Over the past two weeks, I had the pleasure and privilege of teaching the eleventh grade Life-Cycle Seminar at Maimonides. In our study of "A Life in Full," our first session focused on Jewish birth rituals and blessings, as well as end-of-life practices and contemplations. We studied how our tradition asks – both prospectively at the beginning of life and retrospectively at its end – "What makes a worthy life?" And we investigated how Chazal envision the Jewish life course – that is, which milestones and markers help chart the worthy life.
We explored the Jewish lifecourse through the multiple dimensions of different bein adam le- relationships: with Hashem, with other people, with oneself, and with one's society, people, and world. We focused particularly on marriage and family, discussing the relationship between spouses, parents and children, and the place of family within the fabric of society. All our sessions were grounded in interactive Torah text study. Not surprisingly, our Maimonides juniors were vocally participatory, exquisitely thoughtful, creatively insightful, and demonstrated that a Maimonides education has equipped them with the text-study skills to plumb the depths of Torah she'bichtav u'ba'al peh and connect halachic particularities to their underlying Jewish values.
The first pasuk in this coming week's parsha echoes my experience teaching the junior seminar. The parsha begins: Ve'elah ha'mishpatim asher tasim lifneihem, "And these are the mishpatim you shall place before them." (Shemot 21:1) Three questions arise: - Why the connective vav – "And these are…"?
- What is the meaning of mishpatim?
- Why "you shall place before them," instead of the more common "you shall speak to them"?
Here are some answers to consider:
Why the connective vav? Because Parshat Yitro presented the kelalim – the general principles of how to create the good society (i.e. Aseret ha'Dibrot, the Ten Commandments) given at Har Sinai – and now Parshat Mishpatim articulates the particulars (civil, criminal, and ritual laws) also taught at Sinai. What does "Mishpatim" mean? In a formal-legal sense, it means rules or laws. In a judicial sense, it means judgments or case-law rulings. The Midrash, cited by Rashi, notes that the Torah connects (with the aforementioned vav) Parshat Mishpatim to a discussion of the mizbe'ach (altar) at the end of Yitro, signifying both the placement of the Sanhedrin within the precincts of the Beit ha'Mikdash and the linkage of worldly jurisprudence to the religious worship of Hashem. We serve G-d in all our ways, throughout all our days and years. Why "you shall place before them" rather than "speak to them"? Rashi focuses on the pedagogic goal here: "ke'shulchan ha'aruch u'muchan le'echol lifnei ha'adam – like a table fully laid before a person with everything ready for eating." In our study of "A Life in Full," we aimed to achieve all three of these goals. We sought to discern how the details of a halachic life – especially the marking of life-cycle events – connect with undergirding Jewish values of a worthy life. We came to appreciate more deeply how the entire life course, both its emotional and spiritual highs and its everyday mundanities, is meant to be an avodat Hashem – a life lived in the service of G-d. And the goal of the seminar was to present a Shulcḥan Aruch – a way of seeing the totality of life, and its individuated elements, as a set table, ready to be experienced and framed in sanctity and with great purpose. |