Parshah Commentary

This week’s parshah, Mishpatim, opens with a jarring turn from the sublime to the mundane. Last week, in Parshat Yitro, we read about the revelation at Mount Sinai, arguably the most awe-inspiring moment in the Hebrew Bible. Our parshah, though, begins with a set of laws governing the acquisition of Hebrew slaves. It is hard to imagine a more abrupt and deflating transition. The Jewish people have just been liberated from slavery in Egypt—an exodus that leads to their theophanic encounter. It’s a moment which generations of commentators have understood as a paradigmatic mystical experience. But instead of continuing this heightened scene or even gradually transitioning back into the quotidian, the Torah suddenly instructs the people in the proper procedures for enslaving their fellow Israelites—for committing the monstrous crime from which they suffered for generations in Egypt, and for which the Egyptians were brutally punished.

Perhaps this abrupt turn should not be understood as a letdown, but rather as a necessary intervention to ensure that the Israelites’ mystical experience does not untether them from morality. Because of mysticism’s emphasis on directly experiencing ultimate truth beyond conventional modes of perception and conduct, including boundaries between ethical and unethical behavior, it can be easily weaponized to disregard or even justify the most harmful interpersonal activity. This is attested to across religious and cultural contexts, as in the all-too-common predations of spiritual teachers on their students, or the fact that many of the most violent and fanatical Jewish supremacists in Israel/Palestine, such as Yitzchak Ginsburgh and his followers, are also some of contemporary Judaism’s most avowed mystics.

It therefore would have been reasonable to worry that the visceral experience of God at Mount Sinai might have caused the Israelites to fall into a triumphalist understanding of their religious task, according to which their direct access to God allows them to transcend moral concerns. Against the potential hubris that comes from experiencing such proximity to the divine, Mishpatim intrudes on the Israelites’ sublime encounter by imposing a detailed legal code to govern, and thus mediate, their relationships with God and with each other. The choice to interrupt revelation specifically with laws regulating slavery seems designed to prevent the Israelites from imagining that their capacity for transgression is different than that of any other nation, or that their mystical encounter with God exempts them from behaving in line with God’s vision of justice. Because even though the Torah, troublingly, permits slavery, it strictly limits it, turning the institution into something closer to indentured servitude with a required end date.

One classical midrash notes the limits the Torah puts on slavery to draw a contrast between Egyptian slavery and the way the Israelites are commanded to behave. In emphasizing this comparison, the midrash interprets the opening of Mishpatim as a warning to the Israelites that if they violate the parshah’s laws governing interpersonal conduct, “God will do to them what God did to Egypt.” The particular covenant between God and the Jewish people, according to which they were freed from Egypt to receive the Torah, does not grant them any leniency regarding ethical behavior. If anything, our parshah suggests that the opposite is true: that the Israelites’ mystical encounter with divinity heightens their moral responsibility. Just as the Israelites experienced a collective revelation at Sinai, so too is their moral responsibility shared. This is evident in the commandment from Mishpatim, the most frequently repeated injunction in the Torah: “You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not mistreat any widow or orphan. If you do mistreat them, I will heed their outcry as soon as they cry out to Me.” The 12th-century commentator Ibn Ezra notes that the verbs in these verses are inconsistent in grammatical number: the first usage of “mistreat” is plural, while the second is singular. He interprets this to mean that when it comes to ethical behavior, individual and collective responsibilities are intertwined; all Jews share moral culpability for the harms they see others causing.

Ibn Ezra’s underlying argument, according to which the entire Jewish people is one unified body vis-à-vis their ethical obligations, is not dissimilar from the rabbinic understanding that the entire Jewish people, as one, received God’s direct revelation. This idea—that the many can fuse into one, and mortal consciousness can merge with divinity—exemplifies the mystical nature of the Israelites’ experience at Sinai. Mishpatim, with its legalistic interruption of this narrative, and Ibn Ezra, with his extension of that narrative to the structure of ethical obligation, make the implicit claim that mystical experience must not be isolated from commitment to a moral code. In this we find a corrective to two seemingly different contemporary trends: on the one hand, those progressive meditators and psychedelic journeyers who prioritize their pursuit of spiritual experience over the day-to-day ethical cultivation that Mishpatim demands, and, on the other, the militant mystics who commit violence in part because their experiences of encountering divinity make them believe they are above moral concerns.

By imposing these strict moral demands, the Torah reminds us that the revelation it describes makes us no better and no worse than any other people. We too have the capacity to enslave and oppress, to victimize others in the same ways we have been victimized, and, in response to that fact, we must put limits on our power. In other words, the Torah is committed to making sure that we do not pursue sublime religious states at the expense of mundane moral commitments. Instead, we are directed to integrate prosaic ethical practices into the peak moments of our religious lives, and in turn let those peak moments enliven our moral obligations.

Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.