Day 037: Mob Mentality

"You shall not follow a crowd to do evil; nor join with them, so as to turn aside with the majority to pervert justice."  Exodus 23:2

The law sections in the Pentateuch paint a picture of life in the early days of the nation of Israel.  Sure, the prose of prohibitions and specifications can be quite dry and boring after a while (let's say three and a half books' worth), but they can also reveal what was going on.  As one of my teachers told me, referring to treatises of the 18th century, teachers have to write down their rules because people were already doing the things that were being written against.

This law here shows us that the mob mentality has been around for a long time, and it doesn't seem to get any better.  We can have so many political gatherings today, where people spew out so many messages about hate, and it seems that just because there are so many people there, that the people start to agree and subscribe to these messages.  Throughout modern history, we know that mobs can be powerfully destructive, such as the denunciation ceremonies in Maoist China, or the Nazi rallies.

In this chapter, the different laws circle around one idea: don't pervert justice. We can pervert justice not only with mobs, but with money or even intentional inaction.  I'm sure we can all relate to these issues today, where the poor get misrepresented in the justice system, or where the needs of those in distress are ignored by some of the richest and most powerful in the world.

So what are we supposed to do, if we don't have power over the masses?

We are called to circulate truth.  We are called to circulate the Gospel, the Good News, so that everyone may be saved.  We are being called to care for those around us, to understand those who are in difficult situations, to help those who don't have all that we have.  We are being called to love.

Will this be easy?  Of course not.  If it were easy, I'm sure it would already have been done after over 3,000 years of this having been written.  We need to face the mobs and continue to spread the truth, for that is what this world needs.  The world around us needs the love preached in the Gospel.  The world needs our good faith to God, to ourselves, and to our neighbors.