There’s an interesting shift that happens in this week’s Torah reading. Up until this point in the Torah, we have been reading narrative. It’s been the story of our ancestors as a family, the story of community formation, the story of liberation. And last week, as we reached Mount Sinai in all its multi-sensory glory, we experienced the story of Revelation.
But this week, we are stopped while we experience laws. The word Mishpatim, the name of the parsha, means laws, and it’s a parsha that contains lots and lots of laws. They are laws about the everyday stuff of life - about criminal law and the justice system, about kashrut and prayer, about loans and slavery. There is an interesting contrast, not just in the difference between narrative portions of the text and legal portions, but between the grandiose moment of Sinai and the minutiae of everyday laws.
Sinai is a once-in-a-lifetime WOW kind of a moment, but Mishpatim has laws that are all the nitty-gritty of daily life. They aren’t the laws or the moments that grand stories are made of. It can easily feel less exciting, like a letdown. But one of the things I realized is that, in community, we cannot really enable Sinai moments for one another, but we can absolutely enable the nitty-gritty, the everyday moments for one another. We show up for each other so others can do the regular moments and experiences of Jewish living. We come to minyan so someone can say kaddish. We invite someone to our Shabbat table who doesn't usually partake in Shabbat rituals. We teach someone else how to read Torah so they feel empowered to be a part of our services. We gift someone who has just moved into a new home a mezuzah. These are just the everyday moments of life, but when we enable others to do them, they can feel like so much more.
I received an email earlier this week on a listserve of Jewish professionals from someone who works at Jewish Queer Youth, an organization that supports primarily Orthodox Jewish queer young people as they navigate their journeys. The email was asking if anyone had a spare pair of tefillin for a young trans man who was, as a young adult, having a Bar Mitzvah. Having been raised as a girl in an Orthodox community, he never received tefillin. His family, unsupportive of his journey, wasn’t going to help him acquire a pair. Two weeks ago, someone came into my office with a box of Judaica they had cleaned out from their deceased father’s home. Inside that box was a beautiful, nearly-new pair of tefillin, waiting for someone to wrap its leather straps around their arm. They asked me to give it to someone who might use it regularly. I’ve had the tefillin in a box next to my desk. Upon seeing the email, I didn’t hesitate. It’s not a big deal for me to take the tefillin to the post office. And it’s not necessarily a big deal for someone to wrap tefillin in the mornings.
And yet, if we stop and actually mark these everyday moments, as the Torah tries to do throughout Mishpatim, perhaps there is meaning there too. When we shift our viewpoint and see how we can show up for others to make their everyday moments happen, well, that is a life that reflects Revelation. When we zoom out and look at all those nitty gritty, all those seemingly everyday normal moments, we get a vision of Sinai.
