Touch the wooden gate in the wall you never / saw before.
Say "please" before you open the latch, / go through,
walk down the path.
A red metal imp hangs from the green-painted / front door, / as a knocker,
do not touch it; it will bite your fingers.
Walk through the house. Take nothing. Eat / nothing.
However,
if any creature tells you that it hungers, / feed it.
If it tells you that it is dirty, / clean it.
If it cries to you that it hurts,
if you can, / ease its pain.
Thus begins the poem ‘Instructions’ by Neil Gaiman, explaining the rules one should follow if you ever find yourself in a fairy tale, the web of laws that one should obey in order to emerge triumphant from the realm of folk and fable.
In genres that are defined by breaking the rules, by imagining the impossible, we might be surprised to find so many laws that drive the plots of fantasy and science-fiction stories. In the classic movie Gremlins, we learnt that ‘No matter how much it cries and begs, you mustn’t feed a Gremlin after midnight’, or the cries of Chief Engineer Scotty in Star Trek that ‘I can’t change the laws of physics, captain.’
Mythology too is full of rules.
Celtic Mythology, for example, laid out a system of Geasa, taboos that should never be broken, on its heroes and kings. These rules often seemed arbitrary, like never eating dog meat, never wearing a rainbow cloak at sun rise, never sleeping away from home for 9 nights - but violation of these Geasa usually resulted in tragedy.
And just as the tales myth often hinge around rules, so too rules are often founded on myths.
After nearly 5 years of living in this country, perhaps I can mention the legendary status of the Founding Fathers, the mythic quality of the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, as opposed to the more legal agenda of the American Constitution.
Law and myth are intertwined, each giving birth to the other.
And so it is in Parashat Mishpatim.
