This is the sermon I gave at Temple Sinai in Cranston, Rhode Island, on Friday, January 28, 2020, Shabbat Mishpatim.

This week’s Torah portion, Mishpatim, includes a curious verse. I’m not sure everyone today would agree with it. The verse, Exodus 22:27, commands, “You shall not revile judges, nor put a curse upon a chieftain among your people.” Today, it seems, cursing our leaders is not just considered acceptable behavior, it’s practically our national pastime. I want to take a look at this commandment, what we think it means, and what it might teach us about our society today.

First, a word about the Hebrew words of this verse. The part of the verse that says that “you shall not revile judges” actually uses the word Elohim, which we usually translate as “God.” However, since ancient times, the rabbis have understood that the word Elohim sometimes means something more like “great people” or “powerful people.” The earliest commentators all agree that this verse is not talking about reviling God – which is certainly covered elsewhere in the Torah – rather, it is about not expressing hatred for human leaders – judges, kings, elected officials, officers of the court. Yet, the use of the word Elohim here is interesting, as I will discuss in a few minutes.

The ancient midrash collection, Mekhilta d’Rabbi Yishmael [22:27:1], says that the prohibition against cursing leaders applies as long as the leaders do their job as their jobs are defined. You may not like the way they do the job, you may think that you could do a better job, you may believe that they don’t really understand their job, but as long as they are not renegades who ignore the rules of their job, you may not curse them.

So, I want to suggest that the rule is not really about not cursing the person in the leadership position; it is about not reviling the position itself. We have a similar idea in American society today when we say things like, “You may not respect the President, but you still have to respect the office of the presidency.” There needs to be a basic understanding in a society that once we cross the line of despising our political system just because we don’t like the particular people in power, we have undermined the very existence of the system we all depend on to keep us safe, to hold our society together, and to prevent anarchy from overwhelming us.

In American society, we often call this understanding “the rule of law.” It is a phrase made popular in part by the writings of John Adams, the second President of the United States. Adams wrote that a good government should be “an empire of laws and not of men,” meaning that our civilization becomes stable, just, and worthy of sustaining itself when not even the most powerful people can excuse themselves from obeying the law and when every member of the society is subject to the rights, privileges, and limitations of the law on an equal basis. The moment that the law becomes a weapon to use “against thee, but not against me,” the rule of law is broken and those who wield power should be regarded as illegitimate and as immoral, authoritarian despots.

But in observing the rule of law, which despises self-serving autocrats, we also relinquish our claim to despise the people who rule in ways other than what we would choose ourselves. It is a two-way street. Leaders have an obligation to live within the rules; the rest of us have an obligation to accept the authority of the people who govern within the rules.

That seems to be what this week’s Torah portion is telling us. You are not allowed to curse your leaders just because you don’t agree with them; you are required to give the respect due to their office. The only alternative is to ally yourself with the causes of chaos and anarchy that will lead to the ruin of the society as a whole.

If you imagine that the commandment not to curse leaders was more easily obeyed in ancient times than it is today – if you believe that the leaders of the past were so much better than those we have today – if you believe that people loved and appreciated their leaders in the past more – I am sorry to say that you must have a poor understanding of the ancient world and a worse understanding of human nature.

The Torah goes out of its way to remind us about how many Israelites really hated Moses during his forty years of leading them in Egypt and through the wandering through the desert. The Hebrew Bible tells us clearly that King David, the other paragon of leadership in ancient Israel, was so deeply disrespected in his time that even his own wife criticized him publicly and his children tried to overthrow him.

It has always been so. No leader, no matter how great, is without detractors. The game of "King of the Mountain," in which people try to pull down the person at the top, is the oldest game in the world. We never get tired of it. The struggle to “throw the bums out” without, at the same time, allowing all of society to fall into lawlessness is as old as civilization itself.

This is the observation of the Torah. You can see it in the way that the Hebrew Bible never invests itself too much in any particular human ruler. Even Moses and David are shown to have serious flaws and they have eager detractors. But the law itself, the rules by which society is governed, is never attacked in the Torah. It is venerated far more than any human being could ever be.

This week’s Torah portion is a virtual monument to the idea of the rule of law. Parashat Mishpatim contains 53 laws, one of the most of any Torah portion. Among the laws in the portion are laws against crimes like murder and kidnapping and laws for civil conduct like the repayment of loans and compensation for accidental property damage. But at the center of the Torah portion are laws for the administration of the legal system itself. This week’s portion commands judges and other civil authorities, “You shall not side with the powerful to do wrong. You shall not give false testimony to favor the interests of the mighty. Nor shall you show favoritism toward the poor in a dispute…You shall not take bribes" (Exodus 23:2-3,8).

