June 13, 2009 Devar Torah: Parshat B'ha-a-lot'cha – Steven Schiff Lately we’ve been talking a lot about community. It’s a subject I’ve been interested in for many years, as a way of living and also just understanding what makes for strong communities. We’ve been emphasizing developing a caring community, and of course we all want that. But it also occurs to me that there’s another important element of community that is required. Maybe it’s just my particular experience, but I think that strong community also requires some shared obligations and commitments. These two aspects of community, caring and shared commitments, are both needed, and they work together. It’s not good if either aspect is weak or missing. That’s a context I would like you to hold on to as I discuss this week’s parasha. I think this will make more sense as I proceed. Our portion today, B’ha-a-lot’-kha, contains a striking image, an image that actually contradicts a related image that we read and explored several weeks ago. In parasha B’midbar, which we read only two weeks ago, God gives Moses and Aaron instructions for setting up the camps and the marching formation of the Israelites. God says, The Israelites shall camp each with his standard, under the banners of their ancestral house; they shall camp around the Tent of Meeting at a distance. (Numb 2:2) So, here is this vivid image: thousands and thousands of Israelites, holding their standards, in their campsites. It makes me think of all those Hollywood Bible spectaculars. Can’t you imagine this enormous encampment of Israelites, all of them surrounding the Ark, the Ark at the center of their world? Chai used this image as a starting point for her teaching two weeks ago, when she asked us, “What exists at the center of the Kol Shofar community? What should exist at the center of our community?” Later in the passage, God tells Moses and Aaron how the tribes should be arranged as they march. First come six of the tribes, assembled into two large groups. Then, and here is what the text says: “Midway between the divisions, the Tent of Meeting, the division of the Levites, shall move. As they camp, so shall they march…” (Numb 2:17)  And a later passage confirms that the order of the march was the same as the camping arrangement: “The Israelites did accordingly; just as the Lord had commanded Moses, so they camped by their standards, and so they marched, each with his clan according to his ancestral house.” (Numb 2:34) That’s what we read two weeks ago. In this week’s parasha we have more imagery about how the Israelites will move, but it is very different. Movement is set up when God provides a cloud that covers the Tabernacle during the day, taking the form of fire at night. This cloud is a message from God; when the cloud lifts up, the Israelites are to follow it; when the cloud descends and covers the Tabernacle, then they are to stop and camp.   God tells Moses to have two silver trumpets made, to signal the community to gather and begin marching. And finally, all the preparation is done and the Israelites begin moving: “They marched from the mountain of the Lord a distance of three days. The Ark of the Convenant of the Lord traveled in front of them on that three day’ journey to seek out a resting place for them; and the Lord’s cloud kept above them by day, as they moved on from the camp.” (Numb 10:33) “The Ark of the Covenant travelled in front of them.” This is a very different image from the one we read and discussed two weeks ago. Isn’t this a contradiction? Which is right? The Ark in the center of the community? Or, the Ark leading the community? These are two very different images. The idea of the Ark in the center of the community conveys a feeling of caring, the Israelites nurturing and protecting the Torah. The image of the Ark leading the community is more aggressive; here the Torah is leading the community, perhaps into battle, and the Ark is protecting the Israelites rather than the other way around. This sentiment is reflected in the words from this parasha that we say when we remove the Torah from the Ark during our Torah Service: Advance, O Lord, May Your enemies be scattered, And may Your foes flee before You! Was the Ark in front of the procession? Was it in the middle of the procession? Assume for a moment that both of these images are true, that they reflect two aspects of the same reality. The Ark travelled at the front of the procession and also it was in the middle of the group. Chai asked us 2 weeks ago, “What is at the center of the Kol Shofar community? What should be at that center?” I would ask you to consider, “What is leading, what is at the head of our community? What should be there?” Please, give that some thought, and share those thoughts with others, perhaps at lunch today. But now I would like to address another question. We’ve just encountered a contradiction in the Torah, two different versions of how the Ark is positioned during the marching of the Israelites. On a more general note, how do we deal with this? How do we deal with our text, our Torah, considering that it contains many inconsistencies and contradictions? There are numerous examples of this. One of the best known is that there are two different versions of the creation story. At the very beginning of the Torah, creation is described as a seven-day process; male and female humans are created together on the sixth day, after all the animals and plants and other parts of the natural world. In the second creation story, which begins immediately after the first one, , the first male human is created before the animals. The first female human is created after animals and birds when God takes one of Adam’s ribs and forms it into a woman. The stories are very different. Which is the right one? Another inconsistency concerns the 10 Commandments. There are two different versions of the 10 Commandments. One we read several weeks ago, in parasha Yitro.  In this version we are commanded to remember the Sabbath day because God rested on that day after creating the world; in a second version, in the book of Deuteronomy, we are commanded to keep the Sabbath day because God liberated us from slavery in Egypt. We’re not the first to notice these kind of inconsistencies. Our commentators have been discovering and discussing contradictions like these for a long time, well over a thousand years.  