Private vows and sacred cows: self expression and individualism in the Torah

The chapter of Judaism Reclaimed which relates to parashat Mattot explores the delicate balance which must be struck between the pursuit of unified halachic practice on the one hand and the recognition of the individual’s need for self-fulfilment and meaning on the other.

Our discussion is built upon the parashah’s detailing of nedarim, personal vows, which provide a person with the means to prohibit what the Torah has permitted. In his Shemonah Perakim, Rambam takes an overwhelmingly negative approach to nedarim and those who utter them, explaining that the Torah’s laws are carefully designed to lead a person to the perfection of his or her character traits. In choosing to take a neder, a person is essentially rejecting the notion that God’s mitzvot provide an adequate means of regulating his life and implying that he knows better than God how to achieve religious perfection. Rambam posits that nedarim should be employed only as a last resort, when there is no other way to control excessive or inappropriate desires.

Rambam’s strong criticism of those who make nedarim is consistent with a statement of the Gemara that one who makes a neder is like one who constructed a bamah [forbidden altar], and one who fulfills it is like one who offered a sacrifice on it [the bamah]. What exactly is behind the Gemara’s cryptic comparison between the taking of a neder and offering a sacrifice outside the Beit Hamikdash? Several similarities become apparent.

First, just like nedarim, bamot are not always prohibited. In the absence of a Beit Hamikdash, an offering on a private altar to God is considered a great mitzvah. Even so, a person who offers such a private offering in an era in which it is prohibited is liable to receive the punishment of karet. Similarly, nedarim are generally viewed as a rejection of the Torah’s formulation for perfection. In a situation in which a person feels he is likely to be overcome by sin, however, the making of a neder is considered a praiseworthy act.

Ran’s commentary to the Gemara hints at a further connection between these two halachot based on the fact that the Beit Hamikdash was built centuries after the Jewish People had conquered and settled the land of Israel. With the construction of the Mikdash, the use of private altars, which had been deeply ingrained into the national psyche as a valid and meritorious method of serving God, became irreversibly prohibited. Perhaps most significantly, these private altars had served for many years as a way for a non-priestly Israelite, to make a personal offering, literally in his own backyard.

Following the ban on bamot, the ordinary Jew was being asked to forgo a treasured act of personal involvement through which he was likely to have felt great spiritual fulfilment. Henceforth it would be the Kohen who performed all of the sacrificial tasks, leaving with the Yisrael a distant and uninvolved spectator. This deep popular connection to private altars – particularly in the context of the ever-present allure of idolatrous shrines – may explain why enforcement of the ban against bamot was so lax in the earlier years of the Judean kingdom. It was only during the later era of Chizkiyah that bamot were uprooted with any degree of success.

In the presence of a fully functional Beit Hamikdash, bamot represented the suggestion that an individual’s feelings of fulfilment could override the national religious interest. Bamot were therefore considered a rejection of God’s instruction for a unified national place of worship. In a similar vein, nedarim also represent a rejection by an individual of the Divine formula which was transmitted to the nation to guide people towards moral and spiritual perfection, with that individual instead attempting to draw close to God on the basis of his or her own subjective ideas.

Both the rejection of nedarim and the prohibition of bamot, however, are ideals for which God has provided exceptions. For someone who feels that there is no other way to restrain his sinful desires, nedarim are endorsed as a method of strengthening self-control. Similarly, the prohibition on bamot, which is a by-product of a strong, centralized Mishkan or Mikdash, only applies when the Jewish nation is relatively settled or has been unified under a king or strong leader. Against this backdrop of unified purpose and worship, the Jewish People can then complete its transition from being a collection of individuals worshipping God to a true nation of God.

First posted to Facebook 15 July 2020, here.

Does the Book of Devarim have its own unique agenda?

The unique style and content of the book of Devarim, a lengthy account of Moshe’s departing discourse to the Jewish people, has exercised the minds of scholars for many years. Judaism Reclaimed draws upon a wide range of sources in examining the extent to which Jewish tradition recognises Devarim as a distinct prophetic work, with its own particular agenda. In the process it addresses many of the arguments raised by academic critics, such as Richard Elliot Friedman, who suggest that these distinctive features are indicative of different authorship. This post will focus on one aspect of this question – its (re)telling of mitzvot and narratives.

