Mishpatim
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch on Parashat Mishpatim, read on Shabbat Mishpatim — with one of this week's three questions for the two of you.
After the thunder of Sinai, the Torah does not give us more thunder. It gives us mishpatim — civil laws, in painstaking detail. About goring oxen. About lost objects. About the four watches over property. About how to treat a stranger, a widow, an orphan. About the Shabbat that the ox and the donkey rest on. Why, right after Sinai, this granular catalog? Hirsch's reading is unmistakable. Love that does not get translated into specific obligation, into specific structure, into the granular details of how we treat the person in front of us, is not love. It is sentiment. The law is the architecture of love. The form is what makes the love real. A marriage is the same: the love is real when it has built itself into the specific shape of what we do for each other on Tuesday afternoon.
What is one small mishpat — a regular structure, a recurring obligation — that we have built into our marriage that quietly carries our love when we are too tired to feel it?
The full week — the passage itself with its source, the other two questions, and the closing verse of hope — lives in the app. Together Tomorrow on the App Store.