Morning Minyan — Parshat Mishpatim: People of the Book

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

All right. Good morning. Good morning, good morning. Hi everyone.

Okay, where shall we begin? Begin in the same place we'll begin in the same place we've been beginning. All right, I'm gonna share my screen.

Begin with a mode de moda. How grateful Am I to have woken up this morning, to be alive in this world, to be challenged with the challenges that are mine and not someone else's. And just a little reminder to everybody, go ahead and mute yourself so that, so that we don't, by accident, hear the conversations You don't intend us to hear. All right,

mod, Keith, A knee.

Oh Mishkan,

Rabbi Mishkan teala, Rabbi,

Rabbi, seeing some folks just standing and stretching, we say these words of gratitude, acknowledgement of our existence this morning, before anything, simply say, I am here. Moda, Ani, moda, NIFA, Neha,

grateful am I as I sit before you on this day,

living spirit of the world, you have blessed me with a soul you have breathed it into me. Great is your faithfulness in me? Great is your faithfulness in me? Take my Talib here, spread it out like a curtain of light, like a garment wrapping each one of us in love. Here's the words. Baruja, aronai, Elohim, a share, Keith, chana, lijita, teith petit taking a moment to just breathe into your body, whether you're sitting or lying or standing,

taking a moment to feel yourself being supported by whatever is supporting you, a chair, the bed, the earth.

If you're listening to this later, and you're riding the train, you know, just all of the different mechanical parts and pieces that are magically transporting you through space and keeping you safe. Blessed are you the one who wraps us in love at all times you

and as you can see, I feel like I'm sort of leaning hard into all of the all of the rituals and traditions that have to do with regularity, predictability. Me, because I feel like we have these and in a time when the world around us can feel like it is a swirling crucible of chaos, it's actually very nice. I find it very stabilizing and reassuring to have the things that we actually do every day, that are that are blessings that are things that we can physically feel in our body, in our seat, in our home, to offer gratitude for before we start spinning out about what's happening out around us, to take a moment and bless where we are and where we begin so blessing for our body. Raise your hand if you went to the bathroom this morning. Okay, you don't actually have to, but yeah, exactly like, who's happy about that? I'm thrilled. And so we have a blessing for that, for that in in fact, you could say it in the morning, but you can actually say it after every time you come out of the bathroom. So that's what this blessing here is. I'm going to say it in Hebrew. I don't see a transliteration here. I'll say it nice and slow. So if you want to practice your Hebrew reading as I'm reading, you can go ahead. Baruch atah, Adonai, Eloheinu, Melech, haulam, Asher, yatzar et ha Adam, Bucha, necavim, nicavim, hallulim, halluci, they did. They feminized the blessing here at Bucha called us our Uma. La sote. Blessed are you the one who, with wisdom, created our bodies, aperture by aperture, channel by channel, so that if but one of these is closed or open against its design, we would not be able to stand or sit or whatever position you're in and persist in our praise. Blessed is the one who wondrously heals all flesh, all right? And because we're about to do a little sacred Torah screen time, we'll say this blessing first study, Fauci channel, but mitzvah, New LA, soak the divray Torah. Alright. So before we, before we, I think I'm going to space out. I'm going to space out some of our learning and some of our davening. So this week is para Mishpatim. Last week was the 10 commandments we had. We had a little bit of fun watching some some old clips of 10 Commandments movies, both the funny ones and the very earnest ones. So what comes next? And I said this over Shabbat, it's like you've got the 10 Commandments, but then you actually have another 603 commandments, if we say they're about 613 in the Torah. So where do the other 603 live? Well, they don't all live in one place, but many, many, many of them are in the very next partial that comes after yeatro. So like Moses still on Sinai, God still speaking of Moses, laws still being transmitted. Moses still taking them in, writing them down. Um, and there is a, they're they're now defunct. They're closed. But it, it is a Jewish nonprofit that was called God cast. And then after God cast, which was, like, it was cute back when, like, the word podcast was kind of a new word, they were God cast. And then they renamed themselves, bim bam, and then they were and then they couldn't fund themselves, because nobody wants to pay for entertainment, you know, which is really too bad, because they were very unique organization, but they did for a couple years running animated very short summaries of the Parsha. So what I'm going to show you is a summary of the Torah portion, and then a little bit later, I'm going to show you a particular angle on like, one of the laws in it. All right? Parshat. Mishkateam, thank you to you know what I'm gonna optimize for, video sharing this one and share sound optimizer video, and there we go. Okay, I'm

our shopping team is all about laws, detailed rules, all kinds of expenses.

