Myth and Law - Senior Sermon - Mishpatim

This past Thursday it was my honour and privilege to deliver my senior sermon to the JTS community, my colleagues and teachers that have meant so much to me over the last 5 years of learning. You can watch it on YouTube here, or read the text below (but you'll miss some of the ad libbed jokes).

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.

    The parasha begins with laws, following on from 10 commandments:
    Laws of slaves, laws of torts and damages, exhortations to treat other people fairly and do justice:

    “15] And he that strikes his father, or his mother, shall be surely put to death.”
    “5] If anyone grazes their livestock in a field or vineyard and lets them stray and they graze in someone else’s field, the offender must make restitution from the best of their own field or vineyard.”
    “25] ‘If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal; charge no interest.”

    But it ends in the realm of mythology - Moses, Aaron, Aaron’s sons Nadav and Avihu, and the 70 elders ascend the mountain and see a vision.

10. and they perceived the God of Israel, and beneath His feet was like the forming of a sapphire brick and like the appearance of the heavens for clarity.

    How can these two elements of Mishpatim exist side by side? How can we connect the mythic and the legal?
    Law is about social norms, order, logic - it’s concerned with real world, maintaining boundaries.
    Myth is about the mavericks, the heroes, the leaders. Concerned with a world of extremes, in which boundaries are routinely crossed (setting foot on the forbidden mountain, seeing the forbidden face of God).
    This question is at the heart of my Judaism and my rabbinate, how to unite my two great loves, the logical and the fantastical, the Talmud and the Zohar - the side of me that loves outlandish and often transgressive stories about demons and sea monsters, and believes that these tales get to the deepest element of what it means to be human, and the side of me that believes in the power of halacha to transform our regular human lives through precisely defined actions, and loves the intricate logical debates of the legal system.

    This hybrid nature of Torah is expressed by Rashi in his first comment on the Torah. He quotes the Midrash and says:

אמר רבי יצחק לא היה צריך להתחיל [את] התורה אלא (שמות יב ב) מהחודש הזה לכם, שהיא מצוה ראשונה שנצטוו [בה] ישראל

   He asks, why did the Torah begin with creation, with the flood, with the stories of Abraham and the patriarchs? Surely the Torah should have just started with the first real law, the law of Pesach and the month of Nisan.
    His answer, justification of Jewish claims to the land of Israel, is less interesting to me than the assumption behind his question. Seems like he is saying none of this myth stuff matters - surely Torah is really only about the laws, and all this poetic nonsense about light, darkness, divine beings and monsters could be skipped to get to the good stuff, the stuff we need to live - halacha.
    This is a position we have heard, that we may feel ourselves - the Talmud classes that skip rapidly over the aggadic portions of the text to get to the really important meat of the arguments. Sometimes myth seems irrelevant, hard to decipher, and frankly bizarre.
    But I feel the power of myth, the visceral excitement of the stories that sets my heart racing and my imagination aflame...
    Surely we need both!

    In fact, the Talmud itself intermingles halacha and aggadah, flowing from one into the other as the subject moves them. One particular story in Baba Kama 60b highlights the importance of keeping both elements of the tradition together:

    Rav Ammi and Rav Assi were sitting before Rav Yitzchak the Smith, one of them said to him: ‘Let the Master tell us some law’ while the other said: ‘Let the Master tell us some aggadah’. He started speaking aggadah and one of them prevented him, he started speaking about law and the other prevented him. So he said: I will tell you a parable: To what is this like? To a man who has two wives, one young and one old. The young one plucks out his white hair, and the old one plucks out his black hair, until in the end he was completely bald.


    Trying to remove one, picking out the aggadah from the sea of halacha or vice versa, ultimately results in no tradition at all - and like Rav Yitzchak, we have to find a way to combine the two, bring out the mythic from the legal and find the ritual that flows from our legends.

    Here I think the parable of the white and black hairs is helpful - while this implies that one of the two is older, it doesn’t tell us which. Is Aggadah more ancient? Is it that stories spawn laws out of them, arising from a need to enact the principles encoded in the myth in reality? Or is halachah more ancient? Does law exist first, and myth comes to try to justify and explain it?
    The Talmud does not say - and in fact both seem to me to be true. Both myth and law evolved with our people through the millennia, and each grows out of the other, like the chicken and the egg.

    Chaim Bialik pondered this question in his essay halacha v’aggadah. Unlike Rashi, who felt the justify the presence of aggadah, Bialik’s target was defending halacha from modern Jewish artists who thought that aggadah was living and vibrant, while halacha was stagnant, fossilised and irrelevant.
    Bialik explains this relationship:

    “Halacha is the crystallisation, the ultimate and inevitable quintessence of Aggadah; Aggadah is the content of halacha. Aggadah is the plaintive voice of the heart’s yearning as it wings its way to its haven; Halacha is the resting-place, where for a moment the yearning is satisfied and stilled.”

    For me, mythology, as a subset of aggadah, typifies this process. Myth is the timeless expression of the human soul, whose cry bursts into the reality of the universe and crystallises as ritual, as halacha, a way of trying to bind the infinite and eternal to the time-bound and the ephemeral.

    Some of us here may find ourselves identifying with Rashi, feeling that all these crazy stories are kind of silly, and hard to understand. We long for some logical halachic debate, with clearly defined terms and parameters.
    Some of us may identify with those addressed by Bialik, feeling that it is the myths and legends that get our blood pumping but feel bored and constrained by the notion of obligation, and the details of a life bound to halacha.
    As I set out in my rabbinate, I want to create communities that feel inspired by both halves of our tradition, who keep ritual laws and feel the heart-pumping legends beating below the surface, and who know our great legends and use them as a source of inspiration to take real action in the world.

    For our myths in the end mean nothing, if we do not respond to the voices of pain and need that we hear all around us:
    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.