Rabbi Eric Rosin
Temple Beth-El, Richmond , Virginia
February 20, 2004

Yesterday afternoon, I was honored to be invited to deliver the invocation at a meeting of the Richmond Bar Association. The last time I had been in a room with that many attorneys was probably when I was sworn into the California Bar ten years earlier. I have to tell you, yesterday was a lot more fun. The lawyers in Richmond are a more genteel lot than the lawyers in Los Angeles . The suits are a little more conservative, but the attitude is a lot less confrontational. Additionally, after I delivered my words of wisdom and blessing yesterday, they treated me to a lovely fruit plate. In Los Angeles , other than becoming the butt of any number of ill-mannered jokes, I don't think that I got anything after being sentenced to life as an attorney. But best of all, when I left the room yesterday afternoon, I did not have to practice law, whereas I seem to remember leaving the auditorium in Los Angeles those many years ago and returning straight to my office to work on some discovery requests.

Looking back, it seems to me that one interesting way to plot the progress of my entire life is to look at the way that my relationship with the law has changed during the different periods of my life. I would say that that the nine year period between my graduation from college and my matriculating in rabbinic school can best be summed up in the immortal words of the Clash, when they sang, "I fought the law and the law won."

I never really liked being a paralegal. I never really liked law school. I never liked practicing law, but I kept on fighting to like it, until I stopped and decided to do something that seemed more in keeping with my character.

But this is high school Shabbat, so it seems more appropriate to talk about my relationship to the law when I was in High School. In High School, especially after I got my driver's license, when I thought of the law I didn't think of nice suits and austere courtrooms, I thought of police and traffic tickets.

I think back to those days and, in my mind's eye, I can see all of those late nights driving home after youth group meetings or from dates with my first love, and reaching red lights at absolutely deserted intersections. So, there I am, at let's say fifteen minutes after my midnight curfew, and the road ahead of me is empty as far as the eye can see. I look to the left and to the right and I there isn't a car in sight. And I wonder to myself, why have I stopped? Clearly traffic lights serve some purpose during the day, but there is no chance that I would hit someone if I went through right now. I'd be able to see a car from a half mile away and I could stop ten times before they arrived at the intersection.

Nevertheless, even though I felt bitter and resentful about it, I never went through any of those red lights because to do so would have been against the law. And by against the law, what I mean is that there just might have been a police car hidden somewhere off the road, waiting for a little teen aged rebellion to spice up an otherwise boring night in our stayed suburban community.

Perhaps, though, the story that best reflects my teen-aged relationship with the law took place one night when I was about sixteen. To set the scene, when I was growing up in the Jewish community of suburban Detroit, the year before your bar or bat mitzvah it was assumed that you would take a ballroom dance class so that you would be prepared just in case the dee jay at a friend's party decided to mix in a little waltz or a fox trot amidst the Michael Jackson or the Donna Summer or any of the other disco music which may be the greatest shame of my generation.

So, even though I had already emerged relatively unscathed from my Bar Mitzvah year, when I was sixteen, my sister was just entering that terrifying part of her life. As part of the privilege of driving the family car, I had the responsibility of driving my sister and her carpool to their dance class whenever my parents were unable to. And let me describe the family car so you'll all appreciate exactly what a privilege it was. My father is a physician and he has always been very conscious of the necessity of being able to reach the hospital no matter what the weather is like. Therefore, because Michigan is a state that receives a lot of snow, we always had at least one four wheel drive vehicle. But remember, this was the early 80's. I'm not talking about a nice, well-mannered sport utility vehicle or a cross over four wheel drive sports sedan. We had a series of trucks and the uglier the better. I dare say that I was one of the few sixteen year olds in my neighborhood wearing a bow tie and a tweed sport coat and driving a Dodge Ramcharger truck with tinted side windows.

But that particular night we hadn't yet acquired the Ramcharger, so I was, instead driving a Jeep Cherokee Chief that was a mustard color on top, had a profusion of rugged looking black decals across the bottom, and had very large black letters across the door which screamed, "Cherokee Chief," just in case one of my friends might have confused it with their Volkswagen rabbit or their Chevy Chevette. This was not a subtle car.