Stop that. That's too fast. This is a guy I know from San Francisco named David Hanken, and he started a minion called the mission minyan, which, if you find yourself in San Francisco, it's a lovely place where lots of my friends dive in

Parshat mishkatem is all about laws, detailed rules pertaining to all kinds of life circumstances, slavery, assault and bad. Story, sex, ox Goring, judicial corruption, holiday observances, treatment of the poor, the kind of stuff that would keep Rabbi's busy for centuries. The Torah is famous for long lists of God's laws, and this is the first one in the Torah. But though we read it now as a list or a law code, parashat mishkatem is really a story, and the laws are actually a long speech from God to Moses. Moses is supposed to somehow relay all these laws to the people, though he isn't told how. First, Moses recounts what God said, and the people respond, Na, Asa, we will do. But then Moses does something strange. He writes the laws down in a scroll a sefer and reads it to the children of Israel. When he is done reading, the children of Israel add to their acceptance of God's laws the powerful phrase na as Venice, Ma, we will do and we will listen, or we will do and we will obey after the book is accepted, Moses ascends the mountain along with Aaron, Aaron's sons and 70 elders for a most bizarre encounter with the divine. Atop the mountain, they glimpse God. What exactly they see? The Text leads to our imagination, but we are told that under God's legs was something like a pedestal of sapphire bricks as clear as the skies, strange stuff. But the point is that all along, it turns out, this parsha was about divine revelation. The people glimpsed God with different senses, through multiple media and in different ways. In this Parsha, it's not about the Thunderbolts or the stone tablets that made it into the famous movie. Instead, it's about the laws, the pedestal and above all, the book. Jews often describe themselves as people of the book. But what does that mean? Apart from the stereotype of Jews as nerdy bookworms, the Jewish religion is heavy on reading Torah scrolls, prayer books, thick volumes of Talmud and crowded study halls, but so far, we haven't heard much about books in the Torah, and Moses' decision to go the book route with God's laws is pretty momentous. Why does Moses do it? The people had just heard his account, and these are the children of Israel who witnessed divine revelation on Mount Sinai, who directly perceive the sound and fury of God's voice. What do they need books for? Maybe Moses was afraid he'd forget or that he'd be suspected of inaccuracy. Maybe he figured that written laws would be less likely to be amended or discarded. Maybe he wanted the law to be the special possession of some literate elite, or maybe even in a story where God speaks directly to human beings, writing can serve as an object of fascination and sanctity. After all, even people who live together sometimes decide to commit certain messages to paper. I

Yeah, any any reactions or thoughts on that one?

Hi, John, I saw your little face there. Yeah. I Yeah, Catherine says, I have a question. It's like the Israelites were illiterate due to being enslaved for so long. So why would Moses write this down? What a beautiful question.

You know, I really like the emphasis on, I feel like as a Jewish community, or at least before Mishkan, we've gotten away from all of the ways in which we somatically experience the divine. And whenever I hear about where the people of the book were, the people of the book, it doesn't exactly enliven me to

think, because it feels like your head is disconnected from your body. Yeah,

yeah. And I'm not always as interested in the book learning aspect of Judaism. Personally,

I thought that was interesting, but it also is interesting in terms of how what's happening in our world politically right now, with laws and constitution. I

know I was thinking as we were watching, you know, that what he was suggesting about writing, you know, when he put it, put out seven different reasons why you might write something down, and one reason is so that it's clear what we're all agreeing to here. You know, like we're all we're all working with the same information and the same standards, and you can't violate my rights, because I and you can see that we, you know, are agreeing to what those rights are, as opposed to, you know, it makes it much harder for one party to just abrogate those rights. But, you know, not impossible, obviously, Julia wrote allows for some time to process the Wild Things they have experienced. Yeah. Mm, hmm. Yeah, it's true. I mean, have it? Haven't you ever, like, written something down and then years later gone back and been like, oh, wow, I forgot all those details. I'm so glad I wrote them. Also, maybe it was forward thinking, like, right now, these are the people that witnessed it and experienced it, but we're going to continue on. And so they're not going to have witnessed and experienced it, but they can hold this solid thing that also tells the story. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you do, you have any, like, family heirlooms where it's like, you know, that your great, great, great grandmother held this item. You know, just did a wedding over the weekend where it was like, the Kiddush cup was the father's Bar Mitzvah kiddish cup, you know. So it was like, this has been around for 75 years, or whatever it is, or a, you know, Bar Mitzvah over the weekend, where we held up a Tallis that had belonged to the mother's grandfather, you know. And it's just like the connection of the ages. There is something very powerful about that. So that's nice. Rebecca, yeah,

it lives in an academic sense, nothing is real until it's written down. All right, until you write something down, you really do not know

it. And and then, and then the flip side of that, and then, once it's written down, it's only known in the way that it is remembered as it was written down, and whatever other interpretations there might have existed, or perspectives that other people might have had but didn't write down float away,

right? Well, there are two sides to that. One of them is for yourself, you really don't understand it until you write it down. And the second thing, until you write it down. It's not something that people can deal with in a continual sense, because there isn't a, you know, a record that they can go back to.

