Post by Rabbi Neil on Jul 28, 2023 20:20:58 GMT
Our Torah portion of Va’etchanan this week says something very important:
Lo tosifu al hadavar asher anochi m’tsavvecha etchem v’lo tigr’u minenu – You shall not add anything to what I command you or take anything away from it (Deut. 4:2)
So, we may as well go home! I say that because there isn’t a Jewish community in the world that hasn’t broken this rule. We all add and subtract, don’t we? Of course, we don’t add and subtract to the Torah – the text is the text whether we like it or not. And there may well be parts that we don’t like, but we don’t edit them out and say, “There’s no more Number chapter 5 because we don’t like it any more.” We can’t say that because what one person likes, another dislikes. That example of Numbers chapter 5 is the ritual of the Sotah – a ritual that some people find to be abhorrent, while others find it to be liberating. Similarly, I remember once when someone told me how much they thought the story of Abraham and Lot dividing up the land was a ridiculous story and I remember how appalled I was because I find it very moving and inspiring. I even remember one Rabbi in the UK tell their community that the entire Book of Leviticus had nothing interesting in it, whereas I find it fascinating. So, we can’t edit Torah because it’s not realistic since it would be impossible to decide communally what to edit out.
More than this, though, what seems to have little value in one generation may have much more value in another generation. For example, many contemporary Jews now look at the Genesis account much closer given society’s new-found focus on sustainability. When there are population issues, people look at the verse that says that we should p’ru ur’vu umilu et ha’aretz – go forth and multiply and fill the earth,” and they question it. The Mishnah always recorded not just the majority opinion but also the minority opinion because it understood that someday the minority might become the majority. So, we dare not edit out a verse that we don’t find relevant now just in case a future generation does find it relevant.
Of course, there are also obvious theological reasons for not removing anything from Torah – if we believe that the Torah is given to us by God or, at the very least, inspired by God, then who are we to edit it, subtract from it or add to it? Even if we don’t believe that the Torah is divinely dictated word for word to Moses and then passed on to us, Torah at the very least remains our people’s first attempt to understanding what it is that God wants from us, and therefore every verse is absolutely essential.
The Rabbis understood the prohibition against adding or subtracting as a numerical thing – as quantitative changes. For example, there are three sections in the Priestly blessing and it would be wrong to add a fourth. We light at least 44 candles over the entire festival of Chanukah, not 34 or 24. Interestingly, though, the idea of numerical prohibition does not work either, though. On Shabbat, we traditionally light two candles for the two commandments relating to Shabbat in Torah of observing and of remembering it. But in some families, there is a custom of also lighting a candle for each child in the family. That’s clearly adding numerically to Judaism. That said, though, it’s not adding to what God specifically commands in the Torah because God never commands us to light candles on Shabbat in Torah – that’s a later Rabbinic ritual.
The Rabbis were happy to add rituals to Judaism, it’s just that in order to ensure that their additions were deemed authentic, they said that they weren’t adding to Torah at all. To understand Rabbinic Judaism, we have to understand that it is both a received and an interpretive tradition. What that means is that the text of the Bible was considered to have been received word-for-word from God, but the interpretation of that text was also given to the Rabbis. That gave them permission to say that where the text says one thing, what it means may not be the thing you think, and that even gets to the point of changing numbers. One obvious example of this is in the punishment of lashes. Deuteronomy 25:3 says, “The guilty one is given up to forty lashes, but not more, lest being flogged further, to excess, your peer be degraded before your eyes.” The punishment is clear – up to forty lashes. Apart from one dissenting opinion by Rabbi Yehudah, who says that that means up to forty, Talmud (Makkot 22a) makes it clear that the maximum is actually thirty-nine lashes, to be split into three groups of thirteen lashes each. The idea of only thirty-nine is explained in commentaries – if the person giving the lashes accidentally miscounted and added one, they might then contravene the Torah verse that says “forty and no more.” Therefore, the Rabbis tell us that this means thirty-nine and no more, just in case we accidentally add one. So, even the Rabbis added and subtracted numerically from Torah commandments and, most importantly, justified those additions or subtractions as being Divinely approved. And it’s not just in numerical matters that the Rabbis added to Judaism. For example, there are no laws of marriage in Torah, only divorce. The existence of marriage is obviously proven by the existence of divorce, but the specific laws of marriage were never expounded until the Rabbis created them. Perhaps, then, we could get around this verse by distinguishing between two differing types of commandment – the mitzvah d’orietah and mitzvah d’rabanan. A mitzvah d’oreitah is a commandment from the Torah whereas a mitzvah d’rabanan is a commandment from the Rabbis. Maybe we could say that it’s okay to increase and decrease the number of mitzvot d’rabanan as you wish, just don’t confuse them with mitzvot d’oreitah. Since the lighting of the Shabbat candles is a mitzvah d’rabanan, then, we can add more candles than the two traditionally proscribed. But that distinction between the two types of commandments falls apart when we think back to the lashes because the Rabbis clearly limit the number of lashes in a mitzvah d’oreitah, a Torah law. They clearly subtracted.
