Post by Rabbi Neil on Jun 3, 2022 21:31:36 GMT
It is written (Seder Eliyahu Zuta chapter 2) that “When then Holy and Blessed One gave the Torah to Israel, it was given as wheat or flax are given to have flour or garments produced from them.” As Abraham Joshua Heschel comments on this passage, “the giving of the written Torah is the beginning, not the end, of Torah.” For many people, the content of the Revelation on Sinai is … well… written in stone. But although Moses may descend from the mountain with some of that revelation engraved, the application of the Sinai Revelation is far from static. The Rabbis had an extraordinary belief when it came to Torah – they felt that it was they who helped complete it by expounding on its real meanings. Torah, after all, they understood Torah as having two components – an Oral and a Written component. While the written component was obviously set, the oral component was more fluid, reflecting the development of the Rabbis’ interpretation throughout the ages. Torah was therefore set and yet it simultaneously grew with them. But does Torah grow with us? We can add to our learning and we therefore can grow with it, but can it grow with us? Or did Torah stop growing?
It would be disingenuous to put ourselves on the same level of Torah access as the early Jewish sages. These were men who knew Bible inside and out, who spent all their days discussing it, who believed that the secrets to the universe were all locked inside every Torah scroll. Their language was not Hebrew or Aramaic but Torah – to them it was a means of dialogue with the Creator of the universe. To learn Torah was to learn to communicate with God. For us in the 21st century, it is a rather different document. We struggle with passages in ways that they could not have conceived. For us, the struggle is multifaceted – it is a struggle of understanding for Biblical Hebrew is not our first language. It is a struggle for relevance since society has changed so radically since their days that some of the agricultural and social norms of Torah are remarkably antiquated, even offensive to the modern sentiment. It is a struggle for credibility when modern science speaks differently about the origins of the universe and of our people. It is a struggle for prominence in a society where few can afford the luxury of sitting and studying Torah all day every day. It is a struggle for passion – where the early Rabbis felt and acted as though they were married to Torah or, at the very least, married to God through Torah, we can sometimes stare at a passage describing the duties of the priests or the building of the tabernacle and wonder whether we could get any value from it at all.
So, did Torah stop growing? To answer this question, we have to understand how Torah grew with the early Rabbis. To them, growth in Torah was both halakhic and midrashic, Torah grew in explanations both of Jewish law and of deeper understanding of the Torah text. When they expounded on a law and gave it a new application that was relevant to their situation, Torah clearly grew with them. Similarly, when an obscure piece of text was given a new and clever interpretation, it grew with them. So, theoretically, does Torah not grow every time we expound on a law or provide a new interpretation? The answer is in some sense, yes, and in some sense, no.
To grow means to be based on that which comes before. A baby grows up one day based on who they were the day before and halakhah had always been similar. While Rabbis may have disagreed with rulings of some previous Rabbis, they never questioned the entire system. Reform Judaism does that. Take, for example, the laws of Shabbat. The laws of Shabbat were derived mainly from a process known as semichut – the close association of concepts, words or letters. In the case of Shabbat, the concept of the 39 prohibitions are all based around things that one does in building the Tabernacle. When we rest on Shabbat, we rest from anything that we might do to build the Tabernacle and this idea comes solely from the fact that immediately after the explanation of how to build the Tabernacle we have a command to not work on Shabbat. The Rabbis used semichut to understand that the two were connected. But, if we read Torah as Reform Jews, if we see it as a collection of sources that were woven together to help us understand our people’s first encounter with God, then the concept of semichut simply disappears – two texts may be next to each other because they are related, but they may not be as well. As such, the entire basis for the derivation for all the laws of Shabbat is questioned and we then start to try to understand ourselves what it means to not work on Shabbat. This, I believe, is all healthy, but it can hardly be described as growth from previous halakhic endeavours – if anything it completely rejects the foundation upon which those endeavours was based and starts again. It is growth but it’s nothing like the growth of a human being.
Similarly, when we bring contemporary learning into our Biblical interpretation in a critical sense – when we say, “Torah tells us this but science tells us this so we have to understand Torah differently,” we’re interpreting Torah in a completely new way. For the early Rabbis, all scientific knowledge was essentially an offshoot of Torah knowledge whereas for us it invariably is the opposite of Torah knowledge. So when we provide a new Biblical interpretation, our means of interpretation is not the same as before.
