Mishpatim 5774: What Is Man?
By Rabbi Joshua (potentially known as The Hoffer) Hoffman
In the merit of a refuah shleimah, a full recovery, for Rivkah bas Sarah (Regina) Sprecher, mother of Dr. Shlomo Sprecher. Please pray on her behalf, among the ill of Israel in general.
Many of the mitzvos included in parshas Mishpatim deal with issues of civil laws, of relations between man and his fellow man. Included among them, are the laws of damaging others or their property, either through one’s own person or through his possessions. The extensive details of these laws are too numerous to be recorded in the written Torah, and are therefore found in the oral Torah. Rav Shimshon Raphael Hirsch says that what we have in the written Torah is akin to brief lecture notes on a comprehensive topic. Someone who was at the lecture can understand, from the notes, the wider content, but someone who has not seen the wider picture cannot follow the notes. So, too, the oral law teaches us the full range of these laws, and the written Torah is a type of a shorthand reminder.
The section of the Talmud that teaches the laws of damages was, according to one opinion, one long tractate that was later divided into the three tractates that we know now, Bava Kamma, Bava Metziah and Bava Basra, or the first gate, the middle gate and the last gate. They are called gates, explains the commentary Tosfos Yom Tov, because they lead us into a full understanding of these laws that we cannot get from the Torah itself.
The first Mishnah in Bava Kamma categorizes four types of damages that one is liable for: shor, or ox, bor, or pit, maveh, or tooth, and hever, or fire. Our translation of maveh as tooth, meaning damage done by an animal through eating, follows the opinion of Shmuel in the Talmud (Bava Kamma 3b). However, according to Rav, it refers to man, and the term maveh is used based on a verse in Yeshayah (21:12). In that verse, God speaks of the future punishment for evil people, and say, “im tevayun bayu,” if you seek, seek. Maveh, then, according to this verse, is one who can seek, or pray. The commentaries ask why, according to Rav, does the Mishnah use this terms for man, instead of the usual term adam? Many answers are given, but I would like to focus on the one I heard from my teacher, Rav Aharon Soloveitchik, zt”l, in the name of his uncle, Rav Menachem Krakovski, as it can be expanded upon to help understand the underpinnings of the Torah’s view of the laws of damages, and of civil laws, in general.
Rav Krakovski says that a person who damages is referred to in the Mishnah, as maveh, because he does not deserve to be called adam, a man. Rather, he is potentially a man, and if he seeks God, prays to Him, makes restitution and repents, he can then be called adam. The term adam, in fact, has wide implications, as explained by Rav Ephraim Lunshitz in his Olelos Ephraim. He says there that the word adam alone, among the various words used in Hebrew to refer to man, has a different form in the plural than in the singular. The plural of the word enosh is anashim, of gever, gevarim, and ish, ishim. When it comes to the word adam, however, both the singular and the plural forms are adam. The term adam, then, refers to the individual person seen as part of the collective. This is why the Talmud says that only a Jew is called adam in Scripture. As Rabbeinu Tam points out, we do find that a non-Jew is referred to as ha-Adam, the specific man, but not as adam, an individual connected intrinsically and organically to the community. Only a Jew is viewed in this way, because of the unity of the Jewish people, which is reflective of the unity of God. Someone who damages another, then, has not taken care to be careful of the needs of the wider community, and does not deserve the title adam. This is the basis of the Torah’s code of civil laws, requiring the individual to view himself as part of the indivisible unit of the Jewish people, reflecting the unity of God, the source of all the laws of the Torah, as given at Mt. Sinai.