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RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL:EXODUS 21:01 TO 24:18:PARASHA MISHPATIM:"LAW AND ORDER"
EXODUS 21:01 TO 24:18
RABBI ARTHUR L. SEGAL
"LAW AND ORDER"
There are many times when I remember to be proud of being Jewish and of
our vast traditions. Reading this parasha brings me to one of those
exceedingly proud moments. Only two or so months have passed after our
first Pesach, and we are taught by Moses rules of societal behavior in the
middle of the Sinai wilderness
As modern Jews we harken back to the original late 1800 Pittsburgh platform of the first liberal movement
making the ritual laws of ''man to God'' optional, but keeping and doing the
mitzvoth of the ''man to man'' laws. While debate is certainly open to whether one should or should not obligate him or herself in all of God's mitzvoth, there is no doubt that our anthromorphic mitzvoth were far ahead of their time. In an electric letter received from
Rabbi Fred Davidow of Atlanta, he states, "As a general rule, Reform
Judaism would consider all the mitzvoth involving ethics and morals to be
binding." This parasha is chock full of these ''man to man'' laws. Most of
them today, in one form or another, form the basis of Western
democracies. We as modern Jews therefore might do well to study this
portion carefully.
All of these laws today are studied and discussed in our Talmud. I urge
you to read through a tractate or two. Perhaps you will obtain the desire to study Talmud. You will see that
Judaism was always a living religion and a way of life subject to
interpretation and adaptability over time and place. Many of these pasuks
(verses) are discussed in volumes in our great rabbinic literature.
Questions pondered in the Gemora section of the Talmud are intense.
In Ex 21:23-24, does "life for a life, eye for an eye" mean that
literally or do we mean monetary compensation? In Ex 22:24, when the
Torah says we should not charge interest for our loans, and not to pay
interest on loans, is it "kosher" to invite your loan officer to your
home for dinner? If there are so many laws that have the death penalty
as punishment, why does the Talmud say that a court that issues a death
penalty more than once in seventy years is a "bloody" court?
Before one can even begin to understand these laws or to undertake an
acceptance of these man to man ethical laws, we need to ask "why." Why
"should" we do good to our fellow man? Why can't we steal if we can
overpower another? Why aren't our individual lives more important than
another's? The answer lies subtly in the parasha of last week,
specifically in the order of the Ten Utterances.
Before we can do good to our fellow man, we must accept God as the
creator and true judge of all. If good and evil are separated from God,
they become no more than personal opinion. We have seen too often in
history that God without ethics and ethics without God has led to evil.
So the first three commandments command us to know and love God.
In the 1,000-year-old text "Duties of the Heart," which reads as new today as
any self-help book, Rabbi Bachya Ibn Paquda, of Spain, develops his logical syllogism on
the belief in God as the creator of all. Hence we are all His children,
and by doing good with our trained hearts, we are doing God's will.
Without God, no act is holy. With God, all of our acts can be made holy
and can help us get closer to God and develop our own spirituality.
The fourth commandment is about Shabbat. It is a gift from God. Granted,
historically, we know that the Babylonians set aside special days of the
month on their lunar calendar (the 7th, 14th, 19th, 21st, and 28th
days). They could not cook foods, ride in a chariot, discuss work or
politics, reveal oracles, or heal the sick. These were not Shabbats, not
days of rest, but unlucky days to do the above mentioned tasks. If we do
not love and accept God, we will not accept this gift of our Jewish
Shabbat. And if we do not love ourselves to take time out for rest and
our OWN soul's nourishment, how can we love another and do good for
another?
The fifth commandment is to honor our parents.
Can a person with self-hate, who doesn't believe in God,
truly honor his mother and father? And can a
person, who has no love for his parents, truly love strangers and see
them as brothers and sisters of the same Holy Parent? Is this why these first
five commandments are presented before the last five, which deal with
relations between man and man?
Rabbi Samson Hirsh, a Frankfurt nineteenth-century scholar (and no friend
of the German Reform movement), wrote that Torah (tav, vav, reish, hey)
comes from the root word "to conceive" (hey, reish, hay). He says that the goal
of Torah is to plant God's words in our minds and hearts so that we can
cultivate them and manifest them in our good deeds. He says we must
accept God outwardly and bring Him inside of us so that we can produce
good deeds outside. He was in battle with the ethical humanists of his
time, who cast off God given proscribed behaviors, and wanted to develop
moralistic personalities from inside.