And I’m okay with that. They made Judaism more humane by creatively reinterpreting the text and reducing the maximum number of lashes a person can receive. That’s good. They reformed Judaism and made it more humane, and that’s been an essential element of Jewish textual interpretation since the Rabbinic age. The commandment of the stubborn and rebellious child was essentially reformed out of existence. Not all interpretation became more humane – the ritual of the Sotah that I mentioned before became even more humiliating – but the essential aspect here is creative interpretation of the text. We have always added to and subtracted from the text. There are those who pretend that we don’t – who either say that changes to our tradition were pre-determined and handed down from God and we just don’t understand what the text was trying to say, or they actively fight changes and developments in Judaism today. Such is not our way as Reform Jews, because we recognize that Torah is an expansive text that covers much of relevance in our lives but it doesn’t cover everything. By necessity of its place in history, it can’t. That is where our God-given intellect needs to come into play. I believe that God needs us to add to Judaism, just not add to Torah. If God had wanted robots – automatons that just follow everything that they’re programmed to do, then Torah would have been much longer and would have included everything that it could possibly need to cover. But it doesn’t and I think it doesn’t deliberately because we’ve been given an invitation to think.
The challenge for us is how to interpret, though. Do we do so individually? Do we do so communally? If we do so individually, then we could end up with millions of differing versions of Judaism. But if we do so communally, we could end up ignoring modern feelings of individuality which we also celebrate. That’s a difficult question, but perhaps a question for another time, for at least what we can say is that when Torah tells us not to add to or subtract from the law, we can rest comfortable in the knowledge that we’ve never actually kept to that, and to my mind, here’s why. That original commandment was to the Israelites, not to us. That may seem a controversial thing to say because the received tradition is that everything commanded to the ancient Israelites was also for us, but that’s not true. For example, the ancient Israelites were commanded to give animal sacrifices but we don’t because Judaism developed and grew. Some might say that the commandment is still incumbent upon us but we can’t perform it because there’s no Temple, but that denies the reality of the last two thousand years of Jewish life. During the wilderness years, as a fledgling people, there needed to be one rule for all. Now, as Jews are spread all around the world, we have differing customs. The Israelites could not add and subtract but we can… that is why we have a Ritual Renewal Committee to help us work out how to do that in our community.
All this leads to a question for our time, and I think it is an essential one. What is it in Judaism that we feel might be time to subtract? Or, what do we feel is missing in our Jewish experience that we feel needs to be added? The second question is much easier than the first. When the Temple was destroyed, the Rabbis subtracted sacrifice as a necessity for Jewish life and instead added prayer. Rabban Gamaliel added many of the rituals of the Seder by seeing what the surrounding nations were doing and then by making it Jewish. The ceremony of Tashlich did not exist until the people added it, initially without Rabbinic approval and then finally with. So, what is it that needs to be added to Judaism today? What is missing? Answering that question is, I believe, of supreme importance today. May God then help us as we add and subtract in order to refresh our ever-evolving tradition, and may we have hope in the future of Judaism as nourished by our innovations. And let us say, Amen.
