I am so happy to be here with all of you this morning and I want to begin by thanking the community for the chance to have spent the past two weeks in Israel. I am especially grateful to each of you who stepped forward in big ways and in small ways to ensure that the shul was able to function and flourish in my absence. The learning with my cohort of North American rabbis was rewarding. I am eager to share with you, over the coming months, many of the texts and ideas I studied over the past two weeks. I have certain shiur topics lined up and selected for the next six months.
Imagine sitting down to strategize about opening an ice-cream shop. What would you do to maximize the chances of a successful business? You would want high quality ice cream and a great selection of flavors, of course. You would need to price your ice cream competitively. And you would have to decide how large to make your servings. One theory of running a successful ice cream shop would suggest that you make your servings very small, that way you can sell ice cream to people who love ice cream and also sell ice cream to people who feel more ambivalent about it or who are unsure if they like ice cream or not. A small serving size should increase your market. [After all, Starbucks has been very successful selling coffee to people who don’t like coffee].
But, the counter argument is stronger. Who are the customers who will stand in line to patronize your ice cream shop? People who love ice cream! And people who love ice cream love big servings of ice cream. The bigger the servings, the more attractive your shop will be to your most passionate and loyal customers.
I hope everyone remembers never to take business advice from me, but this thought-experiment about ice cream mirrors observations that sociologists of American religion have been making since the 1970s. Dean Kelley’s “Why Conservative Churches are Growing” was followed by Laurence R. Iannaccone’s “Why Strict Churches are Strong.” As American society has diversified and the pull of religion has weakened, religious groups which make clear demands on belief and behavior tend to retain and attract more committed members over time. People who love ice cream will want a lot of it and will seek out a shop that offers big servings. People who love religious life will seek out a religious community that offers religious life in large servings.
This sociological observation can explain the distinct religious grandeur inherent in Parashat Mishpatim amidst the myriad of messy details of crimes and misdemeanors and murder and injury and jealousy and revenge and politics and jurisprudence that comprise Jewish civil law as it is laid out in our parasha. Parashat Mishpatim offers a big serving of mitzvot. The demands imposed upon us in Parashat Mishpatim encompass every facet of life and envelope all manner of human interactions and relationships into a web of mitzvah and responsibility. Parashat Mishpatim is a true pivot and turning point in the Torah. If the Torah up until this point can be characterized as “inspiring stories with a sprinkling of mitzvot” the Torah, from this point on, is mostly a book of detailed and diverse mitzvot with a sprinkling of inspiring stories too.
Parashat Mishpatim , and the paradigm it introduces, entails the sorts of demands from which serious and enduring commitments are made. The experience of standing at Sinai is remembered in Jewish tradition by the phrase “na’aseh v’nishma” . We shall commit to doing the mitzvot and we shall commit to learning about them. But that cry is not found in the aftermath of receiving the Aseret HaDibrot– the so-called Ten Commandments – and that cry is not found anywhere in Parashat Yitro. It is only in the aftermath of the rules of interpersonal interactions, damages, and property law as found in Parashat Mishpatim that we are able to declare “Na’aseh v’Nishma.” The heavens splitting open and receiving the Asseret HaDibrot is too grandiose and too unstructured and unlived to anchor serious commitment. Serious commitment emerges from a large serving of mitzvot.
Hazal, the ancient rabbis, noted the juxtaposition of Parashat Mishpatim to the Torah’s instructions regarding the mizbe’ah, the altar in the mishkan and temple. This teaches, the rabbis say, that the Sanhedrin, the high court adjudicating the torts and damages delineated in Parashat Mishpatim should sit in judgment in the Temple precinct, in the Lishkat HaGazit, the Chamber of Hewn Stone, on Har HaBayit. This understanding connects the inspiration of the revelation at Sinai, and the religious devotion symbolized by the altar, to the routine administration of justice and halakhic deliberations undertaken by the Sanhedrin. As if to say, the way to claim ownership over the moment of revelation, when the heavens split open and Torah is given, is by sitting in judgement between one individual and another to ensure that justice is done.
Rabbi Dovid Tzvi Hoffmann, the great early 20th century scholar and leader of German Orthodoxy, in his commentary to Sefer Shmot elaborates further. The juxtaposition of Mishpatim just after the moment of greatest religious inspiration in human history, and immediately after the Torah’s description of the altar, teaches the interconnected nature of the ritual mitzvot with which we show our devotion to God and the mishpatim, civil-law mitzvot, with which we enact justice within our human societies. Anyone who cultivates a reputation for himself as exceedingly pious, Rav Dovid Tzvi Hoffmann warns, in order to have reputational cover with which to swindle or cheat or embezzle or otherwise harm another person has entirely misunderstood the meaning of the religious mitzvot he so ostentatiously performs. One who ignores interpersonal mitzvot in order to observe ritual mitzvot has lost the value of the ritual mitzvot as well. Because his mitzvah observance was not comprehensive; devotion that ignores justice is not devotion at all.