There is a lot for us to learn from the Torah’s commitment to the rule of law and faith in human systems of justice and governance. The world today is experiencing a crisis in the rule of law that is unlike any time since the end of the Second World War. Democracies are falling toward despotism in countries like Turkey, Poland and Hungary. In just the last eight months, coups with military support have overturned the rule of law in Myanmar, Mali, Tunisia, Guinea, Sudan, and Burkina Faso.

And, lest we think that the United States is somehow exempt, we have seen in our own nation definite signs of decay in the rule of law. We can see, perhaps, how it started when the Supreme Court ignored the ballots cast in Florida and installed George W. Bush as president in 2000. The fractures deepened in 2016 when many people called Donald Trump’s Electoral College win illegitimate because of his failure to win the popular vote. Now it has reached near crisis levels as one quarter of all Americans believe that the result of the 2020 elections were false and the election stolen. The belief is, of course, primarily promoted by the false claims of the losing presidential candidate and his refusal to concede, a line that has never been crossed before in the nation’s history.

How much longer can this go on? What happens when nobody in a society believes that the rules matter as much as “winning” matters? In such a society, the rules will collapse. The rules will just be changed, after the fact, by people who have the power to create new rules that produce the results they want.

Regardless of your partisan allegiances, regardless of your preferred policy positions, you should fear this. It is a recipe for chaos and disaster.

And there is something else we should notice. Remember how this week’s Torah portion uses the word Elohim for the people in positions of authority who must not be cursed? Remember how the word Elohim is usually translated as “God”? I don’t think it is a coincidence.

The Torah itself recognizes that once a society rejects the rule of law, it will also reject the rule of God. Once people have tasted the power that comes with the ability to change the rules however they want, whenever they want to get the results they want, they will never accept the idea of any authority over them – not the authority of justice, not the authority of a moral order, and not the authority of creation’s supreme Source. The Torah understands that accepting the rule of law within the human realm is a necessary step toward accepting the rule of Heaven in our spiritual lives and in our basic understanding of who we are in the universe.

We are commanded not to curse our leaders – even when we disagree with them, even when we believe that they are dead wrong – not because they are above criticism or beyond reproach. We are commanded to respect the framework of governance and the rule of law because it is the floor beneath our feet. It is the foundation of all we aspire to do as a civilization.

Today we are standing on the brink of stepping over the line that leads to chaos. It is time to take a step back and to remember that there are ideals and there is a vision of what we are meant to be that are beyond merely “winning.”

Shabbat shalom.

This week in Alabama, there was a strange case of judicial disagreement in which the chief justice of the state Supreme Court tried to overrule a federal court judge on the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. That sort of thing is not supposed to happen in the American legal system. On questions of federal law and the Constitution, federal courts are supposed to trump state courts, even if the state court is the highest court in the state.

Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court stated this week that his state does not need to follow a ruling by a federal court that throws out Alabama's prohibition on same-sex marriage. Chief Justice Moore's decree seemed to fly in the face of an American judicial system that has clear rules about which courts have superior authority over others. His statement may even be seen as a threat to the integrity of the American judicial system.

Calling on people to ignore a court ruling is dangerous business. Courts are one of the institutions that keep our society functioning. Jewish tradition gives courts in a very honored status for just that reason.

Surely, you have noticed the high regard that laws and legality have in Jewish tradition. Our central sacred book, the Torah, is often called the "Written Law" in Jewish tradition (as opposed to the "Oral Law" of the Talmud and rabbinic teachings). Discussing and arguing about law is one of the central ways that Jews and Jewish tradition explore our relationship to God, our obligations to other people, and the meaning of our lives. 

No wonder there are so many Jewish lawyers.

This week's Torah portion, Mishpatim, includes several laws regarding the conduct of judges and the legal system. The Torah teaches:

You shall not curse (God / a judge) and you shall not speak an imprecation against a leader of your people… You shall not give false reports, and do not conspire with the wicked to be a malicious witness. Do not chase after the majority to do wrong, and do not give misleading evidence in a dispute to support the strong. Nor should you surgar-coat the position of the weak and poor in his dispute. 
– Exodus 22:27, 23:1-3

This section of the Torah portion is clearly talking about courts, judges and legal systems. The law, says the Torah, must be respected, it must be fair, it must be treated with sanctity, and it must be just to all. That seeming clarity is what makes the ambiguity ("God / a judge") in the first verse so interesting.

