Mishpatim | What are Laws?

וְאֵלֶּה הַמִּשְׁפָּטִים אֲשֶׁר תָּשִׂים לִפְנֵיהֶם׃

And these are the laws (mishpatim) that you must set before them [the Israelites]:

כִּי תִקְנֶה עֶבֶד עִבְרִי שֵׁשׁ שָׁנִים יַעֲבֹד וּבַשְּׁבִעִת יֵצֵא לַחָפְשִׁי חִנָּם׃

When you acquire a Hebrew slave, that person shall serve six years; in the seventh year that person shall go free, without payment.

Exodus 21:1-2 

 

What are these, or any laws, that are set before us? The laws put before us in this week's Torah and the laws put before us in the US and other countries, arise out of what Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls "the mind of discrimination," the mind that is caught in duality. This is a mind that has not yet reached the state of freedom that is born from inner compassion and inclusiveness. This is a mind that has not received the insight that, as Marshall Rosenberg, founder of Nonviolent Communication taught, we all share the same needs; that my freedom is bound up with your freedom.

In this opening verse of the Torah portion, God tells the former slaves that they will now become slave owners. God realizes that humans will not find freedom through physical liberation only. They are still living in the limited consciousness produced from enslavement. In that consciousness, Hebrews and non-Hebrews, slave and slave owner, are worthy of different treatment. This is the thinking that creates systems that limit freedom and privilege one group over another. The journey and the teachings are just beginning.

Applying teachings I have learned from Nonviolent Communication and Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, I see all laws, all actions, as attempts to alleviate suffering. Mostly to alleviate the suffering of the lawmakers. The worldview of the ones making the laws, how they choose to attempt to meet their needs, therefore determines who is protected and who is harmed by the laws and their enforcement.

It follows, then, that laws don't represent, by any means, our highest capacity as human beings or our success in becoming undistorted human beings. To the contrary, at their best, laws encourage some to stay on the road to becoming more fully human. At their worst, laws deny humanity and enforce systems that crush human and natural life.

Laws are needed, or perceived to be needed, to manage behaviors that are believed to cause harm. When laws are crafted from a consciousness that relies on blaming individuals or groups to make meaning of harm,  punishment and shaming are relied on to "correct" behavior. This cycle of blame and shame is at the core of a fractured society.

Enforcing laws based on blame and shame easily slides into punishment rather than healing or restitution. Laws and enforcement systems then reinforce the life-alienated states that lead to the establishment of the laws in the first place.

When I was a young civil rights lawyer in New York City I worked briefly on the criminal defense of Yusef Salaam, age 15, one of the now exonerated Central Park Five. After spending a short period of time with some of the young, accused black men and their families, it was apparent to me that they were innocent. It was apparent to all the lawyers in our office.

And still these five young men were convicted in 1990 and served years in prison before they were completely exonerated from the charges of raping a young white woman jogger in Central Park. (Donald Trump played a large role in drumming up white supremacist frenzy against these five young men and called for the death penalty for them.)

How is this connected to this week's Torah portion?

It’s fairly well known that our own criminal injustice system has its roots in the beliefs, biblical systems, and laws set forth, beginning in this week’s Torah portion of Mishpatim.

This week’s blog addresses different ways that the conceptualizing of this system in the Torah haunts every aspect of our lives today. And I will suggest ways of understanding Mishpatim that embrace a radically different vision.

The parasha opens with an unequivocal acceptance of a system of slavery; and then embeds in the system of enslavement distinctions based on the identities of different groups. "Non Hebrew" slaves are treated differently in significant ways than "Hebrew" slaves. Women are treated differently than men in this patriarchal system that apportions rights, power and punishments depending on gender.

These distinctions provided justifications to the "founding fathers" of the United States, who were guided by the Hebrew and Christian bibles when they agreed on a constitution that considered enslaved black Americans and Africans to be "three fifths" human, erased the native peoples and denied women and children any rights.

And, as Isabel Wilkerson writes in Caste, after the US Civil War, continuing today:

The dominant caste devised a labyrinth of laws to hold the newly freed people on the bottom rung ever more tightly...

As immigrants arrived, like my Jewish grandfather from Belarus, they found a pre-existing hierarchy, bipolar in construction, arising from slavery and pitting the extremes in human pigmentation at opposite ends. Each new immigrant had to figure out how and where to position themselves in the hierarchy of their adopted new land. My name was changed from Wallansky to Wall. We became white.

