Do you know that feeling when you're reading through news headlines or a social media feed and the topic keeps changing? This sensation of the "cognitive whiplash" of photos of new babies interspersed with updates on the Coronavirus and news of pardons coming out of the White House was shockingly similar to the feeling I got when I read this week's Torah portion, Mishpatim.
The word Mishpatim means "laws," an apt description for this seeming hodge-podge of a parsha. Following last week's account of receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, the text takes us on a whirlwind tour of laws and statutes on a variety of topics including damages and liability, honest testimony, capital punishment, punishment and restitution for theft, and sorcery. For our #TorahMeme this week, I imagined this week's parsha, Mishpatim, taking the Dolly Parton Meme Challenge.
Some of these laws and statutes leave us feeling "warm and fuzzy" and proud to be the inheritors of Torah and Jewish tradition (for example: [Ex. 22:20] You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress them, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.). Others, however, feel at best irrelevant and at worst ashamed of the acts of an inherited guilt from our ancestors (for example: [When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and s/he dies there and then, s/he must be avenged. But if s/he survives a day or two, s/he is not avenged, since s/he is the other's property]). What do we do with such a parsha - and by extrapolation, with Torah as a sacred text?
Do we pick and choose the pieces with which we resonate? If so, how do we pick, and what do we do with the other pieces? What does it look like to do this with integrity? How does this intersect with the conversation of our texts as holy or sacred?
What do we do with the pieces of the text that challenge our values - or directly contradict them? Do we ignore, brush under the rug, or make historical excuses? Do we face them, name our historical and inherited responsibility for them, and work to make amends through our work to promote justice? Does every generation have atonement and reparation to make?
There is a text from the Talmud (TB Taanit 16a) that begins to invite us to seek an answer:
"What is the meaning of And let them turn, every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands (Jonah 3:8)? Shmuel said,'Even if one stole a beam and built it into his building one must tear down the entire building and return the beam to its owner.'
Similarly, Rav Adda bar Ahava said, 'To what is a person who has committed a transgression and confesses it but does not repent for the is sin compared? To a person who holds an impure object in their hand while immersing in a mikvah (ritually purifying bath). For even if that person immerses in all of the waters of the world, the immersion is ineffective. However, once that person throws it away and has immersed in even the smallest mikvah, the immersion is immediately effective.'
As it is stated One who covers their transgressions shall not prosper, but whoever confessses and forsakes them shall find mercy (Proverbs 28:13). And it states elsewhere, Let us lift up our heart with our hands to God in heaven (Lamentations 3:41)."