The Hebrew word for the entity that must not be cursed is familiar and common in the Bible. The word, Elohim, is usually taken to mean "God." However, the great Torah commentator Rashi makes it clear that the word often has another meaning. 

For example, earlier in this week's Torah portion, there is a law that says that if a slave wishes to stay with his master after his term of servitude has ended, "His master must take him to the Elohim." It could be that the slave is taken before God, but that doesn't really make sense in the context. What seems more likely is that that slave is brought before a panel of judges who must decide if the master has pressured the slave into remaining in servitude, or if he actually wants to stay a slave. The word "Elohim" as Rashi explains, sometimes means "judges."

If we return to the passage about not cursing Elohim, we see a delicious double meaning to the verse that Rashi noticed in the eleventh century. According to Rashi, the phrase, "You shall not curse Elohim," means two things simultaneously. Rashi says, "Behold, this is a prohibition regarding cursing God and a prohibition against cursing a judge." It works both ways. Why?

Rashi could have said that, in this context, the word Elohim should only be read to mean "judge" since the passage is all about judges and courts. But Rashi felt that both readings make sense because, in a way, treating God with respect is the same as treating a judge with respect. 

In the Jewish legal system, laws come from God and they are interpreted and administered by human beings. The legal system depends upon the respect that human beings have for God's law, but it also depends upon respect for those people who have been charged with applying the laws to actual cases and disputes. Curse a judge, and you are cursing God. Curse God, and you are cursing those who serve as judges.

This is why the Talmud teaches, "Any judge who gives true judgement truthfully – even if it is for just a single hour – is regarded by Scripture as if he were a partner with the Holy Blessed One in the act of creating the world" (B. Shabbat 10a). Judges who do their job with integrity are God's partners, necessary for God's laws to enter the world and for God's plans for the world to work as they are intended.

Today it seems that the question of same-sex marriage in Alabama has been settled. Few courts and magistrates are heeding Chief Justice Moore's call to ignore the ruling of the federal court, and that is probably a good thing. When courts are cursed, God is cursed, and, perhaps, our entire society is cursed. When the rule of law is obeyed, when courts are respected and honored, we are all blessed. And God is blessed.

This week's Torah portion (Mishpatim) includes this passage that is often cited when Jews discuss abortion. The text implies that causing the death of an unborn child should not be considered  murder. The punishment for causing such a death is a fine, not the death penalty. The case is treated entirely differently in the Torah than a case in which a person kills another (already born) human being, whether the death was intentional or unintentional. 

For centuries, commentators have used these verses as evidence that the Torah does not regard the abortion of a fetus to be murder. Where abortion is proscribed in Jewish tradition, it is regarded as a crime of shedding blood, not the taking of life. Also, based in part on this passage, Jewish law actually demands that a fetus be aborted if it poses a threat to the life of the mother. 

And what of the logic of "an eye in place of an eye, a tooth in place of a tooth"? Won't that, as the saying goes, leave everyone blind and toothless? Jewish tradition holds that these verses, and others like them, should be interpreted to refer to monetary damages. A person who is responsible for causing another person to lose sight in an eye should pay compensation to that person according to the value of an eye, not by having his own eye put out.

Contemporary biblical scholars find this passage about a pregnant woman to be uncommonly difficult to untangle. There are so many unanswered and unanswerable questions. Does the woman miscarry, or does she give birth prematurely? Is the "eye-for-an-eye" injury suffered by the fetus, or is it the mother? Can a law about an accidental injury be applied meaningfully to an intentional abortion, or is that a flawed comparison?

There is something about the way both traditional commentators and modern scholars look at this passage that troubles me. There is a coldness to the parsing and analyzing of the text. This is a passage that is laden with powerful emotions that should not be ignored when we try to fit the words to our contemporary issues and controversies.

A pregnant woman has been pushed aside and hurt while others quarreled, perhaps to the extent that she has miscarried. How could we imagine that there might be "no injury" in such a situation? Her husband has the right to demand payment for damages incurred. Damages to whom? To the unborn child? To the mother? Or, perhaps, to the man himself? The law seem uncaring to the woman. What might she rightfully demand in this situation? What about her grief over the loss of the child? Is it fair to settle such a matter with the exchange of coins?

This may be the reason the text talks in this story about "life in place of life." (The Hebrew could also be translated as "a soul in place of a soul"). This is a story in which one life touches upon so many other lives. The unborn child. The mother. The father. The assailant. Even the judges. Everyone becomes part of a tangle of lives standing in the place of other lives in a heartbreaking situation … and all because people let things get out of hand when they were fighting and quarreling. We too easily forget how easily one life can affect many other lives when our emotions spill over into violence.

