Thoughts on Parashat Mishpatim 5786
“These are the ordinances (mishpatim) that you shall set before them…” (Exodus 21:1)
Rabbi Menachem Mirski
The parasha opens with a quiet but seismic shift. After the thunder of Sinai, after the revelation of the Ten Commandments—those absolute, unshakable truths—God does not move on to philosophy or poetry. He moves to mishpatim: concrete, practical laws about damages, theft, slaves, strangers, justice in the marketplace, protection of the vulnerable. These are not suggestions. They are not “my truth versus your truth.” They are the architecture of a just society, built on the assumption that good and evil are real, that right and wrong can be known, and that a people who have tasted horror have a sacred duty to remember it.
Western societies—protected by courts, police, armies, and the invisible scaffolding of prosperity—have created a miracle: most of us have never seen a man killed, never been robbed at knifepoint, never hidden in a basement while shells fell. We experience violence almost exclusively through screens. And the result, as you say, is a kind of moral softening. A relativism that treats every value as negotiable, every absolute as suspect, every evil as “context-dependent.” The burden of proof has been flipped: those who believe in objective good and evil must now justify themselves, while those who say “it’s all relative” are simply being sophisticated.
The data from moral psychology (Jonathan Haidt, Paul Bloom, and others) and from history (the writings of survivors of the Gulag, the Holocaust, Rwanda, Syria) backs this out: people who have lived through extreme evil tend to see moral categories more sharply. They do not speak in abstractions. They speak from the experience of blood and fire. The rest of us, cushioned by safety, often speak in nuance until the moment the fire reaches us.
But the Torah, in Parashat Mishpatim, refuses to accept this as inevitable. It offers a path forward.
The Torah’s Diagnosis
Right in the middle of the civil laws, the Torah inserts a commandment that seems almost out of place:
“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:20)
And again, a few verses later:
“You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 23:9)
Why repeat it? Because the Torah knows exactly what you describe: a people who have not experienced oppression will forget what it feels like. They will begin to relativize the pain of others. The only antidote is to transplant the memory of the extreme into the heart of the next generation.
The Jewish people did not receive these laws in a vacuum. They had just come out of four hundred years of slavery—whips, infanticide, dehumanization. The generation that stood at Sinai knew evil in their bones. And God’s response was not to say, “Now that you’re safe, relax your standards.” It was to say: Now that you’re safe, engrave the memory so deeply that your grandchildren, who will never taste the whip, will still feel it in their souls.
Two Answers from the Parasha
1. Ritualized, Repeated Re-experiencing of the Extreme
The first answer is zakhor—remembrance as a technology of the soul. The Torah does not leave the memory of slavery to chance or to personal storytelling. It builds it into the calendar, the seder, the daily prayers, the very rhythm of Jewish life.
Passover is not a history lesson. It is a re-enactment. We eat bitter herbs. We lean like free people who remember being broken. We tell the story as if we were there. The Haggadah is blunt: “In every generation, a person must see himself as if he himself came out of Egypt.”
This is the Jewish genius: to take the wisdom of the traumatized and make it vicarious but visceral. We do not need every Jew to survive a pogrom. We need every Jew to taste the matzah of affliction and feel, for one week a year, what it means to be hunted.
In our time, we must expand this technology. We must tell the stories of October 7th, of the Holocaust, of Soviet Jewry, of the Ethiopians airlifted from famine and war—not as distant history, but as our family trauma. We must bring survivors and witnesses into our schools, our synagogues, our Shabbat tables. Not to traumatize the young, but to immunize them against moral softness.
2. Laws That Force Moral Muscle-Building
The second answer is embedded in the very structure of Mishpatim. The laws are not abstract. They are embodied. When a master strikes his slave and the slave loses an eye, the slave goes free (Exodus 21:26-27). When you see your enemy’s donkey collapsing under its load, you must help unload it—even if you hate the owner (Exodus 23:5). These laws take the raw material of human selfishness and force it into the shape of justice.
The Torah understands that moral clarity is not only taught; it is practiced. In a society that protects us from extremes, we must create mini-extremes of ethical demand: tzedakah that hurts, hospitality that costs, truth-telling when it’s inconvenient, standing up for the weak when it’s unpopular.
The greatest danger is not that we will face evil. The greatest danger is that when evil comes—and it always does—we will lack the moral categories to name it.
Parashat Mishpatim ends with the ratification of the covenant. Moses reads the book of the covenant to the people. They answer: Na’aseh v’nishma—We will do, and we will understand.
They did not say, “Let us first understand, then we will do.” They committed to action first. Because moral clarity is not primarily a matter of the intellect. It is a matter of will.
So here is the task for our generation: to be the bridge between those who have seen the fire and those who have only read about it. To take the wisdom of the scarred and make it the inheritance of the sheltered. Not by making everyone suffer—God forbid—but by refusing to let suffering be forgotten.
If we can do that, then perhaps when the next test comes—and it will come—we will not be surprised by evil.
We will recognize it.
And we will know what to do.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Mirski
The Rabbi Mirski Show on Youtube: Dive into the world of Judaism and the stories that shape our lives with Rabbi Mirski. From faith and tradition to the latest in politics, each episode challenges, inspires, and sparks conversation you won’t want to miss! https://www.youtube.com/@therabbimirskishow
Leave a Reply