Yeah, when I was, when I was in college, I did an alternative spring break on the Navajo reservation in, I want to say it was like Northern, Northern Arizona Southern Utah. And one of the things we learned about the Navajo people was it took a very long time they were they were very resistant to writing down much of their spoken language, because it was a sacred spoken language. And the result was many people forgot it. You know, it's like if it wasn't used in conversation. So then there, and then there was no way to read it and recover it, like it was much harder to then sort of go back and recover it. And of course, now they can write it down, but, and it made me think of the, you know, the Hebrew language, which whether or not it was spoken and used it was written, and we were interacting with it as a written as a written language, which then it was possible to revive from it, it's having been preserved as a written language.

Yeah. Oh, Orion said was going to bring up other indigenous people and how they mostly do spoken history. It's interesting. Like the Dalai Lama, one of the things that he was so curious about when he was, you know, living in exile, you know, trying to preserve the Tibetan religion, traditions, culture, language. And so he brought this group of Jews, this group of Jewish leaders. You can read about this in the book the Jew and the lotus, which delightful book from, I don't know, 2025, years ago, written by Roger Kamenetz. And, you know, and so the idea was, all these different Jewish leaders had different ideas of, like, his question was, how do you preserve a tradition in diaspora? How do you do it, you know, like, it's one thing if you're all in one place, all speak the same language, all doing the same traditions, it's another thing if you're, you know, dispersed all over the world, how do you maintain the coherence and cohesion? And you know the tradition over time. And you know one really good answer, in addition to all of these practices that we have, what Ellen was describing the somatic experience of Judaism. You know the smells of a Friday night dinner, the sights of candles being lit on Friday night. You know the sound of a shofar? Like there are all of these somatic experiences that really like, remind your body who you are. But it's like all of this literature, all of this literature passed down, passed down, passed down. I'm going to read, I'm going to read out loud here, what some folks said My Hebrew professor in grad school worked closely with indigenous communities to help them preserve their language and revive it. Like Hebrew had been gas Prudy, it raised the question of how, in our current political moment, the written law has failed to perform its ancient function of commitment, agreement and cohesion of public belief. Yeah. Mm, hmm, Indeed, indeed. Well, all of this is, all of this is obviously very rich and just, you know, planted the seeds of this conversation from looking at this week's Torah portion, that was like three minutes and 12 seconds, that little video, I'm going to move us into the Shema,

and then I've got another twist on the same parsha. So take a moment here. Take a moment here to become settled in your seat. Or however it is that you're sitting, we'll go to the blessing Ray before, right before the Shema that invites us to gather in the four corners of our seat. Seat two different poems, one by Burt Jacobson and one by Rabbi Shapiro, of two different Rabbi's

do this one here, and you can gather in the four corners of your suit seed as we're reading.

Sometimes the horrors and the emptiness of your world God overwhelm us, frightened and angry. We struggle with you, trying to understand to make sense of it all, and sometimes the precious beauty of life lifts us toward you. The love we receive from those dear to us opens our hearts to a deeper love, and we sense your presence, knowing that you are somehow here within our love, let us learn to deepen our faith, to be more loving and compassionate towards strangers and friends, strengthen our bonds with our people and with the teachings of our Jewish tradition, and to feel our connection with our humanity and with the earth. Blessed are you the one who wraps us in love? Baruch atah Adonai? Where is this? Bucha, moist rail. De ahava, I'm gonna close my eyes and bring my T seat over my eyes, as We say, the Schnabel.

