Receiving the Torah, Moving Toward Wholeness
Giving of the Torah: Becoming Whole
ראוים היו ישראל לקבל התורה במדבר דווקא, כי האדם שנקרא על שם האדמה, כאשר אין לו תורה נחשב כמדבר שאין בו עשב וצמח האדמה. ובשביל חסרון האדם שהוא כמו מדבר ניתנה לו התורה להשלימו, ואז האדמה הזאת מוציאה אילנות וצמחים שלה.
It was appropriate for Israel to receive the Torah in, of all places, the wilderness, for a person, adam, is named for the earth, adamah, and when a person is without Torah they are considered like a wilderness, in which there is no green and no growth. It is in order to respond to the lack in a human being, which makes us like the wilderness, that the Torah was given to us, to make us whole, and then this “earth” is able to bring forth trees and growing things.
attributed to the Maharal of Prague in Itturei Torah, Shavuot
In his college ethics class, a young product of Jewish community practice and learning recently told his mother, he discovered that he already knew much of what is considered basic Western ethics. Of course he does; the way we are meant to treat others is found in our Torah, and transmitted through not only our small Jewish community over the ages but adopted and spread far and wide via Christianity – which is the foundation of modern Western ethics even in the secular world.
We tend to believe that our sense of right and wrong is ingrained in us, in some way: we “just know” what’s just and what’s a travesty. Yet one has only to study comparative anthropology to discover that very much, if not all, of our ethical foundations are relative to our culture. This relativity unmoors certainty and left thinkers of the Enlightenment scrambling for grounding, gifting us all the –isms of modern philosophy.
This is not to say that Torah contains perfect ethics, but that is, anyway, not a Jewish argument for authority. As Dr Byron Sherwin ז״ל used to say, where Christianity may assert that they have a certainty couched in their messianic ethics, all we have is “messy ethics”. The Torah does not offer universal (Kantian) ethics; to look for them in the revelation gifted to us via Moshe at Mount Sinai is to be stymied, discouraged, and, for many, finally, dismissive.
This is a misunderstanding of the gift’s meaning, which might be better grasped by way of the metaphor often used for the Sinai moment between HaShem and the people of Israel: a marriage, with the Torah as our ketubah.
Consider the traditional Jewish ketubah: it consists of a promise that, in the years to come, the parameters of mutual trust and respect specified in the document will be followed, and, in the ancient language, the groom “will provide for his bride the way a Jewish man ought to”. Beyond the initial details, none are laid out; the text does not indicate exactly what trust and respect, or “ought to”, means. Why? because each case is different, and each outcome of a successful marriage is unique. No two human beings are alike; no link between two will resemble each other by very much. Most of the relationship is worked out in the living of it, and the balance that succeeds between two (or more) who are committed to each other in a family is a constantly changing reality.
The Maharal of Prague, Rabbi Judah Loew (1524-1609), offers us the best metaphor for understanding the gift of Torah in this season of the spring harvest, as green thrives around us and life turns its face to the warming sun, we are each a creature just like the earth upon which we live. We, too, turn toward the sun; we, too, are capable of giving forth growth, and fruit that nurtures not only ourselves but others.
Torah is key to understanding our potential, because it does not present a perfect, finished system followed by saints. It is a record of ongoing struggle and very human failure on the way to the occasional joyful success, and even fulfillment. The Torah does not tell us; it shows us the way toward growth, and toward thriving. It is not and will not ever be a finished, perfect thing; it is a relationship. Between you and me; between us and HaShem.
We exist between and among and because of, and instead of looking for an endpoint we need to get used to the idea that what we have been gifted is a support and a guide, not a book of answers that can be wielded like a recipe book of potions and spells. The only magic here is what we make, when we take the offered gift seriously enough to let it support us in the daily struggle to make sense of our failures and our – please let there be some – successes.
That is why Torah study never ends. There is always some new context, some different thought, something that didn’t come up before. The context may be similar, but something is different; the details resemble some other situation, yet there’s something new here. The answer is not on the page, nor in our hearts and minds, but somewhere in between, which is where HaShem has always promised us that we can find it. Eternally present yet always new.
In the Jerusalem Talmud this was expressed by Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, who asserted that אֲפִילוּ מַה שֶׁתַּלְמִיד וָותִיק עָתִיד לְהוֹרוֹת לִפְנֵי רַבּוֹ כְּבָר נֶאֱמַר לְמֹשֶׁה בְּסִינַי “Even what a competent student will discover before his teacher was said to Moses on Sinai.” (Peah 2.4) This is a way of saying that whatever we see has already been seen, yet what we see is entirely new, and no one ever saw it before. And both of these are true within a truly growing relationship with a loved one, with a community, and with HaShem.
Hag Shavuot sameakh, may you recognize and celebrate your harvest on this Shavuot holy day. May you feel yourself well and truly on the path, at least sometimes, toward your wholeness.
Torah for the 21st Century by Rabbi Ariel Stone 