Observing Mishpat (Legal Justice) While Hearing God's Voice

By BRENT CHAIM SPODEK

Parashat Re’eh (Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17)

For many Americans, the notion of intrusive religious law is unsettling, if not simply repugnant. After all, we expect law to interfere with our lives as little as possible—to provide us with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—and no more. We Americans are heirs to a tradition which recognizes that we are naturally in a state of perfect freedom, to make choices and dispose of our property as we see fit.¹

But as American Jews, we are heirs to another tradition as well, and Judaism has a significantly more expansive vision of what law is and might be. The ancient rabbis didn't concede that the law would be as unobtrusive as possible; rather, they imagined a holy society built on a foundation of justice, and saw the law as a necessary tool in realizing that vision. Yet the rabbis, who brought God's inchoate voice to earth in the form of Jewish law, were also well acquainted with its limitations.

For instance, Rabbi Yehuda, who compiled the Mishnah and is one of the central figures in the codification of Jewish law, ruled that if you know of two objects which are lost, one of your own and one belonging to someone else, you should search first for your own and then for the other one. (Baba Metzia 33a)

He derives this principle from this week's parashah, Re'eh, in which God promises the Jewish people that there shall be no needy people in you. The rabbis understand this to mean that you should first look after your own needs, and then look after the needs of others. Even if your parent or your teacher has lost something, the law allows you to search for your own lost object first. But, Rabbi Yehuda is quick to add, one who lives according to this self-centered world view will eventually become needy himself.

By ruling this way, Rabbi Yehuda acknowledged the formal, minimal requirements of mishpat, or legal justice. Mishpat is the aspect of Jewish law which resonates with law as we know it in the free societies of the West. It is law which permits people to pursue their own interests as long as they do not infringe on the rights and freedoms of others. It's the minimum, baseline legal framework that (at its best) treats every person equally, regardless of race, class, gender, or any other narrow identifier.

But Rabbi Yehuda recognizes that while mishpat is necessary, it is not sufficient for a holy society. While he knows that in the case of lost items, Jewish law allows people to pursue their own naked self-interest and look for their own items first, he warns against that sort of behavior, because the purpose of the law is not simply to create a law-abiding society which embodies mishpat, but a holy society which embodies both mishpat and tzedek, or distributive justice. For a society to be holy, simple mishpat isn't enough.

A society in which some feast while others starve might very well be a society of mishpat, but it is not a society of tzedek. To be the holy society which the Torah imagines, we need both. Mishpat allows that we each have to pursue our self-interests and it protects against the abuses that such pursuit can yield. But tzedek demands that we go further.

This discrepancy, between the formal minimal demands of the law and the thoroughly just society toward which it points, suffuses the Jewish textual tradition, particularly in Parashat Re'eh. As the Israelites are preparing to finally enter the land, Moses tells them that if they hear the voice of God and also keep all the instructions which are enjoined upon them, they will not know poverty. (Deuteronomy 15:2)

The vision is beautiful—a society in which there are no needy people—but the preconditions for reaching it are incredibly demanding. The people would not only need to adhere to the law, but they would need to hear the voice of God, describing the just society in which they might live, and bringing that society into the world. Fulfilling both these objectives is a monumental aspiration.

There is a role for mishpat, for formal laws which proscribe our behavior and allow us all to pursue our own ends, as long as they don't bother anyone else. But Moses demands that we follow the law and we also hear God's voice. Many of us choose to follow the laws of mishpat, but so rarely do we hear God's voice demanding tzedek. When our failure to hear God's voice becomes too dissonant, we fall back on a hollow formalism, following God's law, but deaf to God's voice. We hear the halachah, which tells us what to do, but we fail to see the vision which tells us why we do it. We mistake the servant for the master and hear the laws but remain deaf to God. We need to hear the formal demands of mishpat, but without hearing God's voice calling us towards tzedek, we are hearing nothing.

¹ See John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690)

Reprinted with permission from American Jewish World Service.