After a long-ish demographic thin spot, I am again happily studying Torah with a couple of young folks on their ways to becoming bar or bat mitzvah. Every twelve-or-so-year-old is different, of course. But there are some pleasures I can usually look forward to.
As soon as you set a date for your bar/bat mitzvah service, you get a Torah portion for your very own. So if your bar or bat mitzvah service was the first Shabbat in May, say, you would be reading and teaching from the portion called Emor, from the latter part of Leviticus. As you probably know, for many centuries the Torah has been more-or-less divided into fifty-two consecutive sections, one assigned to each week of the year. I say "more-or-less," because there are all sorts of holidays and such which have special portions, and these in turn cause some of the regular ones to double up and such.
Each Torah portion is pretty long, say eight or ten pages of regular book-type. My particular approach is to invite students to pick out the section within their portion that especially draws them towards it. Which part of the portion is the most interesting? The most beautiful? What lights them up? That's the section that they will actually learn to read and chant. I often tell them that those twelve or fifteen sentences will become their best friend.
Most Torah portions have several different stories or pieces of legal subject matter in them. In my experience, way more often than not, kids will go straight for the most distressing, confusing or challenging part of their whole portion! And they will ask incredibly hard questions: how can the Torah say that God is "jealous?" Why so much killing? Why is one person or tribe favored over another? What's wrong with idolatry? God doesn't seem very fair!
Okay, I say, let's take a look and see what we can find out…
When I was writing my rabbinic thesis (on Jewish law about slum landlording) my advisor was Rabbi Eugene Borowitz. Under his direction I had gotten hold of thirteen responsa (Jewish legal rulings) from over the centuries that addressed my issues. All were in medieval Hebrew, with lots of legal terms, words for parts of houses, obscure historical terms and more. Professor Borowitz is one of our generation's eminent theologians, but his Hebrew wasn't easily up to these arcane texts. Nor, heaven knows, was mine. So when we would meet together to work on the responsa, he would take out copies which he had laboriously translated and notated at home, a paragraph or two at a time, and we would plow through them together. I was bowled over by his generosity, and I still think of him taking those texts home and struggling to crack them for me.
I'm not one of those people who knows the bible backwards and forwards. And I like to do my best to emulate Rabbi Borowitz's example by doing my own part to tackle some of my students' questions. And that's how I happened to spend a couple of hours today trying to learn a bit about what the scriptures mean when they say that something (Israel, the Levites, the firstborn, the feast days…) is God's. Doesn't everything belong to God?
So I took out my battered concordance, which lists (in Hebrew, with a few Latin translations) every word that appears in the bible, every place it appears. There are hundreds of verses that use the phrase l'Adonai. They seem to mean "to God," "towards God," "of God" as well as "God's." Psalm 24 says that the earth is l'Adonai and the fullness thereof. But in Exodus God commands the people to make "for Me" a dwelling place. In the beginning of Jeremiah the prophet says that "Israel is holy to God." But hundreds of times God is called "God of Israel." There is even a gorgeous verse in one of the prophets (which I can't seem to find a second time) calling Babylonia, the great enemy, "God's mallet."
So what does l'Adonai mean after all? What does it mean to belong to God? If the whole earth is for God, and yet we must build for God a place to dwell; if Israel is holy for God, but God is holy for Israel, then my original, slightly petulant question -- how can Israel belong to God when the whole world belongs to God? -- seems a little narrow. All this brings me to a delicious state of confusion, of unknowing -- a rich, not quite linear sense that there is something connected in all this, that I can't quite hold it all in my hand or my mind at once. One of my students said recently, "Oh, I see, you can just study this stuff forever and never be done."
And it's true -- I just scratched a little bit of the surface. I didn't even delve into Rashi and the other traditional commentators or look at the historical contexts of the various verses I unearthed. I didn't read any midrashim on any of the matters that arose: on Babylonia or the mishkan (the "dwelling place for God.") I only looked at verses that used the exact phrase l'Adonai -- "to God." I wanted to look for verses that have God saying Li, "to Me." I know that there are a lot of them as well. But I couldn't find them in my concordance. I didn't even begin to think of opening the great mystical Zohar, which is, after all, in some sense a Torah commentary. I didn't meditate on the verses I found or chant them over and over in the mussar fashion. I didn't study the calligraphy or, as Rabbi Akiba was said to have done, expound on the crowns of the letters. It's true. You can study this stuff forever…
By the time I brought my pages of scribbled notes to my upcoming bat mitzvah, I realized that l'Adonai wasn't even the phrase that she was interested in. But I didn't have a minute of regret. Because her questions and the verses that caught her eye began to take us down their own roads -- and we would find ourselves looping back now and then to that question of people and things belonging to God. More of that pleasurable, stretchy confusion, and that sense that it goes on forever…
Well why? You might ask. What did I learn from this excursion? (You'll hear one of these days what my student learned…) What can you find out about how to live from this infinite regress? What use is it anyhow? What's the moral of the story here? And why, in particular, should children -- or proto-adults -- study this stuff which is ancient, arcane and sometimes aggravating?
I think I did learn something, actually. I learned that even a simple phrase can mean a lot of things. I learned that contradictions can enlarge one's understanding. I learned that a binary question (How can X be true when Y is true?) is often too reductive to be interesting. I learned that when you translate something from one language to another, even something as simple as a subject and a possessive, the meaning shifts and stretches in different directions. I learned that there are logical and linguistic problems that arise when you anthropomorphize God. I learned that Professor Borowitz might have had fun trying to read a thirteenth century legal case from Jewish Turkey about home repairs before meeting with his helpless student.
And I think I also learned a little something about God having or owning something -- or at least I thought new thoughts about it, stretched my earlier tighter understanding. Maybe all I learned is that God having something isn't quite like you or me having something (but then, if we really thought about ourselves possessing things, we would discover that this too is a deep and confusing matter…) I learned that God can, as it were, have a whole and a part of the whole, that having is about some kind of relationship, that we can be God's and the Babylonian enemy can be God's, perhaps in quite different ways. I feel some intimation here that being God's -- even being God's chosen or God's consecrated or God's special -- isn't as simple as it sounds at first hearing.
Torah study is a lot of things. One thing it is, is a way of expanding our picture of the world, of life. Torah study stretches its students.
This month, at Shavuot, we celebrate the introduction of Torah into our world. And with it, an endless conversation, an infinite set of questions. I like that!
© 2007 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 05/01/2007(rge)