• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 409 0

revelation and in the covenantal bond between God and Israel. “Moses received Torah from Sinai and passed it to Joshua, who passed it to the judges,” says the superscription of the Mishnah.6 Within this context, the meaning of torah can be as broad as “Jewish tradition,” including all the teachings, practices, commentaries, law codes, homilies, and so forth, produced through the ages, or as narrow as hamishah humshey Torah, the Five Books of Moses. Pushed a bit harder, it can be so broad as to incorporate hokhmah, all of divine/human wisdom (since we are hardly in a position to distinguish between these two) and so narrow as to be squeezed into a single word or even a single letter. Both the broad expansion of Torah and its narrowing or concentration may serve to reshape Torah into a vessel of mystical understanding.7

“Upon commencing study of what body of material is one obligated to recite the blessing over Torah-study?” the Talmudic masters ask.8 This is as close as they could come to what we would call a “definition” of Torah. Over Scripture? Surely the blessing must be recited! Over midrash, the rabbis’ reinterpretation of Scripture's meaning? Yes, this too requires a blessing, because midrash is itself a sacred process. Over mishnah, the codified teachings of the sages? Indeed, recite the blessing; these too are holy. Over talmud (remember, this discussion takes place among the rabbis before there is “a Talmud!”), meaning our own ongoing discussion around the mishnah code? Yes, our discussion too requires a blessing. As the sages say of themselves in another context, “Are we mere reed cutters in the bog?”9 — an old Babylonian idiom that would come out in Brooklynese as “What are we? Chopped liver?” By extension, if we keep the process open as it was meant to be,10 “Oral Torah” is to be seen in its most expansive sense, including that which you and I are creating in this moment. All of it is part of revelation.

What do we mean by “Torah?” The Five Books of Moses seem to be a straightforward starting point. Weren't they all given at Sinai, as later tradition—certainly as insisted upon by Orthodoxy in recent centuries— seems to claim? But were they? Does such a claim, not mentioned in the Torah itself, make any sense? What about the last eight verses of Deuteronomy, beginning: “And Moses the servant of the Lord died there?” Were these too dictated by God on the mountain and written down by Moses (as one midrash suggests) in tears instead of ink? Or were they, as some early rabbinic voices already propose, added by Joshua after his master's death?11 But then what of the whole book of Numbers, filled with tales of Israel's wanderings and rebellions in the years that followed Sinai? Were these too dictated and written down before they happened? How could that be? What would such a notion imply about human free will and determinism? Does it make any sense? All these questions arise prior to and independently of current understandings of the literary origins and editing of the Torah text. They are questions much discussed in earlier generations, but widely ignored by the pious and would-be pious of our own day. Remember that the three questions “What was spoken at Sinai?” “What is the Word of God?” and “What is Torah?” are not identical. God spoke both before and after Sinai, as the Torah itself clearly tells us, and “Torah” may include all of our commentaries, not just the written Word.

Common sense seems to force us toward the school of Rabbi Ishmael among the Tannaitic masters, teachers of the second and third centuries. “Torah speaks in human language,” he insisted, and “Torah was given scroll by scroll,”12 some of it indeed at Sinai, some of it from time to time spoken by God to Moses in the Tent of Meeting, and some of it (the entire book of Deuteronomy, Moses’ final speeches) revealed only before Moses’ death, on the plains of Moab.13 This view is closest to what the Torah text itself seems to say. The view that it was all spoken at Sinai belongs to the school of Rabbi Akiva, a man of uncommon sense. Akiva is a mystic