Law-and-Narrative
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Re Tanakh versions:
Throughout
this site I may use any of three versions of the Tanakh: 1. “Jewish Publication Society” (JPS-1917), 2. “Mechon-Mamre.org” (MEC), and 3. “Sefaria.org” (SEF), three brilliant versions. However, the
JPS-1917 is my preferred version!
Colour coded
details of our beloved TaNaKh:
1. Torah =
History & Law, 2. Nevi’im = The Prophets. 3. *Ketuvim = all other Writings.
*The Ketuvim - Includes, Poetical
books - Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the Megillot,
or Scrolls - Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations of
Jeremiah, Ecclesiastes, and Esther, prophecy of Daniel, and history
of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles I & II.
Please Note: Some alterations
or (additions) have been made relating to ‘Names’ and ‘Attributes’ of אֱלֹהִים - Elohim (God), having been corrected like it once was pre
the “Masoretic Text”.
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Remember the following truth from our beloved Torah!
“Ye shall NOT ADD TO THE WORD which
I command you, NEITHER SHALL YE DIMINISH FROM
IT, that ye may keep the commandments of אֱלֹהֵיכֶם יְהוָה - the LORD your Eloleichem,
which I command you”. Davarim -
Deuteronomy 4:2. (JPS-1917).
However, what have both priests and rabbis of
the past who have purposely made grave and ridiculous additions and disgraceful
changes!
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With Rabbi,
Dr. Reuven Ben Avraham-Goossens, PhD.
Introduction:
This study goes back a very long time, from around 2001, and I have shared this study whilst I was teaching worldwide in some 74 countries. I have given copies of this study to a small number of rabbis, and gave them permission for them to use it, and they did not have to state its origin.
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One of the most striking features of the ‘Torah’, and of our ‘Judaic heritage’ is generally rather insufficiently commented on, namely its combination of ‘law’ and ‘narrative’. And of course, the Mosaic books contain both, and they gave rise to two different literatures in the rabbinic period, namely ‘halachah’ and ‘aggadah’. ‘Halachah’ represents ‘law’. Whilst ‘Aggadah’ is the generic name for everything else - ‘stories’, ‘theological reflections’ and ‘interpretations of our scriptural narrative’. The two literatures have a different feel about them. Thus they reflect different sensibilities.
‘Halachah’ is ‘detailed’ and ‘demanding’ and uses ‘sophisticated rules of jurisprudence’. ‘Aggadah’ is more ‘intuitive’ and ‘imaginative’. One might almost call them the ‘left’ and ‘right hemispheres’ of our Hebrew brain.
Why both? There is a famous comment by Rabbi Yitzhak, cited by Rashi at the very opening of his commentary to the Torah:
Rabbi Yitzhak said: The Torah should have commenced with (the verse) …
“This month shall be unto you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you”. Exodus 12:2.
The answer is less significant than the question which is, on of the face of it, astonishing. Rabbi Yitzhak was asking, why was it necessary for the Torah to mention the fact that אֱלֹהִים - Elohim created the universe? He goes further. Implicit in his suggestion that the Torah should have begun with the twelfth chapter of Exodus is that the entire book of Genesis - the lives of the patriarchs and the birth of Judaism - is unnecessary. So too are the first eleven chapters of Exodus itself, with their account of the sufferings of the Israelites in Egypt, the choice of Moses, the plagues and so on. How could he have said or thought such a thing? But of course these narratives are fundamental to our belief.
However, Rabbi Yitzhak’s question makes
good sense. Essentially he is asking, what kind of book is the Torah? To
what literary genre does it belong? The word Torah in its narrowest sense means
“law”. If so, it should have begun with the first law, and it should contain
nothing but legal material. We do not expect a textbook on ‘torts’ or ‘family
law’ or contract to contain a history of
Why then does the Torah contain both? The answer goes to the heart of the Judaic enterprise. Law is not, for Judaism, a series of arbitrary rules even though it comes from אֱלֹהִים - Elohim himself. Nor is Judaism a matter of blind obedience - obedience, yes, but blind, no. Law is rooted in history and cosmology. It reflects something other and older than the law itself. It speaks to us out of the heart of the human situation. It belongs to a total vision of the universe, the place of mankind within creation, human psychology (especially our propensity for violence and injustice), and the attempts (at first halting and unsatisfactory) to create relationships and societies based on respect for human dignity and the natural environment.