So, is Torah still growing? The answer is yes but not as one might expect. Torah and its interpretation has not grown linearly, always growing forwards from that which has come immediately before. Instead, Torah grows linearly and then there is a break, a reinterpretation of the ways of interpretation, a cutting-back of the extraneous and a starting again. As such, the growth of Torah is much less like a human being and much more like a plant or a tree. Torah grows like a tree in the sense that from specific assumptions and means of interpretation, thousands of new interpretations may blossom. Eventually, though, they become unwieldy and they need to be trimmed back, there needs to be a return to basics, to the trunk. Torah is, then, the ultimate tree of life and with our interpretation and occasional pruning back of previous interpretations, we can allow it to always grow. It is our duty l’ovdah ul’shomrah – to serve it and preserve it – to help it grow and to shape its growth. That is the gift of Torah that God gave to us on Sinai and that is the gift we cherish today. May we all cherish God’s gift – may such be God’s will. (Amen.)
It would be disingenuous to put ourselves on the same level of Torah access as the early Jewish sages. These were men who knew Bible inside and out, who spent all their days discussing it, who believed that the secrets to the universe were all locked inside every Torah scroll. Their language was not Hebrew or Aramaic but Torah – to them it was a means of dialogue with the Creator of the universe. To learn Torah was to learn to communicate with God. For us in the 21st century, it is a rather different document. We struggle with passages in ways that they could not have conceived. For us, the struggle is multifaceted – it is a struggle of understanding for Biblical Hebrew is not our first language. It is a struggle for relevance since society has changed so radically since their days that some of the agricultural and social norms of Torah are remarkably antiquated, even offensive to the modern sentiment. It is a struggle for credibility when modern science speaks differently about the origins of the universe and of our people. It is a struggle for prominence in a society where few can afford the luxury of sitting and studying Torah all day every day. It is a struggle for passion – where the early Rabbis felt and acted as though they were married to Torah or, at the very least, married to God through Torah, we can sometimes stare at a passage describing the duties of the priests or the building of the tabernacle and wonder whether we could get any value from it at all.
So, did Torah stop growing? To answer this question, we have to understand how Torah grew with the early Rabbis. To them, growth in Torah was both halakhic and midrashic, Torah grew in explanations both of Jewish law and of deeper understanding of the Torah text. When they expounded on a law and gave it a new application that was relevant to their situation, Torah clearly grew with them. Similarly, when an obscure piece of text was given a new and clever interpretation, it grew with them. So, theoretically, does Torah not grow every time we expound on a law or provide a new interpretation? The answer is in some sense, yes, and in some sense, no.
To grow means to be based on that which comes before. A baby grows up one day based on who they were the day before and halakhah had always been similar. While Rabbis may have disagreed with rulings of some previous Rabbis, they never questioned the entire system. Reform Judaism does that. Take, for example, the laws of Shabbat. The laws of Shabbat were derived mainly from a process known as semichut – the close association of concepts, words or letters. In the case of Shabbat, the concept of the 39 prohibitions are all based around things that one does in building the Tabernacle. When we rest on Shabbat, we rest from anything that we might do to build the Tabernacle and this idea comes solely from the fact that immediately after the explanation of how to build the Tabernacle we have a command to not work on Shabbat. The Rabbis used semichut to understand that the two were connected. But, if we read Torah as Reform Jews, if we see it as a collection of sources that were woven together to help us understand our people’s first encounter with God, then the concept of semichut simply disappears – two texts may be next to each other because they are related, but they may not be as well. As such, the entire basis for the derivation for all the laws of Shabbat is questioned and we then start to try to understand ourselves what it means to not work on Shabbat. This, I believe, is all healthy, but it can hardly be described as growth from previous halakhic endeavours – if anything it completely rejects the foundation upon which those endeavours was based and starts again. It is growth but it’s nothing like the growth of a human being.
Similarly, when we bring contemporary learning into our Biblical interpretation in a critical sense – when we say, “Torah tells us this but science tells us this so we have to understand Torah differently,” we’re interpreting Torah in a completely new way. For the early Rabbis, all scientific knowledge was essentially an offshoot of Torah knowledge whereas for us it invariably is the opposite of Torah knowledge. So when we provide a new Biblical interpretation, our means of interpretation is not the same as before.
So, is Torah still growing? The answer is yes but not as one might expect. Torah and its interpretation has not grown linearly, always growing forwards from that which has come immediately before. Instead, Torah grows linearly and then there is a break, a reinterpretation of the ways of interpretation, a cutting-back of the extraneous and a starting again. As such, the growth of Torah is much less like a human being and much more like a plant or a tree. Torah grows like a tree in the sense that from specific assumptions and means of interpretation, thousands of new interpretations may blossom. Eventually, though, they become unwieldy and they need to be trimmed back, there needs to be a return to basics, to the trunk. Torah is, then, the ultimate tree of life and with our interpretation and occasional pruning back of previous interpretations, we can allow it to always grow. It is our duty l’ovdah ul’shomrah – to serve it and preserve it – to help it grow and to shape its growth. That is the gift of Torah that God gave to us on Sinai and that is the gift we cherish today. May we all cherish God’s gift – may such be God’s will. (Amen.)