By Rose Alon

Mishpatim, this week’s parasha, translates roughly to mean “sentences”. Moses is now at Mount Sinai (40 days and 40 nights- sound familiar?) receiving God’s sentences, or rules for the Jewish people to follow. These include laws about worshipping other Gods, holding slaves, keeping Shabbat, and kashrut. Going through all of them would get kind of boring and tedious, so I’ll just focus on a particular law that stuck out to me. (It’s also one that shows up in Hammurabi’s Code, the set of laws of ancient Babylon, among other law codes)

In reference to harming a woman who loses her unborn child, the Torah says that the punishment should be “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning” (Exo. 21: 23-25), etc. Here, the Torah commands the Jewish people to have wrongdoers pay for their crimes in a way exactly equal to the damage they caused.

Is this justice? Or is it just revenge? To most people, it can be seen as a matter of perspective. While family and friends of the victim might see it as just, those close to the person who committed the crime may view it as harsh and unnecessary.

But taken slightly out of context, this section of the parasha made me think about the consequences of our actions and the way we learn from our experiences. After all, we’re human. Sometimes, we make mistakes, and other times, we do things without thinking them through and later regret it. To be punished in these instances doesn’t help, it just creates a cycle of hatred, distrust, and revenge.

Plus, because we’re human, we have the opportunity to forgive each other. This works both ways. Asking for forgiveness, when done thoughtfully, makes the wrongdoer analyze their actions and the effect they had on the other person. On the other hand, forgiving someone is usually more difficult, but it leads to mutual understanding. When we forgive, we remember

that often times it could be us that hurt someone in the same way we’ve been hurt.

Even though taking an “eye for eye” is what God explicitly commands, I think it is more important to recognize that as people, we don’t always act with as much care as we should. Part of our mission is to keep working to become the best versions of ourselves, which means constantly evaluating whether we treat others with the fairness that we expect from them in return.