What is more, we are expected to know the story behind the law. The Torah does not seek to create a society around the naked fact of Divine command. אֱלֹהִים - Elohim wants us to know, not only what to do, but why. He wants us not merely to obey but also to understand. In early stages of childhood, a parent insists on simple rules: Do this, don't do that. But as the child grows, he or she needs to question, challenge, probe. Successful parenthood depends on taking these enquiries seriously. The mere assertion of parental authority is not enough. Eventually one of two things will happen: either the child will rebel, or he or she will fail to develop an adult moral sense. That is why a good parent will, as the child matures, begin to explain why it is important to act this way, not that.
The Torah is אֱלֹהִים Elohim’s book to mankind. אֱלֹהִים - Elohim is a parent. We are his children. And אֱלֹהִים - Elohim speaks to us as adults. He wants us to understand the logic of the law and the history of why it is necessary to have these rules not those, this particular structure of commands and constraints.
Some examples: the story of Adam and Eve in
The story of Cain and Abel explains the
peculiar horror Judaism has for murder. Human beings, we are told in the first
chapter of Bereishit, are created in the image of אֱלֹהִים - Elohim. Therefore murder is an assault not just on humanity but on אֱלֹהִים - Elohim himself. The name Hevel(the Hebrew word for Abel) means “mere breath”. It is the
key word in the book of Ecclesiastes. The phrase hevel
havalim, hakol
The story of Abraham praying for the
inhabitants of
One of the most striking examples is the long account of the life of Jacob who marries two sisters, loves one (Rachel) more than the other (Leah), and favours the child of the first (Joseph) more than the others. The resulting tension within the family explains the background to two later laws, one in Leviticus, the other in Deuteronomy:
Do not take your wife’s sister as a rival wife and have sexual relations with her while your wife is living.
If a man has two wives, and he loves one but not the other, and both bear him sons but the firstborn is the son of the wife he does not love, when he wills his property to his sons, he must not give the rights of the firstborn to the son of the wife he loves in preference to his actual firstborn, the son of the wife he does not love. He must acknowledge the son of his unloved wife as the firstborn by giving him a double share of all he has. That son is the first sign of his father's strength. The right of the firstborn belongs to him.
The second, in particular, is almost a
counter-commentary to the story of Jacob and uses language common to both (“the
first sign of his father’s strength” echoes Jacob’s words to Reuben, his
first-born son by Leah: “Reuben, you are my firstborn, my might, the first sign
of my strength”, Gen. 49:3). As to why Jacob acted contrary to later scriptural
law, Nachmanides gives the simplest explanation. The
patriarchs kept the Torah (before it was given) only in the
In short, in the Torah law and narrative are intertwined for the most profound of reasons, namely that אֱלֹהִים - Elohim’s law is not arbitrary. It speaks to the human condition. It arises out of human history. אֱלֹהִים - Elohim, said the Sages, “is not a tyrant”. He does not issue laws and decrees for His sake but for ours. Moreover, He wants us to understand the laws so that we can act not by rote but by educated moral instinct. The Lawgiver is also the Creator (this is what the Sages meant when they said, “אֱלֹהִים - Elohim looked into the Torah and created the world"). Therefore the law goes with the grain of creation. That is the ultimate answer to the question posed by Rabbi Yitzhak. Why does the Torah begin with creation? Because the Torah represents a way of life that respects the integrity of creation and the Creator, in whose image we are.
Nowhere is this set out more clearly than in the sedra of Chukat. On the face of it, the various sections do not hang together at all. The sedra begins with the law of the Red Heifer. It derives its name from the phrase, “This is the decree of (chukkat) the Torah”. Judaism traditionally saw the ritual of the Red Heifer as the supreme example of a chok, that is, a decree that has no reason or logic other than the fact that it was commanded by אֱלֹהִים - Elohim.
The sedra then
proceeds to a series of narratives set towards the end of the Israelites' forty
years in the desert. First Miriam dies. Then the people rebel because there was
no water (a well accompanied the Israelites on their journeys, said the Sages,
because of the merit of Miriam. When she died, the water ceased). Then Moses
and Aaron lose their temper with the people - “Listen now you rebels”. For this
sin they are condemned not to enter the Promised Land. Aaron dies, and the
people mourn. Moses too knows that his days are numbered. He will not live to
cross the
But they do. More than any other passage in
the wilderness years, Chukat is about
mortality. We know from the story of the spies that the people who left
It was not to be. That is the nature of mortality, an idea given its most famous expression by Rabbi Tarfon in the Mishnah: It is not for you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it. The great tasks of humanity are too large to be completed in a single generation. The kind of leadership needed to lead a people out of slavery is not the same as that needed to induct them into freedom. Nor is any of us privileged to see the full fruits of our lives and the impact we make on the next generation. There is a world that will come after us, that we will not live to see. That is the human condition - and Moses, Aaron and Miriam, for all their greatness, were human.