So, anyway, on the night in question, I was I driving through a very nice neighborhood in order to drop off one of the other girls in my sister's car pool. Just after I turned into the private street on which she lived, my body tensed and my heart sank as the car behind me turned on his flashing blue and red lights, sounded his siren, and pulled me over. I wasn't sure what I had done wrong, but I was sure that the police officer would be able to think of something; since that's what I figured police officers did for a living.

Thinking very clearly, I told my sister and her friend not to speak unless he asked them anything directly and I prepared for the knock on my window. I'm not sure what the policeman expected to find inside of the Cherokee Chief, but it probably was not one preppy sixteen year old boy wearing a button down shirt and corduroy pants and two twelve year-old girls wearing lace-necked dresses, tights and patent leather party shoes. Nevertheless, he was all business, and he explained that there had been suspicious cars in the neighborhood and he asked for identification. Wanting, of course, to be helpful, I quickly handed him my driver's license, my school id, my well-used library card, my Red Cross Intermediate Swimmer certification, and probably my boy scout membership card as well.

He returned to his car, no doubt contact headquarters and make sure that I wasn't a criminal mastermind simply posing as a freaked out high school student, but he soon reappeared, seemingly assured that I posed no immediate threat to the good people of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

It's funny when I think of it now, but during those days, when I thought of the law, what I really thought of was getting caught doing something wrong, and what really scared me the most was the idea that I might not even know what I was doing that was wrong. But I suppose that what's high school is about, learning the rules that govern all of the adult activities like driving and working and dating and starting to prepare for your future.

These days I have a much different relationship to law than I had when I was in high school or than I had when I was law student or a lawyer. I had never really thought about the way that my view of law has changed before this week when I read through the parsha in preparation for my brief address to the Bar Association. This week's sedre is found in the Book of Exodus and, coincidentally, it is called Mishpatim, which is Hebrew for "Laws."

The book of Exodus is definitely the most action packed of the books of the Torah. You will note that there have been movies made of the Ten Commandments and the Prince of Egypt, but no studio has attempted to produce a large screen version of the section of Leviticus that deals with how to treat people with skin diseases or the section of Numbers where the God gets so tired of the Jew's complaining that he makes them eat quail until it comes out of their noses. The Book of Exodus, or at least most of the Book of Exodus, is where the action is. Last week, we read about the giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai accompanied by thunder and lightning and the presence of God. The week before that, we read about the Exodus from Egypt and the parting of the Sea of Reeds . This is good stuff.

But this week seems somehow out of context. This week we read a list of laws. And what's more, these laws are not terribly dramatic. Most of them are the common sense kinds of laws we should have been able to figure out even without Divine directives. They govern mundane topics like how to compensate others for the deliberate or accidental destruction of property and what kind of compensation is due if a man should injure his servant. Most of the laws we read about today don't specifically discuss our relationship with God, they specify damages for theft and for negligence

The puzzle posed by this week's portion is not the logic behind the laws. Most of them are completely logical. The puzzle is the placement of these laws. It is as if someone has spliced an episode of Judge Judy into the middle of a great cinematic epic like "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Star Wars." Why has the Torah placed such mundane stuff in such proximity to the pivotal points in the central stories of our people? The answer to this puzzle was suggested to me by a Hasidic commentary called Oznaim L'Torah which helped me to see that the placement of this portion is as meaningful as the text itself. The context in which the Torah includes these laws teaches us about the importance of law in our spiritual lives.

Oznaim L'Torah points out that the section of the Torah that we finished last week, Parshat Yitro, ended with a directive from God to Moses and the Jewish people to build an altar to God. The section that we will read next week, Parshat Trumah, begins by telling the Jewish people how they should build the tabernacle which will contain the statement of the law and which will provide the setting for the most intimate meetings between God and human beings.

But this week, right in the middle of our instructions concerning the physical construction of the holy of holies are our directives about how to treat each other, and the penalties for when we transgress these directives. In other words, there is no separation between our responsibility to build a place where God can dwell and our responsibility to treat each other well and responsibly. They are part of the same process. A significant part of the way that we sanctify this world to make it hospitable for the Divine Presence is to make it a fair and a safe world for our fellow men and women.

I never looked at law this way before. In high school, my thoughts about the law centered on enforcement. When I was a lawyer, my thoughts about law were about process. This week's Torah portion and this part of my life teach me a new way to look at the law. With the help of the Richmond Bar Association and a Hassidic sage, this week I learn that law is the process by which we create a world filled with holiness.

Shabbat Shalom.