Maishpatim: Nostalgia

This parsha brings me back to  elementary school, actually, Yeshiva kitana, the first 8 grades. 

 In second grade at Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin, we learned Shemoth, the second book of the Torah.  I had  the Bais Yehudah edition, a chumash that contained a Yiddish translation of  Rashi, among its features.  Mishpatim, this weeks parsha was the most beaten up, the one that showed the greatest signs of wear.  The pages were falling out and crinckled.  It was a reminder of the centrality of this parsha in the tradition that I was taught in school.

It also reminds me of 5th grade, when we started to learn gemarra: Shnayim ochazim betakith, two people holding on to a garment;   Hakonais tzon ladir, if one pens a sheep. The page of the Talmud:  frames within frames.  This was the sapphire brick mentioned at the end of the parsha, the translucent block through which I could experience Gd.  Mishpatim is the textual basis of the gemorra. The terse text of this parsha explodes into the kaleidoscope that  is talmud.

Most of the issues mentioned in the parsha, and expanded upon in the gemarra, never touched my life. But I could imagine that the worker for whom the union fought as the remnant of the Hebrew slave; The automobile collision was analogized to the goring cattle.  I wanted to make these words relevant, to insert the tradition that stretches back to the word of Gd (though Moshe) into my life.

Mishpatim, and the Talmud that it spawned, is one of the lenses through which I see my Judaism.  These exercises in theoretical justice: recognizing the personal life of the slave, recognizing the rights of both the victim and the victimizer, tolerance with limits - they are how I relate to my faith.

The devil is not the only entity in the details.