The Torah is Not in the Heavens But Right Here on Earth

By BRENT CHAIM SPODEK

Parashat Nitzavim/Vayelech (Deuteronomy 29:9-31:30)

Toward the end of his life, Moses calls on the Israelites to resist temptation and to stand firm in their devotion to God. Moses, who initially tried to demur when God called on him to take part in the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt (Exodus 3:11), knows full well how hard it can be to respond to the Divine. So he reminds the Israelites of all the miracles which God has done for them (Deuteronomy 29:15-16) and threatens them with terrible consequences if they turn astray.

As Moses speaks to the Israelites in the double parshah of Nitzavim-Vayelech, so too is he speaking to us, his readers and inheritors thousands of years in the future. We, like the Israelites are constantly pulling away from God. Our very real complaints that prayer is often boring, that tzedakah can be terribly expensive and that Shabbat can feel like a burden have their antecedents in the grumbling of the Israelites in the desert. Moses insists that the Torah is not in the heavens but right here on Earth (Deuteronomy 30:12), and yet the Israelites still complain that the Torah is too hard, too esoteric. To put it mildly, the ancient Israelites were not instantly enamored of the Torah and its system of rewards and punishments.¹

But while we today are so similar to the cranky, skeptical Israelites, we are very different as well. Where the Israelites were tempted to worship foreign gods, many of us find it difficult, if not impossible to worship any God at all. The Torah assumes that the ancient Israelites turned to heaven with supplications; the only question was where in heaven. For many of us though, the difficulty is in turning to heaven at all. We turn to doctors and lawyers and therapists, of course, but to actually turn to heaven for manifest help with practical issues can seem silly.

Yet regardless of our skepticism, much of Jewish religious life is focused on beseeching the Master of the Universe to respond to us, to be pleased by our mitzvot in order that God might grant some request and be merciful in punishing us for our sins. Love God and heed God's commands, says Moses and you will live long on the land which God swore to your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. (Deuteronomy 30:19-20)

Despite appearances, we post-Holocaust Jews are hardly the first generation to try and make sense of the enormity and seeming pointlessness of human suffering. From Job through the Talmud and well into the present day, Jewish theology has understood human suffering, particularly the persecution of the Jews, in light of a relationship with the God of the Torah. But we are among the very first generations for which it is essentially an article of faith that the Torah is the product of humanity, not Divinity. Many Jews, particularly liberal Jews, see in the Torah a profound message about how God and humans might find each other in the world in which we live², but do not see that its mitzvot represent the will of God. We live with the scholarship of the 20th Century, and to deny that learning so we can live by a pre-modern theology in a post-modern world is to live an ersatz Judaism which betrays both the religious heritage of liberal Jews and the modern world in which they live.

Moses told the Israelites that if they were very good, behaved properly, and turned to God with all of their hearts and souls, they would live in abounding prosperity and God would inflict curses upon their enemies but not on them. (Deuteronomy 30:6-10) Despite its centrality in Deuteronomy, this proposition rings false to many modern ears. Many of us who have been denied our earnest pleas that a loved one live, that a child be born, that suffering end, suspect that petitionary prayer is, at best, an innocuous balm for our anguished spirits. Prayers and mitzvot are terribly important for developing our souls and supporting our communities through space and time, but they don't induce God to change the material reality of the world. We humans are both the actors and the audience for our own prayers and for the rest of the mitzvot which Moses demands throughout the book of Deuteronomy - nobody else seems to be watching.

While many Jews intuit that that the God who brought the world into being is not the author of the Torah, and is not particularly interested in our mitzvot, this is not the whole story of human existence. God has written no books, but God has written every human being, and we are intertwined with God as intimately as the characters of a book are intertwined with their author. Even if God might be disinterested in mitzvot, whose origins are human, God is passionately interested in humans, whose origins are Divine.

Through mechanisms which are best described through science, not scripture, God has given us all the gift of life. Simply to exist is to be indebted to the One who brought us here, yet God can accept no repayment from us. God needs nothing which we do - the enormity of God mocks the very idea that we have something to offer to the One who laid the earth's foundations. (Job 41:4) God created the world and its inhabitants without us, and needs nothing from us. But like a wealthy man who loans money on condition it be repaid one day to his children, our debt to God for our existence can only be repaid to God's children. It is through serving God's creatures that our debt to our Creator is acknowledged, even if it cannot be repaid.

Voluntary service to those in need can be seen as a pleasant or even trite addition to religious life, or a way to mitigate the severity of Divine judgment as we approach the High Holidays. But true service is an acknowledgement of our indebtedness to the Creator of all life. In serving God's creatures who suffer in Darfur, on the streets of New York, and in AIDS clinics around the world, we serve God more directly than we ever can with words.

One who mocks the poor affronts his Maker (Proverbs 17:5) just as surely as one who serves them praises his Maker. When we serve others of God's creatures, we make the only possible move towards repaying the debt we owe for our own existence. Prayers and mitzvot are incredibly important for they develop our souls and create our communities. But God's essence is intertwined with the tendrils of every living thing, and when we assuage the suffering of human creatures, we assuage the pain of humans' Creator. When we assuage the suffering of human creatures, we live religion at its purest.

¹One rabbinic source even imagines the Israelites running from God's Torah like a child running from school lest he get more homework. See Yalkut Shimoni 729.

²My thanks to Rabbi Gordon Tucker for some of these theological and linguistic phrasings.

Reprinted with permission from American Jewish World Service.