Our place in this land

Yitro tells the story of the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai, that singular moment of revelation when God spoke directly to the Jewish people. It was a divine engagement, unmatched by any other moment in our history.

Mishpatim, on the other hand, is as mundane as one can imagine – laws about damages, oxen, stolen objects. Our parsha focuses on our everyday encounters with one another, setting forth the rules and norms that maintain a well-functioning society.

Parshat Yitro and Parshat Mishpatim represent two paradigms, two sides of the coin that make up our religious consciousness. These two components – our relationship with God and our relationship with others – are the hallmarks of our religious outlook, making them inseparable from one another.

The haftarah for Mishpatim zeroes in on one of the laws appearing in the parsha, highlighting God’s great concern for how we treat one another. In the haftarah, the prophet Jeremiah exposes a troubling deception: Jewish slaveholders were indeed following the letter of the law by releasing their servants after six years of servitude, as technically outlined in Exodus 21:1-6.

Yet instead of upholding the spirit of the law, they immediately reclaimed their former slaves – sidestepping the Torah’s directive to ensure a pathway to true freedom for all.

In the face of this grave injustice, Jeremiah conveys to the people God’s scathing rebuke, condemning their actions as a desecration of God’s name. “Therefore, thus says the Lord; since you have not hearkened to Me, in proclaiming liberty, everyone to his brother, and everyone to his neighbor: behold, I proclaim a liberty for you, says the Lord, to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine; and I will make you to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth.” (Jeremiah 34:17)

Essentially, if we fail to live up to God’s expectation of us to build a just society, we are unworthy of God’s protection and blessing in our sacred homeland.

Jeremiah’s critique, sadly, remains painfully relevant today, even if slavery no longer exists in the Jewish world. Our failure to genuinely care for one another — to respect those who are like us and those who are not, those who agree with us and those who do not — this too is a desecration of the divine name, and such a failure may well threaten our place in this land.

Last year’s heinous attack on our people and homeland was carried out by Hamas, who bear the unquestionable moral and physical responsibility for their atrocities. But as a people rooted in Torah we are always called to self-reflection — not to explain tragedy, or relieve the perpetrators of their responsibility, but to emerge from it with even greater strength.

We are thus left to explore: what spiritual deficiencies can we repair? Can we improve in our capacity for respect, for seeing ourselves within the face of the other, as Torah demands?

We must look not just at God for such answers, but among ourselves. This should be our ultimate goal. For holiness in Judaism is rooted in the mundane in what we do in the everyday. The everyday defines our spiritual journey and our relationship with God.

The closing verses of the haftarah (Jeremiah 33:25,26) – deliberately selected from the previous chapter to ensure that the reading ends on a note of hope – offer a powerful promise. If we rise to meet God’s expectations of us, both in our vertical relationship with Him and in our horizontal relationships with others, we will merit the divine blessing: “And I will return their captivity, and I will have mercy upon them.” (33:26).