Schnabel, Dona, Hello, hey, no, I

Bucha. The

Bucha. Bucha, home, O, dacha, they, hi, you had a variem. Haila, a share, a no, he mitza De ha, ha ha, Bana

ha vardha, bum beh Taha, beta, Rabbi, Taha, uvala, Kumar, Bucha for hot Deena, Bucha, Tom al

Miz, Taha, ovihi, shara,

and you shall love Adonai your power with all your courage, your passion and your strength. Let these teachings through which I enjoin and guide you today enter your heart. See that your children understand them. Speak of them when you're settled at home, when at work in the world, when you lie down and when you rise up, tie them as a witness to the work of your hands, see them as a front light before your eyes. Pass them as they frame the places of your passage, and you shall love yourself, for you are a spark of the divine. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself. And you shall love the stranger, for you are once strangers in the land of Egypt. All of those are commandments, by the way, in the Torah, let love for all fill your heart and being. I call on heaven and earth to witness before you today, life and death I have set before you the blessing and the curse. Choose life so that you and your children may live love the source of all being, the power of all your powers, by heeding the voice and joining the one for the eternal is your very life. The Infinite is the fullness of your days. Thus you will become aware and carry all the divine direction you receive from the one and your lives will be bound in holiness to the power within you. I am the infinite that drove you to leave the land of bondage to become your power. I am the infinite, your power in truth. Sort of an interpretive translation, but a pretty good one for verses for the second and third paragraphs following the Shema, alright, as we go into Miha Mocha, prayer for coming through the passage of something hard and harrowing. Want to use this as a healing prayer. So for anyone you are thinking about this morning who needs a prayer of healing, of encouragement, of strength, of of transcending and coming through something harrowing, now is a good. Time to either say their names out loud, which you're invited to do, or put them in the chat. And of course, now we're seeing lots and lots of names and categories of people coming through. Thank you. Prudy, federal workers, like people we know in our community. I'm speaking to a different person every day in our own community, whose livelihood depends on government grants that you know are hanging in the balance right now, of course, just folks in our own lives and on our own lists and in this very room, in this Minion room, or in our community, who are struggling you

Oh, say fell and no Right to heal us. Oh Shiba, who get us? Fauci?

Me daba ye

I smile. I

one thing that I think is so powerful about this Minion and about the fact of having a chat as we sing, and then as people populate the chat with the folks that you're thinking about, folks that you know, and folks that you know of you know, seeing yard Deen Vivas in the chat, surviving hostages that are still captive. And everyone who you know sits, whether it's in the West Bank or in Gaza or in Israel, wondering about their fate and the fate of their family and the fate of their home. And folks that who's you know, folks whose name and story you know very intimately, a family who's trying to create their home and community in Southern California, somebody who's struggling with mental health, with anxiety, with bipolar, with cancer, with infertility, with recovery, with aging, you know, I just and no prayer for any one of those people or groups of people obviates or pushes out or makes any smaller anyone else's prayer, all of it can coexist in a kind of ever expanding heart of compassion and love and awareness of all of the all of the pain and all of the love that we we're just holding with us at all times, Felicia says Ashay, amen in shalom, yeah, and so that we can say Amen to each other's prayer, even if the person who you're holding isn't the person we're holding, or the category or the group, isn't a group that you're particularly close to, to see that somebody else in this room is holding them, you know, and was moved to say their name, or say you know, say that they're thinking about them, and we can say a main Amen to that. And I pray for their recovery and their healing as well. So rafuzza to all of those people. And now, before we go into Keith om, we're going to do one more one more little God cast. We're. Because another friend of mine, who's the Who's the one responsible for for making this one Rabbi schmielbitz, who runs something called the Valley Bay Midrash. And this guy is an orthodox rabbi who is also a vegan and a kidney donor, and somebody who has fostered children and animals, and this guy is just kind of, he's, he's a Tzadik, you know, one of those, one of the 36 we say, lamed, Vav, nikim, one of the 36 in the world, who's, you know, whose life and efforts basically hold up the world. There's a, there's a tradition. Those people don't know who they are, and we don't actually know who they are, but tradition says there are like 36 people in the world at any given time. So anyway, the person who wrote this little three minute video, I think, might be one of those people. He probably wouldn't like it if I said that. All right, so this is what the Bible says about doing the right thing. Parashat, Mishkan, the different take.

