It's Right Here in the Bible

Jewish ways of reading Torah allow multiple interpretations to exist side-by-side. The danger or literalism is the arrogance of believing that we can know the will of God without any doubt.

Lech-Lecha 5770 / October 31, 2009

When I prepare to write a sermon, I usually start by reading. Besides being a great way to procrastinate, reading also provides me with great insights into the parsha. This week, as I was reading multiple commentaries on Parshat Lech-Lecha, I took a step back and reflected on how we as Jews read the Torah.

When I’m studying Torah, I usually start by reading the Hebrew text itself. Despite having studied Hebrew for several years, I still look up difficult or ambiguous words. Hebrew is a rich language with a great deal of nuance. There are archaic Hebrew words in the Bible that no one knows exactly what they mean. And, as I’m reading the parsha, I’m looking for what biblical scholars call “surface irregularities” – places in the text that call out for interpretation. An irregularity might be the ambiguity of a word or unexpected grammar. An irregularity might be a gap in the text – something that is perhaps implied but not explicit. I’m also looking for apparent contradictions, unexpected ideas, and theological challenges. As I read, I start asking questions of the text, pondering all the possibilities of its meaning. This is how I was trained to read as a Jew and as a rabbi. Jewish reading of sacred text always starts with questions. It is the beginning of a conversation – not the end.

After I’ve done my own reading of the parsha, I move on to commentaries. As soon as the Bible was set down, commentaries started to appear. From a Jewish perspective, the Torah continually calls out to us for interpretation and commentary. We know from the Torah itself that there were certain people – judges – who were designated to interpret the law. We know that Ezra the Scribe preached to the exiles returning from Babylonia and interpreted the Torah for them. There is evidence in the Torah itself that later texts comment on or revise earlier texts. And, after the destruction of the 2^nd Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 CE – lacking the apparatus of sacrifices to communicate with God and lacking an organized priesthood to lead the people and interpret the law – our sages established methods of Torah study. Through deep engagement with God’s Torah, we would continue to hear God’s Word. The methods and rules of Jewish interpretation were carried down from generation to generation. The essence of Jewish spirituality was summarized in the 2^nd Century by the Sage known as Ben Bag-Bag when he said, “hafech ba, v’hafech ba, d’chola ba…” “Turn [the Torah] over and over again, for everything is contained in it; and reflect upon it and grow old and worn in it and do not leave it; for you have no better lot than that.” To this, his colleague Ben He-He adds, “in accord with the effort [of Torah study] is its reward.”

There are literally hundreds of major commentators on the Torah. There are commentaries on the commentaries; and there are commentaries on top of those commentaries. To the beginner who jumps into Torah learning, it can be overwhelming. But, as Ben Bag-Bag admonishes, engaging in the depth of Torah interpretation is eminently rewarding.

From a Jewish perspective, the Torah never just says what it says. As I mentioned before, sometimes we can’t even agree on what a single words means. And, the text has what seem like deliberate ambiguities that invite us into dialogue with the Torah. The Jewish way of reading Torah is enormously valuable and it is the reason, I think, that the Torah and the Jewish people have endured for so many years. What makes our way of reading Torah so valuable is that in relatively few words, the Torah can say so much. It is precisely in its ambiguity that it has the power to communicate. By being open to interpretation, the Torah can mean multiple things all at once. Not every interpretation is necessarily as good as any other, but it is possible to have multiple valid interpretations and they can exist side by side.

The torah can also mean different things over time. The beauty of a Jewish way of reading scripture is that our way of reading keeps the Torah alive. The Torah through a Jewish lens is an act of continual revelation. When a person is called up to the Torah, the blessing is Baruch ata… noten ha Torah. Blessed are you God who gives the Torah (not gave, but gives). In other words, every time we open this scroll, it speaks to us anew.

An interpretive tradition such as ours allows the text to evolve. It allows us to reflect on the text and to engage in a dialogue with the words of God. What comes out of that dialogue is a combination of God’s will and, to some extent, our will. Our rabbis did not see themselves constrained by a literal reading. They made the Torah apply to their circumstances. Their interpretations reflected their values and their striving for truth and justice. Over the centuries, generations have read and re-read the Torah and, in dialogue with it, have come to different conclusions.

