Shabbat Messages

On a recent Tuesday evening, I was leading a Torah study for young professionals in the beautiful Siegel Lounge of our Resnick Campus. That night we were exploring various stories from the Jewish tradition of God giving the Jewish people the Torah. A participant asked a simple yet deceptively complicated question: “When we say ‘Torah,’ what are we referring to?”

Think for a moment of how you’d respond. What is Torah?

Common answers may include:
The scroll that lives in the ark of a synagogue.
The first part of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), which is sometimes referred to as the Five Books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy).
The entire Tanakh.
The entire Tanakh, which is referred to as the Written Torah, plus all of the Talmud, which is referred to as the Oral Torah and is the essential text of Rabbinic Judaism compiled around 500 CE.
The entire Jewish tradition.

Being one of our most important, sacred, frequently used words, one might think there would be a single, clear, agreed-upon definition for “Torah.” But no such luck!

Even the Torah itself has its own definition of the word “Torah.”

In this week’s parsha, D’varim, the word “Torah” is introduced into the Jewish lexicon for the first time. In D’varim, we meet the Israelites after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. Moses knows he will die before the Israelites enter the Promised Land, so he gives his farewell address to the people he led through the exodus, revelation, wars, complaints, mistakes, and miracles.

D’varim introduces Moses’s final speech with the following verse:

“On the other side of the Jordan, in the land of Moab, Moses undertook to expound this Torah. He said…” (Deuteronomy 1:5)

In the context of this verse, “Torah” (תורה) means “Teaching” or “Instruction.” It is derived from the Hebrew “horah” (הורה), meaning “to teach” or “to instruct.” It is also related to the Hebrew “morah”/“moreh” (מורה), meaning “teacher.”

Moses, as the original teacher of Torah, uses the Book of Deuteronomy to instruct the Israelites on matters of law, tradition, and theology.

The great 19th century Polish rabbi known as the Sefat Emet understood the verse “Moses undertook to expound this Torah” to mean that Moses, with an eye to future generations of Jews, interpreted the Torah (referring here to the Five Books of Moses) in many languages and in terms anyone, anywhere could understand. Meaning, thousands of years ago, still in the wilderness, Moses made the stories and traditions and laws of the Jewish people accessible to anyone across space and time, a common instruction and resource for a disparate and diverse Jewish community.

So what is Torah?

Like most things in our tradition, perhaps it is more about the discovery prompted by the question than arriving at a singular answer for all people, all at once. It is up to each one of us to seek and to find the meaning of that word for ourselves today.

May our search, and our discovery, lead us ever deeper into the multivalent wisdom of our tradition and the people we are called to become through our Torah.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Leah Fein