When Scaffolding Crumbles: Answering With a Soft, Raging Heart
by Rebecca Feldman
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The Torah is full of mishpatim, laws. It’s also full of chuqim, which are… more laws. What is the difference? According to Rambam, “The Mishpatim are those commandments whose motivating rationale is openly revealed and the benefit of their observance in this world is known…The Chuqim are those whose motivating rationales are not known.” (Mishneh Torah Me’ilah 8:8) That is, mishpatim are laws regarding how we interact with the world in ways that impact those around us—laws that would exist in a just society regardless of religious orientation. Rambam’s examples are “the prohibitions against robbery and bloodshed.” Chuqim, on the other hand, are laws that have no rational basis, laws that make sense to YHVH such as kashrut or temple sacrifice but that don’t necessarily contribute to the notion of a just society.
I had an entirely different drash on disability and parshat Mishpatim planned. But now, writing solely about how rational laws function for me as an autistic person and how these laws can work as scaffolding in building just society feels incongruous.
On January 7, 2026, an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer shot and killed a white, queer woman named Renee Macklin Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I was born and raised and where I returned to live this past June. Renee was not the first person killed by an ICE officer during the second Trump administration’s deployment of this federal agency. Only seven days earlier, Keith Porter, Jr., a Black man in LA was shot and killed by an off-duty ICE officer. And barely more than two weeks after she was murdered, on January 24, two more ICE officers in Minneapolis shot and killed Alex Pretti, a white man with a camera in hand who stepped in to help a woman an ICE officer had shoved. There are many others as well—it’s impossible to find an accurate number of shootings and resulting deaths by this agency since January 2025, which is, in fact, a representation of the issue at hand: ICE is operating in a way that seems to be completely lawless.
It’s been a very long time since I believed that rational laws, mishpatim, could create a just society. It’s also not news to me that states enact violence on their people with regularity. But as I sit here in Minneapolis, watching my neighbors mobilize with unrelenting resolve, to fight back against this occupation and to care for this community in ways that fill me with pride, while I lie bedbound, stuck primarily in the dark, attempting to recover from a three-month long state of rolling PEM (post-exertional malaise), the debilitating condition that is the hallmark of myalgic encephalomyelitis (more commonly known as ME/CFS or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome), I find myself wondering if mishpatim have any role at all in justice.
Mishpatim was my Torah portion at my bat mitzvah more than thirty years ago. I was a very sensitive kid (I’m still a very sensitive adult), and one of the areas I was most sensitive about was justice and fairness. At the time, in the early 90s, “autism” was a term that was being used almost exclusively to describe non-verbal or language-delayed kids, and as someone who started speaking at six months, it certainly wasn’t on my family’s radar. But the landscape has changed, and now autism is, without question, a part of my identity. And as with many young autistic people, a heightened sense of justice was a significant part of my life.
On top of that, as an autistic kid, trying to get by in settings where everyone else seemed to effortlessly know what to do, I liked rules. I still do. I like to follow them. I also like to break them. I like to poke at them to see what they’re made of, how they’re constructed, and whether they’re useful or harmful. I like the structure that rules provide. I like to know if I’m doing things right or wrong, regardless of whether that will change how I’m doing them. I like clarity, and rules provide that. I like to know that the people around me and I are operating on a common set of assumptions—and rules should do that, even though, as it turns out, most people are not hyper-aware of them and so they don’t quite create that commonality after all.
That’s because in reality, not everyone worries about rules. In reality, rules are seen as limitations rather than supports by many people. Rules are seen as stopping freedom rather than creating it. And as we see so often in the way law enforcement operates to oppress, an awful lot of people just plain think that rules don’t apply to them—a belief that’s reinforced by the way the legal system is set up and deployed in this country.
When I first got assigned this Torah portion for my bat mitzvah, my parents immediately teased me: Oh how perfect for you! A list of rules, just what you like!
What I heard was: in this vast and rich scroll full of stories (I didn’t know the Torah was mostly not stories), you are a dry list of rules that ruin everyone’s fun.
Even my bat mitzvah was set up to be a killjoy. And I hated it. I churned out a short but passionate drash on the theme of justice, and I refused to engage any further. After that day in February 1994, I put parshat Mishpatim out of my mind and didn’t think about it again. In fact, I didn’t really think about Torah at all for another twenty-plus years. Even as I stayed Jewishly engaged (and then… for a while, not so Jewishly engaged), Torah didn’t really factor into how Judaism functioned for me.
Even still, during that time, I thought a lot about rules and rational laws. Since I was born, I’ve been told I would make a wonderful lawyer. My family tells stories about my bubbe predicting this career path for me as a newborn, and about me crafting complex logical arguments at age two to get what I wanted. I started therapy for my depression at age seven; the issue that was weighing on my heart was the way classmates—and teachers—treated some kids differently than others, which just wasn’t fair or right. The first time I had a professional astrologer look at my chart, she asked if I had considered becoming a lawyer. Something about rules, order, and justice is baked into who I am at my core. But as I became aware at age seven, unspoken social rules, no matter how rational, don’t protect people. Further, written rules only protect certain people, and only up to a certain point. And I knew I couldn’t be a lawyer if I didn’t have faith in the law and the justice system.
