This past week during Shabbat services (10 am prayer and song; 10:45 Torah study, every week at this link) we studied Parashat Mishpatim, the Torah portion known as Mishpatim which means rules or enactments—a fitting title because this is the point in our Torah where the majority of the text shifts from narrative to law. Judaism is, after all, a religion very concerned with law, in the sense that law facilitates practice; practice being a form of action; and actions being the spaces in which our relationship with the Holy plays out.
But law does not necessarily mean legalistic. Take, for example, the law laid out in this past week’s parashah that, “When a fire is started and spreads to thorns, so that stacked, standing, or growing grain is consumed, the one who started the fire must make restitution” (Exodus 22:5). On the surface of it, this law plays like a fairly standard tort action: if someone was negligent and it leads to damages in another’s property, that party must make a payment to make the other party whole. It brings be right back to first semester of law school, right down to the Socratic method that serves as something of a model for our Torah discussions.
And yet when the ancient rabbis delved into this text, they went deeper. “Turn it over and over for everything is contained within it,” a rabbinic sage is quoted as saying in Pirkei Avot (a revered compilation of rabbinic aphorisms), referring, presumably, to Torah. Perhaps nowhere is this exhortation carried out more fully than with regards to our seemingly legalistic verse.
“Calamity befalls the world only when wicked people are in the world, but the calamity begins only with the righteous first,” Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahmani said that Rabbi Yonatan said, “as it is stated in the verse: ‘If a fire breaks out, and catches in thorns, so that a stack of grain, or standing grain, or the field, is consumed…’ (Exodus 22:5).”
“When does the fire, i.e., calamity, emerge?” he continued. “At a time when the thorns, i.e., the wicked, are found with it. But calamity begins only with the righteous first, as it is stated in the continuation of the verse: ‘And a stack of grain is consumed.’ It is not stated: If a fire breaks out, and catches in thorns, and then consumes the stack of grain; rather, it states: ‘A stack of grain is consumed,’ meaning that the stack, i.e., the righteous, has already been consumed before the thorns.”
Our rabbis recognized a world where justice was not always applied straightforwardly: sometimes the righteous struggled mightily. They found a text in Torah that, when examined in a thoughtful, probing light, shed light on this phenomenon. Then, as a participant in our Torah study, beautifully introduced, our task is to “make restitution,” or, as stated in the Hebrew in our Torah verse, shalem yeshalem—we must make the person who suffered whole; or, another interpretation of shalem, help them be at peace.
We are going to encounter brokenness in the world. Even the ancient rabbis recognized that. “It is our task,” as Rabbi Art Green says, “to find these [encounters] meaningful, to find challenge within them as to how to better direct our lives in the face of them, which is to find God — or the Presence, or the divine spark— within them.” It is our task to contribute to finding and effecting wholeness in the brokenness.
