Mishpatim 5774 - English

By Rabby Guido Cohen
Asociación Israelita Montefiore
Bogotá, Colombia

This week’s parashah, Mishpatim, holds more than fifty mitzvot, or precepts, on which the general principles of the ten commandments we received last week take shape, as countless and detailed laws.

The last part of the Parashah, however, leaves out these complex rules and lingers on a particular episode which describes the celebration shared by Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu and the seventy elders of the people, after receiving the Torah.

In an awesome verse of that section, the Torah tells us that this select group “saw the God of Israel … and they ate and drank” (Ex. 24:10-11).  As of several centuries ago, traditional scholars felt uncomfortable with the idea that these men chose to eat and drink, at the time they perceived the divine revelation.  In fact, many interpreters tried to detach these two events, affirming that on the one hand, they saw God, and only later did they eat and drink.  More so, according to a Midrash, it was this act of eating and drinking after having lived such an intense spiritual experience that sealed the fate of Nadab and Abihu, who were later punished following a strange episode.  Assuming that eating and drinking is not something that should be done after (or at the same time) as perceiving the divine revelation, most of the traditional readers of the text have searched for arguments that may prove that these two things were not connected in any way.

Up to now, everything in line with what we know: the divine is tied to the solemn, with the spiritual, with silence, with meditation exercises and complex rituals.  Food, drink, and other secular things do not bring God closer, but seem to remove man from the Divine.

Nevertheless, the traditional interpretation of this verse was “revolutionized” some three hundred years ago, when Rabbi Yisrael ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, started to outline the main ideas of Hassidic thought.  In his opinion, witnessing the divine revelation and enjoying worldly pleasures, such as food and drink, are not contradictory, but rather this ability to perceive the joy of the mundane differently is what actually enables human beings to perceive the divine revelation.

Based on the verse of the Psalms that says, “O taste and see that the Lord is good” (34:8), the Baal Shem Tov plays with the words and says, “Where you taste and see that it is good, then the Lord is there.”

Hassidim thus develop a concept known as Avodah beGashmiyut, which could be translated as “the worship of God through engagement of the physical”, where the physical is understood as the worldly and, seemingly, trivial.  Based on the core idea which affirms that “no place is devoid of His presence”, Hassidic Jews began to teach that people should look for the divine “in all their ways”, instead of limiting their encounter with the transcendental to traditional places and rituals.

Challenging the ascetic and elitist trends that abounded in the Judaism of those times, scholars such as Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl maintain that the divine word that gives vital force to the universe lies in bread (and in every food), and therefore, those who deprive their body of eating, deprive themselves (and the world) of receiving the divine sparks which reside in that food.  Rabbi Nachman of Breslav follows the same line when he teaches that it is through food that the people of Israel do yichudim (unification), that is, unite the heavenly worlds with the earthly world.

After Baal Shem Tov’s interpretation, it is not even enough to affirm that the consumption of food and drink occurred immediately after the revelation.  It was precisely during the profane act of sitting down to eat and drink that Moses, Aaron, and the rest of the “VIP’s” witnessed the divine revelation!  Their bond with the divine was precisely eating and drinking.

Celebrating the earthly world, finding the sacred in day-to-day things and in the seemingly profane, and the awareness of the divine potential held by our most trivial activities, all constitute ways to find the divine.  Or better yet, we could say that those are the ways in which we are more likely to find the divine.  Fasting and ascetic practices remove people from their fellow men and women; perhaps that is why Hassidic Jews consider that these things end up separating them from God as well.  In contrast, shared celebration around a table binds us and brings us together, and therefore, brings God’s presence closer to each one of us.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rab. Guido Cohen

Asociación Israelita Montefiore

Bogotá, Colombia