Send this to a friend Ismar Schorsch is the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary. With this week's parasha, our landscape changes abruptly. We take leave of the hospitable realm of narrative history and enter the austere world of legal rules and cultic regulations, where we shall stay put, with but one brief excursion, till we reach chapter 11 of the book of Numbers. There can be no doubt that law is central to the Torah's conception of religion. Boundaries create order and give shape to existence.
Community springs from the limits placed on individual freedom.
That legal emphasis raises again the question as to the role of the Torah's narrative material. The Torah should have begun with the laws of Passover or the Ten Commandments, as a number of ancient rabbinic legalists suggested. You may recall that I first raised the issue when we read Hayyei Sarah back in November and argued then that the book of Genesis laid claim to the land of Palestine as the eventual home for that holy kingdom. The laws assembled in Mishpatim illuminate a different linkage. They do not appear to be organized in any logical pattern.