Parshiot for February / March


24 / 25 February – 28 / 29 Shevat (MISHPATIM)


Exodus 21: 1 to 24: 18


This week’s Torah portion, as the name suggests, elucidates a number of laws to be kept by the Jewish people as a sign and practice of the covenant between them and their god. It notably contains the famous exhortation to repay “eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise”, yet there is no indication that this was ever taken or implemented literally – from the earliest days of Jewish nationhood the consensus opinion was that monetary compensation should be made for each type of wound and that the Torah’s strict equation of one thing with another of its kind was only meant to remind us that no more should be demanded than what is necessary. Yet it is clear that the motivation for such a symbolic interpretation could only have been an aversion to a literal application, showing that even before the advent of the Reform movement and its insistence on the mutability of Jewish law, the sages could not bring themselves to apply even biblical law in a way which – rightly or wrongly – ran counter to the demands of their natural sensitivity and human predisposition toward compassion. In that sense Jewish law has always been a co-creation by both man and God, the only question being how much each is willing to cede to the other in terms of how our world should be shaped. (The haftarah for the special SHABBAT SHEKALIM is II Kings 12: 5 to 16 and recalls the collection of money during the reign of King Jehoash for maintenance of the Temple, speaking exactly to the necessary role of man in the ongoing work of the world’s sanctification).


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