So a natural question is how do we know if an interpretation is valid? Is anyone’s reading just as good as anyone else’s? The answer is that the Jewish way of reading is always embedded in community. We don’t read alone as Jews. The Mishna (Avot 3:3) says that when two people sit together and exchange words of Torah, that God’s Presence dwells between them. I take this to mean that there is something transcendent about conversations over Torah – something that is greater than the sum of its parts. From a Jewish perspective, the conversations that come from Torah are at least as important as the written word. And, the communal conversation transcends time and space, because when we open up all those commentaries we are also – in a sense – in conversation with generations of Jews who came before us. Through that conversation, we feel out the boundaries of interpretation.

And, finally, the Jewish way of reading Torah – with the possibility of multiple interpretations – displays humility and proper reverence for the Word of God.

By contrast, there are fundamentalists out there – Jewish and Christian – who claim to read the plain and literal meaning of the Torah. I’m not going to pull my punches here: I think that what they are doing is violence to the text. And furthermore, what they do in reading Torah literally is potentially dangerous. I’m not criticizing them for interpreting the text. After all, I just explained that there is no way to read Torah without interpretation. And, they too have a communal consensus and a method of reading. That’s not the problem either. The danger of literalism is the arrogance and vanity to believe that you know EXACTLY what the text says. The danger of literalists is that they won’t admit that what they are doing is interpretation. It is arrogant to assert that you know the will of God. It is arrogant to claim that the text is transparent. The danger of a literalist reading of Torah is that – instead of inviting conversation and debate – it asks us to suspend and even deny our own human intellect and the ability we have to make moral choices. Literalists say: what you think is fact – that’s actually wrong. What you see with your eyes – that’s a deception. What thousands of scientists have carefully studied – all lies. What archeologists find through painstaking investigation – that’s myth. Ethical and moral debates – they’re pointless… For fundamentalists, the “will of God” can justify any means. And why? Simple: “because the Bible says so.” The problem with fundamentalism is there no room for conversation, there no place for dialogue and no tolerance for dissent… and when dissent and conversation are suppressed, violence and coercion are not far off.

So now let us consider an example from our Torah portion:

Parashat Lech-Lecha is so important because it reports the first encounter that our forefather Abraham had with God. The Torah records that God appeared to Avraham with a promise: “I will make you a great nation and I will bless you: I will make your name great and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse him that curses you; and all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you” (Gn. 12:2-3) Later in the Torah portion, God goes on to describe what will be Abraham’s inheritance. To his children, God will give a plot of land. And, by the way, according to this account anyway, that land extends from the Nile Delta to the Euphrates (Gn. 15).

There are fundamentalist Jews and Christians who say they know exactly what this promise means. They say they know exactly how this promise has played out in history, and how it is playing out today, and they claims to know exactly how it will be manifest in the not-to-distant future. And, they know exactly what their role is in making it happen. And, because they are literalists, and because they believe that the Torah is the unambiguous, infallible, inerrant, literal word of God, there is no room for compromise. There is no place for dialogue or conversation.

The fundamentalists’ certainty about so-called Biblical Prophesy is really quite funny, though. It’s funny because our forefather Avraham himself did not seem nearly as sure about the promise. In our parsha, God again tells Avraham, “Fear not, Avram, I am a shield to you; Your reward will be very great.” But Avram said, “O Lord God, what can You give me, seeing that I shall die childless…” You see, Avram at the time had no children to inherit whatever God was giving him. So God assures Avram that he will have many offspring and they shall possess the land. But Avram again replies, “O Lord God, how shall I know that I am to possess it?” God reassures Avram that he will indeed have an heir and then the Torah states, “because he put his trust in the Lord, he reckoned it to his credit.” And herein lies the difference between the complexity of Avraham’s faith in contrast to a fundamentalist notion of faith.

