Love me tender, Love me Jew... Mishpatim

Good Shabbos,

Parshas Mishpatim (the Torah segment called “ordinances”) - a laundry list of tort laws, marital laws, by-laws and more laws (including sorcery!). What a wonderful parsha. For those of us who spent years in yeshivas, this is the bread we’ve been raised on. All the subtleties, nuances, details, applications, manifestations, incarnations of God’s Law. Each word rings with hours and days and weeks of Talmuldic discourse, reams of commentaries, plumbed depths of philosophy and logic. The familiar smells of home, the tastes that linger and remind us of the place to which we yearn to return.

The parsha begins, “And these are the ordinances”. As we all learnt in grammar school – never, never begin a sentence with “and”, let alone a whole book, so to speak – except, of course, if you’re God. When He says it, He means to connect this entire teaching to the previous – not merely a run-on, but inextricably intertwined. Just as the previous parsha (10 commandments) was spoken and given on Har Sinai, so too were all these details. God’s world is like pointillism: the greatness of the big picture is only a result of an appreciation of the details, while the details themselves have no meaning other than their place in the larger context. Details, details, itty-bitty nitty-gritty beautiful, gorgeous details…

The measure of love is in the details. Go ask anyone who has navigated the labyrinths of marriage successfully and thus finds him/herself enveloped in love and oneness to sketch a picture their better half – what you’ll get are details and more details, well beyond the physical appearance. An open-ended story with infinite discoveries. And only a true lover will relish them – every last one to the nth degree.

The Torah is a love story. The Sages liken the revelation on Har Sinai to a wedding, with the mountain being our Chuppah – God and the Jewish people as bride and groom. I would be so bold to say that Egypt was the courtship, The Red Sea splitting the engagement, Har Sinai the marriage, and Mishpatim the honeymoon. These laws and intricacies, sometimes blamed as the source of ultimate frustration and abandonment of Torah, are actually the very keys to marrying the metaphysical. Judaism stands alone in striving to find God in the details – which really translates into bringing the spiritual in the physical, giving every inch of life and all its scenarios a connection to its source, and discovering holiness in the seemingly otherwise profane.

Wishing you a “loverly” Shabbos,

Rabbi Lynn