NOTES for Exo 22:22

The Torah always required from man an attentive and caring attitude towards those who especially need protection, in particular, to widows and orphans. Certainly, it was much more conditioned by the patriarchal traditional regime of the society, in which were in force the laws set in the Book of Exodus.

A big patriarchal generation in such a society was the base not only for the family, but also the public, and the religious life, and the orphans and the widows being very often without the traditional patrimonial protection, were particularly vulnerable. Moreover, such a situation is met not only in a patriarchal society, among the most vulnerable, we find in it not only orphans and widows today. What is then the logic of the legislator here? Is it in this case only about the social justice?

Of course, about it too. Hardly it is necessary to talk about a normal spiritual life where the social justice is forgotten. And all the same the problem is maybe not only in it. Indeed, the social injustice, supposes above all that most of the members of a society cease looking at certain persons of this society as people.

This majority begin to see in them not neighbors, but just a certain human mass, with which one can do if not all what he wants, then at least treat them not as all the rest. And that is the way to the spiritual collapse: because, as it is known, the one who does not love his neighbor, who is before him, will hardly be able to love God, Whom he does not see.