The Aftershock of Revelation (Mishpatim)Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Parashat Mishpatim is dense, an intricate weave of civil laws: torts, damages, guardianship, personal injury, property, and responsibility. Case after case unfolds in careful detail. It does not read like poetry. It does not soar. It arrives immediately after Sinai, after thunder and lightning, after a mountain aflame, after what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l, called God’s entry into history. Our ancestors had just seen the sounds and trembled before the Infinite, and then the Torah turns to oxen, loans, damages, lost property, Shabbat rhythms, and judicial integrity. The transition is jarring; it feels like spiritual whiplash.
The Israelites had walked through walls of water and survived plagues that dismantled an empire. They stood at the foot of Revelation itself. These moments, the splitting sea, the trembling mountain, the Divine Voice, are the peaks of biblical Jewish memory. And then comes Mishpatim. No fireworks, no spectacle, only law. It can feel almost disappointing. How can a list of ordinances compete with a sea that splits or a mountain that burns?
Perhaps that is precisely the Torah’s point. Life cannot be lived at Sinai every day. If the only places we encounter God are in the miraculous, then we will miss God almost all the time. The sea does not split each morning, and mountains do not regularly blaze with revelation. But neighbors borrow and lend, workers labor, property is damaged, words are spoken, and power is exercised. The Torah moves us from spectacle to structure, from ecstasy to ethics. Mishpatim teaches that the aftershock of Revelation is responsibility. The thunder fades. Justice must endure.
There are miracles in the quiet textures of daily life: the flower that stops you mid-stride, the unexpected kindness that softens a difficult day, the subtle shift in air when winter loosens its grip and hope returns. These, too, are revelations. Yet Mishpatim insists on something even more radical: that a society committed to fairness, accountability, and dignity is itself a sustained miracle. The connective tissue of this parashah is justice, protection of the vulnerable, limits on power, sacred regard for the stranger, the widow, and the orphan. Financial systems are infused with compassion, and courts are animated by integrity. God is not only in the thunder but in the terms of the loan, in the boundaries of ownership, and in the restraint of the strong.
I think of my beloved teacher, Rabbi Elazar Diamond z”l, who taught that God is in the details and embodied that truth. He once described stepping off a bus moments before Shabbat began, holding a challah he was bringing to a meal. As the sun dipped and Shabbat arrived, he still had miles to walk. The halachic challenge was real, for one may not carry from domain to domain on Shabbat. So, he walked less than four cubits and stopped, then less than four cubits and stopped, again and again. To an onlooker, it might have seemed like a strange, halting promenade. To him, each measured step was an act of devotion, each pause a recalibration, each movement a conscious invitation to the Divine. He was not merely transporting bread; he was sanctifying space and bending time as he walked with God.
Mishpatim is that walk. Law at its best is not dry regulation but disciplined love. It is a framework that trains the heart toward attentiveness and insists that every action matters, that no encounter is trivial, and that justice is enacted step by careful step. As Dr. Jacob Milgrom z”l taught, Leviticus is not merely a book of law but a book of love, and Mishpatim prepares us for that truth. Law becomes the architecture through which love enters public life.
How we step matters. Every vote cast, every policy shaped, every interaction at work, every moment of restraint when we could dominate but instead choose dignity, these are Sinai extended into the street. We are still standing at Sinai if we understand that Sinai was not meant to remain on the mountain but to descend into contracts, courts, kitchens, and marketplaces. Revelation becomes real only when it transforms the mundane.
Rabbi Diamond held a challah, but he was also holding covenant, community, and sacred time with trembling care.
That is the purpose of law: to carry God carefully through the world.
May the next action we take, whether small or large, be infused with intention. May we walk in a way that might seem peculiar to those who measure life only by spectacle, and may we walk as those who know that every step can hold Presence. Sinai echoes still, not only in thunder but in the steady, unceasing building of a just society. May we find God in the details, and may our careful steps make the world more compassionate, more beautiful, and more whole.
