Jason Lever Sermon – 22nd Feb 2025 / 25th Sh'vat 5785

Mishpatim

This part of the Book of Exodus is often called the “Covenant Code” (Sefer ha-B’rit). This follows straight on from the Ten Commandments, which should actually be considered as an important preamble, necessary but not sufficient in themselves. More of that later.

We read the rules around slavery (or better described as serfdom), and laws addressing various types of injuries, such as grave punishments for disrespecting or striking one’s father or mother and dealing with instances of two parties quarrelling.

And we’ll be reading in the coming weeks about familiar themes of “an eye for an eye”, the forbidding of sorcery, the command not to oppress the stranger, right through to instructions for responsible neighbourliness and rules to promote civic harmony (such as, “When you encounter your enemy’s ox or ass wandering, you must take it back”). Who hasn’t done that in the last few weeks – well, perhaps a cat?

Rabbi Jonathan Magonet explains that while the Ten Commandments can be seen as ‘a kind of checklist against which to measure the state of our society’, these mishpatim or just laws in Exodus chapter 21 through to 23 ‘provide the basic rules for community life under God’.

Some Sages stress the proof text of the vital interrelationship of the Ten Commandments and this Code of laws lies in the first letter I leined at the very beginning of this Parasha – ‘vav’, meaning ‘and’. The whole sentence being, ‘And these are the laws that you [Moses] shall set before them’.

And so in our tradition, these are just as important as the Ten Commandments; they take our journey as a people forwards, and form ‘the basis of how they were to build their society’.

They’ve had the revelation at Mount Sinai and know they’re on an exhilarating yet also scary and challenging journey to the Promised Land, and the daunting prospect of creating and running their own society. God is preparing them by being clear on the expectations and boundaries, whilst during their wilderness trek encouraging them on how they’ll establish themselves in this new land of Canaan and prosper provided they play by these rules.

In broad terms, we can understand the covenant as being a two-way contract between us and the Divine. And rather than go into details of some of these many rules, I’d rather think about how such a covenant style approach lies behind how we live as Jews now.

For example, we can connect these Mishpatim to our approach to prayer. The mystical tradition of the Rabbis in Sfat in the 16th century (Sha’ar Hakavanot, 1572) wrote beautifully that we can prepare ourselves for prayer by saying, ‘Behold I accept myself the commandment to love my fellow as myself’ and I ‘have the intention to love every member of Am Israel like their own soul’. What we are being asked to do when we are together in this Beit Knesset (this house of gathering, assembly) is to cultivate ‘the love of friends who labour together in Torah, each one [of us] must conceive of themselves as if they were one limb of their fellow’.

I really like this. It is suggestive of that emblematic image in our faith that not just the Israelites of Biblical times but also all subsequent generations of Jews, stood/ stand before God at Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. An elision of past and present.

And these words evoke the reason we don’t just pray on our own, but are always encouraged to do so in assembly, with others – and so bring about ‘the love of friends who labour together in Torah’. This is Torah in the widest sense – not just about absorbing a shiur of the Rabbi or deciphering a dracha like this, but a way to enact or embody how we should live our lives in Jewish and wider society, steered by those mitzvot at Sinai (the commandments) and the mishpatim (rules to live by).

Coming back then to the mishpatim we learned today and will do so more in the coming weeks, what are the connections between that seemingly mixed bag of rules that I listed earlier? They would all seem, in one way or another, to be about restoring the relationship between neighbours, family and wider people when it has broken down because of conflict of some kind.

Rabbi Magonet takes this further and argues that they in fact ‘form the minimum basis of a shared commitment to justice on which positive relationships can be built’.

I don’t know about you, but when we could only join together in prayer in this Shul community through Zoom during the COVID period, while it was a great comfort to have any safe means to pray in a virtual community, yet the real connections only built up again when we met here. Checked in on each other before/ after the service. Could offer support face-to-face. Re-forge or make new personal relationships, all of which I think also drew more people to come regularly to Shul to see, feel, sense a unity of purpose in prayers for the health of the community. And more recently to have the safe space to commit our identity as Jews together with our Israeli cousins, in the especially tough climate since 2023.

It can be a very solitary and frustrating experience to read or hear about injustices on our radios, i-pads and in social media posts. The medium as much as the message can reinforce our own prejudices – make us stubbornly tribal to the loss of empathy and finding some common cause or even just toleration (not a fashionable attribute when identify politics can trump all – no pun intended).

There is something, I would suggest, supported by the Torah commentary and guide to our tefillah (praying) that we have reviewed, about how bringing us closer to putting into practice those Divine rules about how we should live with others is more likely to happen when we find those spaces to be together (in our house, in this kohel, our local neighbourhood, with wider society and across religions and nations).

With each other in sacred spaces.

Doing a local community or charity event.

Taking part in something Jewish cross-communal or interfaith.

Start small – let’s get more of these things, our relationships with our neighbours whomsoever they may be.

As we know from politics in this and other counties, and in world affairs, and not least within Israel within the Middle East, this becomes harder and harder once the ‘micro’ becomes ‘macro’ as the stage or forum for finding some common cause or compromise for the widest possible good under God’s guidance and through his Commandments and Mishpatim.

To end with two quotes from the Sages. ‘The world stands upon truth, justice and peace’, R. Shimeon ben Gamliel, under Roman occupation 1900 years ago.

We can but and should try. And in the spirit of what the Pirkei Avot (Saying of our Fathers) teaches us, ‘You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it’.

Shabbat Shalom.