Maidenhead Synagogue – 13 February 2026 / 27 Sh’vat 5786
Have you ever wondered why we have laws at all? We could, in theory, have complete freedom: no rules, no constraints, no obligations to anyone. But the cost would be enormous. The 1789 French “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” understood this. Article IV states: “Liberty consists in the ability to do whatever does not harm another; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no other limits than those which assure to other members of society the enjoyment of the same rights.” In other words, my freedom ends where yours begins. Laws exist to mark that boundary.
This week’s portion, Mishpatim, is one of the most law-dense in the entire Torah. According to Maimonides’ count in the Sefer HaMitzvot, it contains 53 commandments: 23 positive and 30 negative. Only a few portions contain more: Ki Teitzei has the most with 74, Emor has around 63. But what makes Mishpatim remarkable is not just the number. It is where these laws appear. They come immediately after the great revelation at Sinai in the previous portion, Yitro. One moment we have thunder, lightning, and the voice of God. The next we have rules about uncovered pits, borrowed oxen, and lending to the poor.
Rashi, commenting on Exodus 21:1, notes that the opening word, “And these are the laws,” with its conjunctive “and,” links these civil regulations directly to Sinai. They carry the same revelatory weight as the Ten Commandments.
But the French Declaration and the Torah are doing something quite different. The Declaration grounds law in reason: we limit freedom because unlimited freedom would cause harm. The Torah grounds law in something deeper: in story and in memory.
The American legal scholar Robert Cover made this distinction powerfully in his article “Nomos and Narrative” (Harvard Law Review, vol. 97, 1983, pp. 4–68). Cover argued that law never stands on its own. Every legal system lives inside a world of narratives that give it meaning, which he called nomos. Without those stories, law becomes what he called “jurispathic”. It kills the values it was meant to protect. Law without narrative becomes mere coercion: rules backed by force, obeyed out of fear rather than commitment. And when they are so detached from the world they are supposed to organise, they simply don’t make sense anymore.
Mishpatim works in exactly the opposite way. Its laws for the vulnerable – the widow, the orphan, the stranger – are not based on abstract logic. They appeal to lived experience: “You shall not oppress the stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, having been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9). You protect the vulnerable because you remember what it was to be vulnerable. The narrative of slavery in Egypt is the engine that drives the law.
This matters for us today in three ways.
Memory as moral formation. The Torah does not ground its call to justice in philosophy. It grounds it in experience: you were slaves, therefore act justly. The Mishnah (Pesachim 10:5) insists that at Pesach, each person must see themselves as though they personally left Egypt. This is the deliberate cultivation of empathy as the basis for ethical action. For us, this means that our response to the vulnerable, whether asylum seekers, the homeless, or the isolated elderly, cannot begin with policy papers alone. It must begin with the effort to remember what displacement and powerlessness feel like. Without that effort, our good works become routine rather than covenantal. It becomes detached and loses its meaning.
Keeping meaning alive. Cover warned that legal systems destroy meaning when they reduce law to a single authorised interpretation backed by force. Mishpatim resists this. Its laws are case-based and open-ended, as starting points for moral reasoning, not closed rules. The lesson for us is that a community which runs charitable programmes without cultivating the stories behind those programmes is already losing its way. Torah study and communal storytelling are not extras alongside social action. They are what keep social action meaningful.
Structural fairness, not just good feelings. The Torah says, “You shall not favour a poor person in their dispute” (Exodus 23:3). Rashi explains that the temptation to side with the poor out of pity, though emotionally appealing, distorts the very justice meant to protect them (Rashi on Exodus 23:3). Justice means neither bias toward the powerful nor bias toward the vulnerable. It means fair process. This challenges us to ask whether our advocacy work is just in essence or merely emotionally satisfying. Compassion without good institutions produces inconsistency. Good institutions without a living story produce bureaucracy. Mishpatim demands both.
The French Declaration gave the modern world a vital principle: my freedom ends where yours begins. Mishpatim takes us further. It says that the boundaries we draw around our freedom are not just rational limits to prevent harm. They are expressions of a shared story, a story of slavery and liberation that tells us who we are and what we owe one another. When we forget that story, even the best laws become empty. When we remember it, even the smallest regulation, whether the uncovered pit or the borrowed cloak returned before nightfall, then becomes an act of faithfulness to the covenant.
The question Mishpatim puts to us is simple but demanding: are we building fair societies or communities and at the same time keeping alive the story that makes fairness matter?