Let’s hear it for reclaiming a 16th century mystical custom! Isaac Luria, a third generation refugee of the expulsion from Spain, taught that God was in exile along with the Jewish people. In Luria’s kabbalah, our life on Earth mirrors –-and can actually affect— the heavens. As we do mitzvot that bring harmony below, we help create Divine unity up above.
While few of us would take this as a literal cosmological statement, it makes for a great myth, which has re-entered our siddur on page 151 (though you have to be at shul by 9:35am to hear it!). Before uttering our first blessings of the morning liturgy, we say: “for the sake of the unity/reunion of the Holy-Blessed-One and His Shekhinah [the male and female aspects of divinity], here I am ready and invited to take upon myself the positive commandment, ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ (Lev. 19) –- and by this merit, I open my mouth [to pray].”
May all our words, and our prayers, be guided by this principle! Amen, selah. But wait, there’s more… I’m thinking of Hillel (1st century BCE) and the chutzpadik guy who asks the great rabbi to teach him the entire Torah while he stands on one foot (“al regel achat”). Hillel’s response, which paraphrases Leviticus 19 into one version of the cross-cultural Golden Rule, is deceptively simple: “what is hateful to you, don’t do to your neighbor. That is the whole of the Torah; the rest is commentary –- go and learn it.”
As with our morning prayers, Hillel says that Judaism begins with (and must never stray from) ethics — but it doesn’t end there, and neither should our learning. So it can be for us. May we appreciate and explore the vast richness of our tradition, while remaining ever conscious of (and moved by) its all-important moral basis.
“The rest is commentary, go and learn it” –- Is the commentary second in importance, or only in order? Can we do without commentary at all? In the Torah tradition, we cannot. Jews learn Torah not out of the scroll, but out of the chumash, replete with commentaries both classical and contemporary. Only a tiny fraction of the words in a chumash are those of the original text itself, yet every word has something to teach us.
To help us better appreciate the commentaries —which ultimately helps us better appreciate the sacred text itself— I will lead a four-part adult education series this month called “Great Torah Commentators” (every Sunday at 10:30, except 3/23; no Hebrew knowledge required, though we’ll make frequent reference to it). We’ll get a sense of Rashi’s synthesizing, Ibn Ezra’s rationalizing, and Ramban’s mysticizing. We’ll see how Torah gets twisted and turned, pulled and prodded –- and why others have done this, and why and how we might do the same. We’ll consider contemporary commentators, and offer plenty of comments of our own.
I hope that in our spiritual and intellectual journeys, we never lose sight of the centrality of right action –- as Rabbi Leo Baeck put it, “Judaism is not merely ethical; ethics constitute its essence.” But grounded thusly in ethics, I also hope that we feel free to explore the breadth and depth of our tradition –- to “go and learn the commentary.”
Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb