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Mishpatim
And These are the Judgments –
££And These are the Judgments – And These are the Judgments –
ki tisa א ָּׂ ש ִת י ִּ כ £And These are the Judgments – And These are the Judgments – And These are the Judgments –
££
Secrets of ReincarnationSecrets of ReincarnationSecrets of Reincarnation
“And these are the judgments (mishpatim) that you shall place
£Recognizing the Individual’s Recognizing the Individual’s Recognizing the Individual’s before them” (Exodus 21:1). This very same verse – on which Rashi
££
Infinite WorthInfinite Worth
Infinite Worth 9 comments that the people must be taught the Torah’s deeper reasons
and ideas (as discussed in the previous section) – is the occasion for
the Zohar’s comment that these “judgments” contain the secrets of
reincarnation. The Zohar follows this statement with a lengthy and
Ki Tisa begins with the commandment to take a census of all the very explicit explanation of the reasons and the manifestations of
men of Israel twenty years of age and over. There are two unusual reincarnation. The Zohar’s obvious intent in suggesting that these
things about this census. Firstly, God does not actually use the verb “judgments” about to be mentioned in this Torah portion contain
“to count” in ordering the census, instead He uses the expression the secrets of reincarnation arises from its understanding that
“when you lift up the heads of the children of Israel according to the numerous cases of conflict and disagreement and the various
their numbers” (Exodus 30:12). Secondly, the men are not to be applications to the courts to provide judgment are connected to
counted directly; rather, the half shekels they each contribute to the accounts both from this lifetime and from previous lifetimes as well,
maintenance of the Tabernacle are to be counted in order to establish which are only now being resolved.
the number of contributors. The particular way the Torah describes
and conducts this census has much to teach us about contemporary The portion of Mishpatim contains both the laws concerning
reality and the human psyche. premeditated murder and accidental homicide: “One who strikes a
man who dies, will be put to death. But for one who had not waited
The sense of alienation, of being a nameless entity in a cold and in ambush and God had caused it to come into his hand, I will provide
impersonal world, has perhaps never been stronger than today. a place to which he shall flee” (Exodus 21:12-13). The unintentional
With the bonds of family and community increasingly weakened murderer must flee to a city designated as a “city of refuge” and
and the proliferation of a computer driven, consumer society, almost reside there for (what will probably be) a considerable length of time,
everyone experiences at some point the sinking feeling that he or she for he is not considered totally blameless. The intriguing question is:
is just a faceless number trapped in an ever increasingly complex what does the verse mean when it states that “God had caused it to
web of bureaucracy. It was no accident that the Nazi death machine come into his hand”? The obvious inference is that somehow God
branded numbers on peoples’ arms as a way of degrading them and was acting behind the scenes and had caused this death to occur.
as a way of robbing them of their humanity, freedom, and true However, if God caused it to happen, placing the blame on the
identity. unintentional murderer seems difficult to understand. This makes
Therefore the Torah instructs us not to count people as we would Rashi’s explanation all the more remarkable:
count other objects. A human being can never be thought of as a
number devoid of a unique personality and infinite worth. The Why should this go forth from Him [be brought about by
Torah’s method for conducting the census teaches us how to properly God]? This is what King David said: “As the parable of
the ancients says – ‘from evil ones comes evil’”(1 Samuel
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