This one’s going to get a little prismatic.

With parashat mishpatim, we cross one of the great dividing lines in Torah. For the most part, Bəreishit and the first part of Shəmot are full of vivid narratives. There’s a lot, thematically, to hang your hat on in their stories of creation, messy family dynamics, famine, enslavement, dramatic liberation. Some might even say too full — many of these parashiyot contain so many dense narratives that it’s impossible to even survey them completely in a dəvar of any reasonable length. But then we get to the theophany at Mt Sinai and suddenly . . . there’s not so much narrative. Instead, there’s just a lot of legislation. Here’s what to do if your ox falls into your neighbor’s pit. Here’s what to do if someone steals your sheep. There are, to be sure, colorful narrative interludes still to come — the golden calf, Qóraḥ, the talking ass — but going forward, they’ll be more the exception than the rule.

Even serious Torah nerds don’t always find these passages totally riveting. The style is dry, the laws are arcane, and many of the situations covered don’t immediately translate all that clearly to modern life. (When was the last time you encountered an overburdened donkey belonging to your enemy?) And yet they just keep coming, and we keep reading them, year after year.

This, the first mostly legislative parashah, introduces these ordinances: וְאֵלֶּה הַמִּשְׁפָּטִים אֲשֶׁר תָּשִׂים לִפְנֵיהֶם | və’eileh hamishpatim asher tasim lifneihem | “And these are the judgements that you [ie Mosheh] shall set before them [ie the Israelites]” (Shəmot 21:1). I think it’s important that they’re called mishpatim, judgements, as opposed to torot, instructions, or mitzvot, commandments, or some other roughly synonymous term. One can command in absolute and instruct in generalities, but judgements are tied to disputes, to all the gnarly complexities of living in the world. Mishpatim come from real people crashing into each other and seeking out a third party to settle their differences. They don’t exist in abstraction; they depend upon the world.

It’s easy to come up with general, broadly unobjectionable principles. It is much more difficult to put those principles into action at the societal level. Few people would object to the idea that you should try to fix damage you’re responsible for, but are you responsible if your dog gets out and bites someone? Does the answer change if everybody knows your dog has behavioral issues? What if you’re a professional rehabilitator of traumatized dogs and the dog in question only recently came into your care? What if the person it bit is its abusive former owner? Does the required fix change if one of the parties here is very rich and the other very poor?

The specifics of judgement are endless. When we imagine utopia, I think many of us imagine a place without the need for this sort of judgement, a place where we all just somehow magically get along. But utopia, etymologically, is a not-place, a world that does not and cannot exist. To build a utopia of ideas is trivial, and also useless — no one can live there, because it is not real. The useful utopia — the eutopia, if you will, the good-place — will have to exist here, in the world with actual humans in it, the world full of disputes and quarrels and judgements. Eutopia will be built not by laying out the most brilliant intellectual plan but by hashing out, together, all the endless horrible nitty-gritty details of how we want society, practically, to work. We all value fairness, but what is fair, and what do we do when you and I don’t agree? We have to get down in the mud if we want to lay a foundation that will last.

Hamishpatim has a standard gematria of 484. But Jewish mysticism isn’t content with just one way of turning a word into a number. We can keep going — just as we add the letters of a word together, we can add the digits of a number together to compress a word down to its very essence, to the root of what it is. If we do that until there are no more numbers left to add, hamishpatim turns into seven (4 + 8 + 4 = 16; 1 + 6 = 7). Seven is, of course, the number of creation completed, the number of the day of rest, the number of Biblical perfection. It is also the number of the səfirah of Nétzaḥ — Endurance, Eternity. Hamishpatim, then, are the stuff eternity is built on. They have no end, and they are also the key to a world that endures.

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]