Nowhere else in the Torah is mortality so
poignantly expressed? We feel little sympathy for Adam and Eve. They had only
one command to keep and they broke it. Abraham and Isaac die in relative
serenity. Jacob dies reunited with his beloved son. Joseph dies in honour, a
prince of
That is why the narrative is preceded by the law of the Red Heifer, whose entire purpose is to purify those who have come into contact with death. Indeed the whole passage exemplifies one of the axioms of Judaism that “אֱלֹהִים - Elohim provides the cure before the disease”.
The symbolism the Red Heifer is simple. The Red Heifer itself represents life in its most primal form. Firstly it is an animal - and an animal simply lives without reflecting on life. Secondly it is red, symbolizing blood, which for the Torah represents life itself. Thirdly it is an animal “on which a yoke has not yet come”. Its life has not been constrained by being domesticated, used. This is life at its most vigorous and elemental.
The heifer is killed and burned and reduced to ash, in the most dramatic possible enactment of death. The ashes are mixed with those of burnt cedar wood, hyssop and crimson thread (part of the purification ritual of the metzora or “leper” also: see Lev. 14; evidently these three elements had a particular power, physical or symbolic, to absorb and thus remove impurity). They are then dissolved in “living water” to be sprinkled over the person who has been contaminated by contact with, or proximity to, a human corpse.
The phrase “living water” is an explicit
metaphor. Water is the source of all life, plant, animal and human. In the
desert, or more generally in the
We die, but life goes on - that is the symbolic statement of the Red Heifer rite. All that lives eventually turns to dust (and in the case of the Red Heifer to ash), but life continues to flow like a never-ending stream. Significantly, the Hebrew word for “inheritance”, nachalah, is related to the word for a stream or spring, nachal. Heraclitus said that “no one bathes in the same river twice”. The water that was once here is gone. It has flowed into the sea, evaporated into cloud, and fallen again as rain. But the stream continues to flow in the same course, between the same banks. There is death, yes, but there is also continuity. We are never privileged to complete the task, but others will take it on and move a little closer to fulfilment. So long as there is a covenant between the dead, the living, and those not yet born, mortality is redeemed from tragedy. The dead live on in us, as we will live on in our children or in those whose lives we touched. As dust dissolves in living water, so death dissolves in the stream of life itself.
Far from being unintelligible, the law of the Red Heifer is a powerful statement about life and death, grief and consolation, the ephemeral and the eternal. And far from being disconnected with the narrative that follows, it is intimately related to it, and the two are commentaries on one another. Together they form a fugue. Before we are exposed to the death of Miriam and Aaron and the decree of death against Moses, the Torah provides us with a profound metaphysical comfort. They died, but what they lived for did not die. The water ceased, but after an interval, it returned. We are destined to mourn the death of those close to us, but eventually we reconnect with (the water of) life.
Law informs the narrative, and the narrative explains the law. We need both, just as we need the analytical left-hemisphere and the integrating right-hemisphere of the brain. And now we understand the meaning of the word that gives the sedra its name, chok, usually translated as “statute” or “decree”. In actual fact, chok is a word that brings together two concepts of law. There are scientific laws, which explain the “isness” of the world, and there are moral laws which prescribe the “oughtness” of the world. The singular meaning of chok is that it brings both concepts together. There are laws we ought to keep because they honour the structure of reality.
The most significant feature of the structure of human reality is death. To be human is to be mortal. The law of the Red Heifer honours the fact of death. It does not try to deny it. Death is real; grief is inevitable; bereavement is the most painful of all human experiences. But אֱלֹהִים - Elohim is life. אֱלֹהִים - Elohim is to us as water is to the desert (“אֱלֹהִים - Elohim, you are my אֱלֹהִים - Elohim; I search for you, my soul thirsts for You, my body yearns for you, as a parched and thirsty land that has no water”. Psalm 63:2). The Red Heifer comforts us for the loss of Miriam, Aaron and Moses, and for the existence of death itself. The touch of אֱלֹהִים - Elohim, like the sprinkled drops of the waters of purification, heals our loss and brings us back to life.
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Remember what אֱלֹהִים - Elohim, blessed be He, said
the following through a number of our prophets...
“The More Torah, the More Life”,
For Elohim is the One who gave us our ... “Life!”
May
the שָׁלוֹם - Shalom = Peace of צְבָאוֹת- יְהוָה= the LORD of hosts, be with you, and
please always uphold our blessed שַׁבָּת - Shabbat, as well as the מוֹעֲדִים - Mo’a’dim - Feasts,
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שָׁלוֹם
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