But what I don’t usually tell people because it’s too personal perhaps, is this idea expressed in the Talmud in Berachot 6a and b, that God is found between. Between two people studying and between three judges judging and between ten people in a minyan praying. What I mean by this is that on a desert island, I can experience God and transcendence, but only in community do I experience the joys of a system with a particular calendar, language and tradition. So, God is in-between us in a minyan, here today. No one person owns it alone. It’s a lot to explain to someone who asks me casually why I come to shul every week.
Last week, we read the ten commandments in the parasha. The moment of the encounter at Sinai. There was thunder, lightning, and a peak moment of connection with God. Moses was up the mountain. Today we are down to earth with a thud, in the parasha called Mishpatim. The laws or mitzvot. We are in between, in between the peak of Sinai and the everyday laws of Mishpatim.
Mishpatim is the parsha with the second most number of laws among all the 54 parashot. Most of the laws of Mishpatim are ethical living spelled out, and there are also laws that are purely ritual laws mixed in too. Those laws are sometimes called cultic regulations, or they are dismissed as ceremonial laws. In Mishpatim, all these laws are included. It’s not either or, it’s both.
For example, right in the middle of civil legislation, Mishpatim mentions: 1. the laws of Shabbat. 2. three pilgrimage festivals. 3. Bringing first fruits to the Temple, 4. Not boiling a kid in its mother’s milk 5. How to do sacrifices properly.
What is the point of the torah’s particularist rituals here? I want to make a case that this is an essential part of our story.
Those strange Torah cultic laws are what make us Jewish today. Those laws are later refined and changed and sometimes squeezed out entirely through the process of the Mishnah, the Talmud, the Shulchan Aruch and responsa until today. Today we are rabbinic Jews within a living system that still breathes life into all of us in some way. That’s what I love about our tradition. It’s the part that makes us different to everyone else. The weirdness of being Jewish in a non-Jewish world. That we go to shul on Saturday, or that we light candles and eat challah on Friday night or that we refuse to eat a cheeseburger or still celebrate Pesach despite the Temple being long gone. We can feel it in our kishkes. We do it and then we think of why we do it.
So what actually makes us Jewish now, what puts that feeling in our kishkes, or in our children’s kishkes? Many Jews might answer, we ca ne proud of our glorious ethical laws. Care for the vulnerable. Protection of the stranger. Justice in the courts. Mishpatim certainly teaches that. In fact, over and over, the Torah reminds us: You shall love the ger or stranger as you love yourself. But ethics alone does not make us uniquely Jewish.
Ethics, Justice and Compassion are universal, or at least I wish they were. And if Judaism was only a moral message, we could/should insist on it loudly. We might sometimes think if we say it loud enough, maybe the world would give us a seat at the table, when they see how good we are. ‘We are just like you’ we cry. ‘In fact, our rule is we love the stranger as we love ourselves.’ But if that was truly our only rule, we would also gradually dissolve into the wider moral culture around us. Maybe that’s because we as Jews don’t love ourselves enough as Jews. Ethics are necessary. But they are not enough to sustain us past one generation. How do we love being Jewish, and teach our children to love being Jewish?
Have you heard the question asked by many post Holocaust theologians: ‘is Jewish life centred around Sinai or Auschwitz?’ Today the question would be: is Jewish identity centred around Gaza or Sinai? But if that’s the central organising event of Jewish life, then Jewish life is defined by antisemitism and fear, and not love of being Jewish, of Jewish joy and of pride.
I think there’s another orientation, and that’s in the parasha today. It’s in the in between space, between the transcendence of Sinai and the everyday rules of Mishpatim, and more than that, between the ethically grounded laws of mishpatim and the particular ritual ones. Mishpatim suggests that what sustains Jewish life is not choosing between ethics and ritual but binding them together. What makes us Jewish now is not just that we imagine our ancestors once shared a moment at Sinai. It’s a way of understanding our shared practise today and loving what makes us different.
Here are some examples. We have all come to shul this particular day that we call Shabbat. Our homes that have mezuzot on our doors, look different to the homes of our neighbours. We all give tzedakah, feeling automatically obligated. We know many of the words to the same tefillot today, and we know when to bounce three times on our heels even when we’re not sure why. We feel like we ourselves were liberated from Egypt. We plan our Pesach seders and sing Chad Gadya to the tunes of our childhood. We taste the bitter maror, and the sweet haroset that our hands can make without looking up the recipe on the internet. I particularly love Friday nights when I bless my particular children, and I know they love that moment too.
Yes, transcendence is wonderful, but it is by nature universal and can be felt lots of places like in Mozart’s requiem and in the poems of Mary Oliver. But there is also wonder and love of ourselves to be felt, in the particular in between small moments of Jewish life.
Jewish life today is not sustained by catastrophe. Not Auschwitz. Not Gaza. Not antisemitism, and not even Sinai alone. People can’t build a future on trauma. And it can’t live forever at the peak of revelation.
So where is Jewish life actually centred? Perhaps it is here, in Mishpatim. It is not either/or. It is in the inbetween. In between the universal and the particular. In between the lovely stories and the strange laws. In the shared structures we understand that make community possible. It is not dramatic and big, it’s small and particular.
We are heirs to a tradition that refused to choose between ethics and ritual, between personal transcendence and group responsibility. We obeyed and then we understood.
Here we are together, living in that in-between space between what’s going on in our own heads and in each other’s heads... Shema Israel Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad.
Never mind encountering God at Sinai, this is why I come to shul. Together between ten of us showing up to pray on this particular Shabbat morning and listening to each other is where God is always now.
