Th eighteenth portion of Torah takes us on a journey into the possible, the difficult and the concerning. At Mt Sinai, G-d dictates to Moses a further tranche of comandments, and we are led into some of the most important instutcions and prohibitions in both our Torah, and our community reliatiobnships. It's hard to imagine how we might engage with one another, in rich and rewarding ways, without the basic architecture of shared values described in Mishpatim. But alongside bans on murder, recklessness and dangerous behaviour, there is a long section describing how to manage slavery. This is one of the most contentious and challenging sections we ever read, and finding a way to understand it in a modern sense is vital. Whether we like it or not, slavery is a live issue for us today, and as such we need to distil what it is that G-d wants us to know. The barbarity of slavery might be awful, but ignoring the problem might even be worse.