**If the Hebrew quotes appear as nonsense characters, go to the 'View' tab, press 'character encoding' and then 'Unicode (UTF-8)', or simply ignore it - I've translated the essential lines.
Moses gives his parting advice to the Children of Israel, as they prepare themselves physically and mentally for the greatest paradigm shift since their emergence from slavery. From being a Nation of Manna eaters, living an exalted, spiritual life in the Clouds of Glory, they were to make a transition, to re-enter the civilised world as a National entity, a country among other countries and a people among other peoples.
But not just any Nation - they were to become a Holy Nation, a Kingdom of Priests. They were to use their National Sovereignty to show the rest of humanity what it means to live a morally exalted life under the Law of God. This was the pretext for the gathering of the people at Sinai, and now forty years later in the Plains of Moav, Moses re-emphasises that this is central to the mission that they must fulfil.
Let's listen to part of his speech:
ראה למדתי אתכם חקים ומשפטים כאשר צוני י-ה-ו-ה א-להי לעשות כן בקרב הארץ אשר אתם באים שמה לרשתה. ושמרתם ועשיתם כי היא חכמתכם ובינתכם לעיני העמים אשר ישמעון את כל החקים האלה ואמרו רק עם חכם ונבון הגוי הגדול הזה. כי מי גוי גדול אשר לו חקים ומשפטים צדיקים ככל התורה הזאת אשר אשר אנכי נתן לפניכם היום...
"See, I have taught you rules and laws...and you shall keep them and do them, this is your wisdom and insight in the eyes of the nations, who upon hearing of these rules, will declare this nation as simply a wise and insighful Nation..."
Unfortunately these words have come back to haunt us and taunt us as one nasty turn after another shows some Jews to be anything but wise and insightful, in the most public way. What with corruption scandals and violent, ugly protests, the modern day Jewish people seems far from fulfilling it's mission. Where have we gone so far wrong?
Holding that question, let's point out a peculiarity in Moses' choice of words:
Notice that of the chukim - the Torah's laws that are beyond human understanding - and the mishpatim - those that are logical and sensible to our intellect and reason, it is the former that the nations will hear of and attribute wisdom and insight to the Lawmaker and His People! This is strange, for we might expect the very opposite to be true, that when non-Jews notice that our mishpatim stand up to the scrutiny of the sharpest intellectual analysis, they will take their hats off and stand in awe of the God who invented such a legal system and of the People that upholds it. But that they should observe our particularity about shatnez - the prohibition of combining wool and linen in the same garment, or other such inexplicable rituals, and acknowledge the wisdom of the Torah based on such observation is hardly to be expected. In fact it is often precisely these things that make outsiders view Orthodox Judaism with scorn...so in what sense did Moses mean this? How do the chukim particularly bring the Torah's wisdom and enlightenment to the attention of non-Jews?
To answer both these questions, I don't think we need to look far. Let's rewind a couple of lines to a section that we might not necessarily see as connected to the one we've just read. Moses says:
לא תספו על הדבר אשר אנכי מצוה אתכם ולא תגרעו ממנו לשמור את מצות י-ה-ו-ה א-להיכם אשר אנכי מצוה אתכם...
"Do not add to the word that I have commanded you and do not subtract from it...so that you shall live...".
Now it's easy to see why someone might want to subtract from the Torah's laws - but it's harder to understand the drive to add to them. What is Moses trying to warn against - it must be a real concern otherwise he wouldn't have wasted words for it.
Moses contintues:
"Your own eyes have seen what happened to those who followed Ba'al Pe'or..." As if this is supposed to somehow support the warning not to add or subtract from the Torah!!
Turning to the explanation offered by Ibn Ezra, a coherent picture begins to take shape. Ibn Ezra seems to understand that a person might, in his desire to serve God, invent his own personal forms of service, using his own intellect and perception of what would be the right thing to do, and it is precisely this kind of misplaced religious enthusiasm that Moses warned against. We aren't talking about someone who would rather not have to bother with this whole Torah thing anyway; we're talking about someone who's passionate and driven to come close to God and live a spiritually meaningful life.
But how does such a person come to actually make changes to the Torah's commandments?
I think there are two ways in which this does happen all the time:
This pursuit of meaning, like all natural human drives, is essentially driven by the self, by the ego and as such it tends towards behaviour that is gratifying in one way or another. Someone whose whole Divine Service is generated by this inclination alone will not be found taking on stringencies that don't promise some personal gain, either in status or financial terms. He will tend towards the ritual aspects of observance, and away from the area of ben adam lechavero - the Torah that regulates how one behaves to his fellow man. What can happen here is that a person will come prioritise those aspects that bring him gratification, while ignoring those that don't, which leads to a self-perpetuating cycle that leads to adding stringencies upon stringencies in some areas, and leniencies upon leniencies in others.
