Mishpatim 3 |
Blind Faith? Parshas Mishpatim Contact Rabbi Spero at 862-9546 or jsohr1@juno.com If you are interested in receiving
Rabbi Spero's Dvar Torah in your email each week, please contact him at jsohr1@juno.com. Immediately
after the Jews had received the Ten Commandments at Sinai, they were given
several civil laws known as mishpatim. There is a common misconception that
religion relates solely to G-dly matters, but more earthly matters such as civil
law do not. The truth is contrary to this. Our goal is to imitate Hashem as much as possible. One of the
primary ways of doing this is through honesty in money matters. So the
juxtaposition of the receiving of the Torah and civil law fits in perfectly. After
Moshe had related the laws to the Jews, they proclaimed in one voice "Na’aseh
v’nishma", we will do and we will listen. Concerning this proclamation
the Talmud relates an incident: A Saducee (one of the many deviant Jewish sects
at the time of the Talmud; 100 C.E) asked one of the sages (Rava; tractate
Shabbos 88a-b): "Why were the Jewish people so impetuous as to promise to
do before they promised to understand?" And
if one thinks about it rationally, is this not a legitimate question?
Why did the Jews not respond to Hashem: "If we are able to
understand, and it makes sense to us, we will keep the Torah." Were they
willing to accept Hashem’s Torah on blind faith? When the Jews said we will do
before we will listen, they were not saying it to an unknown entity. They had
already experienced first hand Hashem’s intervention in the world, and they
knew that anything He did was done out of His love and concern for them. They
might not always understand it as it was happening — for example, their
enslavement in Egypt — but they knew it was done for the best. This
is why the Ten Commandments start off with "I am your Hashem who took you
out of Egypt", as opposed to "I am your Hashem who created the
world." Creating the world was a greater feat than taking the Jews out of
Egypt, but the reminder of deliverance from slavery had a stronger impact on the
Jews: it had happened to them personally. We
reject the notion of blind faith. Hashem expects us to believe in Him because of
our prior relationship with Him dating back to our forefathers. For
example: If a person is driving on a particular highway for the first time and
gets off by exit 38, does he know for a fact the road continues beyond the exit?
He can certainly make a strong hypothesis that it does, since road signs and his
map indicate it does, although he has never seen it with his own two eyes. So
too, looking at world history, and how we as Jews relate to it, particularly the
fact of our survival for 2000 years without a country (from the fall of Masada
until the formation of the state of Israel) is certainly enough to instill in us
a belief in Hashem. Rabbi Jay Spero is the rabbi of the Saranac Synagogue in Buffalo. |