Rabbi Anderson's Divrei Torah

Shabbat shalom! This week’s Torah portion includes a very odd public art project. Once the Israelites have crossed the Jordan, Moses instructs them to stand up large stones, coat the stones with plaster, and write on them kol divrei ha-Torah ha-zot, which our chumash translates as “all the words of this” capital-T “Teaching” (Deut. 27:3). The plaster-coated stones will ultimately be set up on Mount Eval, along with an altar of unhewn stones on which the Israelites can make offerings to God. “On those stones you shall inscribe every word of this Teaching most distinctly,” ba’er heitev, Moses concludes (Deut. 27:8).

This account raises many questions. For starters: how many times are the stones coated with plaster? The Torah suggests both before and after writing, which makes the writing seem anything but “distinct.” And exactly what “Torah” is being written on the stones? A modern-day Torah scroll contains 304,805 separate letters, to say nothing of required line and paragraph breaks: even with very large and flat stones, that’s a monument-sized project – I’m thinking of something like Mount Rushmore. But in Deuteronomy the term Torah is used more elastically, hence the translation of “teaching.” Perhaps the stones would contain just the book of Deuteronomy itself. Still, it seems like a monumental task. Finally, why are the Israelites supposed to do all of this? For whom is the Torah written on the stones? The Israelites already have their Torah; why would they leave another version for the Canaanites, whom God has commanded them to destroy?

In the book of Joshua (4:2-3), there’s actually a description of the Israelites taking stones and erecting them after the Jordan crossing, but it seems to be a different tradition: a total of twelve stones are brought from the miraculously dry Jordan riverbed the Israelites crossed to Gilgal, where they will serve “as a memorial for all time” (Josh. 4:7) of the Jordan miracle. No Torah is written on these stones, much less “most distinctly.” An extended passage in the Talmud[1] trying to reconcile the two accounts makes things even worse, at one point adding a third set of stones that Moses himself erected in Moav, before the crossing, when – at the beginning of the book of Deuteronomy – he began to “expound this Torah,” be’er et ha-Torah ha-zot, a phrasing that reminded the rabbis of ba’er heitiv. Still, the Talmud is interested in the question of who would read the “distinctly” written stones. Rabbi Yehuda suggests that in fact the Israelites did write the Torah on the Gilgal stones, and then plastered over their own writing: when the Holy One of Blessing wanted to share this Torah with the nations of the world, to see whether they were also willing to learn it, God had to give them binah yeteirah, “extra wisdom,” so that they would figure out how to peel off the plaster and copy down the words. (Spoiler: they did not study the Torah seriously.) Rabbi Shimon, Yehuda’s contemporary, thought that was ridiculous; in his retelling, the words of Torah were always legible atop the plaster, allowing for the possibility that if the Canaanites had done teshuvah for their idolatry, the Jews could have accepted them and co-existed with them in the land of Israel. In both these opinions, the words of Torah on the stones had a potential non-Israelite audience – and in fact, a little later in the same Talmud passage, we get the claim that the stones contained “all the words of the Torah in seventy languages” – seventy being all the languages of the world, in the rabbinic imagination – so that none of those non-Jewish readers would even have to go find a Hebrew dictionary.[2]

The idea of putting our Torah out into the non-Jewish world is appealing – but also alarming. It’s one thing to have a monument with words of Torah in a Jewish space, like the JCC or the Federation building, but a monument in a neutral public space is too easy to misinterpret. And in my American experience, public monuments engraved with so-called “Scripture” aren’t Jewish anyway. They’re usually the project of Christian evangelicals, emerging out of some unsubtle culture war; they most often feature the “Ten Commandments,” not the whole 613, and not even the right numbering according to our tradition. I think a Jew who grew up in Israel might have a different set of associations with writing the Torah on stones; we shouldn’t forget that the original idea in this week’s parsha was to erect those stones in a Jewish homeland. But in the rabbinic world of Shimon and Yehuda, at the height of the Roman Empire’s power, there was no longer a Jewish homeland – and they still imagined the nations of the world reading those stones.

Still. Let’s set all that aside. Let’s assume that whatever Torah made it onto those stones was actually our Torah, the Jewish version. Let’s assume – as some medieval commentators do[3] – that all the translations were perfectly accurate, due to divine inspiration. Do we want our Torah out there, open to everyone? And do we think it would bring them to teshuvah, as Rabbi Shimon imagined? Today, whether or not we have stones on Mount Eval, we have the printing press and the Internet, so that the nations of the world can read our Torah anytime they want. There are more resources for studying and learning Torah open to more people – Jews and non-Jews alike – than every before. Much as I wish it were otherwise, there’s not the most amazing track record of people doing teshuvah as a result of reading Torah on the Internet, but there are certainly examples of non-Jews learning and encountering Torah in a meaningful way online. Sometimes they learn something new about their own religious tradition and how it relates to Judaism; sometimes they find a genuinely inspirational passage that speaks to them; once in awhile they are even moved to seek out a Jewish community and learn more – I’ve met a number of such people. But usually they’re not just reading from the online equivalent of a chumash; they’re encountering Torah through explanation, through a podcast or lecture or drash or some other form of explanation, which is another meaning we could attach to be’er heitev: well explained. One contemporary rabbi and educator, Tzvi Hirsch Weinreb, suggests that perhaps each word of Torah on the stones didn’t have seventy translations but “seventy different teaching strategies, seventy pedagogical tools…. [or] seventy different learning styles.”[4] For every reader, viewer, or listener, there might be one way of teaching about the Torah that will make an impact.

The more I think about the impossible stones that Moses told the Israelites to set up, and the more I think about the symbolism of Joshua setting up twelve – one per tribe – the more I suspect that the stones are symbols for people and for communities. We are the public monuments for Torah; we are the ones whose words and actions as Jews determine what non-Jews think of us. We can cover ourselves with plaster, but if you scrape it away, there’s still legible Torah underneath. And we are the ones whose words and actions might, or might not, bring people to teshuvah in the two weeks remaining before Rosh Hashanah. You might be thinking that that’s easy for a rabbi to say, and it’s true that I agreed to be a kind of public Jewish figure when I took on this role, but this is a season in which many of us feel especially public in our Judaism. We have important holidays that aren’t very well understood outside the Jewish community, and we may even have to take off work for them – less so this year if you don’t work weekends, but then there’s Monday Yom Kippur. We’re all in the project of living Torah, living Jewishly, in a world where we sometimes have to explain ourselves to our non-Jewish friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, and so forth. or curious Uber drivers and sales clerks. The challenge for us, as we approach the High Holidays, is to live our lives in a way that makes Judaism appealing – or at the very least, clearly explained – to the people around us. And as your rabbi, I’m here to offer you resources and help any time you need more explanation, or more support, in living Jewishly. I hope you’ll ask me lots of questions, and I hope you’ll keep thinking about what it means to be Jewish in public, especially this time of year.