Rabbi S. R. Hirsch explains that the book of Devarim has a specific function: to teach or review all of the mitzvot and guidance most necessary for the Jewish nation’s imminent entry into the land and establishment of civil society. The presentation of the laws of the festivals in the book of Devarim, which differs significantly from that of the earlier books of the Torah, is examined in detail by R’ Hirsch and serves as a basis from which he develops his theory.

R’ Hirsch highlights how this review of the festivals only includes Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot – the three whose meaning and application would be significantly altered by the nation’s entry into Israel. Unlike the other four festivals not repeated in the book of Devarim, the meaning of which derive entirely from the relationship between the Jewish people and God, the festivals chosen for review contain an additional dimension that specifically relates to the land and its seasonal cycle. In addition, Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot include the commandment for the whole nation to make a pilgrimage to the Mikdash in Jerusalem. It was therefore specifically these three festivals which were selected for review by Moshe on the Plains of Moav in preparation for entry to the land.

The parshiyot in the middle of Devarim deal with the establishment of institutions which would be necessary in order to govern the land effectively. R’ Hirsch further suggests that the emphasis on tithes and providing for the poor, which also features heavily in the book of Devarim, would take on particular significance with entry to the land. Until that point, the miraculous sustenance of the Jewish people in the desert had made provision for the poor unnecessary. In his commentary on the book of Devarim, Abarbanel consistently seeks to show how each apparently new commandment is merely an extension of a primary mitzvah previously recorded in the first four books — an extension intended specifically to relate to the new challenge of entering and settling Israel. Entire bodies of law such as torts and sacrificial law, which were to remain largely unchanged after entering the Land, do not feature in Devarim.

Moshe’s retelling of Jewish history from the previous 40 years, which occupy the first eleven chapters of the book of Devarim, can also be seen to conform to this theme. The desert years, in R’ Hirsch’s understanding, were designed as a crash course in order to train the Jewish people to maintain faith in God in matters of both national security and sustenance. This theme features strongly in the narratives of the opening parshiyot of Devarim, which emphasise how faith in God is an indispensable requirement for achieving military success, while the miraculous provision of mannah is also recounted. Crucially, these chapters are not solely concerned with recalling the events of the past 40 years, but are interspersed with didactic messages to be drawn from these recent experiences, and how such messages should be applied when entering the land.

Similarly, the lengthy accounts of the Jews’ military encounters in the desert are punctuated regularly by criticism of the Jews’ lack of faith, and God delivering military success as promised. In chapter 11, Moshe concludes this narrative section by stating that his audience, as witnesses of God’s miraculous demonstrations, bear particular responsibility to maintain loyalty to God; loyalty and obedience which will promote success in the land for generations to come.

Reading the opening narratives of Devarim in this context may also address a number of discrepancies between the way in which the first four books of the Torah describe various events which took place in the desert and how they are subsequently related in the book of Devarim. These inconsistencies, such as the apparent shifting of blame to the nation for initiating the episode of the spies and for their culpability in Moshe being denied entry into Israel, are not simply to be explained by the fact that the events are being retold from Moshe’s subjective perspective. Rather they fulfil a didactic role by highlighting the underlying shortcomings and lack of faith within the nation which contributed to the sins of the spies and set the stage for Moshe’s sin of hitting the rock for which he was prevented from entering the Land.

First posted on Facebook 14 July 2021, here.

Torah and universal morality

The chapter of Judaism Reclaimed which relates to parashat Shelach explores complex questions of religion and morality from the perspective of Jewish tradition. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the episode of the spies is that, while the nation was apparently lacking faith in God, it had witnessed a spectacular array of miracles from the plagues in Egypt and splitting of the sea to the revelation at Sinai and military victory over Amalek. It is incomprehensible that members of a generation that had seen the results of God’s intervention with their own eyes could have doubted His ability to vanquish the Canaanites; rather, they must have doubted His willingness to do so.

Such doubt might well have been generated by the sharp contrast between God’s prior miracles – the rescue of downtrodden Jewish slaves from the savagery of Egypt and Amalek – and the command to invade and eliminate the Canaanite population which would for the first time place the Jews in the apparent position of unprovoked aggressors. Would the God whom they had only experienced as a champion of the oppressed truly intervene miraculously to allow the Jews to put Canaan to the sword?