The role of Mishpat, from our parasha Mishpatem, is the performance of
justice. The performance of justice is not just a divine occupation. The
world without justice (tzaddakah) is rebelling against what Locke called
Natural Law. When we perform acts of justice, we become a partner with
God in doing Tikun Olam (repairing the world). We therefore are all
elohim (dispensers of justice). "Every judge who judges with complete
fairness even for a single hour, is as though he had become a partner to
the Holy One, in Creation" (Talmud Bavli Tractate Shabbat 10A).
When we do good deeds to our fellow man, and follow the ethics in the
Torah that we as liberal Jews embrace, we help bring the Shechinah (God's holy Presence) into
the world, a Midrash teaches. Man has the capability of bringing the
divine presence of God into each of our hearts by treating our fellow
humans justly and with love.
The writers of the Kabbalah (Isaac Luria et al.), described ten sefirot
(countings, levels) of God's nature that if would be nice if we achieved
for ourselves. The sefirah of judgment (din), also called gevurah
(power), represents the fearsome powers of divine punishment and wrath in
the world. This power, it is posited, is needed to maintain control over
the universe. This power also contains the seeds of demonic evil, also
known as the "other side" (sitra ahra). God's name when He dispenses din
is Elohim. It appears on the left side of the kabbalistic "map." The
sefirah of chesed (loving kindness or compassion or love), also called
gedullah (greatness) ,represents the generous, benevolent side of God,
best shown in man by Abraham. God is known as El or El elyon when he
shows chesed, and this trait appears on the right side in kabbalistic
terms. Luria says there are seventy-two bridges of chesed.
The right side represents attributes of chakmah (wisdom), chesed (love),
and nezah (eternity), while the left side represents binah
(understanding), din (justice), and hod (glory). We can see how the left
side without balance from the right can lead to evil, while the right
side without the left can lead to weakness.
Wisdom seeking, like a cave-dwelling monk without real life understanding,
is not a Jewish concept. Knowledge without wisdom can lead to disaster. Too much mercy without
justice leads to anarchy, while too much justice without mercy leads to
totalitarianism. The middle column brings us tiferet (beauty) with a
strong foundation (yesod) , leading to a divine crown (keter), and a
oneness with the Godhead, the Ein Sof, the Unknowable Infinite. This
middle represents the ideal balance of mercy and justice. This harmony
the Kabbala teaches is important for the survival of the universe.
The beauty of this week's parasha is in its combining of everyday
societal problems with a relationship with God. Judaism takes the
everyday and makes it holy. We take what some religions consider profane
and make it divine. The Talmud teaches that it is a sin to be offered a
new fruit you have never tasted before and refuse it. Our religion
glorifies relations between husband and wife. And we make holy our
relationships with one another, when we truly are a Keneset Yisroel, the
people of Israel, the children of the One God.
We need, as the saying goes, to think globally but to act locally.
Let's keep our eyes on our own
behaviors instead of judging our fellow congregants, officers, rabbis, and cantors, and
let's work to make our own temples, shuls, and synagogues places where
the Shechinah would be happy to dwell.
Shabbat Shalom,
RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL
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RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL:EXODUS 18:01 TO 20:23:PARASHA YITRO:"RECLAMATION+REVELATION"
EXODUS 18:01 TO 20:23
DR ARTHUR SEGAL
"RECLAMATION AND REVELATION"
Imagine, if you will, a movie trailer advertisement that yells loudly at
you as your popcorn flies into your lap:"Coming in Technicolor---Charleton
Heston staring as Moses in "JETHRO"!!!! This week's parasha takes the
children of Israel to Mt. Sinai for the Revelation, the giving of the Ten
Commandments and Torah. Yet the portion is not named after these Ten
Utterances, but after Moses' father-in-law, Jethro, a Midianite priest.
Our rabbis teach that God chose the wilderness of Sinai to reveal Torah
so that no one nation could say "Torah was given in OUR country," so it
is fitting in this regard that this Torah portion was named after a
person who was not a "member of the tribe."
Our rabbis also teach that all of the 613 commandments given in the Torah
all stem from one or more of the Big Ten. Even the law against gossiping
is said to be stealing a man's reputation and actually murdering him. Of
the 613 mitzvoth, most cannot be performed today as there is no Holy
Temple, and many other mitzvoth are only valid in the original territories of the
twelve tribes or if the Sanhedrin (Jewish court) has jurisdiction. (The
Sanhedrin has not functioned fully since the Roman conquest.) As individuals we
need to reclaim the revelation for ourselves so that we can perform those
mitzvoth that help us remember to adhere to the Ten Commandments, via a path of Jewish Spiritual Renewal.
