In some congregations, there is a custom of celebrating the
festival of Simchat Torah, by unrolling a Torah Scroll. This gives those in attendance, an
opportunity to glimpse the Written Torah as a whole, to get a sense of what it
means to navigate through the text by noting its highlights. The interesting thing is that most of said
highlights, are written in a distinctive fashion so that they stand out. This, in a
text that has no page numbers of any other markers to indicate where one is.
One of the first obvious visual
features is the gap that exists between each of the Five Books. So if you’re at the very start of Genesis and
want to find the start of Exodus, you roll ahead to the gap of about two
inches, below which you see the opening words of the book: Eileh shemot benei Yisrael…
Then, certain passages are ‘marked’
by some distinctive way of writing them.
For example, the Shema, Deuteronomy 6:4, is marked by an
elongation of the last letters in the first and last words of the
declaration: the Ayin in the word
Shema, and the Dalet in the word Echad. The two elongated letters, form the word Eid,
meaning ‘witness.’ The very text of
the Shema offers an important witness to the existence and nature of G-d.
Some passages are easy to identify
by their being written with a unique spacing.
Last week I allowed as how I think the Song of the Sea, Genesis 15, is
one of the highlights of the Torah. Its
words are spaced in a way that supports its poetic metre, which makes it easy
to immediately spot as one scans through the text. Likewise, other poetic passages are written
to support the poetic metre of their words.
This week’s portion contains a
significant piece not of poetry, but of thundering prose. It, too is spaced in a way that makes it hard
to miss as one rolls or scans through a Torah.
The passage in question is, of course, none other than the Ten
Commandments.
The Ten Commandments is one of the
best-known passages in the Torah. Even
if it didn’t fairly jump off the page at us, it is one of those passages by
which people define the Torah. And not just
the Torah. Christians consider the Tanach
under the name ‘Old Testament’ to constitute some two-thirds of their holy scriptures,
volume-wise. And for most, the Ten
Commandments is one of the defining passages.
So not just for Jews, the image of Moses carrying the two tablets of
stone with these words chiseled into them, is central to their faith story.
Recently, my daughter and I visited
the US National Archives in Washington, DC. We couldn’t miss the Great Hall, where the
originals of all the important documents of American history are on display. The line past the display cases moves slowly,
because people tend to stand and read, word-for-word, the key passages of each. When it comes to the US Constitution, people
tend to read only the Preamble. We the People of the United States, in
Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic
Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and
secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and
establish this Constitution for the United States of America. It’s a simple declaration, but it sings in a way that few run-on
sentences of 52 words can. Even when we
Americans fail to make our country live up to its founders’ lofty aspirations,
we find that these words resonate deeply and inspire us to get back to work.
So
too the ‘preamble’ of the Ten Commandments.
I am Hashem your G-d who led you out of Egypt, the house of bondage. Much shorter than the Preamble to the US
Constitution! Much more to the point! Only eight words in the Hebrew. And yet, these eight words sing to us across
the centuries and capture our attention for what follows.
The
Torah does not identify the Ten Commandments as such. It just tells us that G-d presented them to
Moses. The idea that they contain ten
discrete statements, is commentary. But
it stuck. Our tradition loves symmetry. The idea of ten specific, identifiable
statements chiseled on two stone tablets, five to a tablet. We tend to attempt to order everything around
us into recognizable patterns, in order to make them make more sense. It that’s so, then which commandment is the
first? Well, that depends on whom one
asks. Some authorities consider this
preamble, this statement of who G-d is, to be the First Commandment. It sure doesn’t sound like a
commandment! It sounds like nothing more
than a preamble, a setting of the tone for what follows.
But without
this preamble, the rest of the Ten Commandments are gutless, with little power
to compel us. It is because Hashem did
this for us – took us out of Egypt and relieved us of our servitude – that he
has the authority to then proceed to make demands on us in the form of a list
of positive and negative commandments.
Whether
you prefer to consider this statement – I am Hashem your G-d who led you out
of Egypt, the house of bondage – as ‘just’ the preamble, or as a rather
strange First Commandment, is not important. Because whether it does constitute a
commandment or not, it gives us the basis for all that follows. That we have not always gotten with the
programme of the latter, does not call the enterprise into question. The establishment of Divine authority is the
basis. Not just of the Ten Commandments. But for all 613. Shabbat shalom!
Shabbat Shalom Rabbi.
ReplyDeleteThanks!