It says, In Exodus, chapter 23, verse two, you shall not follow the majority for evil, and you shall not respond in a dispute to distort justice by inclining after the majority. In other words, you have to determine for yourself your own sense of what is right, regardless of what is popular, especially when the masses want to undermine justice for the easy way out, one of the most important parts about growing up is having the ability to decide how your actions make an impact on your friends and the world around you. When it comes to making a decision of what to do, do you follow the path of being just and fair, or the path of going along with the crowd, no matter how mean they may be. This principle is found in the Torah portion of Mishpatim, which is all about ways to follow Jewish ethical traditions and moral precepts. You see, back when Moses received the commandments at Mount Sinai, the Israelite people were in a bind, newly freed from slavery in Egypt, the laws and customs they were used to couldn't apply to their status as free people, so the Israelites had to adapt and follow a new path where everyone was treated fairly. So laws and courts were put into place today we call the ability for all to have a say democracy. But even in this early period of Torah history, the Israelites were concerned about the need for fairness. As slaves, they had no say in their well being, but as a free people, they would be able to determine their destiny and the destiny of their descendants. Democracy means having the ability to choose representatives who will act on behalf of the people. What is most exciting about living in a society that values democracy is that the focus is on ideas, discussion, disagreement and compromise, all values that are central to a Jewish life. You might say that the seeds of the society that we live in today are found in this part of the book of Exodus, where Moses selects people to serve as representatives of the larger community to ensure all are treated with dignity. From these Bible verses, the Jewish tradition evolved a rich system of justice that still functions to this day. But democracy is not the end, it's the beginning. Your choices determine the path you set out on. This is a heavy burden, but also a blessed opportunity. Beware of those who may lead you astray. That is the easy way out. Instead, look to role models, parents, friends and teachers to help guide you on your journey. Don't be afraid to go against the grain, to do what is right over what is popular, Be courageous. Be bold. Be you. These values allowed our ancestors to flee hardship and survive against the cruelest conditions. Take to heart the need to seek light in the darkness and reject bad decisions. Seeking love, respect, compassion and seeing the uniqueness in all people is the best way to avoid being a follower.

All right.

Well, let's not try and be cynical and be like, Well, those are quaint ideas that don't apply anymore. Let's not do that. Let us, let us, like, hold on to that. You know, touchstones of touchstones of who we are and what we need to remind ourselves, okay, I'm gonna find Where's Kadia Tom. Hello, hello, all right, well, I'll find it in here. I know exactly where it is in here. And after we say mourners, Kaddish, which is also, of course, the prayer we say after learning something, which we now have twice over. So then we'll stay on and chat about whatever folks want to chat about. So as we move into mourners Kaddish, who. Is it that we are remembering this morning? Teresa, Owen, Nathan Pollock, Mark nurlov, Andrew ruskowski, Nancy Pryor,

my grandmother, Helen grossfield, it's her yard site today.

Anyone else? My

sister, Joan Carlo.

Joan Carlo, is there anybody who would like to lead us in Kaddish or have try their hand at lead us, leading us in Kaddish? Make the words nice and big for you. I will All right. Thank you.

Would like to unmute and join and also for the responses yikadal, the yidka Dash, Rabbi Leonarda, Rabbi Amaya Yid, Rabbi Nase

itadar Vitale she may Taleb, reho Layla, me call bircha tava, shirata, Tova, nechamata, Dami, Ron b almavi, amain, shalama, Rabbi, mean shamayim, The Chaim. Elena, the I'll call you sir elvim. Amen, shalom. Beau ya says Shalom. A newbie, I'll call you sir. I'll call you she bell be removed.

Amen. Amen. All their memories. Be blessings. Thank you. Was that Glenn? Was that you? I couldn't see it was, I thought it was your voice. Yes, it was Glenn, yeah. Thank you, Glenn. And for anybody in this room or listening later on the podcast we have, it's either this Thursday night or next Thursday night. I think it's next Thursday night. We're doing a new builder orientation. And so I look around this room and I see many of you, many of you have been in this community for a long time. You're not new builders. However, if you haven't ever been on a new builder orientation, it's a really nice opportunity to meet new folks in the community and be reminded of what our community norms and values are. That's like, what we do in the orientation is we talk about like, who are we and what do we value in our community? And how do we talk to one another? You know, knowing that we come from across all vectors of, you know, different kinds of backgrounds and religious backgrounds and socioeconomic backgrounds and gender backgrounds and sexual orientation background, all these different kinds of things. And how do we hold each other with love and and do right by each other. And also, if you were not a builder, it's a great time to join, because now you can jump into one of those new builder orientations. And, you know, meet a couple new folks right away. Just needed to say that. And then also, whether you're in town or you're out of town, we're already thinking about Purim, and

it's, I mean, it feels like we're living in the Purim story right now, honestly. But it can be fun to suspend reality and have a night of dressing up in costumes and drinking whatever you want, whether you know sober or sober, sober or something that bends your mind a little bit, and laughing at ourselves and the tradition and the world around us, and making fun of even the things and people we love, I understand. There's a lot of making fun of me every year in the porch field. There's a lot of making fun of me in the most loving way and our community and all the things we love about it, but are also quirky and ridiculous and that we are not too good to poke fun at ourselves about. So Anywho. All right, I'm going to turn off the I'm going to turn off the watch mckissel here, and then if folks want to keep talking, we sure can. I.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai