Shoftim - Rishon

Hello, this is Rabbi Eric Levy.

I'm pleased to bring to you the Sidra of Shofatim in the book of Devarim.

It may be unwise to overgeneralize the connection between all the laws that we are about to read in this Parsha, as well as their connection to the Parsha before and afterwards.

But I believe that all the laws in the Mishneh Torah, which started in Chapter 12 in Parshat Re'eh and extend all the way through Chapter 26 in Kitavot, All of them have to do, in my opinion, with establishing a functioning and moral and religious state, a holy people in the promised land of Israel.

Or as they say, or as actually we are required to say in the commandment of Vidoi Masa, which is the final commandment in this Mishnah Torah, quote, look from your holy dwelling, speaking to God from the heavens and bless your nation Israel and the land that you gave us.

just like you promised to our parents a land flowing with milk and honey, which means these are the things that we need to do in order to make sure that the state of Israel exists as a holy nation and its holy land.

The Sidra of Shoftim begins with perhaps the most essential responsibility that a viable and moral state has, a system of law and order, with a capital L and a capital O. I should mention before I begin that there is a huge amount of Torah Shabbat per oral law connected with all of these laws in the Mishnah Torah in general and the laws of Shofutim in specific, in particular.

These oral laws define when, where, how, under what circumstances these laws apply and when they do not apply.

In some cases, the oral law is at odds with the text and seems to not agree or... take what is the plain sense of a sentence and say that it actually means something else.

And it's easy to see where the oral law emanates from.

That is, you can look at the laws that not only are mentioned here for, in many cases, a second time.

They've already been mentioned in the Torah, but they are mentioned very often in a slightly altered format, which sort of begs that there are differences that do not immediately, apparently, that do not apparently meet the eye.

In addition, there are anomalies in the language, there are strange syntaxes, there are redundancies, and all of this seems to be hinting at an oral corpus of law that is not written in the text, but that was passed down, obviously, mouth to mouth.

Oral law, by the way, is not an anachronism in biblical times.

It was well established that Hammurabi's laws, which were written in the 1700s, were applied by the court systems.

We have the actual legal rulings of those court systems, and there's no question that they were applying those rules based on not only Hammurabi's written laws, but on an oral corpus, which was not immediately apparent.

It's clear that their legal rulings take into things into consideration, which were not written down.

Now, I'll occasionally point out these textual anomalies, the strained syntaxes, the redundancies.

And I'll occasionally mention the oral laws that are derived based on these anomalies.

However, the focus of the shiurim of Shnai Mikra HaTargum is on the text itself.

So mostly I'll stick to the plain sense.

And now let's go back to the issue of law and order.