Join us each week as we journey across the United States and gather words of Torah from rabbanim representing each of the fifty states. This week we are pleased to feature divrei Torah from Rabbi Eliezer Sneiderman from Wilmington, Delaware.
* * * * *
Moshe Rabbeinu‘s instructions to Klal Yisrael in Sefer Devarim may have been written thousands of years ago, but they can give us insight into Jewish education today. Chazal refer to the sefer as Mishneh Torah, a review of the Torah (Deuteronomy comes from the Greek translation of that name).
A new generation of Bnei Yisrael is about to enter Eretz Yisrael and needs a review of what it means to be Jewish. The text switches into the second person as Moshe speaks directly to the nation and in Parshat Va’etchanan we are commanded to model this behavior and instruct our children.
Yet, if Devarim is all about instruction and review, why isn’t the content an exact duplicate of what came before? The existence of any culture is predicated on it being able to replicate itself. We know that a Sefer Torah missing one letter is posul. This halacha is the foundation of the Chatam Sofer’s admonition that everything new is forbidden. If we cannot pass on Yiddishkeit to the next generation, we will cease to exist. What better way to drive home this fact than to have Devarim be an exact repetition? And yet, many of the laws reviewed here are mentioned for the first time. And when a halacha is repeated, Chazal note that the difference in language teaches us important lessons about its observance.
The Maharal in Tiferet Yisroel explains that the difference between Mishneh Torah and the other books of the Torah correspond to the difference between “giver” and “receiver.” The first four books are Hashem’s direct instruction to Moshe Rabbeinu. But the words of Sefer Devarim are Moshe’s own, designed to fit the mental state of the Jewish people.
Herein lies the difference between education and indoctrination. For a student to truly learn, material needs to be processed, understood and reflected upon. It needs to be owned. This is the model of instruction given to us by Hashem, a model that forms the foundation of the Oral Torah and the basis for traditional chavruta study. Talmud engenders discussion and debate. Through the back-and-forth exchange of ideas, a resonating, personal truth is forged. And while truth is important, more important is the student’s ownership of the material, so that it becomes a creation of his own understanding. The goal is not some objective absolute truth that everyone must agree on, but rather, engagement in the process of learning. If the goal of Talmud study were merely absolute truth, the Gemara could be clearer, and it would not lend itself to spirited debate.
That is not to say that the rabbis were relativists. For a community to survive it needs norms. Only in Judaism “truth” is more of a Venn diagram than a specific single destination. The process is more important than the product. There are readings that are off, of course, ones that we can say are outside the Venn diagram, but the Jewish concept of “truth” is larger than we know. Few cultures can say, “Both this and this are words of a living G-d…”
Too often, however, the lessons of the Tannaim and Amoraim are forgotten. Jewish education, for many, is about indoctrination: “Do exactly as we do, think exactly as we do.” There is no room to deviate from the communal standards. Better to not be Jewish at all than to do things differently from your parents or teachers. But, if this were truly the pattern Hashem wanted us to follow, then Devarim would be an exact repetition of what came before it.