For people who read the Torah literally, faith means believing without doubt and without questioning. Fundamentalist faith means suspending critical thinking and ignoring the difficult questions. By contrast, the Torah portrays Avraham as a man filled with worry and doubt. Avraham struggles to understand God’s will and wrestles to comprehend the promises God makes that seem to contradict his life circumstances. One of the lessons we can take from the example of Avraham is that faith is a willingness to trust despite ones doubts. According to Rashi, the 11^th Century commentator, there was nothing wrong with the question, and the evidence of Avram’s trust was that he did not ask for a sign. But, in classic rabbinic fashion, there is never just one interpretation. A generation after Rashi, Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman (Ramban) disagrees diametrically with Rashi. In fact, he says Rashi is flat-out wrong. Ramban says that Avraham did not doubt God’s promise but instead doubted himself. Avraham didn’t know if he himself was worthy of what God was promising. What a remarkable statement! What a contrast to the self-assuredness of a fundamentalist! What Ramban is saying is that even if we believe that God’s word is infallible (even if we believe the Torah is the literal word of God) we may still harbor doubts because we know that we are fallible human beings. (And these are just a couple of many interpretations on these verses.)

As a fellow Jew and as a Rabbi, I want to celebrate our Jewish way of reading Torah. It holds the Torah up to us as a mirror and as a looking glass. And, I want to caution you about anyone who stands up and tells you that they know, without a doubt, what the will of God is. After all, even our forefather Avraham wasn’t that self-assured.

The Oldest Building

Building a Sukkah reminds us that community is something we make (and re-make).

Shabbat / 1^st Day Yom Tov Sukkot 5770

What is the oldest building in human history that is still standing intact today? Is it the Greek Parthenon? Is it the Roman Coliseum? The Great Pyramid of Giza? Machu Picchu? The great civilizations of world history have all engaged in grandiose building projects. The emperors and kings who commissioned these great buildings intended these massive monuments to stand as symbols of their power and the endurance of the great civilizations over which they ruled. Well, all of these great building lie in some stage of ruin today. Their walls have crumbled, their bricks are broken. The kings who commanded their construction are long-since dead and the enormous empires that built them are the stuff of history books. At one time, we too had a great monument. The Temple in Jerusalem was God’s palace and the center of our religious and national life. It too was destroyed, and yet we as a people have survived the tests of time. We continue to practice our religion and customs more-or-less as our ancient ancestors did. So, what’s the difference? Why are we here, while the Romans – who destroyed our Temple – are not? I would submit to you that we have survived precisely because we learned a valuable lesson following the destruction of our Temple. We learned that stones and bricks don’t make a civilization strong. Instead we have a building that has stood through the ages and sustained us as a civilization for thousands of years. That building is right outside those doors and it might even be in your back yard. The oldest building in human history is the Sukkah.

The sukkah, the little hut we build year after year at the festival of sukkot, is the most stable structure in history precisely because it is not permanent. The Sukkah endures because it isn’t made out of stones and bricks. And Judaism – like the Sukkah – endures because it is a structure that can be reassembled everywhere that history has taken us. Its wobbly walls remain standing because they bend with the winds of changing times. The sukkah’s roof hovers over our heads precisely because it is permeable – letting in new ideas. And, like the Sukkah itself – when we as a people get knocked down, we pick up the pieces and rebuild. What has made it possible for us to survive, where other civilizations did not, is that we have a culture and a religion that is portable and flexible.

But there is yet another lesson to be learned from the Sukkah. The lesson we learned after the destruction of our Temple is that what makes us endure as a people is not the edifices we construct, but rather the process of building them. Impressive structures and magnificent monuments don’t, in themselves, create community. What creates community is the energy of building. This week my family built our sukkah at home. My brother happened to be in town, so he helped me construct the frame on Tuesday. Being an engineer, he had some good ideas that helped improve the sukkah. Melanie helped put up the walls and the schach. Koby hung decorations. Even Hannah and Micah got into the building: as we worked, they looked on with fascination and pretended to build.

There is a wonderful energy in building things – especially when you don’t know exactly how your efforts will turn out. It’s fun to plan and measure and imagine what you want the the project to look like. It’s exciting to gather the materials. There are interesting challenges to solve that you didn’t anticipate at the outset. The act of building is also so gratifying. It feels good to work with our hands. There’s a certain satisfaction in standing back and looking at what you’ve built.

