Mishpatim – A Puzzling Prohibition

There’s something puzzling about the law prohibiting a judge to take a bribe (Shemos 23:8).

The law, of course, is aimed at ensuring that a decision will be made without prejudice. As the pasuk continues, “for bribery blinds the clear-sighted, and perverts the words of justice.”

And the Gemara (Kesuvos 105a) states that, beyond the obvious wrong in a judge’s favoring one litigant over the other, the Torah is teaching us that a remuneration is sinful “even if the purpose of the bribe is to ensure that one acquit the innocent and convict the guilty,” where “there is no concern at all that justice will be perverted.”

That, too, is understandable. If one litigant offers money or service to a judge, even in exchange for only the latter’s impartial and best judgment, there is still the fact that the judge, by accepting the offer, may favor the offerer.

But the Gemara seems to say, too, that a bribe “to acquit the innocent and convict the guilty” is forbidden even if it is offered by both litigants (see Derisha, Choshen Mishpat 9:1). Presumably offered simultaneously, where there isn’t even the fact of one party being the first to offer, thereby prejudicing the case.

Why should that be? Nothing is changed by such a joint bribe to deliver a proper judgment.

It could be that there is no logical answer. That mishpat, judgment, is, in the end, a chok, a Divine ordinance, and, no less than other laws in the Torah that defy human reason, so must  judgment of court cases follow the Torah’s direction, logical to our minds or not. But the pasuk’s providing a reason for the prohibition – that bribery “blinds the clear-sighted” – would seem to require some rationale here. 

The best I can come up with is that the entry of any other factor – money or any other benefit – beyond the testimony of the litigants and the pertinent prescribed laws somehow pollutes the process of adjudication. Mishpat must be executed in purity, with no extraneous elements present. Anything less, puzzling though the fact may be, somehow perverts a judgment.

© 2025 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Yisro – Iron and Irony

I’ve long fixated on a phrase Yisro uses. When he rejoins Moshe and joins Klal Yisrael, he declares why, although he had been a guru in countless cults, he came to the conclusion that “Hashem is greater than all the powers.” 

“Because,” he explains, “of the thing that [the Mitzriyim] plotted against them [i.e. Klal Yisrael]” (Shemos 18:11).

Rashi, in explanation, cites the Mechilta: “… the Mitzriyim thought to destroy Yisrael by water and they were themselves destroyed by water.” And he quotes Rabi Elazar (Sotah 11a), punning on the word “plotted,” which can also mean “cooked,” that “in the pot that they cooked up they ended up being cooked.”

What strikes me is that it is irony – here, that the means the Mitzriyim employed to kill Jews ended up as the agent of their own downfall – that moves Yisro to perceive the Divine hand.  

It is such a Purim thought. In Megillas Esther, too, although Hashem’s name is entirely absent, His hand is perceptible through the irony that saturates the story: Haman turns up at just the wrong place at just the wrong time, and ends up being tasked with arranging honors for his nemesis Mordechai. All the villain’s careful planning ends up upended, and he is hanged on the very gallows he prepared for Mordechai. Haman’s riches, according to the Book of Esther, were given to Mordechai. V’nahafoch hu, “and it was turned upside down.”

Amalek may fight with iron, but he is defeated with irony.

Shortly after Germany’s final defeat in WWII, an American army major, Henry Plitt accosted a short, bearded artist painting on an easel in an Austrian town and asked him his name. “Joseph Sailer,” came the reply.

Plitt later recounted: “I don’t know why I said [it, but] I said, ‘And what about Julius Streicher?’” – referring to the most vile and antisemitic of Nazi propagandists.

“Ya, der bin ich,” the man responded. “Yes, that is me.” And it was.

A reporter later told Major Plitt that, had only “a guy named Cohen or Goldberg or Levy… captured this arch-anti-Semite, what a great story it would be.”

Major Plitt, in fact, was Jewish.

Stars and Stripes in late 1945 reported that Streicher’s possessions were converted to cash and used to create an agricultural training school for Jews intending to settle in Eretz Yisrael. 

And when Streicher was hanged at Nuremberg in 1946, his final words, shouted just before the trap sprang open, were: “Purim Fest 1946!” – a rather odd thing to say on an October morning.

© 2025 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Bishalach – The Nation Newborn

I’ve always found it delightful that the term we use for when the amniotic sac ruptures, releasing the fluid within and beginning the birth process, is “breaking of the waters.” Because the birth of the Jewish nation, after its gestation for centuries in Mitzrayim, also involved the “breaking” of the waters of the Yam Suf.

The comparison is not whimsical. A newborn is empty of worldly experiences and intelligence, unable to speak or move in willful ways. What it is, though, is a dynamo of potential. So was the nation that was comprised of our ancestors. They had sunk to the penultimate rung of tum’ah in Mitzrayim and they still pined, when trapped at the sea, to return to their nation-prison. Their worthiness lay in their potential, which began to emerge weeks later at Har Sinai.

The Maharal (in his Gur Aryeh supercommentary on Rashi [Beraishis 26:34] and in his sefer Ner Mitzvah) assigns a stage of human life to each of the year’s seasons.  We tend to associate nature’s awakening in spring with childhood, the heat of summer with petulant youth, autumn with slowed-down middle age and cold, barren winter with life’s later years.

