Parashat Mishpatim: The long search for moral society

After the thunder and lightning at Sinai, Moses began the longer and more demanding task of transmitting the full scope of the Torah and God’s will. These teachings reach into every corner of human life. They shape daily routines and festivals, what people eat, and how they build families and sustain relationships.

Yet within this wide-ranging body of law, the first material delivered after Sinai focuses on social order. The Torah portion of Mishpatim sets out a system of justice and the legal structures that enforce it. It explains how law is applied and clarifies the standards meant to guide how people treat one another.

God is understood in the Torah as a moral being, and His will is therefore moral. These teachings are meant to guide personal conduct and public life alike. Religious observance is not meant to be mechanical obedience; it is meant to shape character and cultivate moral seriousness. This goal is not always realized, but it remains central to religious life.

The Torah also limits the power of slave owners, especially in the case of female servants. Slavery is not presented as an ideal, but recognizing it reflects a willingness to confront the realities of the ancient world while placing firm constraints on cruelty and insisting on basic dignity and physical safety.

Taken together, these laws outline a moral vision that applies to individuals and to society as a whole. God’s will is meant to shape behavior at home and in the shared spaces of public life.

Revelation is not the only source of moral awareness in the Torah’s worldview. God is also understood to have placed such an awareness within the human heart. This inner voice recognizes right and wrong, success and failure. Across history, many people who never encountered biblical revelation nevertheless lived serious moral lives, guided by conscience and sensitivity.

This was especially true before Sinai. The figures described in Genesis did not receive the Torah as later generations would. Even so, they discovered God and moral truth by listening inward and responding to what they sensed was right.

Even after Sinai, people are still expected to listen to more than one moral register. Alongside the authoritative voice of law, there remains a need to attend to moral intuition. Not every ethical challenge can be resolved through citation or legal reasoning alone. At times, faithfulness to God requires recognizing moral truth as it emerges within conscience and directs action toward decency and integrity.

Throughout history, societies have tried to build moral order without religious foundations. In the 17th and 18th centuries, thinkers such as Spinoza and Kant believed that reason and education could sustain moral life on their own. Enlightened rationality, they argued, could replace tradition and revelation.

This confidence placed too much weight on human reason. People do not act on rational insight alone, and understanding what is right does not reliably produce right action. More often, reason is used to justify desires and impulses that already exist.

In the 19th century, socialism and communism offered a different promise. By restructuring economic systems and eliminating class divisions, they claimed that moral failure would largely disappear. By tracing wrongdoing almost entirely to inequality, these movements misunderstood the persistence of human ambition, pride, and cruelty. Power corrupts even without wealth, and moral failure survives even when material gaps are narrowed.

Twentieth-century fascist movements pursued moral unity through enforced loyalty to the state. Individuals were bound tightly to collective identity, and outsiders were treated as threats to moral health. By defining virtue through loyalty and purity, these systems removed moral limits on behavior. Once allegiance replaced conscience, cruelty became acceptable.

After the collapse of these large ideological projects, much of the Western world turned toward a more restrained moral vision. Liberal democracies sought stability by limiting harm and protecting dignity; tolerance and concern for vulnerable populations became central moral commitments.

These approaches achieved real successes. Over time, however, their weaknesses became harder to ignore. Concern for the disadvantaged shifted from alleviating hardship to competing for moral authority. Victimhood became a source of status, and society increasingly came to be understood as a struggle between groups rather than a shared moral enterprise.

As moral authority moved inward, shared moral language weakened. Values were treated less as obligations and more as personal preferences. Without common reference points, it became harder to speak clearly about right and wrong.

Tolerance, once a stabilizing force, also lost its moral weight. When every value is affirmed, none can be elevated. Public life became crowded with claims but thin in guidance. Attention shifted toward protecting rights rather than forming character or encouraging responsibility.

Humanity has yet to construct a moral system that reliably sustains both personal integrity and public justice. A framework in which morality shapes private conduct and shared civic life can emerge only from a moral vision that reaches beyond human preference and rests on enduring ethical commitments.

As we work within imperfect systems, the task that remains is to preserve the moral substance of modern society – while remaining alert to forms of individualism and moral drift that weaken it from within.