Mishpatim
Exodus 21:1-24:18
Jeremiah 34:8-22, 33:25-6
In these turbulent times, my mind is often filled with dramatic images from the news media. As I write these words my heart and mind hold two particularly vivid pictures of relationship to the “enemy.”
I cannot quite free myself from the dreadful images of Abu Ghraib, reinforced by the recent conviction of one of the soldiers responsible for the abuses committed there. I am not sure which is worse: the ways that human beings were treated, the playful looks on the faces of the American soldiers involved or the suspicion that we may never know who was ultimately responsible. Somehow, some American service people, surely working in the midst of hellish circumstances, came to feel that the people in their charge were not to be treated as human beings.
Thankfully, another set of images is lodged with equal power in my mind. Two couples, one Israeli and one Palestinian, fled together for safety to the rooftop of their hotel in Phuket, Thailand, as the tsunami struck. Yossi and Inbal Gross, of Kiryat Gat, on a delayed honeymoon, knew that their money, passports and airline tickets, locked in a safe deposit box in their hotel lobby, were lost when the hotel was completely destroyed. Sami and Sally Khoury, of East Jerusalem, gave the Grosses $300, half of what they had with them, to pay for food and lodging as they all waited to get home.
“In a situation like this you are people to people in the same danger,” said Yossi Gross. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we are Israeli and they are Palestinian.’ We were just people with the shared goal to return home in peace.” Two weeks later, safely home in Israel, the two couples greeted one another with open arms. I strongly suspect that this was not the only case in which people reached beyond the usual boundaries of identity to help one another in the midst of the crisis.
I open this week’s parashah and find a deceptively simple piece of legislation: “When you encounter your enemy’s ox or donkey wandering, you must take it back to him. When you see your enemy’s donkey lying under its burden and would refrain from raising it, you must nevertheless raise it with him.” (Exodus 23:4-5) The eye might quickly skip to more impressive pieces of law but for the very turbulent nature of our times, when definitions of “enemy” are so present and so troubling.
The first fascinating thing about this law is that it was promulgated in the first place. The Torah clearly knows that if we encounter our “enemy” in trouble, our first instinct may be smug distance, if not outright pleasure. We are bombarded every day with debates about the treatment of “enemy combatants,” and strangely shielded from accurate accounts of “enemy” casualties, as if the suffering of the others is of no account. Perhaps it is natural that under attack, the mind and heart is constricted by fear, so that only the purest among us might respond with empathy for the other’s plight. And so the Torah must explicitly tell us what would otherwise go without saying: If you find a lost animal, you must return it to its owner, even if you hate the guy.
The second law requires even more of us, for presumably if we encounter a collapsed beast, its master would be present. What would it take for us to put aside our feelings of hate, fear, and revulsion, to roll up our sleeves and lift the heavy beast to its feet, panting and sweating for a moment beside our enemy?
As usual, the Torah does not tell us how we should feel. It realistically assumes that we will not naturally respond to such situations with openhearted caring and positive energy. But the Torah does tell us that we must not be controlled by our first instinctive response. We are commanded to do whatever it takes to move beyond those very human feelings of hate, vengefulness or superiority to treat the other as every human being should be treated. Or perhaps, for a moment, to cease to see this person as “other” at all.
May this simple image of helping the other inform our lives, strengthening us in our resolve to heal our world.
Rabbi Amy Eilberg is a spiritual director in private practice.