In a powerfully American confluence, this week finds us marking: President’s Day, Black History Month, Jewish Disabilities Awareness and Inclusion Month, and Repro Shabbat. It’s also, in case you were wondering, National Cabbage Day and National Random Acts of Kindness Day today, so let that be an inspiration to you as well.

Perhaps it is fitting too that this week we prepare to read Parashat Mishpatim. This parasha, following immediately after the giving of the 10 Commandments, begins to lay out the ethical, legal, and religious framework through which the Israelites—and eventually us—are meant to build their society and their lives.

As is true in most of the chapters and sections of Torah in which rules are offered or explicated, the laws as set forth in Mishpatim are diverse, running the gamut from financial to nutritional to ritual. Mishpatim, this very first collection of rules and statutes, reminds us of the holistic nature of Jewish life; it is meant to be all-encompassing. Judaism, this text reminds us, is meant to guide and inform all the aspects of our lives, from the physical to the spiritual to the intellectual—and from the most mundane to the most sanctified.

Here, in this first iteration of our communal rules and norms, we are given the message that repeats throughout Torah, and again this week with all of its confluence of celebrations and commemorations (especially that cabbage thing). We are, all of us and collectively, only whole when we are our fullest selves, when we are able to live the holistic life our text imagines. While rabbis and scholars have tried, over the centuries, to separate and categorize our religious obligations, defining some as moral and some as ritual, our text has always braided them together, reminding us that one cannot exist separate from the other.

So too with us, even today. We are, all of us, a combination of multiple identities and multiple commitments. So were our ancestors in the desert, making their way to an unknown future. And because of this, Torah—and this week’s abundance of commemorations—reminds us that our physical, spiritual, national, and religious identities are deeply tied to one another, and, when integrated, each one is made stronger.

—Rabbi Sari Laufer