Thursday, March 29, 2007

Tzav 5767: Commandment and Revelation

Leviticus 6:1-8:36

This week covers more procedures for the sacrifice in the Mishkan, and then the record of those first sacrifices. Like many of these chapters about the sacrificial procedure, it is seemingly irrelevant to things today. It was seemingly irrelevant to the world of even the Rabbis who didn’t have a temple either. Yet in places where we find things objectionable or irrelevant, like sacrifices, it is time to look closer at the text for deeper meaning. Our portion begins:

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Command Aaron and his sons, saying, This is the Torah of the burnt offering; It is the burnt offering, because of the burning upon the altar all night to the morning, and the fire of the altar shall be burning in it.[Lev. 6:1-2]

After God stops speaking:

And Moses did as the Lord commanded him; and the assembly was gathered together to the door of the Tent of Meeting. Then Moses said to the congregation: This is the thing which the Lord commanded to be done. [8:4-5]

The word which gives our portion its name tzav, to command, is interesting. The word is spelled Tzadi-Vav (TzV [צו]), and is the command form of a verb root spelled Tzadi-Vav-Heh (TzVH [צוה ]). We most know of this word from a derivative of the present tense intensive or causative of the verb, usually thought of as the noun mitzvah.

TzVH by itself might mean command, but as the Hasidic Master Levi Yitzchak of Bertichev notes the word really means to bind, and thus one who performs a mitzvah properly, binds themselves to God. The word also means in the intensive case to appoint. We are not commanded as much as appointed to perform the mitzvot. This would be like a CEO of a company appointing one of his executives to run a certain division of the company. It is the responsibility of the executive to run the division, and the performance of the division would reflect him. But it also reflects the whole company and the CEO’s status, in terms of the trust put in the executive by the CEO and his loyalty to the CEO. So too with mitzvot. We do the mitzvot appointed to us by God. On one level they provide a personal level of performance, yet on another they reflect our loyalty to the CEO of CEO’s, Ha Kadosh Baruch Hu and the trust put in us to perform the assignment given us.

But the question that bothers many is where that appointment came from. How legitimate is it? Is the source a valid one? Indeed in modernity this can a be an interesting question. Assassins, terrorists, governments and even religions use the similar words to Moses in Leviticus 8:2, “God commands for us to…” for many violent and horrible things. Some think we should do away with God because he is so violent to such actions. Immanuel Kant took this to the ultimate conclusion, stating that a religion that took everything as divinely revealed law, was at best amoral and thus the Jews needed to be “euthanized”, a passage of Kant’s which translated into the social and political policy of Nazi Germany. Yet this assumes that there is validity to the claim to violence, the claim that the law is to be executed as it was reported.

Jews believe the Mitzvot comes from God through divine revelation to Moses at Sinai. Moses’ ability to receive divine revelation is believed to be a valid one. Maimonides even made it one of his thirteen principles of faith. Yet, what the extent and the method of that event of revelation gave laws to Moses is of course a matter of debate among streams within Judaism. And while some of the modern streams look at the question of doing lesser amounts of divine law, the rabbis of the Talmud looked to more. As the Perkei Avot 1:1 notes, there was not just the written tradition of The Torah, but also an oral tradition handed down through the generations:

Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the men of the great assembly. [Avot 1:1]

This is a set of laws not on the books that were orally transmitted. Many of them fall into the class of Halakah, the way we observe the mitzvot. Yet in both the oral tradition, eventually redacted into the Talmud, and the biblical tradition, there is more than just commandments, refuting Kant. There is also story and commentary on story known as Aggadah. As many commentaries, have noted, if Judaism was a religion of just law, then the book of Genesis and the first eleven chapters of Exodus are redundant and shouldn’t be there. Yet no one suggests throwing out the book of Genesis from the Bible. Aggadah has another purpose, the theology and ethics behind the law. It is Aggadah which tells us about divine revelation in general and how to look into its validity.

Moses of course was not the only prophet, there were many more after him. Tractate Megillah actually tries to count them at one point after the sages put the number at forty eight prophets and seven prophetesses.

Were there no more prophets than these [forty-eight]? — Is it not written, How there was a man from Ramathaim-Zophim, (I Sam 1:1) [which we interpret], one of two hundred prophets [zophim] who prophesied to Israel? — There were actually very many, as it has been taught, ‘Many prophets arose for Israel, double the number of who came out of Egypt’. Only the prophecy which contained a lesson for future generations was written down, and that which did not contain such a lesson was not written. [B. Megillah 14a]

The Gemara does a little word play on the place-name Ramathaim-Zophim. Through a bit of word-play, Ramathaim makes the word mataim, two hundred, and Zophim is another word for prophet. So the Talmud re-translates this to mean one man from two hundred prophets. Thus there is a biblical verse that maintains there are more than 48 prophets, but instead two hundred. Then the Gemara goes further stating there were 1.2 million prophets. Yet those prophets were not written down because they did not prophesy lessons which would help future generations.

