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Va'etchanan 5762
Commentary by Rabbi Barry Leff
Deuteronomy 4: 2. You shall not add to the word which I command you,
neither shall you diminish nothing from it, that you may keep the
commandments of the Lord your God which I command you.
This week's parsha contains a well known injunction against adding or
subtracting from the commandments that God has given us. Some would use
this passage as an argument for the halakhic "status quo," whatever
that
may be, lest we be adding or subtracting to the Torah.
However, it is well known that the rabbis over the years have in various
ways done things that may seem like "adding or subtracting."
The
blessing we recite over the Chanuka candles is "Blessed are you, Lord
our God, Ruler of the Universe, who has sanctified us with his
commandments, and has commanded us to light Chanuka candles."
However,
since the events surrounding Chanuka occurred more than a thousand years
after the giving of the Torah, how can we say that "God commanded
us?"
This was a commandment put in place by the rabbis many years later.
Isn't this "adding" to the Torah?
Furthermore, much of what we take for granted in Judaism-the details of
how we keep kosher, or how we observe the Sabbath-are also not found
directly in the Torah. There are also things in the Torah that we do
not follow today: for example, in the Torah it says that a rebellious
son is to be killed; yet in the Talmud, in tractate Sanhedrin it says no
rebellious son was ever put to death, and none ever will. How do we
reconcile these seemingly wide variances in our practice from what is
written in the Torah? How could the rabbis justify all these changes?
For the answer to that question, we look at another parsha later in the
book of Deuteronomy, to parsha Shoftim. In chapter 17, verse 11 it is
written regarding the judges in each generation: "According to the
sentence of the Torah which they shall teach you, and according to the
judgment which they shall tell you, you shall do." This verse is the
basis for rabbinic authority to determine halakha.
However, even with this permission for the judges (rabbis) to determine
law found in parsha Shoftim, the verse in this week's parsha, the
instruction that "you shall not add to the word which I command you,"
must be there to teach us something. The question is what.
The answer is perhaps alluded to in a midrash on the story of Adam and
Eve eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The story
of Eve and the snake is a familiar one: God tells Adam not to eat from
the tree, Adam passes along the prohibition to Eve, the snake seduces
Eve into eating the fruit anyway, and the rest, as they say, is history,
mankind is expelled from the Garden of Eden, men will have to struggle
with the soil, and women will bear children in pain.
If you look closely at the verses in the story in Genesis, you will see
that God instructs Adam not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and
evil; yet what Adam instructs Eve is different in a seemingly small, but
very important way. Adam tells Eve not to even TOUCH the tree of
knowledge of good and evil, lest she die.
The midrash tells us that the snake took advantage of this discrepancy
between the instruction given to Adam by God, and the instruction Adam
passed on to Eve. According to the midrash, when the snake
meets Eve,
the snake tries to get Eve to eat some of the fruit, and Eve at first
refuses, saying she was told if she even touches the tree she will die.
The snake then pushes Eve into the tree, and says "look, you didn't die!
You can also eat the fruit, don't worry!" Seeing that she did not in
fact die from touching the tree, Eve goes ahead and eats the fruit.which
WAS a violation of what God commanded.
In this story, Adam is partly to blame for what happened in the Garden
of Eden. By telling Eve something was forbidden, which was not in fact
forbidden, he led Eve to sin. When she saw the result of violating a
rule was not in accord with what she had been told, it eroded her
confidence in the rules altogether.
Pirkei Avot, the ethics of our ancestors, includes an instruction to
"make a fence around the Torah." Many of the rules surrounding
the
observance of Shabbat are in this category: for example, there are some
objects we don't use on Shabbat lest they break and we be tempted to fix
them. Adam's problem was that he went beyond a mere fence. He
didn't
keep in mind that what was prohibited was EATING the fruit; he added
another level of prohibition, TOUCHING the tree. We can understand this
as adding a totally new prohibition, violating the injunction in this
week's parsha not to add to the Torah.
The message of the verse in this weeks' Torah portion, "not to add to
the instructions," is that while rabbis do have the power to interpret
the Torah and determine what is the halakha, this power should be used
judiciously. Rabbis can make a fence around the Torah, but it should be
known that this is a fence, and the penalty for violating it is
different than the penalty for violating something in the Torah itself.
Some rabbis favor more fences than others: the Ben Ish Chai, the chief
rabbi of Baghdad in the mid-19th century, wrote a teshuva permitting the
use of bicycles on Shabbat, saying in his teshuva that the Torah
prohibits enough things, we don't need to add to the list unnecessarily!
One of the challenges Judaism faces in the 21st century is balancing the
need for a Judaism that reflects the realities of the world we live in
(judges are also admonished to "go after what is before their eyes")
with a fidelity to tradition as exemplified by the verse from this
week's Torah portion, "do not add or subtract from it." This in
fact is
what you might call the motto of the Conservative movement: "Tradition
AND Change."
Shabbat Shalom