Parashat Mishpatim exhibits two features of what I would call “Modern Orthodoxy lechatchilah” or Modern Orthodoxy, not as a compromise and Modern Orthodoxy, not as a watered-down outreach tool to unaffiliated Jews, but Modern Orthodoxy as an ideal contemporary instantiation of what we believe the Torah demands of us. The juxtaposition of the Torah’s civil laws and the instructions for the altar is an early example of our community’s insistence that ritual mitzvot and interpersonal mitzvot are one and inseparable. There is no piety or service of God that is not intertwined with the cultivation of ethical excellence. And Parashat Mishpatim is demanding and detailed and laden with so many mitzvot that by embracing them we have a chance of fostering a robust and thick religious life that has a possibility of earning the allegiance of another generation of proud Jews who love the Torah and love its mitzvot.
But Modern Orthodox communities, like this one, are also characterized by opening our doors wide to Jews who practice very differently and who may even believe very different things. We try, when possible, to lower the barriers to participation and to ease the burden of accepting a life of mitzvah observance for the sake of busy modern people with many demands on our attention and allegiance. But, we are inclusive, not because we are angling for attracting new members. We are inclusive because it too is an ethical imperative. Inclusivity and our open community is not a marketing trick, it is a fulfillment of the Torah’s own expectations. Easy religion doesn’t work in modern America; nobody will wait in line for a small serving of ice cream if what they really want is a sandwich. But the detailed and demanding commitments of the Torah are ethically oriented toward care and consideration and kindness. Any exemplary life of Torah and mitzvot will seek out ways for those values to be expressed.
My last trip to Israel in February 2025 coincided with a brief ceasefire and a series of hostage exchanges. This was my first visit since the end of the war and the return of every Israeli hostage, living and dead. Last winter the poetry and reflections of the Israeli faculty, and the comments of my friends, reverberated with the Hebrew phrase “ein milim.” Meaning “there are no words” to describe the horrors of the moment, but we will try all the same to express in words what we have experienced and suffered. This year’s Hebrew phrase, which I heard several times from several Israeli rabbis, is “mah karah l’America?” What has happened to America?
What is happening to America? We inherited a form of government rooted in self-restraint. We inherited a constitution in which nobody stands above the law. “Mah Karah l’America?” What has happened to us? When power detaches from law, Parashat Mishpatim reminds us, covenantal society breaks down.
Interpersonal mitzvot bind us to God and connect us to one another. They strengthen society and they foster a community. Parashat Mishpatim and its mitzvot take the thunder and lightning and the split heavens and contain that wild spiritual energy in a thick web of interpersonal, communal, and jurisprudential obligations. They are a cure for social ills. In Parashat Mishpatim, law is always more important than power. We encourage seekers to join us and we care about including everyone who wishes to become part of the community, but our inclusion is always an expression of a sense of ethical obligation and not a cheap gimmick to bring new faces into the building.
Ice cream shops should cater to those who love ice cream. Communities, and nations, thrive when they demand something real. Are we willing to demand enough of ourselves to build the kind of community, and the kind of society, that can endure? Can we say “na’aseh v’nishma” not only in response to revelation and religious ecstasy, but also to the perpetual discipline of law and justice?
We have the luxury, in this congregation of committed and devoted Jews, to avoid the need to struggle over basic questions of affiliation. None of us, I suspect, grapple regularly with foundational existential questions of “Why be Jewish?” We are engaged, instead, in the quest for profundity. I did not become a rabbi to educate toward a thin or superficial Judaism. And you did not build this community to offer small servings of Torah or a bite-sized community. We are here because we believe that covenant and community mean something real. Justice means something real. The rule of law means something real. Mitzvot matter.
I became a rabbi because the privilege of serving as a bridge between a Jew and the profound wisdom of our tradition continues to excite me like few other thrills. And I became a rabbi because I want my children, and all of our children, to inherit a world in which the Torah is understood to demand and support communities of ethical excellence, spiritual transcendence, and justice for each and every human being.
Our ancestors stood at Sinai, heard God’s voice reverberate across creation, and then bound themselves to the discipline of careful, conscientious, comprehensive mitzvah observance; a way of life that touches every facet of existence and binds every person into a web of mutual obligation.
A fragile society, which is to say, every society composed of fragile and limited human beings, cannot survive without a serious covenant.
Na’aseh v’nishma.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 