A lesson the world ignores

^“See,” says Moses in this Shabbat’s Torah reading, “I have taught you laws and judgments, as the Lord my God commanded me…. Keep them, therefore, and do them, for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who, when they hear all these laws, will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’”

That sounds wonderful, but it raises at least three problems.

Problem No. 1: God wrote these laws and judgments. We didn’t. How does our wisdom and understanding shine through if all we are doing is obeying laws someone else gave us?

Problem No. 2: Many of the Torah’s laws lack the details we need in order to obey them. Why did God leave so much unexplained?

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And Problem No. 3: We’ve been studying and attempting, at least, to obey these laws for approximately 3,500 years. After all this time, does the world admire us, as Moses predicted it would? Pogroms and gas chambers are not signs of admiration. Thousands of people marching through the streets today chanting “From the river to the sea” are not expressing admiration.

Before we can address these problems, we need to understand what the Torah actually represents.

The Torah God gave is not our lawbook, per se. It’s the source text for our laws. It provides the foundations, principles, and categories from which our legal system grows. We’re tasked with creating what I call the “enabling legislation” required to make these laws work at all times, in all places, and in all circumstances.

That’s how a 3,500-year-old law prohibiting the needless destruction of productive fruit trees grew into Judaism’s mandate to recycle as part of an already extensive environmental code.

That’s how a law prohibiting moving a neighbor’s boundary marker could ban insider trading, among other items, in its strict code of business ethics.

That’s how a law prohibiting placing “a stumbling block before the blind” could become a prohibition against giving misleading advice, concealing a conflict of interest, taking advantage of another person’s ignorance, or causing someone to commit a wrongdoing.

Often, the Torah’s laws can’t be followed at all without this interpretive process.

Consider a law we will hear read this Shabbat that is stated as clearly as any law could be: “Lo tirtzach”—“Do not murder.” What does that actually mean?

Is killing someone in self-defense, or by accident, murder?

Is killing an enemy during a lawful war murder?

Is abortion murder?

Is withdrawing medical treatment from a dying patient murder?

Is “Do not murder” the same as “Do not kill,” which is how “Lo tirtzach” is almost universally — and incorrectly — translated?

The Torah gives us two words: Lo tirtzach. We have to fill in the blanks.

The statement regarding Shabbat this week presents an even clearer example because the text leaves us with a great many questions that must be answered.

“Observe the Shabbat day to keep it holy,” it says. What is meant by a “day”? When does it begin and end, and how do we “keep” a day holy?

It says we may “not do any work” on Shabbat — any work, not just work. What does the word “work” mean? And what does the word “any” mean?

Does work require physical exertion? If so, how much?

Does pushing a button constitute work?

Does carrying a handkerchief from one place to another constitute work?

If our job requires us to use our heads, not our hands, is thinking work?

May a physician treat patients on Shabbat?

May someone at home set the table and serve a meal?

These questions are only the tip of the iceberg where Shabbat is concerned.

God didn’t spell out all those answers in the Written Torah. Instead, God entrusted us with the authority — and the responsibility — to study the Torah’s words, draw out their implications, and apply them to circumstances the Torah itself never mentions. God provided the foundation. Human wisdom had to build upon it. That is the task of the Oral Law.

That resolves our first two problems. God gave us the Torah, but the wisdom Moses speaks of is demonstrated in what we do with its laws — how we interpret them, how we apply them, and how we update them to meet circumstances that didn’t exist when those words first were spoken.

Our Sages of Blessed Memory studied every letter of every word in the Torah, and every nuance of every phrase. They asked what each word included, what it excluded, why it appeared where it did, and how it related to every other passage.

Hillel distilled the Torah’s ethical message into a single sentence: “What is hateful to you, do not do to another.” That, he said, “is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and study it.”

Consider Shabbat again.

At its heart, Shabbat is one of the Torah’s most profound statements about social justice. The right to rest doesn’t belong only to the powerful, the wealthy, or the free. Everyone receives the same day of rest as everyone else. And so do the ox, the donkey, and all the other animals whose labor sustains human society.

Once every seven days, we must acknowledge that we’re all equal to each other.

And the principle carries into the sabbatical year. Every seventh year, the arable land itself is given a rest. The soil is permitted to recover. Fields are not planted or harvested in the usual way. Whatever produce grows in that year belongs to the poor and to animals. Debts are also released, although as modified later by our Sages.

Shabbat and the sabbatical year teach us that we humans don’t own creation. God does. We’re its caretakers, not its masters.

This truly is a remarkable legal and moral vision.

And so we return to Problem No. 3. After 3,500 years, has the world embraced that vision?

The answer, sadly, is no.

For example, the nation that declared 250 years ago that “all men are created equal” tolerated human slavery for nearly another century and racial inequality for much longer.

Bible-thumping slaveholders in the Old South could quote Scripture on Sunday and buy, sell, and abuse human beings on Monday.

Forced labor, human trafficking, and forms of modern slavery still exist today in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas.

The Torah warns us 36 separate times against mistreating the stranger. Again and again, it commands that the stranger be protected and receive equal justice.

Is that how strangers are treated in most countries?

Is that how ICE treats them in this country?

The 20th century industrialized mass killing on a scale earlier generations scarcely could have imagined. The Shoah, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, and so many other atrocities demonstrated how efficiently governments and movements could turn hatred into bureaucracy and bureaucracy into death.

That process continues today — in Syria, in Sudan, in Ukraine, and elsewhere. The world just keeps getting better at killing.

Hundreds of millions of people still live in extreme poverty. Wealthy societies increasingly behave as though their suffering is someone else’s responsibility.

Even right here, in arguably the wealthiest nation on Earth, the elderly especially must choose between buying food and filling prescriptions — and Congress pays lip service to the problem but does nothing to alleviate it. The poor, the disabled, and the elderly continue to be treated as financial burdens rather than as human beings created in the image of God.

Moses’ words notwithstanding, the world doesn’t always admire us because of our laws. Instead, it often holds us to what it considers a higher standard precisely because these are our laws.

Would any other country that was attacked as Israel was on October 7 have reacted differently? Would any other country have been told that defending its citizens was itself an outrage?

I doubt it.

I don’t approve of most of what Israel’s current government has done or is doing, to be sure, but I reject the notion that there exists some kind of higher standard. There’s only one standard. It is a moral standard, it applies to every nation on Earth, and it insists that human life has value, that the innocent must be protected, that power must be restrained, that the stranger must be treated the way a citizen would be, and that no one stands above the law.

The whole world must live by that standard if tomorrow is to be better than today.

Moses says that the world will recognize our wisdom because of our laws, and by implication will want to make the values behind our laws its values, as well. We’ve seen no such thing in 3,500 years.

At first, it may seem that Moses neglected to tell us how to get the world’s attention. But he did tell us. “Keep them and do them,” he said.

Do them.

Help create a society in which the poor are protected, the stranger receives equal justice, workers are allowed to rest, animals are treated with compassion, the environment is not recklessly destroyed, and power is never permitted to place itself above the law.

Then, perhaps, the world finally will begin to pay attention.

So where is Moses when we need him most?

He is right here, in this Shabbat’s parashah, pointing his finger not at the nations of the world, but directly at us, to our great shame.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.