Parashat Mishpatim and Purim

There is a passage in this weeks Torah portion, where G-d is offering the Torah to the Jewish people at Sinai. The text says that the Jewish people stood under the mountain. The Midrash explains, that G-d lifted up the mountain and held it over the Jewish people and said, “Accept the Torah, or there will be your grave.”

So, first off, this doesn’t sound like the Jews accepted the Torah out of free will – it sounds more like they were forced into it. They felt that G-d would have dropped the mountain on top of them if they didn’t accept it; hence the enthusiastic “We will do and we will listen” (see last posting).

But if you look closely at what G-d said, you see another problem. If G-d is holding the mountain over the Jews and would have dropped it on them if they did not accept Torah, then G-d should have said “Accept the Torah, or here will be your grave.” Why did G-d say ‘there’ instead of ‘here’? Where is the ‘there’ that G-d was refereeing to?

The commentary explains that ‘there’ means in the time of Achashverosh – the King from the Purim story. Of all the times and places to choose from, why did G-d say that their grave would be there if they did not accept Torah?

To answer that, we need to see what is special about that time, and what it means to accept Torah.

In order to accept Torah, you need to know what the Torah means. At first that was easy, you have Moses to explain. After that if you had a Torah question, you would go to a prophet and ask them (there were over 1,000,000 prophets in Jewish history). When did prophesy stop? After the destruction of the First Temple. (I’ll discuss why it stopped then in another posting). Once the Temple was gone, no new person could attain prophesy, but those who attained that level in the time of the Temple, retained it.

The Purim story happens about 60 years after the destruction of the Temple, so any prophets who were around at the time of the destruction of the temple had died out. So that was the first time in Jewish history that there were no prophets to turn to for questions about Torah law.

At that point, the Jewish people had a choice; they could either abandon Torah, or make a commitment to study, so that they can learn what the Torah is telling us. The events of Purim convinced the people to choose to accept Torah. This time they accepted it without a mountain over their head.

What G-d was saying, is that if you don’t accept torah in the time of Achashverosh, then that will be the grave of the Jewish people.

In this light, we can even better understand the phrase from last posting “Na-asai v’Nishma” – “We will do and we will listen”. They were saying that while they had prophets to guide them, they will do the words of the Torah as they were told. But after that they agreed to study and learn torah, so that they can continue their relationship with G-d.

Shabbat Shalom.