In an era of international law and human rights, we too may struggle to reconcile the apparently genocidal military campaigns against the Canaanite nations and Amalek with our perception of Judaism as the religion which introduced monotheism and the notion of a moral code to much of the world. How are we to resolve this contradiction and, if we accept that it was right to put Canaan to the sword, are we truly able to claim that Judaism embraces an objective and universal morality that eschews murder?

Judaism Reclaimed approaches this question first from the point of view of Rambam, maintaining that the Maimonidean perspective rejects the very notion of God being subject to or working within human conceptions of morality. This principle of Maimonidean thought is predicated upon Rambam’s profound explanations of the interplay between objective divine-based truth (emet) and human conceptions of good and bad (tov vera) which sullied humanity’s mind as a consequence of Adam and Eve’s sin in Eden. (The constraints of a brief Facebook summary prevent me from doing justice to this idea here.)

We move on from there to the Akeidah, where Rambam describes how Avraham, whose hallmark was kindness, was prepared to sacrifice personal feelings, aspirations, and moral judgments which he had developed and preached over an entire lifetime in order to comply with the “true” will of God. Avraham’s absolute obedience to God, despite his moral qualms, earned him generous accolades and promises of Divine bounty. But we also note that there are occasions on which Rambam does appear to require one to use moral reasoning.

In chapter 6 of Shemonah Perakim, Rambam distinguishes between chukkim and mishpatim, invoking a Talmudic teaching that some mitzvot, “even had they not been written, it would have been proper to write them.” This clearly implies that prohibitions such as those against murder, theft, and unprovoked violence could legitimately be regarded as inherently wrong or “immoral” even without an explicit scriptural prescription. We attempt to reconcile these sources by using Rambam’s teaching that, while is proper for a person to contemplate the mitzvot in order to understand God’s purpose in commanding them, this must be accompanied by an acute awareness of the wisdom differential between man and God.

Rambam’s apparent endorsement of a moral imperative in Shemonah Perakim stems not from human judgment, but rather from a broader assessment of God’s revealed teachings. By analysing God’s will as it appears throughout the Torah, we can develop an idea of what is generally consistent with His will and thereby conclude that such mitzvot would have been “proper to write” even if the Torah omitted them. When faced with an explicit command of God, however, we must recognize that we cannot plumb the depths of His wisdom and must therefore set aside our limited assessment of what God’s will should be in favour of the revealed truth of His word. We trace this through the events of Avraham’s life, noting how his protesting God’s planned annihilation of Sodom was based upon his own understanding of God’s justice and mercy. At the Akeidah, however, Avraham was faced with a clear command from God and recognized that his own preconceived notions of the correct course of action could not challenge God’s truth as expressed in His explicit words.

We highlight the fact that, throughout the biblical texts, any command for the Jews to act in a particularly violent manner was communicated explicitly and unambiguously through a unanimously accepted prophet. In the absence of such a clear and exceptional command, we are required to develop an understanding of God’s will and act on the basis of God’s mitzvot and their “moral” lessons. The chapter concludes by addressing the question of Judaism and universal morality from the very different perspective of Rabbi S. R. Hirsch.

First posted to Facebook 18 June 2020, here.

King Josiah and the secret Temple scroll

By Daniel Abraham and Shmuli Phillips

As discussed a few weeks ago on this group, the origin of the book of Deuteronomy has long been a matter of intense speculation and debate. This post will tackle a popular approach from academic bible critics, which attempts to trace Deuteronomy’s provenance to the religious revolution instituted by King Josiah towards the end of the First Temple era.

The young Judean king is raised in a religious void following the efforts of his predecessors to erase knowledge of Torah and Jewish beliefs from the nation. II Kings 22-23 describes how Josiah courtiers discover a Torah scroll (II Chronicles 34:14: “written by the hand of Moshe”) which had been concealed within the Temple. Josiah proceeds to read this “scroll of the covenant” publicly to his subjects before enthusiastically instituting its requirements.

Scholars point to the biblical passage describing Josiah’s reaction to reading the scroll, identifying a number of “Deuteronomic” words, phrases and themes. Various theories evolved from this identification, which proposed distinguishing between the book of Deuteronomy and the previous books of the Torah in terms of their functions, authorship and era. Some even went so far as to suggest that Deuteronomy – with its strong insistence on centralized worship and power – was a forgery, perpetrated by Josiah’s courtiers as part of a ruse to enhance the authority of the young king.

