Serbs and the Islamist extremists’ as normative human behavior. Fundamentally, upon what other basis than our religious tradition could we pass judgment on their perverse exercise of power and their assuming control over life and death? Were we not to be engaged in the broadest sense as religious people in a religious culture, upon what basis could we call these people evil? Rather, theirs would be the normal way of the world, with the powerful relating violently and subjugating the less powerful.
The rabbis mark a division between two types of laws, mishpatim and hukkim. A mishpat is a law that the rational among us can perceive, even without its being commanded by God. Taking care of each other, not hurting each other, preserving each other’s property; these are all principles that would define a mishpat. We can deduce the benefits of a mishpat, without requiring God’s instruction. A hok, on the other hand, is a rule that comes directly from God, which has no universal or rational bearing, but can come only from God. Shabbat, pesach, tallit and tfillin, these are hukkim. Jewish life today is as it was for our ancestors, a combination of mishpatim and hukkim, both of which come from God.
But so far, I have only told you half the story. (Don’t worry, my sermon is almost over, and you can prepare your tummies for dinner!) God’s giving the mishpatim and the hukkim to Moses to share with the Israelites is only half the story. What cements this new reality of God’s ethical law that applies to Israel and to all humanity is not only that God gave it. God is always giving Torah. What cements God’s ethical law is that, for the first time in history, people, our ancestors, accepted it. We said to God (from this week’s Torah portion): “’All the things that the Lord has commanded, we will do!’ Moses then wrote down all the commands of the Lord.”
Without Am Yisrael, the people of Israel in the desert, without their hearts and their ears open to hearing the God’s, the commanding voice of God would only be an echo. It would reverberate among the stillness, but it would never land in the human heart. Am Yisrael, the people of Israel stood and accepted this foundation of ethics, of justice, of human concern as part of our covenant with God. Only then did God’s voice and God’s teaching take root in the human soul. And from here, even during the darkest periods of human history, God’s commanding moral voice could never be shaken.
A prayer to end:
Our God in heaven, we are grateful to you for sending us your Torah. For you have taught us hukkim umishpatim, laws and precepts to guide us and help us be our light to the nations. We pray that you continue to guide us, and may we always be open to hearing your word. Help us to turn Your thoughts to become the works of our hands, and may we always be a blessing to You and the world.
Amen
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