“Great is human dignity, for it overrides a prohibition in the Torah,” is a famous assertion found over and over again the Talmud, holding out a challenge and an opportunity for all of us to prioritize people over rules, and to elevate human dignity over systemic consistency. How easy it is to allow ideology to obliterate human worth, to permit devotion to an ideal to render invisible the individual before us.
Today’s Torah portion is read in a similar light. Generations of sages have asked a structural question about this week’s Torah portion: why is it that the listing of rules (“These are the rules that you must set before them…”), which introduces this week’s parashah, follows immediately on the conclusion of last week’s reading dealing with the proper treatment of the altar in the Tabernacle (and later, the Holy Temple in Jerusalem)? The final verses of last week’s parashah reads, “Do not ascend My altar by steps, that your nakedness may not be exposed upon it.” What is the logical connection between rules of deportment at the altar and the social rules of Parashat Mishpatim?
Rashi (11th Century France) reflects an earlier Midrashic understanding when he understands the connection as telling us “to place the Sanhedrin adjacent to the Temple.” There is to be a connection between social priorities and religious observance. Rather than two separate realms that have nothing to do with each other, this confluence of verses reminds us that religion has everything to do with justice, compassion, and decency, and that how we behave should reflect our spiritual and religious convictions.
The Talmud offers another interpretation that supports Rashi’s point. “Rabbi Elazar says, Where can it be derived that a judge should not trample on the heads of holy people? Because the Torah says, “Do not ascend My altar by steps,’ and adjacent to that it says, ‘And these are the laws (Sanhedrin 7b).”
Rabbi Elazar tells us that the connection between the end of last week’s Torah reading (about the rules of the Altar) and the beginning of this week’s (about social and ethical conduct) is to be found in the religious value of human dignity. Rashi makes the implicit logic clear:
Isn’t the matter of not ascending on steps a kal va-homer [inference from a minor matter to a major conclusion]? If the Torah says regarding the stones of the altar, which are not sentient and are not particular about their disgrace, ‘do not ascend My altar by steps’ – meaning do not treat them in a disrespectful manner – then your colleague who is made in the image of your Creator and who is particular about being disgraced, how much more so should you treat that person with respect!
It is too easy to let ideology blind us to the humanity and the need of the individual before us. On the Right and the Left, our systemic commitments can erase the humanity of a person, the simple reality of pain, sorrow, need that calls out for an equally human response. Rather than indulging that erasure, Judaism confronts it. Even a commitment to Torah cannot remove the priority of human dignity.
In an age of ideological rigidity, in a time when too many put ideas or systems ahead of actual people, the Torah demands on God’s behest, that we remember that systems are there to serve human betterment, that ideology is a tool for justice, righteousness, and love. And that it must defer to those abiding Torah goals.
Shabbat Shalom!