What makes the sukkah such a powerful project is that it brings people together and draws out our collective energy and creativity. It can only do this, precisely because it is a temporary structure. It has this power because we are never done building it. We build it over and over again – and, in doing so, we are able to improve it, to change it, to grow it. Even if it collapses in the middle of the week, it’s still fun to build and it still brings us together. It is this energy that has made us strong as a Jewish community for all these many ages.

Today in the Jewish community, however, we face difficult times. Affiliation with the grand institutions we have built is at an all-time low. We have, perhaps, as a Jewish community, fallen victim to our own success. For the last few generations (in the period following the Shoah) Jews in America spent a lot of time and resources building wonderful institutions. We erected magnificent houses of worship and communal organizations. Our community was animated by the energy of building. And, our people flocked to these buildings when we opened the doors. Now we have these beautiful buildings and we are witnessing a dwindling in the number of people who step inside. Synagogues, which once served as the backbone of Jewish community, are no longer the centers they used to be. There are many reasons that we’ve seen a steady decline in the Jewish community as of late. I don’t mean to explain the entire problem with my metaphor, and I might be overstating the case to make my point, but I propose that one of the reasons we’re seeing this decline is that we, as a community, have built these wonderful structures and we’ve forgotten that what made them so great was not the architecture and decor, but the energy and creativity and the sweat of countless individuals that went into building them. I think this also explains, in part, why the latest hot trend in Jewish communal life is the emergence of independent minyanim and havurot all over the country. Groups like Qohelet or Minyan Na’aleh here in Denver meet in people’s homes, in rented spaces, in converted churches, and in JCCs. They don’t have a lot of money, they often are not lead by ordained rabbis or trained cantors; but, they are animated by the energy of volunteers and invigorated by the excitement of building something new. The lesson of the sukkah is that what really matters is not the strength of the walls, but what happens within those walls. A sukkah with no people in it is no better than the ruins of an ancient fortress.

But, despite how successful some of these small independent groups have been, and how much buzz they have generated, I don’t think these groups represent the future of Jewish community. I think they are an outgrowth of the problem itself – a symptom. Building is exciting, but the answer isn’t to abandon established institutions and start from scratch every 20 years. The problem is that the established institutions of the Jewish community have forgotten their own roots. We have forgotten that we too started out as little shteiblach and grassroots organizations driven by volunteer energy. We were once energized by the excitement of starting something new. And, now that we are established, we have fallen victim to our own success. We are stuck admiring the powerful institutions we built. We think we’ve arrive – that the work is done. The solution isn’t to form new little groups. The solution for the Jewish community is to revitalize the energy and excitement of the building process.

One of the values we find in the celebration of Sukkot is the idea of getting back to basics. By its nature, a sukkah isn’t fancy or elaborate. The sukkah is what it is – three walls and an incomplete roof. It is simultaneously good, but never good enough. It continually calls out to us to do more and do it a little better next time. By its nature, building a sukkah requires people to work together… to connect with one another. That’s what we, in the Jewish community, need right now. We need to get back to basics.

The basic building block of community is human connection. Community is built like a sukkah – by connecting scattered pieces together. This might sound like a continuation of my Rosh Hashanah sermon – that’s because I think it’s that important and it bears repeating. The more we connect with one another, the more we will continue to build our community, the more we will re-energize our community.

One of the interesting aspects of the laws of sukkot is that every individual Jew is required, by halakhah, to build a sukkah. But, you can fulfill the mitzvah of making a sukkah by simply participating in even the smallest way in helping to build a sukkah. If you drive even one nail, turn just one screw, carry one piece of wood, or hang just one decoration, you’ve fulfilled the mitzvah of making a sukkah. My challenge to us all in the coming year is that each of us will take responsibility for building a small part of this sukkah we call the HEA. It can be as simple as sitting with someone you don’t know at Kiddush, inviting someone to your home for Shabbat, being friendly to someone who walks in off the street for the first time, contributing to the Kiddush fund, attending a program you’ve never been to… the list goes on and on. Let’s remember that the mitzvah of is not just to sit in the sukkah, but also to build it.

Shabbat Shalom and Hag Same’ach.