And still, none of that changes that I’m personally predisposed to turn toward order, toward rational laws, in the hope that they will support just society.
However, as the Trump administration and ICE are proving right now, laws—those mishpatim that exist for the betterment of society, for justice and for the sake of the social contracts that allow us to create civilizations together—are very, very tenuous, fragile things. They only serve us (and by “us,” I mean the people they’re designed to serve, which is often white, cis, able-bodied and otherwise non-disabled, usually Christian men, or people who fit as many of those categories as possible) if we all agree to operate by them. As soon as that agreement stops being universal, those rules don’t do a whole lot.
So here I sit. In bed. Permanently disabled by a number of chronic illnesses that resulted from a COVID infection in 2022. As my community rises to meet this occasion that proves the fragility of law and the power of fascism to completely ignore those mishpatim, I’m left to find my own way to participate in the resistance. When I feel well enough to sit up and be in front of screens, I can try to help with dispatch or other information sharing. I can donate to various mutual aid organizations. I can hang signs in my windows so that the delivery drivers I rely on as a disabled person know that this is a safe house to deliver to. I have chosen to use my limited available energy to engage with the day of resistance on January 23rd and to visit the memorials of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, to sing and pray and light candles with community members I’ve never met before. I can work to educate myself every day and I can tell my friends and colleagues around the country the truth of what life, occupation, and resistance are like in Minnesota right now. Sometimes I can be vocal—while other times, my health means that’s not safe for me.
And I can wrestle with dreaming of a better world. I can spend time wondering, what does it look like to dream of that better world in this time without invoking spiritual bypassing? What can I, as a person stuck lying down in a dark room most of the time these days, do to promote the belief that this current state of the world—here in my own city and well beyond—is not destiny or irreversible without falling into “positive thinking” as the only antidote?
When I turn back to Torah via my teacher Rabbi Yael Levy, this parshah, Mishpatim, opens back up to me again. Every week, Rabbi Yael sends out a summary of the Torah portion as interpreted through the lens of her approach to Judaism, which is one grounded in mindfulness and softening the heart. And her take on Mishpatim several years ago struck me:
“So as we went from the mountain,
We drew boundaries around our actions and relationships.
We created rules to live by,
Practices, disciplines that would help us
Live for the well-being of all.
And the Mystery whispered,
Yes, I am in the thunder, in the lightning,
In the spectacular events.
And, I am everywhere, always.
Feel me in the call to treat each other with fairness and dignity,
Know me in the laws that insist on justice, honesty, inclusion and care.”
My lifelong orientation toward rules and justice and their intertwining has always been a stringent one. My sometimes unyielding and strict autistic tendencies usually lead me to see only the rigid control aspect of mishpatim. The human aspect.
I don’t really believe in a god-figure, nor do I believe that either mishpatim or chuqim were handed down by any being on high. But I do believe in a Divinity that is greater than humanity alone. A Mystery, as Rabbi Yael calls it, something not meant for me to fully grasp or understand, but that imbues situations it inhabits with something inclined toward action, and toward all that is good, including true justice.
Rabbi Yael, with that grounding in softening the heart, in her infinite wisdom, wrapped those two things, laws and just society, together in a holy package that doesn’t have to be so rigid and reminds me that there is no justice without deep care and gentleness. That laws create just society only when they’re paired with that softening of the heart. And she implied that when laws are used to create a just community, the presence of the Mystery, of whatever we might call Divinity, dwells with us.
I don’t find a contradiction in having a soft heart and in being angry at injustice. I don’t find contradiction in gentleness and furied action for what is right. And in this, Rabbi Yael says, there is Divinity.
“Feel me in the call to treat each other with fairness and dignity,
Know me in the laws that insist on justice, honesty, inclusion and care.”
The realities of this parshah are challenging. They’re literally hard to parse as well as hard to swallow (I haven’t even gotten into the problematic laws included in the actual parshah, including laws condoning slavery and creating the foundation for capital punishment). And more than thirty years post-bat-mitzvah, I’m not even sure where I stand on the notion of laws creating justice at all. But that doesn’t mean they absolutely can’t.
As a disabled person, specifically a chronically ill person with limited energy and physical capacity, I also don’t fully know how to contribute to fighting for a world in which mishpatim truly represent justice. But I do think that reminding my autistic stringent tendencies that softening my heart, over and over, and also letting my rage at injustice fuel my actions can exist together—perhaps must exist together—is an important way forward. I think that maybe, this is the way to call Divinity into the search for justice, especially if we want mishpatim to be part of that process.
Rebecca Feldman (she/her) is a rabbinical student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She hates writing personal bios, but really likes getting to know people interpersonally.
