In Parshat Yitro there were the Aseret Hadibrot, the “ten utterances” or general principles. Now in Parshat Mishpatim come the details. They begin by outlining the laws of Hebrew servant.
Why begin here? There are 613 commandments in the Torah. Why does Mishpatim, the first law code, begin where it does?
The Israelites have just endured slavery in Egypt. It seems that this was the necessary first experience of the Israelites as a nation. From the very start of the human story, the God of freedom sought the free worship of free human beings. It took the collective experience of the Israelites, their deep, intimate, personal, backbreaking, bitter experience of slavery – a memory they were commanded never to forget – to turn them into a people who would no longer turn their brothers and sisters into slaves, a people capable of constructing a free society, the hardest of all achievements in the human realm.
This lecture is part of the Covenant & Conversation series.
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