We will first address the claim that Josiah’s revolution reflects an exclusively Deuteronomic influence, before examining some of the broader theories of a fraudulent power-grab which sprouted up around it.

Josiah’s Scroll: From All Four Corners of the Bible

In Who Really Wrote the Bible?, Clayton Ford responds to the claim that Josiah’s revolution reflects a solely Deuteronomic theme by arguing that terms and ideas from all four supposed biblical sources can be found in the crucial passage of II Kings. While scholars draw upon common linguistic and legal themes in order to connect Josiah to “D”, he explains, the same kinds of arguments, however, prove that the book of the Torah must also have contained the other proposed J, E, and P sources too.

The discovered scroll is referred to in II Kings as "the Book of the Covenant." Near the end of his reform, Josiah commanded the people to "Keep the Passover to YHWH your Elohim, as it is written in this Book of the Covenant" (II Kings 23:21). At the beginning of his reform, when Josiah gathered the people to the temple, "he read in their ears all the words of the Book of the Covenant, which was found in the house of YHWH" (2 Kings 23:2). Aside from this episode, “the Book of the Covenant" appears in only one other place: “Then he [Moshe] took the Book of the Covenant and read it in the ears of the people” (Exodus 24:7). Scholars are in agreement that this verse originates from “E” – containing all of the laws of Exodus 21-23. Based on the methodology of the critics, therefore, the book which Hilkiah found must have contained E as well.

Furthermore, the description of Josiah’s reforms recounts how he "smashed the sacred monuments and cut down the Asherim [a type of idol]" (23:14). This directly replicates and fulfils a law found only in Exodus 34:13, a passage attributed by scholars to the “J” source: "You shall smash their sacred monuments and cut down their Asherim" (Deuteronomy 7:5 contains a similar though differently worded law). The alleged “P” source is also reflected in Josiah’s reaction to discovering the scroll, which describes how he prevented the priests who had sacrificed at the prohibited bamot (private altars) from officiating at the Temple in Jerusalem. Nevertheless, they still “ate unleavened bread among their brethren” (II Kings 23:8-9).

In The Exodus and Biblical Narrative, Richard Elliot Friedman himself notes how Josiah's treatment of these priests was similar to the treatment of the physically blemished priests proscribed by a law in “P”: "He may eat the bread of his God...only he shall not go near the curtain nor approach the altar, because he has a defect" (Lev. 21:22-23). The “P” source, he continues, may also have prevented Josiah from prohibiting priestly consumption of bread to those who had sinned since it commands “all the males among the children of Aaron may eat it. It shall be a statute forever in your generations" (Lev. 6:16, 18). Finally, the description of Josiah defiling Topheth so that “no man might make his son or his daughter pass through the fire to Molech" (2 Kings 23:10) closely reflects the language of Lev. 18:21).

Thus all four of the critics’ claimed biblical sources are reflected and well represented in the passage describing Josiah’s revolution.

Was Josiah Attempting to Centralize Sacrificial Worship?

Further academic theories have proposed more radical implications of the alleged special relationship between Deuteronomy and scroll of Josiah. One claim put forward in a variety of forms by bible critics over the last 150 years is that Josiah’s attempt to eradicate idolatry and bamot, was driven by the desire to consolidate power and assert control over the nation’s religious worship. His advisors, it is alleged, fraudulently composed the scroll and claimed to have found it hidden in the Temple.

The unique structure and content of the book of Deuteronomy — which we examined a few weeks ago— together with its injunctions not to offer sacrifices on private bamot, are taken by these critics to be evidence in support of this theory. While this idea has enjoyed widespread popularity among some bible scholars, Amnon Bazak, (To This Very Day) demonstrates that powerful questions against its credibility tend to be overlooked.

