On the divine compromise

God therefore precisely chose the exact words, stories and laws in order to best give over the Divine directive.

By AHARON E. WEXLER
THIS RELIEF at Beit Hatfutsot – The Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv – likens the development of Oral Law to a river’s course. According to the museum, ‘it starts as a small stream (upper part) whose gentle ow gradually becomes a strong current in the spiritual landscape of the Jewish people (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
THIS RELIEF at Beit Hatfutsot – The Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv – likens the development of Oral Law to a river’s course. According to the museum, ‘it starts as a small stream (upper part) whose gentle ow gradually becomes a strong current in the spiritual landscape of the Jewish people
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
As we read through the stories of Genesis it would be wise to remember what it is we are experiencing.
The Torah is not history, nor is it science. The Torah is one thing and one thing only; theology.
Theology is a fancy word for how we relate to God and how God relates to us. It is a theology that takes the form of law, lore, narrative, history and poetry, but those genres are just the vehicle to convey eternal truths about God.
At Mount Sinai, God had a choice. He could remain silent and paralyzed by the prospect of communicating the sum total of all his glory and greatness to the minds of mere mortal men, or He could compromise Himself and try to translate into the roughest of terms His message into words, ideas, images, stories and laws to teach us about Him and the relationship we should be having together.
This was not an easy choice for God. He waited millions of years till we evolved enough to even attempt such a thing. But God was lonely and sought fellowship.
Yes, “more than the calf wants to suckle, the cow wants to nurse” (TB Pessahim 112a).
God could not remain silent any more. Risking total failure, God broke into human history, appearing at Sinai, and introduced Himself to the only receptive audience He could find.
It was a downtrodden rabble of former slaves, the very descendants of his old friend Abraham, who proved themselves not just worthy, but eager to receive the Divine word.
By translating the Divine message into ideas that humans could understand, God needed to speak Hebrew – the language His audience spoke. This was not an easy task. God needed to at once speak of the loftiest of ideas, but use the patriarchal, agrarian language of time to be understood.
God needed to strike a balance between communicating His message and not having that message lost in the noise of the primitive world that the Israelites lived in. If God aimed too high, the Torah would have been irrelevant and meaningless. If God aimed too low, the Torah would have failed to elevate us.
God therefore precisely chose the exact words, stories and laws in order to best give over the Divine directive.
But there is an inevitable problem. By taking the timeless eternal word of God and inserting it into the temporal confining language of Man, God froze the Torah into the set patriarchal, agrarian and primitive language of the time. While it is meaningful to those who stood at the mount, it risks being irrelevant to future generations.
To avoid this God gave the Oral Law to accompany the frozen written one. Only the two together, working in tandem to complement each other, yield a Judaism that has survived till this day. “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow” (Ecclesiastes.4:9-10).
To understand this symbiotic relationship, think of the written Torah as a great piece of hardware and the Oral Law as the constant system updates allowing the hardware to keep up with the times.
The Mishna, Talmud and rabbinic responsa served throughout the millennia as the means with which the Torah remained ‘our life and the length of our days, allowing us to bask in it daily.’ By constantly responding to the exigencies of the time through regular system updates, they made Torah as relevant as the day it was given.
If there were even one generation for whom the Torah was irrelevant or ceased to speak to them, then the Torah would have not been passed to the next generation and would have been forgotten. The harsh price required to remain Jewish required every generation to believe with all its heart and soul that the Torah was the most important thing in the world.
The Jews had to believe that it was their very life-blood. They also needed to acutely feel that the personal responsibility of transmitting the Torah fell upon their very shoulders. Failure to give over the Torah to the next generation meant an irreparable severance of the chain that linked us all the way to that encounter at Sinai.
At the synagogue we gather to pray and talk to God. The centerpiece of our experience during the service is the Torah reading. In other words, we pause from talking to God in order to hear what God has to say to us. With this better understanding of what Torah is, let’s try to pay better attention to what it is that God is trying to say.
The writer holds a doctorate in Jewish philosophy and teaches in post-high-school yeshivot and midrashot in Jerusalem.


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