Sefer Devarim
Parshat Nitzavim: On the Inclusiveness of Torah
By Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz
Parshat Nitzavim, which means “You are standing,” begins with Moses saying, “You are standing this day, all of you, before the Lord your God.” 1
And by “all of you,” Moshe meant everyone: “your tribal heads, your elders, and your officials, every householder in Israel; your children, your wives, even the stranger within your camp, from woodchopper to waterdrawer.” 2
This is significant, because Moshe’s goal in this parshah is to persuade everyone to live according to the Torah. He later tells them, in one of Deuteronomy’s most famous passages:
Surely, this mitzvah which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens, that you should say, “Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?” No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it. 3
Here we learn that Torah life and learning is not some elite endeavor to be kept away from the people, but a necessary and accessible activity for all. The Torah is not “hidden,” and it’s not “far away,” even if one feels excluded in some way from the institutional Jewish world and might feel that way.
The nearness of the Torah democratizes Jewish life even to the extent of removing exclusive power away from the rabbis. The 16th-century Italian scholar Ovadia Sforno commented:
[It is not beyond your reach], that you have to ask the leading Torah scholars of your generation who live a long way from you to explain how to observe this commandment. You can easily observe this commandment even in the Diaspora where you may not have any Torah scholars nearby. 4
Jews without access to formal Jewish learning experiences can still access the Torah from their own place. Better yet, Jewish educators and institutions should strategize on how to best reach others to provide them an even richer experience. While many organizations and individuals are doing so, more needs to be done.
If we take the Torah’s ethic of inclusivity to heart, we can see how pressing the problem of exclusivity in the Jewish world is. Yes, there is a value to putting fences around the Torah, to protecting what we cherish. But that means taking good care of the Torah so that it can live and thrive among us, not being exclusive and hiding it from the people and turning it into a dead relic. The thing that’s most cherished to us needs to be made available and accessible.
Primarily, this means providing educational opportunities for all people. As we learned above, Torah is for the leaders and the laborers, men and women, the old and the young, the familiar faces and the strangers.
For Torah educators, our task is to maintain the authenticity and depth while also lowering the barriers to entry. And, like keeping the commandments of the Torah, accomplishing this is not at all out of reach.
Outside of the Jewish world, we can use the Torah’s teaching to recognize that the great moral debates in society today cannot be reserved for elite philosophers, powerful politicians, and wealthy businesspeople, all while the masses are left without access to wisdom, merely as pawns for partisan bandwagoning. As a culture, we need to reinvigorate a robust system of moral education that is deep and challenging, but digestible by the masses. Just as we teach math, English, and science in schools, so too should we should we do more towards fostering moral reasoning and cultivating empathy.
We must reawaken a moral discourse beyond Twitter-shouting.
The famous Talmudic story regarding a tanur shel achna’i 5 comes to mind. The Talmud relates:
The Rabbis taught: Rabbi Eliezer answered all the possible answers [regarding the status of the oven], but the Sages did not accept his explanations… [So] Rabbi Eliezer said to them: If the halakhah is in accordance with my opinion, this carob tree will prove it. The carob tree was uprooted from its place one hundred cubits, and some say four hundred cubits. The Rabbis said to him: One does not cite halakhic proof from the carob tree…
Rabbi Eliezer then said to them: If the halakhah is in accordance with my opinion, the walls of the study hall will prove it. The walls of the study hall leaned inward and began to fall…
Rabbi Eliezer then said to them: If the halakhah is in accordance with my opinion, Heaven will prove it. A Divine voice emerged from Heaven and said: Why are you differing with Rabbi Eliezer, as the halakhah is in accordance with his opinion in every case?
Rabbi Yehoshua stood on his feet and said: It is written, “It is not in heaven” (Deuteronomy 30:12)…
Years later, Rabbi Natan encountered Elijah the prophet and said to him: What did the Holy One, Blessed be He, do at that time? Elijah said to him: The Holy One, Blessed be He, smiled and said: My children have triumphed over Me; my children have triumphed over Me. 6
We now live in an era when we’re more informed by the consensus of the people than by clear instructions from God. To rebuild democracy to its best form, we first need to rebuild a healthy moral discourse.
One of the ways to get there is through a year or two of mandatory service between high school and college which would provide hands-on experience and learning about pressing moral issues. An even better approach would be to incorporate such a program into the school curriculum itself, as some schools are indeed doing. But also, for adults, we have to reawaken a civic-engagement and civic-learning process stressing that we need a fourth space in society, beyond the three dominant ones of market, government, and home. For many, that fourth space will be sports or religion. But we equally need a space where we rebuild society through moral dialogue.
This is a rejection of both libertarianism and authoritarianism. It is neither all about the individual nor all about the collective. We must hold both the rights and dignity of the individual and the collective utilitarian good, rejecting the crudest forms of capitalism and communism. And religion should be a part of the solution rather than an inhibitor, fostering moral discourse rather than fundamentalist ideology.
Similarly, in the specifically religious realm, we are so far removed from the era of Moses that our understanding of the Torah requires layers upon layers of interpretation. This might, at first glance, feel like a violation of the Torah’s sanctity. However, the Kedushat Levi, an 18th- and 19th-century Hasidic master, explained it like this:
When a child wins a game of chess against their parent for the first time, the parent derives great satisfaction of having taught their child so well. Similarly, if, during a discussion on the meaning of a certain verse in the Torah, the “child,” i.e. one of the Torah scholars, has shown outstanding skill and understanding of the Torah’s deeper meaning, the author, God, derives great satisfaction from this. 7
The largest group that has so often been excluded from this process, contrary to Torah values, I would argue, is women. Professor Tamar Ross unpacked how women need to be more included in her book Expanding the Palace of Torah:
If feminist morality is more than a passing fad, it is likely that the interpretive tradition
will discover that some of the values expressed by the feminists are indeed those of the
Torah and should be pursued accordingly. The fluidity of meaning that allows for this
does not require that we understand that the Sinaitic revelation was incomplete. Other
feminist values may be considered as opposing the values of the Torah and as such be
rejected. Still other matters may remain in the realm of the permissible but not obligatory.
Such a solution could be no less effective than claims to divine intervention in history in
avoiding the theological pitfall of faulting the existing biblical text. Sufficient to this task
should be an underlying assumption that the multiple meanings inherent in a divine
message become apparent only through a protracted process of rabbinic interpretation. 8
Whatever reason a person might feel excluded from the Torah conversation—their gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, status as a convert, or anything else—we must respond to the Torah’s call to ensure that communal and societal participation includes us all.
Sources
- Deuteronomy 29:9
- Ibid. 29:9-10
- Deuteronomy 30:11-14
- Sforno on Deuteronomy 30:11:3
- Tanur shel achnai literally means “oven of a snake.” It is referred to by that title due to the fact that the Talmudic rabbis “surrounded” the oven with question after question regarding its purity status, much like a snake coils itself.
- Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzi’a 59b
- Kedushat Levi, Exodus, Yitro 25
- Tamar Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism (Hanover, NH: BrandeisUniversity Press, 2004), 221-23