In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Mishpatim ('Ordinances', Exodus 21:1-24:18) sets out a detailed body of civil and ritual law, on servants, damages, property, justice for the stranger, the sabbatical year and the festivals, and ends with the people accepting the covenant, saying 'we will do and we will hear.'
Mishpatim's opening laws on the Hebrew indentured servant, released after six years of service (Exodus 21:2), are read by commentators as placed deliberately at the head of the legal code immediately following the revelation at Sinai, a position rabbinic tradition reads as a pointed reminder that a people only just freed from Egyptian slavery must build a society that limits, rather than replicates, the institution of servitude even where it permits it under regulation. The portion's repeated instruction not to oppress the stranger, 'for you were strangers in the land of Egypt' (Exodus 22:20, 23:9), grounds one of the Torah's most frequently repeated commandments, appearing in some rabbinic counts more often than any other single instruction, in the community's own remembered experience of vulnerability rather than in abstract principle alone.