This week’s parshah is Mishpatim (Exodus 21:1-24:18). Mishpatim are judgments, or ordinances, or rules. I hadn’t ever noticed it before, but the Ten Commandments is the point at which the Torah shifts from being a collection of stories about people to being a collection of commandments. Not that there aren’t stories all through, but the stories from this point on punctuate the laws, which are the bulk of it. This, of course, means that my task is much, much harder. For those Gentle Readers who haven’t been following along, my task is to choose something in the parshah and ask what it would be like if it had gone differently.
I took as my question an odd moment at the end of the parshah. In 24:3-4, Moses tells the people all of the words of the Lord and all the judgments, and then writes them down. It’s not clear what “all the words of the Lord and all the judgments” is referring to, and there is a good deal of rabbinic disagreement. Rashi says that Moses reads the Torah from the beginning through 24:4, that is, he brings them up to the current moment. Other say that he only reads them chapters 21-24, that is, the mishpatim in parshah Mishpatim. Still others say that he hands down at that time the entire Torah, including those parts that describe things that hadn’t happened yet. I’m inclined, here, to go with Rashi, but mostly out of fondness for the old Frog than actual persuasiveness of his decision.
Anyway, if that’s what happens, then the major shift in subject and style that I mentioned in the first paragraph above is the decision made by Moses in the second paragraph above. And he could have done it differently. He could, f’r’instance, have said “Here’s a book of the history of the people of Israel, from the creation of the earth to the present moment. And here, in my other hand, is a book of laws.” Making the book of laws part of the book of stories, and the book of stories part of the book of laws, was a choice, and not an obvious one. In this country, for instance, we have history books, and we have law books. Even the Bible Stories book I read to my Perfect Non-Reader is a history book and not a law book, and that’s not just because I chose one suitable for young ears. What would have been different if instead of five books of mixed history and law, we had one book of history and one of law?
One thing that occurred to me after the end of the short and listless discussion was if there are law books and history books, then there are lawyers and historians. We just have rabbis. It’s not possible to study Jewish Law without studying the history as well, nor to study the (scriptural) history without studying the law. Now that I’m typing, I realize that it also gives the history the force of law. And the two lend each other an unvarying aspect that makes each stronger.
An occasional attendee said to me afterwards something like “The more I study the Torah, the more I’m in awe of whoever put it together. If you believe it’s Gd, then that’s easy, because you are already in awe of Gd. But if you believe that people did it, you have to really be in awe of those people.”
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.