The Power of Witness

How Our Words Create Reality and Sustain the World

In memory of our holy soldiers who fell sanctifying God’s Name and the Land of Israel:

Ephraim son of Liat and Shmuel, Yosef Malachi son of Dina and David, Eliyahu Moshe Shlomo son of Sarah and Shimon, Yosef Chaim son of Rachel and Eliyahu, Netanel son of Revital and Elad, Yakir son of Chaya and Yehoshua

#ParashatMishpatim opens its laws of justice with a powerful warning:

לֹא־תִשָּׂא שֵׁמַע שָׁוְא; אַל־תָּשֶׁת יָדְךָ עִם־רָשָׁע לִהְיֹת עֵד חָמָס׃“You shall not accept a false report; do not place your hand with a rasha to be an ed ḥamas.”(Shemot 23:1)

The Torah does not specify the #crime, the #victim, or even the content of the #testimony. Instead, it focuses our attention on the structure that allows injustice to take root. We are introduced to a harsh category of witness, or perhaps it feels more threatening after a two-year war: עֵד חָמָס, a “witness of #ḥamas.”

To understand why this is so serious, we need to ask several questions. What does ḥamas mean in the #Torah? Why does it appear here in Mishpatim? Why is this witness tied specifically to a rasha? And what kind of wrongdoing depends so heavily on testimony that the witness becomes central to the harm itself?

Ḥamas in the Torah

We meet Hamas for the first time in the story of the Flood. The generation of Noach is primarily condemned for a pervasive social corruption, rather than what would seem more difficult sins like murder or idol worship:

וַתִּמָּלֵא הָאָרֶץ חָמָס“The land was filled with ḥamas.”(Bereishit 6:11)

Chazal already note that the sins of that generation were many, yet the decree was sealed specifically because of ḥamas. The Zohar sharpens this point:

שֶׁלֹּא נִשְׁלְמָה סְאָתָם אֶלָּא בְּעֲוֹן הֶחָמָס“Their measure was not filled until the sin of ḥamas.”(Zohar, Noaḥ)

Ḥamas here is the slow corrosion of trust that a just legal system like Mishpatim is designed to prevent at its root. It describes a society in which exploitation becomes ordinary, where people take what is not theirs through pressure, power, or manipulation. The damage is cumulative and structural. The world cannot endure it, because it erodes the basic trust that allows human life to function.

Why a Rasha?

The verse in Mishpatim addresses cooperation with a rasha, a term whose meaning is already shaped by Tanakh itself. Throughout the Torah, a rasha describes a person positioned against moral order, someone who uses power, influence, or systems to advance himself at the expense of justice. The warning about placing one’s hand with such a person highlights the danger of joining someone who twists justice for personal gain.

The Zohar describes this alignment explicitly when commenting on the verse from Tehillim:

ה’ צַדִּיק יִבְחָן, וְרָשָׁע וְאֹהֵב חָמָס שָׂנְאָה נַפְשׁוֹ“Hashem tests the righteous; the rasha and the lover of ḥamas His soul hates.”(Tehillim 11:5)

The Zohar highlights the pairing:

וְרָשָׁע וְאֹהֵב חָמָס“The rasha is one who loves ḥamas.”(Zohar, Toldot)

The pairing of rasha and ḥamas reveals something deeper than individual wrongdoing.

Ḥamas describes the atmosphere of corruption; the rasha is the architect who normalizes it.

Before the Flood, exploitation became a shared culture. The rasha thrives in such an environment because ḥamas gives him cover, and his influence in turn spreads ḥamas further. Together they form a closed system: distorted will generating distorted practice, and distorted practice reinforcing distorted will. This is how evil becomes durable.

Why Testimony Is So Powerful

In halakhic reality, testimony establishes standing. A crime without witnesses may be morally real, but it does not fully exist in court. Testimony gives events legal permanence.

The Zohar extends this idea into the spiritual realm. The Zohar repeatedly describes witnesses as forces that register reality itself. In one formulation:

שְׁנֵי עֵדִים — עַיִן רוֹאָה וְאֹזֶן שׁוֹמַעַת“Two witnesses: the seeing eye and the hearing ear.”(Zohar, Shoftim)

To testify is to give קִיּוּם, durability—existential standing in the world. When testimony aligns with truth, it stabilizes the world. When it aligns with ḥamas, it distorts reality and stabilizes harm.

Crimes That Require Witnesses

Every crime requires witnesses in court in order to be legally established. Theft, assault, or physical violence leaves observable damage; even if no one speaks, the harm itself is visible and concrete.

Other forms of wrongdoing leave no visible trace. They occur in private and produce no obvious physical evidence. In those cases, the only path to legal or social recognition is testimony. Dispossession, silencing, reputational destruction, institutional abuse, and exploitation hidden behind authority are a few examples of crimes that fall into this category. The injury may happen behind closed doors, and without credible witnesses willing to speak, it can disappear. Its exposure and survival depend almost entirely on how witnesses respond.

In these cases, the perpetrator depends on a certain kind of witness in order to continue. He depends on character references that vouch for him, on communal silence that discourages scrutiny, on procedural cooperation that delays accountability, and on moral cover that reframes harm as misunderstanding. When respected figures stand publicly with the guilty party instead of protecting the vulnerable, they do more than remain neutral; they supply the legitimacy that allows the system to remain intact. This is the realm of עֵד חָמָס—the witness whose presence sustains injustice rather than exposing it.

Punishment and Consequence

In halakha, a corrupt witness is disqualified. The Rambam rules that such a person cannot serve as a witness because he has undermined the justice system itself. The issue is not a single false statement but a breach of trust in the institution of testimony.

In Torat Nistar, the consequence takes a different form. Punishment appears as a loss of alignment with truth itself. The Zohar focuses on what happens within the person who sustains falsehood. Over time, his speech loses integrity. His words no longer generate clarity or stability. Reality bends around distortion, and he inhabits a world shaped by the very falsehood he helped uphold—even if, outwardly, he remains socially respected.

A Personal Turn

There is also an inward dimension to this teaching, and it speaks directly to those who have been harmed by a rasha. When injury happens in private—especially in childhood—the only witness may be the one who suffered. Over time, many survivors learn to align themselves with the narrative of the perpetrator. They absorb the story told about them: that they were at fault, that they were worth less, that what happened was small or unclear. The crime does not end; it reorganizes itself inside the victim. It becomes a system of self-minimizing, of protecting the one who caused harm by justifying, questioning, softening, or erasing the truth.

In that moment, something painful occurs. The injured person becomes the witness who sustains the distortion. By repeating the false version of events, the harm gains durability. The rasha is shielded, and the burden is relocated onto the one who was wronged. This is how trauma works, when survival required silence, minimization was protection.

The Torah’s warning reaches here as well:

אַל־תָּשֶׁת יָדְךָ עִם־רָשָׁעDo not place your hand with the rasha.

The command calls for a return to truthful testimony. It asks that we refuse to protect evil by absorbing its story. It demands a full and honest accounting to free the victim. Healing begins when a person becomes a true witness to what was done, without sugarcoating, without self-blame, and without distortion. We deserve a testimony that tells the truth. We deserve to withdraw our hand from the rasha and stand on the side of reality and morality.