Traditional commentators, including many contemporary people, believe that God wrote the Torah and transmitted it to Moses in its existing form. Since God and by extension God’s teachings are perfect, the contradictions must be explicable, and not really contradictions at all. So this form of commentary develops explanations for the contradictions, which to my ear at least, sometimes sound far-fetched, and sometimes take us far away from the direct sense of what is written in the text. I would rather just accept the idea that there contradictions in the text. Of course, your mileage may vary. That’s just the way it seems to me. Most modern scholars hold that the Torah consists of a number of different texts, composed by different people in different locations and different times, which were then woven together into a unified document sometime around 500 B.C.E.  They arrive at this conclusion through literary analysis as well as looking at the linguistic differences between different passages. From this perspective, different and contradictory source texts were included intact, perhaps in error, or perhaps deliberately in order to earn the allegiance and to placate different groups of people. This point of view about the origins of the Torah originated in the late 19th Century, and is called the Documentary Hypothesis. I don’t have enough knowledge to independently evaluate the validity of this idea, but for me it seems to be the simplest and most reasonable explanation of why there are different versions of similar stories or even differing ideas in different parts of the Torah. The Documentary Hypothesis makes sense to me as a scholarly way of studying the Torah, but while intellectually satisfying, it leaves me a little cold, a little detached from the Torah. Our people have made the Torah the core of its spiritual experience. For 2500 years we have been treating the Torah as if it were a single, unified piece of literature. Thinking of as a collage of different texts might be intellectually satisfying but when I do that I feel separated from our greatest sages and teachers, who experienced the Torah as a unified document, the word of God. Somehow the text feels less compelling when I think about it in this way. And more simply, sometimes it feels that this way of understanding the text  makes it too easy to explain away the mysteries and contradictions of the Torah. It’s too easy to say, “That’s just another source.” Especially for people like me who are not scholars, this approach can be used as an easy out, a way of avoiding deep encounter with the text. How, then, do we deal with the contradictions of the Torah? Some of us simply let go of the need to resolve contradictions. We allow ourselves to accept that the Torah sometimes expresses itself in conflicting stories, ideas, or images, just the way that we do and the way that many great works of literature and art do. Truth, then, is experienced not as consistency but as coherency. Remember that for a long time most people experienced the Torah by listening, by having someone read it to them. And we know that listening to words is very different from reading words. When listening, logical transitions and complete consistency are less important than emotional and thematic coherence and impact. When listening, the images and the sounds have to make sense to our gut, as opposed to satisfying our needs for intellectual rigor. Unfortunately, many of us experience the inconsistencies and contradictions in the Torah as obstacles to engagement, as reasons for not taking this text seriously, even for rejecting it altogether.  A lot of how we experience the Torah depends on our intention, the mind-set we bring to encountering it.  Are we determined to find things that don’t make sense or that offend our modern sensibilities? In other words, are we looking for evidence to disqualify the Torah as a source of inspiration? In that case, we will succeed. And the same thing would happen if we took that approach towards any ancient document created in a very different culture, created first as oral literature, with the structure and conventions appropriate for that medium, then later put into writing. That’s way too easy for us. Many of us have superb educations that gave us great skills in being critical readers. We’ve trained for years. We know how to pick a text apart. We’re already good at that. The greater test is, can we put it together again? That was the challenge offered to us by Rabbi Steve Greenberg when he taught here last year. Can we find the wisdom in old texts that have been spiritual source books of our people for thousands of years?  Can we go beyond our intellectual, analytical intelligence and use other parts of our minds and hearts? Can we discover the wisdom sometimes hidden in our old sources, the wisdom hidden by inconsistencies as well as archaic language and ideas? I like to imagine a person older than I am, someone with a lot of wisdom, perhaps someone the age of my parents when they passed on, in their late 80s. Is it easy to run faster than them? Of course it is. Is it easy to talk faster, to string together words and ideas more glibly than they can? Often it is, yes. On the other hand, can it be hard to draw out their life experience and wisdom? Can it be hard to deeply understand their words and expressions in order to learn the most from them? Yes, that can be hard. And it can be infinitely rewarding. This applies to our 3,000 year old text, the Torah, but even more so. “What shall we do with this book?” I think that this is a central question for those of us who take being Jewish seriously and who live in liberal Jewish communities like Kol Shofar. “What shall we do with this complex, confounding, contradictory, sometimes boring, sometimes distressing book?” Do we put our book on a high shelf and let it get dusty, out of sight, out of mind? Do we display it more visibly, so we can assure ourselves of its centrality in our lives, even though we never really struggle with it? Do we toss it in the garbage can because it doesn’t meet our expectations? Do we ask others, our Rabbis, our teachers, to do the hard work for us, accepting a level of passivity that we absolutely refuse to experience in any other domain of our lives? Are we content with seeing the Torah scroll several times a month, touching the scroll with our tallises, hearing the text read in a language we don’t understand, revering the Torah without engaging it? And as we have studied in Pirkei Avot, “In accord with the effort is the reward.” So, I ask you again, What is at the head of our community? What should be at the head of our community? May we find ways to amplify our engagement with Torah, and may we build strong Jewish community as we share that engagement with others. Shabbat Shalom.