The first challenge questions the assumption that Judaism before the time of Josiah lacked any notion of centralised worship, and that no religious laws restricted private sacrifice. Support for this assumption is often premised on a verse shortly after the first recording of the Ten Commandments, which is taken to approve sacrifices in any place of the worshipper’s preference. A more careful reading of the verse however shows that this approval of sacrifices is limited to a place “asher azkir et Shemi — where I [God] allow My name to be mentioned”, which clearly implies a limitation. Furthermore, the Hebrew text contains a subtlety which does not translate easily and is therefore often overlooked. In the phrase “bechol hamakom asher azkir et shemi” the word makom (“place”) is prefixed by the heh hayediah (the Hebrew equivalent of the definite article, i.e. “the place”) which means, in effect, “any specific place in which I allow My name to be mentioned”.

In fact, many biblical sources point strongly to an earlier prohibition against the performance of sacrifices in private non-centralised locations. The details of the construction of the Mishkan in the desert are related at length by the Torah, as are the details of Shlomo’s construction of the first Mikdash – an indication of the importance placed on a place of centralised sacrifice. This is underlined by the prohibition (Lev. 17. 1-9) of the performance of any sacrifice (and at times even regular slaughter) outside the Mishkan’s perimeters Furthermore, in an episode towards the end of the book of Joshua (chap. 22), a misunderstanding brought the nation to the brink of civil war when the tribes of mainland Israel thought that their Transjordanian brethren were setting up their own altar to rival the centralized one.

Dating Deuteronomy

A closely-related question which arises from the suggestion that Deuteronomy was forged for political reasons by the courtiers of Josiah (or Hezekiah as others suggest) is the broader antiquity of the book. But is the content of Deuteronomy consistent with such a claim that it was authored in the late First Temple period?

Many scholars maintain that the book was the work of power-grabbing leadership who sought to centralize worship in Jerusalem. But were this to be true, it would be surprising that within the entire book of Deuteronomy there is not even a single instance of any mention by name of the capital.

If anything, the text appears delicately and deliberately to step around the word “Jerusalem”, substituting in its place the verbose and vague phrase “in the place in which God shall choose that His name shall dwell there” – a phrase which appears approximately 20 times throughout the book. While this phenomenon can be seen to support Jewish tradition that the Temple was just the latest and most impressive of the places of centralised worship, it deals a blow to the claim that a primary aim of the book of Deuteronomy was to focus on the central importance of this specific place.

Additionally, despite the existence of several mentions of the prohibition to sacrifice outside the permitted place(s), it is far-fetched to imagine that it constitutes the primary or even a central theme of the book of Deuteronomy. Instead, Deuteronomy places far greater emphasis on avoiding the temptations of idolatry, the establishment of effective institutions in the Land and appropriate preparations for upcoming battle with the Canaanite nations.

A broader look at the book of Deuteronomy reveals that, if its composition was dated to the era of the later kings, this would render much of its content both anachronistic and absurd. The entire context and tone of Deuteronomy is fundamentally suited to a nation being addressed by Moshe on the cusp of its entry into the Land of Israel. Politically, Deuteronomy (23:8) regards the nation of Edom favourably, as a ‘brotherly’ nation not to be “rejected”. The reality in the era of Josiah, however, was that Edom had become a bitter enemy of the Jewish people, with whom it had fought several severe battles. It is indeed hard to imagine a book composed in Josiah’s times viewing the nation of Edom in such a positive light; however, this position is entirely consonant with the more peaceful attitude towards Edom displayed by Moshe in Numbers (20:14-21), where God instructed him to detour rather than trespass and provoke the Edomites.

The wars of conquest which are envisaged and legislated for in the book of Deuteronomy are well suited to a nation posed to embark on an invasion. Such descriptions, however, are profoundly incongruous with the political reality of Josiah’s era in which, it is alleged, they were composed — an era in which the tiny Judaean state was struggling to exist alongside the regional Assyrian and Babylonian superpowers. Furthermore, there is no hint in the entire book of Deuteronomy of the serious rupture which had taken place among the Jewish people, splitting it into two separate kingdoms, one of which had recently been defeated and exiled. The fundamental incompatibility of the content of much of the book of Deuteronomy with Josiah’s era was conceded by Richard Elliot Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? p 120, who considered that: “The laws of war in the book of Deuteronomy, therefore…suggest an early, nonmonarchic point of view”. Friedman also argues that the type of conscripted armies described in Deuteronomy had been entirely replaced by professional armies by the time of the later kings such as Josiah.