The universality of our religion was promoted by our prophets and our Talmudic rabbis. By their
time, no longer was God thought of as the tribal protector-judge of
Israel. Our teachings, in part, were co-opted by Christianity and Islam.
Maimonides stated that the popularity of Christianity and Islam are part
of God's plan to spread the ideals of Torah throughout the world. The Ten
Commandments move society closer to a perfected state of morality and
toward a greater understanding of God. Western law and democracy finds
its roots in Torah.
This premise leads to some interesting conclusions as we are now into the
third Gregorian millennium. In a thought-provoking article in Tikkun
Magazine (Nov.-Dec. 1999), Rabbi Rami Shapiro, of Miami's Temple Beth Or
and director of the Shema Center for Jewish Mediation makes five points,
which I have elaborated or amended.
1. We need to stop thinking in terms of Jews and "non-Jews." We must
cease defining people by what they are not and begin to understand them
for what they are. There are Hindus, secularists, Muslims, Buddhists,
Christians, atheists, etc. And we need to stop labeling them as non-Jews,
Gentiles, or worse yet "goyem."
2. We need as Jews to remember as we read this Torah portion that we all
stood at Mt. Sinai when God declared us to be a holy, set aside, people.
God did not command us to be Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, or
Reconstructionist. We need to direct our energies away from labeling each
other and away from denominational competition. We need to focus on what
we have in common and not on man-made walls and rules that keep us apart.
There are two types of Jews: serious and not serious. Serious Jews, Rabbi
Shapiro continues, range from the most halachic to the most humanist. We
share a love of a commitment to Jewish civilization, the basics of which
we read in this week's Torah portion.
3) We need to develop a similar service and liturgy that brings us closer
to God and not puts us into a paper chase to read every last prayer in a
rushed and non-meaningful way. Talmud Berachot makes it very clear that
Kavenah (spiritual concentrated intention and attention) is the most important
element of prayer and that an abbreviated version of prayer said in one's
vernacular is more meaningful than a rushed full prayer said in a
language one does not understand. We need to create a new liturgy that
opens us to God in our prayers and to each other as a united, loving,
caring community.
4. We need, to quote Rabbi Shapiro, "to mainstream the mystical." There
are three fundamental aspects to Judaism: culture, ethics, and spirituality.
For the past fifty years, Rabbi Shapiro posits, we have emphasized the
first often at the expense of the last. One no longer has to be Jewish to
enjoy Levy's Rye Bread, but we as Jews have failed to make Jewish
practice compelling. We must reclaim the inner life of Judaism and speak
to our souls in a powerful and mystical way. We need to recapture the
feeling Abraham had when he prayed to God and not let the walls that we
built over the millennia keep us from God. By living spiritually and
walking humbly with God, as our prophet Micah suggested, and remembering
what was taught in this week's parasha, we will not only be good to
ourselves, but also to our community, and our society. Tikkun olam,
repairing the world, can really only begin when we repair our own souls.
5. Last, when we read Parasha Yitro, we must remember the light we were
(and still are) and were meant to be to the other nations. We need to
reclaim Yeshu the Jew, as opposed to Jesus the Christ. Let's face it,
Yeshu is the most influential Jew of all time. We have allowed the
horrors done to us (and others) in his name to prevent us from claiming
him as one of our own. Yeshu was a first-century Jewish mystic, reformer,
and even a healer. We need to understand not the religion about
Jesus, but our OWN religion, which was the religion of Yeshu.
So many of the things that are originally Jewish, but that the Church
does well, we as Jews shy away from as "non-Jewish or goyish." We, as
Jews, need to develop healing services. We need to have mitzvah or ahavath
chesed committees to help the rabbi do his work within our community the
way churches have pastoral committees. When disaster strikes, let our
shuls be open to provide shelter and food. This is not just a
Christian-thing, this is a Jewish-thing.
So, to close, as we listen to the Torah read this Shabbat let us
individually and communally vow to personalize the Revelation, and
reclaim Spiritual Judaism for our use and for our doing all that is truly Jewish and be renewed.
Shabbat Shalom,
RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL
Overheard at a local retirement community : One mitzvah can change the world, two will exhaust you.
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