Obviously that is a lot of divine revelation! Yet we still don’t know what is true and what is not. Heschel notes in God in Search of Man the Rabbis do have one interesting litmus test found in Sanhedrin 89a: If you get identical prophecies in the exact same words from multiple prophets, it’s a false prophecy. It’s like two witnesses having the exact same words for testimony in a legal case; such words are evidently rehearsed and learned from other human beings. Yet in contrast the prophet says things in his own words and his own expressions and their own personality.

The prophetess Hulda for example got into trouble with the rabbis for her manners when prophesizing. The rabbis berate:

R. Nahman said: Haughtiness does not befit women. There were two haughty women, and their names are hateful, one being called a hornet [Deborah] and the other a weasel. [Hulda] Of the hornet it is written, And she sent and called Barak, instead of going to him. Of the weasel it is written, Say to the man, (II Kings 22:15) instead of ‘say to the king’. [Megillah 14b]

Hulda while prophesizing about the validity of the suddenly found book of Deuteronomy in the middle of a payroll audit calls the king of Judah a mere man, which obviously is not in good respect. Had she been repeating verbatim what God had said, this would not have been an issue, and the Midrash would have gone off on why God was being so belittling to a great a pious king like Josiah. But it was her arrogance filtering the words of divine revelation. Sanhedrin 89a gives anther example of Obadiah and Jeremiah having the same prophecy but stating it rather differently. As Heschel points out “the word of God” is not an actual set of words but some less restrictive form of communication than auditory words, compared to a coal of fire by the psalmist – and that too is still not completely comprehensible or usable to the lips of man. We can only filter it through our own experience and personality.

When the rabbis speak of millions of prophets I do not believe that means an actual number, but a belief that we all have the potential to be in the God encounter of divine revelation. We all receive Torah, and it is interesting to note a few places where the tradition backs this point of view. The Maharal of Prague noted the blessings for the Torah are not natan ha-Torah “who gave the Torah” in the past tense, but instead the present tense notein ha-Torah “who gives the Torah” as it is perpetually revealed. The Apter Rebbe, the ancestor of Abraham Joshua Heschel taught:

Everyone is told to consider himself to be standing at Mount Sinai, to receive the Torah. For to human beings, there are past and future events, but not for God; day in and day out God Gives the Torah, and day in and day out one may receive the Torah.

Yet how do we receive the Torah every day? The rabbis made an interesting statement: Since the day when the Temple was destroyed, prophecy has been taken from the prophets and given to the wise. [Baba Batra 12a] While this can be seen as giving themselves legitimacy, it can also be seen in another light. It is no longer the sacrifices you give that creates the God encounter, such as the ones of Elijah at Mt. Carmel, Gideon at his father’s high place, or the parents of Samson had and beheld divine beings or wonders. Instead, it is study that brings us into the divine encounter. I particularly like this version of study from the Perkei Avot:

R. Gamaliel the son of R. Judah the Patriarch said: Excellent is the study of the Torah together with a worldly occupation, for the energy [taken up] by both of them keeps sin out of one's mind; and [as for] all [study of the] Torah where there is no worldly occupation, the upshot [is that] it comes to nothing and brings sin in its train; [Avot 2:2]

But along with study of the written is study of the oral tradition as well, as

Yose b. Yo'ezer used to say: Let your house be a house of meeting for the sages and make yourself to be covered by the dust of their feet, and drink in their words with thirst. [Avot 1:4]

There are three kinds of study we must partake: the Study of the written law, the study of the oral law, also known as the tradition, and finally the everyday world where we put that learning to practice. All are important and all, in combination, provide us with a sense of divine revelation – not some deep Charlton Heston voice, but in a deeper understanding done in community. Sometimes it confirms what we already knew, sometimes this process reveals novel applications of the Mitzvot we do.

The word which starts our portion, Tzav, is a verb, and even the noun we use to describe the divine orders we refer to as Mitzvot is derived from present tense verb. Commandments, or as I like to think of them appointments, like running a division of a company, are not static, they are dynamic actions, things requiring our continued actions over time, requiring care and adjustments and constantly getting guidance as to how to do them properly. We get that in study, particularly in groups with other learned people where we can synthesize ideas from different perspectives. Hebrew in general is about the verb, not the noun.

Halakah comes from the root to go. Jews, therefore, keep on going. Life really is a highway.

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