There's another, perhaps more sophisticated way in which this drive gets us into trouble, even bringing altruistic people to err tragically. There is an ancient debate among Jewish scholars as to whether Judaism asserts some knowable ultimate purpose for which God created the world and to which He contrives to bring us to through His manipulation of history, or whether in fact there is no such "grand purpose", at least not that has been revealed to us. While this is to grossly simplify a profound debate, I hope the following thought will provoke you to further questioning.
Many Jewish thinkers in the last few hundred years held, in varying degrees and manifestations, of the former approach of those I described - and much of the writing of latter day Jewish philosophers consists of their attempts to explain and elaborate on this purpose and on what it's practical ramifications are.
And that's where all the trouble starts! In those "practical ramifications". Because once we begin asserting that God definitively wants to achieve this and that result, then surely it obligates us to seek ways in which we can bring that result to fruition. And what happens, let's ask, when said purpose actually doesn't quite fit with all the pedantic details of halachic Judaism? What happens when we begin to assert a purpose that is, so to speak, more fundamental than the actual commandments of the Torah?
The search for purpose, when we get carried away, ceases to be merely an earnest attempt to gain greater clarity as to why we are here and where we are going, but becomes the thing that defines what our mission is and how to fulfil it.
I hope the difference is clear, because the rest is commentary, or should I say history? Particularly the history of the last two centuries. For it is in this recent period of time that we've seen the proliferation of movements and ideologies within the Jewish world, each one founding itself on a particular perspective of the Divine Purpose, each describing that ultimate Cause in different terms, each one emphasising one of the 70 Faces of Torah and making that into the goal in whose pursuit we must direct all our efforts.
What happens, as Moses warns, is that good intentions fulfil their cliche and pave the road to hell. The holy inclination of some of the cream of our people led them in their time to worship the Ba'al Pe'or, and that is the tragedy that has played itself out throughout our history. It is this that has brought Jewish leaders to innovate systems of "Jewish" practice and observance that have ironically dispensed with the Divine Law in pursuit of the Divine Purpose.
And when that happens, it's no surprise that we find various ugly distortions of Torah that lay claim to representing what Judaism is all about, which cause those who watch from a distance to look away in embarrasment or dismiss the whole business out of contempt.
Listening to the Torah once again, we see a clear warning emerge:
לא תספו על הדבר אשר אנכי מצוה אתכם ולא תגרעו ממנו לשמור את מצות י-ה-ו-ה א-להיכם אשר אנכי מצוה אתכם... - do not add to the Word that I have commanded you, nor subtract from it i.e., although you might reach conclusions about what God created you for, do not add nor subtract from that which I have revealed to you on the basis of that which I have not...
עיניכם הראות את אשר עשה י-ה-ו-ה בבעל פעור כי כל האיש אשר הלך אחרי בעל פעור השמידו י-ה-ו-ה א-להיך מקרבך. ואתם הדבקים ב-י-ה-ו-ה א-להיכם חיים כלכם היום...- for your eyes have seen what God did with Ba'al Pe'or...because once you base your service on your own ideas of what God wants from you, the danger is that you will come to distort the Torah beyond all recognition, even turning to the worship of non-gods...
ראה למדתי אתכם חקים ומשפטים כאשר צוני י-ה-ו-ה א-להי לעשות כן בקרב הארץ אשר אתם באים ושמרתם ועשיתם כי היא חכמתכם ובינתכם לעיני העמים אשר ישמעון את כל החקים האלה ואמרו רק עם חכם ונבון הגוי הגדול הזה. כי מי גוי גדול אשר לו חקים ומשפטים צדיקים ככל התורה הזאת אשר אשר אנכי נתן לפניכם היום... - instead of making things up based on your own reasoning, see I have commanded you rules and laws...and when the nations hear of these chukim they will say that this people can only be a wise and insightful nation...
People! It is the chukim!! These rules and rituals that are incomprehensible to any human conception of reason are the very reminder to us that no matter how much we think we know what God wants from us, the only thing we have to go on is what He told us to do! It is when we remember that regardless of how we conceive of God's mission for us in the world, we can only achieve it through relating to the Torah's laws as chukim. If we take a firm hold of that perspective, we may yet come into our own as a Kingdom of Priests. Shabbat Shalom!
Or hit the orange button to subscribe by RSS Delivered by FeedBurner
Connect with me on LinkedIn
Feel free to copy, reproduce and distribute any of the articles - all I ask is that you don't make any changes and that you link back here or attribute appropriately. Thanks!