We can reclaim that pregnant woman and give her loss new meaning by looking at the text again with new eyes, so to speak. "A life in place of a life" reminds us to place ourselves into the situation of others, to allow our compassion to inform the choices we make, before we hurt someone. We are commanded to see ourselves in each other — a life in place of a life.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Rape, Abortion and Judaism
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We spent the afternoon on the water, learning about the living things in and around the lagoon, studying some Jewish texts, and watching the dolphins (who were also watching us). We spent time on a small island where we did a scavenger hunt inspired by the writing of Rav Kook, the great Torah scholar who served as the first Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of Palestine. Our theme for the day was appreciating the natural world, opening our senses, and allowing ourselves to be awake to each moment.

I taught one of my favorite texts, a teaching from Rabbi Menachem Mendl of Kotzk, the slightly mad and reclusive sage who is known as the Kotzker Rebbe. This teaching is an interpretation of a verse from the book of Exodus:

It is not often that you see a group of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds who have the spiritual awareness to spend an afternoon in a kayak with the kind of mindfulness I saw today. Each of them, in his or her own way, showed an appreciation for the importance of "being there" — of taking in a beautiful place, of being genuinely curious about the world, of letting the experience happen without demanding too much from it, and just allowing the truth of the moment to emerge. 

It is with great pride that I say that we did not just go on a kayaking trip. We were there.


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God of the Natural or the Supernatural?

This is the sermon I am delivering tonight at Temple Beit HaYam.

We often think of the Torah as a storybook. It tells us the story of God creating the world, forming a covenant with the patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—and, through Moses, leading the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, through the wilderness for forty years until they reached the land of Israel. The Torah is the book that tells us our story.

That’s true. Yet, the Torah is a great deal more than storytelling. The Torah also is a book of mitzvot, commandments. In fact, Jewish tradition often puts more emphasis on the laws of the Torah than on those stories we learned as children. Torah, according to the rabbis, is primarily about the mitzvot.

This week's Torah portion is called Mishpatim, which means “laws.” It appears immediately after the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai and it contains more than fifty specific mitzvot ranging from the ritual, to the ethical, to the inexplicable. 

For example, this week’s portion contains mitzvot for the ritual observances of Shabbat and the pilgrimage festivals of Passover, Sukkot and Shavuot. It commands that we eat only unleavened bread for the seven days of Passover and that we stop working on Shabbat and take time to rest.

The portion also has some well known ethical mitzvot: the prohibitions against bribery, gossip, bestiality, giving false testimony, and mistreating widows and orphans. It contains the requirement to provide food for the needy. It includes the most often repeated mitzvah in the entire Torah: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20). Good rules, all of those.

In the category of mitzvot that are “inexplicable” (or, at least, difficult to understand in the modern world), this week’s Torah portion commands that Hebrew slaves who refuse to be set free at the end of their term of service must have their ears pierced with an awl and remain slaves for life. It commands that a man who seduces a virgin must marry her. It also commands that children who insult their parents must be put to death.  (Well, maybe that last one’s not so bad.)

There is no distinction made in the Torah between the different types of mitzvot. The ethical mitzvot, the criminal mitzvot, the ritual mitzvot, the sensible mitzvot and the inexplicable mitzvot, all are given together as one. God says that we are expected to observe them all.

This raises a problem for contemporary Jews. We are impressed by the wisdom of the ethical laws and feel their weight upon us. Even if we are sometimes tempted to gossip, we recognize the harm that gossip does and we recognize that this mitzvah makes sense for living a better life.

We also acknowledge that the ritual laws are important, but most of us think of them differently. We know how lighting Shabbat candles, for example, helps us preserve continuity with our ancestors and keeps alive the collective memory of our people. Yet, most of us probably do not feel that rituals are as critical as ethical laws. Lighting Shabbat candles every week just doesn’t feel like it carries the same weight as refraining from bribery and mistreating widows and orphans.

Mitzvot of the third category—those that make little sense to us—may not inspire any obligation in us. None of us will be looking this weekend for an awl to pierce the ears of our slaves. Those mitzvot that offend us, like the commandment to put a child to death for insulting his or her parents, should make us feel an obligation to reject them.

We want to sort the mitzvot into categories to know which are important, which are critical, which we consider, and which we reject. We want to pick and choose. Yet, the Torah does not admit a distinction. The mitzvot are the mitzvot. They are what God expects us to do. 

How do we deal with that?