The Maharal, however, describes things differently.  He regards autumn, when leaves are shed and nature slows down, as corresponding to older age; summer’s warmth, to our productive middle-years; spring, to reflect the vibrancy of youth.  And winter, to… childhood.

It seems counterintuitive, to put it mildly. Winter is, after all, stark, empty of vibrancy, activity and growth. Childhood is, or should be, full of joy, restlessness and development.

But spring’s new plants and leaves don’t appear suddenly out of nothingness. The buds from which they emerge were developing for months; the sap in the seemingly dormant trees was rising even as the thermometer’s mercury fell.  The evidence of life that presents itself with the approach of Pesach was developing since Chanukah.  In the deadest days of deepest winter, one can see branches’ buds, biding their time, readying to explode into maturity when commanded.

Winter, in other words, evokes potential.  And so, what better metaphor could there be for childhood, when the elements that will emerge one day and congeal into an adult roil inside a miniature prototype?  When chaos and bedlam may seem to be the norm but when potential is at its most powerful?  “The Child,” after all, as Wordsworth famously put it, is indeed “father of the Man.”  Every accomplished person was once an unbridled toddler.

And we read of the potential that lay in our ancestors at the “breaking of the waters” of the sea while winter still envelops us. And as the days are few until Tu B’Shvat, the Rosh Hashanah of the trees.

© 2025 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Ugly Facts on the Gaza Ground

The public celebration that ensued when Hamas terrorists emerged, post-“deal,” in Gaza doesn’t bode well for peace (or for Gazans, including the celebrants). 

Much else is nervous-making about the situation in Israel. To read about what I mean, please click here.

Russian Revelation

No one familiar with Russia’s penchant for poisoning dissidents or arranging for their unfortunate defenestrations should be surprised by the recent revelation of Moscow mayhem. To read about it, please click here.

Bo – The Sound of Silence

The dogs in Egypt were still as they watched the Jewish people leave the land (Shemos, 11:7). The Midrash contends that, in keeping with the concept that “Hashem does not withhold reward from any creature,” dogs are the animals to whom treifos should be cast (ibid 22:30; see Rashi).  

Another Midrash, however, notes a different“reward” for the canine silence: The fact that dogs’ dung will be used to cure animal skins that will become tefillin, mezuzos and sifrei Torah.

How intriguing that the lowly refuse of a lowly creature should be cast to play a part in the production of the most sublime and holy of objects.  And that silence seems somehow key to the ability to sublimate the earthy into the hallowed. 

Rabi Shimon ben Gamliel (Avos 1:17) states “I have found nothing better for the body than silence.”  The phrase “for the body” (or “the physical”) seems jarring.  Unless it, too, hints at precisely what the Midrash seems to be saying – that silence somehow holds the secret of how the physical can be transformed into the exalted.

We humans’ hope for creating holiness here on earth lies in our aptitude for language, our ability to clothe subtle and complex ideas in meaningful words.  That is why when life is breathed by Hashem into the first man, the infusion is, in the words of the Targum Onkelos, a “speaking spirit” (Beraishis 2:7). The highest expression of human speech lies in our ability to recognize our Creator, and give voice to our recognition.  

So isn’t it speech, not silence, that leads to holiness?

It is. But silence is in a way the most salient symbol of the power of speech.

After all, aren’t the things we are careful not to waste the things we value most?.  We don’t hoard old newspapers; but few – including billionaires – would ever wrap a fish in a Renoir.

Our ability to use speech meaningfully is the most valuable thing we possess.  Someone who truly recognizes the worth of words’ will use them only sparingly.  The adage notwithstanding, talk isn’t cheap; it is, quite the contrary, a priceless resource, the means, used properly, of coaxing holiness from the material world.

And so silence – choosing to not speak when there is nothing worthwhile to say – is perhaps the deepest sign of reverence for the potential holiness that is speech. And can help the base yield the sublime.

© 2025 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Vo’eira – The Seed’s Decay is All We See

It’s all too easy to disassociate the beginning of a parsha from the end of the preceding one. But Rav Shlomo Yosef Zevin, in LaTorah UlaMoadim, sees Hashem’s declaration at the opening of Vo’eira as connected to Moshe’s question toward the end of parshas Shemos. That question was (Shemos 5:22) “Why have You treated this nation badly?” And Elokim’s response (6:2) is “I am Hashem.”

Rav Zevin compares the apparent question/answer disconnect here with what transpires in Ki Sisa, when Moshe asks Hashem to “Let me know Your ways” (33:13) and is responded to with “You will see My back but My front will be unseen” (33:23).

What gives?

In both cases, explains Rav Zevin, the response expresses the reality that we cannot perceive justice, or even any sort of sense, with our limited purview of history. We are like a person first seeing the “burial” of a wheat kernel and its decay in the ground without having ever seen the stalk of wheat that emerges as a result, and the loaf of bread to which it will eventually contribute.

Elokim – the midas hadin, strict justice, name of Hashem – tells Moshe to rest assured that the din he perceives is not detached from “I am Hashem” – the sheim havaya that implies rachamim, benevolence. The din is but a prelude to rachamim, and the redemption of the Jews is at hand.

And the ultimate redemption, too, as hard as it may be to spy, is forthcoming no less.

© 2025 Rabbi Avi Shafran