Mishpatim

Mishpatim – Jonah Steinberg

Jonah Steinberg is Director of Talmudic Studies at the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College, in Boston, and a founder of the Open Bet Midrash Initiative.

"‘These are the statutes that you shall place before them' (Exodus 21:1) - array them before them like a laid table." (Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 35a)   "Even that which a veteran student will, in the future, innovate before his master was already said to Moses at Sinai." (Jerusalem Talmud, Peah, 17b)  

Old friendships renewed amid the kaleidoscopic bustle of Limmud took me back to, among other places, the Ashkenazi synagogue in Jerusalem's Yemin Moshe, and a time of consolidating my own Jewish adulthood.  The elderly gentleman who designated leaders for each morning's prayers there, would ask, in Talmudic idiom, "Would you be prepared to pass before the ark on our behalf?"  In the same, formal manner, he always asked a second, and a third time, assuming rabbinic propriety in one's demure and hesitation.  He had been a fighter in the days of settlement and early independence.  Now devoted to constant learning, he seemed to reside at his corner table under the window, always poring over his Gemara.  To be included by him, to recognize and answer his ritual greetings, to respond to his knowing queries about one's own sacred studies, conferred a sense of unimpeachable belonging and authenticity in this shtibel nestled in the comfortable alleyways overlooking the Old City.  I fell into an easy rhythm of starting my days in the synagogue.

It was the year of my egalitarian awakening.  Invited by a dear new friend and host to give the first in a series of Divrei Torah by young people in the synagogue, it somehow occurred to me to ask whether young women would be included as well among the speakers.  The community was not ready for that, was the answer - and, somewhat surprised at my own principled self-alienation, I found myself embarked overtly on the paradoxical adventure of the progressive-traditionalist, the religious free-thinker, trading easy admittance in the assured harmonies of long-established traditions, in the time-worn chambers of the holy city, for a world of exploratory gatherings, rough-hewn, risky, and often amateurish liturgical forays in apartments and schoolrooms.  Moments of the sublime, the coin of the surrounding realm, seemed less in circulation in those places, but perhaps were all the more precious for being hard won and shining with new hints of redemption.  (I don't mean to comment on present-day progressive options in Jerusalem - anyhow, there were far fewer then.) 

An interpretive reading of Jeremiah 33:25 (in the haftara (weekly reading from the Prophets) of Mishpatim) yields: "If My covenant did not abide, day and night, I would not have established the laws of heaven and earth."  From the very first midrash of Genesis Rabbah (collection of traditional rabbinic narratives), and onward, we are taught that Torah is fundamental to the fabric of the cosmos, a linchpin, even a blueprint of creation.  A corresponding interpretation of a seemingly contrary teaching, that commandments will cease to exist in the world to come, suggests that Torah will be instinctive to Jews of the redeemed age - no longer experienced as commands, but as second, or rather first nature.  Does that mean that we will have finally relinquished our obstinate subjectivity and will have submitted unquestioningly to revealed law?  Or are there other ways in which we can imagine Torah coming finally to be what our hearts really mean? 

Toward my departure from that year in Jerusalem, I returned one morning to the neighborhood synagogue.   From the corner table, over a volume of Gemara, came the kindly observation, "You don't honour us in the mornings so much as you used to."  How to explain my absence to this iconic presence?   Months before, I might have said that this man's approbation represented the legitimacy I had come to Jerusalem to find.  I decided to risk honesty - foolhardy, I thought, but I was leaving anyhow.  I anticipated anger, as elsewhere, or, at best, dismissal.  I could not have been more surprised by his reply, or better reminded that the world is a far more rich and wondrous place than often we imagine.  "Ah - I understand.  On that, we need a new Talmud; we need a new Order of Women in the six orders of the Mishnah; on these matters, we need a new Shulchan Arukh (standard legal code, 16th century).  Perhaps your generation will write it for us."