In the early decades of American Reform Judaism, the movement’s leaders attempted to answer that question by explicitly stating that the standards had changed. They wrote in the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885: 

We recognize in the Mosaic legislation a system of training the Jewish people for its mission during its national life in Palestine, and today we accept as binding only its moral laws, and maintain only such ceremonies as elevate and sanctify our lives, but reject all such as are not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization. 

Since the times of the Pittsburgh Platform, the Reform Movement has backed away from such a bald rejection of some parts of the Torah. We have slowly tried to find a balance between the concerns of the modern age that rejects the irrational, and the concerns of Jewish faith that hears the Torah as divinely inspired, transcendent beyond the passing tastes and preferences of our times. If Torah is holy, we must be willing to hear it even when it seems difficult or out of step with our times.

There is nothing new about this. Parts of the Torah were also a challenge to the ancient rabbis. You don’t like the way the Torah allows masters to treat their slaves? Neither did the sages of the Talmud. However, rather than just saying that the Torah was wrong, the rabbis used the power of interpretation to find deeper meaning in the Torah.

According to the Talmud, there is a hidden message in the mitzvah to pierce the ear of the slave who refuses freedom. The Torah says that this slave believes “tov lo imach” (Deuteronomy 15:16). The simplest reading of the phrase is “it is good for him to be with you,” meaning that the slave says he is happy to be your servant. However, the Hebrew could also be read to mean, “It is as good for him as it is for you.” The Talmud jumps to this reading and states that a Hebrew slave must be treated as his master’s equal—as good for him as it is for you. The rabbis say a Hebrew slave must be fed the same food as his master and given a feather bed like his master’s bed. They conclude from this that, “When you buy a Hebrew slave, it is like buying yourself a master” (B. Kiddushin 22a).

What at first seemed like a law for turning temporary slaves into a permanent slaves is actually, according to the rabbis, a spiritual lesson about the price we pay when we force or coerce others to do our will. The price of enslaving others is that we become slaves ourselves. 

This is not just gamesmanship, flipping around the words of the Torah to get it to say whatever we want it to say. It is, rather, an act of love. The rabbis loved the Torah so much that they struggled to find meaning in it, even in the places where it seems harsh or difficult. 

We do the same thing with the people we love. When you love someone who has a difficult personality, you take extra pains to know that person more deeply, to understand the experiences that have shaped him or her so you can respond compassionately and with forgiveness, even when that person is being difficult. The Torah is like that, too. It was raised in an age when slavery was common, when men had tremendous power over women, and when most people had little control over their destiny. The Torah is shaped by those experiences. Because the rabbis loved the Torah, they probed it deeply to understand it and to read it compassionately as a text that brings deeper spirituality and meaning into life.

In our own day, we continue the process of interpreting the Torah. We don’t need to reject Torah to deal with its difficulties. In fact, we embrace the idea that Torah should be difficult. It should challenge us to find meaning in our lives. Life, we know, is not easy and we need to learn how to negotiate life’s challenges and hardships while maintaining our ability to find joy in it.

The purpose of the Torah is not to instruct us in what to do and what not to do. The purpose of the Torah is to force us to be mindful about what we are doing and to hold it up to a standard that does not originate out of our own heads. The Torah is about disciplining ourselves to recognize that our lives belong to something greater than ourselves, and to make us aware that the choices we make in life reflect that truth.

Rather than thinking of the Torah’s mitzvot as a kind of check list of things we have to do to please God (and things we have to refrain from doing), think of them instead as part of a conversation we are having with God. Like a good teacher, Torah does not want us to just memorize facts that will be on the test. Torah wants us to consider what we are doing, learn to assess our actions against our values, to find new meaning in our lives by brightening our spiritual dimension, and deepening our relationship with God by continuing the conversation. 

We don’t need to reject parts of the Torah, as the Pittsburgh Platform sought to do. We need to redefine it. 

The Torah is a the book of wisdom that God gave us as a wedding gift on the day we were married at Mount Sinai. It is a book that wants to be read joyfully. It wants to be read actively, so the reader will draw upon his or her own experience and wisdom to interpret it. It wants us to linger over each phrase to discover hidden treasures that help us to understand ourselves more deeply, even in the difficult parts. Torah gives us mitzvot, not to enslave us to a legal code, but to free us to discover who we really are. 

In this way, we discover the real reason why there are no distinctions in the Torah between the ethical, the ritual, the sensible and the inscrutable. All the mitzvot are there for us to savor and consider, to awaken us and to prepare us every day for the journey of life. The Torah is the song we sing, and the mitzvot are the path we walk, as we travel toward our purpose.

Shabbat shalom.



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