Mishpatim: "Agony that is not yet language"

“Do not maltreat a stranger, and do not oppress them, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. Do not oppress any widow or orphan. If you do oppress them… For if they cry out to Me, I will hear their cry.” (Exodus 22:20-22)

What are we to make of God’s strange phrasing? Why does God begin to articulate a threat (“If you do oppress them…”) without finishing the thought?

Some commentators suggest that, despite the unusual wording, we should simply read the sentence as one continuous thread: “If you oppress them and if they cry out to Me, I will hear their cry.”¹ Others, though, argue that the halting language indicates a deeper meaning. The Be’er Yitzchak, a 19th-century commentator, argues:

The text is incomplete in order to demonstrate the seriousness of the sin… It is like a person speaking with great intensity. When this person says, ‘If you oppress them,’ the idea of the oppression of an orphan or widow awakens compassion for the vulnerable and anger and cruelty towards the oppressor. He cannot speak because of his intense feelings, and he expresses himself with bodily movements and facial expression.²

The Be’er Yitzchak compares God to a person who cannot contain their shock and rage in the face of injustice. The text is incomplete because language fails God. When we see something that truly shocks us, it creates a fissure: there is something that cannot be captured in the frameworks, symbols, words, or ideas that have until now allowed us to interpret the world around us.

During the Roman persecution, when Rabbi Elisha ben Abuya saw the tongue of another rabbi being dragged in the dust, he cried out, “Shall the mouth that produced gems lick the dust?” Full of despair, he became a heretic.³ The traumatic impact of the event obliterated the religious structures through which he had previously made meaning of the world.

Why does the Talmud, which labels Elisha ben Abuya as Acher (“Other”) itself record this story? And given that the Talmud does include the story, why doesn’t it offer a response to ben Abuya? Isn’t this just encouraging others to follow ben Abuya’s example?

The rabbis of the Talmud know that questions like ben Abuya’s are unavoidable: each of us will experience or witness pain and suffering that undermines what we think we know about the world. If the rabbis were to ignore this obvious fact, their religious system would be revealed to be inadequate and unrealistic. At the same time, they recognize that the typical answers given to such questions (“Everything happens for a reason,” “God’s ways are mysterious”) can never quite suture the fissure induced by these traumatic experiences. They admit that there is a void that no religious system (or any other system) can paper over, “a point which escapes symbolization.”⁴

But the fact that such questions undermine our religious, moral, and political frameworks is not simply a tragedy to be mourned or accepted; those questions also allow us to break free of the rationalizations that keep the horrors of the world at bay. “The ethical demand made by the Other,” writes Judith Butler, “is that vocalization of agony that is not yet language or no longer language, the one by which we are wakened to the precariousness of the Other's life.”⁵ Ben Abuya’s question is, on its most basic level, a protest against the world as it is: “The mouth that produced gems should not lick the dust!” Perhaps it’s not that the Talmud is simply resigned to the fact that we, too, will inevitably ask the question, but instead it wants to actively encourage us to do so: Do you, reader, not know how many tongues are licking the dust right now?

The Talmud asks how the sage Rabbi Meir could learn from ben Abuya, and it answers, “Rabbi Meir found a pomegranate: he ate the inside and threw out the peel.”⁶ Though this is typically understood to mean that Rabbi Meir was able to learn Torah from ben Abuya without imitating his heresy, perhaps we should understand it differently: Rabbi Meir was able to internalize ben Abuya’s question without emulating his response, to confront the evils of the world around him without succumbing to hopelessness.

And maybe this is is also why God leaves the phrase “If you do oppress them…” incomplete. God is not merely imitating humans’ halting speech, as the Be’er Yitzchak suggests, but also expressing an ideal way of speaking: God wants us, too, to be at a loss for words for a moment. To the Talmud’s dictum that “just as God is loving and merciful, so too should you be loving and merciful,”⁷ we can perhaps add, “Just as God is horrified, so too should you be horrified.” It is only when our explanations fail, our rationalizations come up empty, and our language breaks that we can begin to recognize and respond to the obligations we have to one another.

1. See the Ramban on Ex. 22:22.

2. Be’er Yitzchak on Ex. 22:22.

3. BT Kiddushin 39b.

4. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 193.

5. Judith Butler, Precarious Life, 139.

6. BT Hagigah 15b.

7. BT Shabbat 133b.