“Be careful to observe only that which I enjoin upon you: neither add to it nor take away from it.”
—Deuteronomy 13:1
There is a wonderful, old joke where Moses is convened with God atop Mount Sinai and God is conveying the laws and statutes of the Torah. God says, “And remember Moses, in the laws of keeping Kosher, never cook a calf in its mother’s milk.”
Moses replies, “Ohhhhhh! So you are saying we should never eat milk and meat together.”
“Wait, what?” God replies, “No, what I’m saying is, never cook a calf in its mother’s milk.”
Moses apologetically replies, “Oh, Lord, forgive my ignorance! What you are really saying is we should wait six hours after eating meat to eat milk so the two are not in our stomachs at the same time.”
Increasingly annoyed, God replies, “No, Moses, what I’m saying is, don’t cook a calf in its mother’s milk!!!”
Moses thusly replies, “Oh, Lord! Please don’t strike me down for my stupidity! What you mean is we should have a separate set of dishes for milk and a separate set for meat and if we make a mistake we have to bury that dish outside….”
Koh amar Adonai—Thus says Adonai, “Ah, do whatever you want…”
All joking aside, this scenario illustrates a tension that has existed in Judaism since the moment the Temple was first destroyed and Jews were sent into exile in 586 BCE by the Babylonians. Since that time, Jews have had to ask ourselves, “How do we maintain the integrity and principle intent of our founding document, the Torah, while allowing the Torah to be a living document that can and should apply to Jews of all generations until the thousandth?”
In my opinion, Judaism has been rather successful in finding this balance between tradition and progress. This balance between textual originalism and the practical innovation is demonstrated through the creation of “fences around Torah” at the heart of rabbinic Judaism. “Fences around the Torah” are a way to describe the protection of the original, literal text. The gates of the fence provide openings for interpretation of the written Torah (Torah sh’bictav) through what is called the Oral Torah (Torah sh’b’al Peh) — an expansive, legalistic, hermeneutic system of engaging with Torah. In other words, Torah may not be added to, but it may be understood to meet the needs and practices of Jews for all times and all space.
Aren’t we lucky that Judaism provides the space that each of us might contribute to this conversation, that each of us might live the Torah of our own?
Rabbi Brett Weisman