Lo tosifu al hadavar asher anochi m’tsavvecha etchem v’lo tigr’u minenu – You shall not add anything to what I command you or take anything away from it (Deut. 4:2)
So, we may as well go home! I say that because there isn’t a Jewish community in the world that hasn’t broken this rule. We all add and subtract, don’t we? Of course, we don’t add and subtract to the Torah – the text is the text whether we like it or not. And there may well be parts that we don’t like, but we don’t edit them out and say, “There’s no more Number chapter 5 because we don’t like it any more.” We can’t say that because what one person likes, another dislikes. That example of Numbers chapter 5 is the ritual of the Sotah – a ritual that some people find to be abhorrent, while others find it to be liberating. Similarly, I remember once when someone told me how much they thought the story of Abraham and Lot dividing up the land was a ridiculous story and I remember how appalled I was because I find it very moving and inspiring. I even remember one Rabbi in the UK tell their community that the entire Book of Leviticus had nothing interesting in it, whereas I find it fascinating. So, we can’t edit Torah because it’s not realistic since it would be impossible to decide communally what to edit out.
More than this, though, what seems to have little value in one generation may have much more value in another generation. For example, many contemporary Jews now look at the Genesis account much closer given society’s new-found focus on sustainability. When there are population issues, people look at the verse that says that we should p’ru ur’vu umilu et ha’aretz – go forth and multiply and fill the earth,” and they question it. The Mishnah always recorded not just the majority opinion but also the minority opinion because it understood that someday the minority might become the majority. So, we dare not edit out a verse that we don’t find relevant now just in case a future generation does find it relevant.
Of course, there are also obvious theological reasons for not removing anything from Torah – if we believe that the Torah is given to us by God or, at the very least, inspired by God, then who are we to edit it, subtract from it or add to it? Even if we don’t believe that the Torah is divinely dictated word for word to Moses and then passed on to us, Torah at the very least remains our people’s first attempt to understanding what it is that God wants from us, and therefore every verse is absolutely essential.
The Rabbis understood the prohibition against adding or subtracting as a numerical thing – as quantitative changes. For example, there are three sections in the Priestly blessing and it would be wrong to add a fourth. We light at least 44 candles over the entire festival of Chanukah, not 34 or 24. Interestingly, though, the idea of numerical prohibition does not work either, though. On Shabbat, we traditionally light two candles for the two commandments relating to Shabbat in Torah of observing and of remembering it. But in some families, there is a custom of also lighting a candle for each child in the family. That’s clearly adding numerically to Judaism. That said, though, it’s not adding to what God specifically commands in the Torah because God never commands us to light candles on Shabbat in Torah – that’s a later Rabbinic ritual.
The Rabbis were happy to add rituals to Judaism, it’s just that in order to ensure that their additions were deemed authentic, they said that they weren’t adding to Torah at all. To understand Rabbinic Judaism, we have to understand that it is both a received and an interpretive tradition. What that means is that the text of the Bible was considered to have been received word-for-word from God, but the interpretation of that text was also given to the Rabbis. That gave them permission to say that where the text says one thing, what it means may not be the thing you think, and that even gets to the point of changing numbers. One obvious example of this is in the punishment of lashes. Deuteronomy 25:3 says, “The guilty one is given up to forty lashes, but not more, lest being flogged further, to excess, your peer be degraded before your eyes.” The punishment is clear – up to forty lashes. Apart from one dissenting opinion by Rabbi Yehudah, who says that that means up to forty, Talmud (Makkot 22a) makes it clear that the maximum is actually thirty-nine lashes, to be split into three groups of thirteen lashes each. The idea of only thirty-nine is explained in commentaries – if the person giving the lashes accidentally miscounted and added one, they might then contravene the Torah verse that says “forty and no more.” Therefore, the Rabbis tell us that this means thirty-nine and no more, just in case we accidentally add one. So, even the Rabbis added and subtracted numerically from Torah commandments and, most importantly, justified those additions or subtractions as being Divinely approved. And it’s not just in numerical matters that the Rabbis added to Judaism. For example, there are no laws of marriage in Torah, only divorce. The existence of marriage is obviously proven by the existence of divorce, but the specific laws of marriage were never expounded until the Rabbis created them. Perhaps, then, we could get around this verse by distinguishing between two differing types of commandment – the mitzvah d’orietah and mitzvah d’rabanan. A mitzvah d’oreitah is a commandment from the Torah whereas a mitzvah d’rabanan is a commandment from the Rabbis. Maybe we could say that it’s okay to increase and decrease the number of mitzvot d’rabanan as you wish, just don’t confuse them with mitzvot d’oreitah. Since the lighting of the Shabbat candles is a mitzvah d’rabanan, then, we can add more candles than the two traditionally proscribed. But that distinction between the two types of commandments falls apart when we think back to the lashes because the Rabbis clearly limit the number of lashes in a mitzvah d’oreitah, a Torah law. They clearly subtracted.
And I’m okay with that. They made Judaism more humane by creatively reinterpreting the text and reducing the maximum number of lashes a person can receive. That’s good. They reformed Judaism and made it more humane, and that’s been an essential element of Jewish textual interpretation since the Rabbinic age. The commandment of the stubborn and rebellious child was essentially reformed out of existence. Not all interpretation became more humane – the ritual of the Sotah that I mentioned before became even more humiliating – but the essential aspect here is creative interpretation of the text. We have always added to and subtracted from the text. There are those who pretend that we don’t – who either say that changes to our tradition were pre-determined and handed down from God and we just don’t understand what the text was trying to say, or they actively fight changes and developments in Judaism today. Such is not our way as Reform Jews, because we recognize that Torah is an expansive text that covers much of relevance in our lives but it doesn’t cover everything. By necessity of its place in history, it can’t. That is where our God-given intellect needs to come into play. I believe that God needs us to add to Judaism, just not add to Torah. If God had wanted robots – automatons that just follow everything that they’re programmed to do, then Torah would have been much longer and would have included everything that it could possibly need to cover. But it doesn’t and I think it doesn’t deliberately because we’ve been given an invitation to think.
The challenge for us is how to interpret, though. Do we do so individually? Do we do so communally? If we do so individually, then we could end up with millions of differing versions of Judaism. But if we do so communally, we could end up ignoring modern feelings of individuality which we also celebrate. That’s a difficult question, but perhaps a question for another time, for at least what we can say is that when Torah tells us not to add to or subtract from the law, we can rest comfortable in the knowledge that we’ve never actually kept to that, and to my mind, here’s why. That original commandment was to the Israelites, not to us. That may seem a controversial thing to say because the received tradition is that everything commanded to the ancient Israelites was also for us, but that’s not true. For example, the ancient Israelites were commanded to give animal sacrifices but we don’t because Judaism developed and grew. Some might say that the commandment is still incumbent upon us but we can’t perform it because there’s no Temple, but that denies the reality of the last two thousand years of Jewish life. During the wilderness years, as a fledgling people, there needed to be one rule for all. Now, as Jews are spread all around the world, we have differing customs. The Israelites could not add and subtract but we can… that is why we have a Ritual Renewal Committee to help us work out how to do that in our community.
All this leads to a question for our time, and I think it is an essential one. What is it in Judaism that we feel might be time to subtract? Or, what do we feel is missing in our Jewish experience that we feel needs to be added? The second question is much easier than the first. When the Temple was destroyed, the Rabbis subtracted sacrifice as a necessity for Jewish life and instead added prayer. Rabban Gamaliel added many of the rituals of the Seder by seeing what the surrounding nations were doing and then by making it Jewish. The ceremony of Tashlich did not exist until the people added it, initially without Rabbinic approval and then finally with. So, what is it that needs to be added to Judaism today? What is missing? Answering that question is, I believe, of supreme importance today. May God then help us as we add and subtract in order to refresh our ever-evolving tradition, and may we have hope in the future of Judaism as nourished by our innovations. And let us say, Amen.