Shai Cherry
This week’s Torah portion is Mishpatim: Exodus 21:1 – 24:18
The plot of the Torah is not mysterious. It is not convoluted. It’s just easy to lose in the fascinating details that we rabbis, going back 2,000 years, tend to focus on.
Here’s the plot: God establishes a covenant with one man who becomes the father of Am Yisrael, the people of Israel. The people become political prisoners to an Egyptian tyrant, and God liberates them from slavery. God leads the people for forty years in the desert as they receive laws preparing them to enter the land of Canaan/Israel and create a just society, an anti-Egypt.
This week’s Torah portion, Mishpatim, presents us with the first batch of laws, and they begin with slavery. “Slavery” is the common translation, but if the law is to free the person after six years of labor, “indentured servant” may be a better translation. The Torah gives these indentured servants Shabbat off, and a generous severance package, and the Talmudic rabbis provide full medical benefits.
Our laws begin with slavery because we, the people of Israel, began in slavery. We were enslaved because we were vulnerable as immigrants without the protection of the law. The anti-Egypt we are to build forbids us from abusing the immigrant. More than that, the society we are to build demands we show love to the immigrant.
In Egypt, residents lost their wealth and property and were forced to permanently enslave themselves to Pharaoh. That can never happen, according to the Torah. In Israel, every seven years, debts are forgiven, and slaves are freed. Every 50 years, property that had been sold during that period is restored to the family.
In Egypt, the king is an absolute monarch. The only restraints on Pharaoh are his own morality, his own mind. That’s why I was marching in sub-zero temperatures in Minneapolis three weeks ago. As a rabbi, my first responsibility is to the safety of Am Yisrael, and no form of government has proven more catastrophic to Jews than Germany’s 20th-century version of absolute monarchy. I was marching against our nation’s lurch toward illiberalism.
The Torah envisions a constitutional monarch where the constitution is the Torah. The king is to write a Torah, read the Torah and rule by the Torah. The founding fathers of the United States of America envisioned a similar role for our Constitution.
It’s time to recover the plot. We must speak and act against this administration’s abuses of power, violations of due process, dehumanization of immigrants, suppression of free speech, disregard for the separation of powers and harassment and intimidation of news programs and media. If we do not, we risk losing much more than the plot.
There are several definitions of “politics” in the dictionary. Partisan politics, the policies that distinguish Democrats from Republicans, do not usually track onto Jewish law or values in an obvious way. For example, the Talmud is clear that there should be limits on the possession of lethal weapons — but what those limits should be today and to whom they should apply is not obvious. Those are the kinds of politics, partisan politics, that do not belong on the bimah.
The Torah and Jewish tradition give us guidelines about how to treat people in our communities, but not about immigration quotas. Just because we are commanded to show love to the immigrant once they’re here does not obligate us to invite them in. That is a policy question that does not belong on the bimah.
Other definitions of “politics,” such as values or structures of governance, are integral to the plot of the Torah. When we read the Torah from the bimah, those politics are literally on the bimah. Creating an anti-Egypt demands accountability from leaders. No absolute monarchs — no kings! Creating an anti-Egypt demands treating immigrants with kindness. And creating an anti-Egypt demands we extend a hand to folks who fall on hard times, not exploit their weakened condition to permanently impoverish and enslave them.
The Passover Haggadah demands that we see ourselves as though we came out of Egypt. That’s the mitzvah, more than any other, that ensures we recover the plot.
Shai Cherry is the rabbi at Congregation Adath Jeshurun in Elkins Park.
Thank you, Rav Shai, for composing in one clear and ringing voice the teachings of Torah, the morality of our prophetic voices of post biblical times, and the vision of our Founding Fathers. Clergy and others must not be silenced in reminding us of the big picture from the Bimah.