Finally, if the primary agenda motivating the composition of the book of Deuteronomy was truly to expand the authority of the monarch by centralising religious worship in Jerusalem, it is extraordinary that this scroll in fact limited monarchy in a way which was unique among ancient cultures. The concept of a limited monarchy was a contradiction in terms in ancient Eastern cultures. It is an unfathomable proposition that a king, setting out to compose a fraudulent document in order to broaden his power, would include such a passage – which sets limits to his glory and places him within rather than above the law as was the norm in Josiah’s era.

First posted on Facebook 8 August 2021, here.

Yefat to'ar and contemporary sexual violence

Yesterday’s Torah reading on the subject of the Yefat To’ar – the beautiful captive – took on an acute relevance this year in light of the recent Eilat rape which has horrified Israel. Statistics released in news reports connected to the rape (as well as those reporting the recent #MeToo revelations) demonstrate that what might have once been regarded as unpleasant isolated incidents are actually symptoms of a widespread societal sickness.

People tend to offer solutions which fit with their existing worldview. Some religious thinkers see the sexual violence as the result of an overly-sexualised society in which teenagers are prone to translate prevalent, often violent, pornography and sexual images into real life. They argue for increased boundaries between the sexes and a reduction in the exposure of teenagers to powerful sexual images.

On the other hand, those coming from a secular standpoint believe that the plague can be resolved, or at least significantly diminished through education. By seeking to change the way in which society in general and men in particular view women, masculinity and rape culture (see more here).

While Judaism Reclaimed only deals with the phenomenon of Yefat To’ar in passing, I was pressed by a (female) reviewer to include a lengthy footnote on the subject (a footnote she edited ). At first viewing, there seems little in the passage of Yefat To’ar that we may be inclined to take instruction from in terms of combating sexual violence in the 21st-century. Taking a broader perspective however, including the teachings of the accompanying Oral Tradition, I believe that we can draw inspiration from the Torah’s overall approach to the phenomenon.

The basic law of Yefat To’ar conveys the Torah’s belief that mere moral teaching alone may often fail to curb the powerful male sexual desire – particularly in scenarios in which he does not feel immediately threatened by the long arm of the law. However, the laws themselves are to read – according to the Midrashic tradition – in context of their placement alongside the Ben Sorer Umoreh (Wayward and Rebellious Son) to impart the Torah’s severe warning of the consequence of such awful conduct. If this is correct, and any lesson from Yefar To’ar is to be transposed to tackling today’s plague of sexual violence, it may be to combine the two approaches cited above: both to reduce the exposure of teenagers to violent sexual images and culture and to accompany this with re-educating today’s youth towards a healthier frame of mind.

THE JUDAISM RECLAIMED FOOTNOTE:

“Yefat to'ar causes understandable consternation among those fortunate to live in peaceful societies, distant from the sobering realities of warfare, particularly those involving close combat. Even recent warfare, however, provides numerous examples of how human behaviour tends to be affected by the atmosphere of impunity and lawlessness which typically prevails in war zones. From 'comfort women' in the Japan-Korean war to ongoing inter-African conflicts, last century’s world wars, and the recent Arab uprisings, rape has often been regarded as a weapon of war and a legitimate incentive to soldiers risking their lives. Recently even non-combatants such as UN aid workers have been implicated for sexual abuse in lawless war zones.

The question that must be posed is that, if all of the armies partaking in the horrific history of human warfare had adopted the laws and teachings of yefat to’ar, would there have been a considerable reduction in the amount of war crimes relating to mass rape and sexual abuse. Note that the Torah does not encourage or condone the yefat to'ar. It is a framework to guide and coax the soldier caught up in the heat of battle, surviving on his primal instincts, away from immorality and abuse by 'putting off' the captive woman until after the battle when, hopefully, his passions will have subsided, and the morality of real life resumed. Midrashim, quoted by Rashi on the passage of yefat to’ar make it clear that, even when the soldier takes a yefat toarin a permitted manner, this is very much frowned upon by the Torah. In fact, these midrashim teach that the laws of yefat to’ar are deliberately placed adjacent to those of the ‘hated wife’ and ‘wayward and rebellious son’ in order to show the likely effect that taking a yefat to’ar will have on the family life of this weak-moralled person.”

First posted to Facebook 30 August 2020, here.