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A word of Torah:
This week’s portion depicts the moment of the revelation of Torah at Sinai. Torah is usually understood as the five books of Moses written on a scroll. In addition, the rabbis proclaimed an oral Torah that was passed down for many centuries until it was written down and is known as the Talmud. Centuries later, the Hasidic master, the Sefat Emet, had an additional view of the oral Torah. For him, the oral Torah is comprised of the lives of the righteous, the stories of the families in the book of Genesis. For this reason, the Torah begins with the book of Genesis rather than with the moment of revelation at Mount Sinai
Expanding this notion further, I would suggest that everyone, not just the righteous, has the potential to add to the Torah by their actions. In this understanding the oral Torah is an ongoing dynamic process. Instead of a fixed text, it is a “tree of life," as we say when we put the Torah back in the ark on Shabbat. To be alive a tree must continue to grow and have new branches and leaves. This idea of a Tree of Life comes from the Garden of Eden story where, in addition to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, there was a second forbidden tree—the Tree of Life. Adam and Eve tasted of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and were exiled from the Garden. They never ate from the second tree and therefore humans became mortal. The Torah is referred to as the Tree of Life because, despite our mortality, the Torah as a Tree of Life enables us to touch immortality by connecting us to the universe. We hold the past, we see the present, and we hope for the future.
According to the tradition, the 613th commandment is that each person should write a Torah scroll. This is sometimes fulfilled by paying a scribe to write a letter on your behalf in a new Torah scroll. Another way of understanding this commandment is that, by our deeds, each of us writes the Torah scroll of our journey. The Sefer Ha-hinukh (a medieval work) states that we are obligated to write a Torah scroll even if we inherited one from our parents. Why? For “fear that their spirit might find the old scrolls of their ancestors unappealing.” I understand that to mean that as much as we inherit the Jewish tradition, we must also make it our own—in our own words and understandings. Thereby, we continue the ongoing unrolling of the Torah scroll of the Jewish people.
FRIEND, WHEN YOU SPEAK by Leonard Cohen
Friend, when you speak this carefully I know it is because you don’t know
what to say. I listen in such a way so as not to add to your confusion. I make
some reply at every opportunity so as not to compound your loneliness. Thus
the conversation continues under an umbrella of optimism. If you suggest a
feeling, I affirm it. If you provoke, I accept the challenge. The surface is thick,
but it has its flaws, and hopefully we will trip on one of them. Now, we can
order a meat sandwich for the protein, or we can take our places in the
Sanhedrin and determine what it is to be done with those great cubes of
diamond that our teacher Moses shouldered down the mountain. You want
to place them in such a way that the sun by day, and the moon and stars by
night, will shine through them. I suggest another perspective which would
include the light of the celestial bodies within the supernal radiance of the
cubes. We lean toward each other over the table. The dust mingles with the
mist, our nostrils widen. We are definitely interested; now we can get down
to a Jew’s business.
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