Seeing and listening: Lessons from Parshat Mishpatim

Exodus 21:1 – 24:18

Each Shabbat, during the Musaf Amidah, there is a line that always slows me down. I know it’s coming, and still I pause.

I say it deliberately, word by word: “Purify our hearts to serve You in truth.”

I linger over be’emet, in truth. Not because I am sure what it demands, but because I am not. I think about what it means to approach God with honesty rather than certainty, with presence rather than polish; to serve God by standing within my reality, rather than by escaping it. Parshat Mishpatim insists on this kind of truth.

It begins with law: “And these are the statutes that you shall place before them.” Rashi understands “place before them” as more than teaching the law; it is laying it out clearly, like a set table. Justice must be accessible. Livable.

The statutes that follow are concrete and often difficult. They address injury and responsibility, power and vulnerability. Mishpatim faces harm directly. It assumes that people will hurt one another and insists that covenantal life includes accountability and repair.

And then, suddenly, the parsha carries us back to the mountain.

Moshe ascends with Aaron, Nadav and Avihu, and the 70 elders. And the Torah tells us: “They saw the God of Israel. Under His feet was something like a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity. Yet God did not stretch out His hand against the leaders of the Israelites; they saw God, and they ate and drank.”

They saw God and lived.

This moment is unsettling. God had told Moshe that no human can see God and live. Our commentators notice the tension. Some suggest that the elders gazed too casually, even while eating and drinking, and that they merited punishment, though it was delayed so as not to overshadow the revelation.

But the Torah draws our attention elsewhere: “God did not stretch out His hand against them.” There is a way of seeing that does not destroy.

Earlier, the people had said, “Na’aseh v’nishma — We will do and we will listen.” The covenant begins with listening — with attentiveness, with commitment, with readiness to live within the demands of relationship.

As a chaplain, I know that my work requires both listening and seeing. I listen to words — and to what cannot yet be said. I notice breath, posture, silence. In moments of pain or fear, joy or awe, seeing without listening can feel invasive; listening without seeing can miss what is right in front of us.

Only after the people commit themselves to listening and to covenantal life, do they ascend and see. And what they see is not God’s essence, but what lies beneath God’s feet: clear sapphire stone. The Mekhilta d’Rabbi Yishmael connects this image to the bricks of Egypt — the symbols of suffering that once weighed the people down, now transformed into a holy foundation beneath God. The pain is not erased. It becomes part of what holiness rests upon.

This is where sorrow and joy meet.

In pastoral moments, holiness often emerges when feelings are named without being rushed; when fear is acknowledged, when grief is allowed its full presence.

In those moments, there can be a quiet steadiness, a sense of being accompanied.

Joy opens us in similar ways. Gratitude, connection, even relief ask for honesty in order to be fully received. Sacred life is sustained through shared responsibility, through what we contribute and build together, through the recognition that holiness rests on what we collectively bring. Holiness takes shape in small, material acts — by showing up.

The Torah underscores this with a final, grounding detail: “They ate and drank.” Encounter with God does not pull us out of life. It brings us back into it. Holiness does not distance us from the body; it sanctifies lived experience.

Parshat Mishpatim teaches that revelation is found in truthfully lived relationship with God and one another. When we listen deeply, when we see clearly, when we stand honestly in both sorrow and joy, we may glimpse something of the divine.

Be’emet. PJC

Rabbi Kara Tav is a Pittsburgh-based educator, chaplain and counselor. This column is a service of the Greater Pittsburgh Jewish Clergy Association.