African American writer and prophet James Baldwin once said, "no one was white before they came to America."

And, as Wilkerson recounts, a Nigerian scholar said to her:

Africans are not black....They are Igbo and Yoruba. Ewe...They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves and that is who they are.

And for a moment, in the preceding parasha of Torah, it seemed that the Israelites, too, were becoming humans on the land. At the end of Yitro, last week's Torah portion, Elohim, the Creating Energy of plurality, gave the people a beautiful instruction about building altars: to not profane the land — to create a place on the land, from the soil and unhewn stones, from which to encounter Elohim in creative fullness.

But the people were silent after this instruction. And so there is a tragic flip, another turnaround, in the tortured and circuitous journey toward a promised land.  The laws that follow assume that the former slaves will now become the slave owners. Like their former enslavers in Egypt,  they will wander in a trance of  alienation from divine source, from life energy itself. They are in a state of privilege, but not freedom.

Standing at Sinai, the place of enlightenment, the former slaves become slave owners, possessors of women. They will be subjected to harsh laws that punish them for crimes of violence and domination. This means their journey has barely begun. It is no longer Pharaoh who enslaves them, they enslave themselves in a new form of slavery. The slavery born from not recognizing and holding with reverence all forms and all places as manifestations of Divine Presence.

What is the nature of the freedom for which the desert wanderers have been brought out of physical slavery and promised a new land?  Surely it is not the freedom to become slave owners or to possess women and drive other peoples off the land. It is the freedom to evolve into the highest potential of the human form, the fruition of the vision of creation of the form. This is the freedom of minds and hearts that transcend concepts of picking and choosing who is favored and who isn't favored. The journey forward is to stop eating from the tree of dualism, of "good and evil;" and to return to the tree of life, of reverence for all life and all life forms. This is a shift from "othering" others as "lesser than" to centering and valuing all life. This is the journey we still are on today.

In Hasidism, this is sometimes referred to as creating a yihud (ייחוד) a union between heaven and earth, in every act, in every moment. This is our purpose and this is our freedom.

In Buddhist meditation practices, we use mindfulness and concentration to develop insight into the One Source of everyone of us and everything. The sanskrit word Nirvana means extinction, referring to the freedom that comes when we abandon mind concepts that create separation.

Nonviolent Communication offers many practices to help us shift to this "we" consciousness. We train to see and hear what connects us to each other, to all life. We lean in with curiosity to listen to difficult messages in our own hearts and in other's words and actions.

Rather than using blame or shame, in the Buddhist practice and NVC we listen deeply to discover the shared visions and dreams, our shared feelings and needs, the suffering that is being revealed to us.  Instead of listening for what is "right" or "wrong" in the other person’s view, we listen for what is important and life sustaining for them and heart opening for us. This creates the possibility for the deepest freedom.

When we find shared territory, we can move forward as friends rather than enemies, trusting that we all need the same things. Trusting that helping you receive what what you need in the world will bring more of what I need too.

Shifting from Punishment 

This Torah portion puts before us a choice between systems that are based on punishment and systems that are based on restoration or restitution. Recognizing and transforming the tendency to punish, in ourselves and in our systems, is part of the move toward greater personal and societal freedom.

I read a story today in the local Asheville, North Carolina newspaper about the arrest of a 43-year-old grandmother from Tennessee, my neighboring state. She is actually being charged with theft for “stealing“ her grandson’s toy from under his Christmas tree.

Does this grandma need punishment? Is this going to bring the healing that is needed from the trauma that has generated such a breakdown in three generations of a family?

What is the karmic effect on the family when this is what society offers to resolve a dispute within a family? Between families?

This is the approach of punishment, born from legal systems and thinking that turn to blame and shame as motivators . This is our Pharaoh nature, the aspects of ourselves that are frozen to our cries for compassion. As long as people operate under systems of blame and shame, the systems will reproduce the tendency to punish and exclude.

The promised land is not in our reach until we reach each other's hearts, Jews and Palestinians, vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, blacks and whites, men and women. Until then, the systems we see in Mishpatim and in the world today will maintain an order of domination and exploitation. Until then, we will be wandering in the desert in search of freedom.