Shabbat Bo-Beshallach
Written by Dr Moshe Lavee Monday, 05 February 2007
The very first comment of Rashi for the Torah refers to last week’s parasha. ‘The Torah should really have begun with ‘This month shall be for you [the beginning of the months] (Exod. 12:2).
That chapter includes the first halakhic instructions aimed at the people of Israel, and these instructions were perceived by Rashi as the goal of the Torah. More than once I was furiously reflecting at the implied self-imposed censorship hidden in this comment. Can we imagine our Torah without the Creation story, without the binding of Isaac, without Joseph and his brothers? Does this approach mean that the story of the Exodus, with the Song at the Sea, recounted in this week’s parashah but without halakhic content, is insignificant? What would be left from our Judaism if we were to erase any trace of stories, poems, parables, indeed treatment of any human relations, and leave only the halakhic instructions?
To a certain extent this frightening vision was almost realized during the history of Jewish books. Rashi’s comment reflects a tendency to erase non-Halkhic material. It did not happen to the Scriptures, but rather to the Talmud and to some other Rabbinic traditions. The collection of halakhic midrashim indeed begins with the lection Bo, with Exodus 12, reflecting the view cited by Rashi that there is no need to waste time on mere historical narratives. Alfasi abbreviated the Talmud, leaving us with only one or two sentences for each Sugia, expressing his halakhic decision. In doing so he took the vitality out of dialectic discussion, exploring the various aspects of a theme. He also deprived his readers of the delicate intertextual relations between legal discussion and Talmudic narratives. In many cases the naratives give voice to oppositional views, or to the perspective of the Other within society. Alfasi’s omissions leave us with nothing of this. In other cases, such as that of She’iltot, we even lost the haggadic legacy of the book. What we have now is only a practically censored halakhic version. For those involved in this process, the Torah indeed began only from last week’s Sidra.
Yet, reading the Torah with my children or telling them of its content in the last few years, I realized that the opposite to the halakhic-centered occured. In a sense, the Torah ends when it comes to these legalistic portions. No more nice stories to tell. So we skip over material, and by Terumah, which contains little more than lists of the building materials for the tabernacle, are weekly reading with our children is almost dying away. Reflecting on our own family practice I realized that we are not alone and not the first to do so. Ein Yaakov cut of the Talmud all its halakhic material, to leave us only with aggadot; Sefer Ha-Aggada of Bialik and Ravnitzky, that for a certain period gained an almost canonical status, did the same. Are we involved in a new type of self-imposed Jewish censorship?
My teaching in Leo Baeck College is motivated by the wish to avoid any kind of self-imposed cencorship, by opening the gates to books and genres, by providing examples of the potential and depth supplied by the full range of rabbinic literature applicable to the daily work of the rabbi in a progressive context; by enabling or even creating a relevant progressive discourse with halakhic literature. This discourse assumes that the halakhah is no longer functioning as an obstacle to individuality, instructing every detail the daily practice of each person. This discourse finds rabbinic literature as important without the naïve theology accompanying and justifying it, and without acceptance of the authoritative structure and submissive concepts supported by it.My belief in the need for literary inclusiveness—i.e. avoiding self-imposed censorship—is also based on a certain theology, and even, I might say, on an ethical stance. From a theological point of view the commitment to converse with all components of our Torah in its wider definition—the new and the old, the text and its interpretaions, the Haggadic and the Halakhic, the rational and the mystical—is rooted in a certain understanding of revelation. In the Rabbinic conference last summer Arthur Green spoke about the implication of evolutionary theory for our understanding of creation as an on-going development. God is constantly expressed through the evolving nature.
The same is true with our culture. It is an ongoing evolving revelation. We are commanded to seek the divine in each of its aspects, and as Jews we are the guardian of the Jewish culture, as same as other groups are the guardians of theirs (guardians or gardeners? this is a topic for another Dvar-Torah!). The ethical implication is similar to that of the belief in the divine image of each creature. If God is expressed through humane ideas, stories, laws, and any other cultural artifact, we have a never-ending commitment to converse with every cultural expression, to search for the good and the truth hidden in it. The dialectic and discursive nature of the Talmud become our legacy, and the discourse we are forcing ourselves to have with the otherness within our own culture and literature, including with those components that are problematic for us, becomes a binyan-av, an archetype, for a wider commitment to converse with every other group of people and opinion, and through communication to seek our common good. The laws pertaining to the first Seder, recounted last week, are important, but only in juxtaposition and conversation with the narrative of the Exodus to freedom, which we read this Shabbat.
