Rewriting What is Written in Stone

Fire in Stone
original sketch by the blogger ;)

The image of the ten commandments - a few dozen words etched directly by G-d into two tablets of stone - epitomizes the notion of immutability of not just these few words, but the whole of Torah, perhaps the whole bible.  

All of the progressive movements of Judaism have made gender-balancing changes to the siddur (prayer book), at least as an option, thus literally changing the words of our texts.  

But no Jewish community has, to my knowledge, rewritten the text of Torah. Torah is sacred and, for all intents and purposes, written in stone.

One of my two year old’s favorite TV shows, Super Why!, focuses on reading as a superpower. The show opens with song: “Who’s got the power / The power to read / Who answers the call / For friends in need / … / Who looks into books / For the answers we need / It’s SUPER WHY and the Super Readers.”  

Little boy Whyatt and his friends transform into superheroes. As Super Why, he says, “with the power to read, I can change this story and save the day!”

What a radical concept! Not only does reading provide knowledge, but the opportunity to change the very thing we are reading.

The stories the Super Readers enter and make to are often well known, like Jack and the Beanstock or Goldilocks, stories I would have thought nearly as sacred, immutable, as Torah.  

But the Super Readers come in and “save the day” by challenging the very text.  An angry giant takes a nap on his “huge bed” rather than having a “huge tantrum” (Season 1, Episode 1); moonlight suddenly brightens the room of a bear who is afraid of the dark by changing the last word of the sentence, “Charlie’s room is dark,” to “light.”

They transform the story by changing the words.  

But we can’t do that with Torah.  And there are times Torah seems to, I’ll be honest, contain things we would rather not read, let alone teach our children. So what do we do?

Essentially since the moment Torah was written, there have been ways to transform meaning. Consider, for example, the understanding of the word שמע shema (as in the credal, “Hear, O Israel,” (Deuteronomy 6:4)) as שאו מרום עיניכם - “lift high your eyes” - not only emphasizing the notion of “pay attention” but linking it to another text (Isaiah 40:26).  

In this week’s Torah reading, Parashat Vayikra, we find the following (Leviticus 1:2):  אָדָם כִּי-יַקְרִיב מִכֶּם קָרְבָּן

Just to give you a sense of how translation is inherently interpretation, I offer the following:

• 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation, “When any man of you bringeth an offering...”
• 1999 Jewish Publication Society translation, “When any of you presents an offering…”

The main difference between the two translations is a problem, as it were, with the first word, ADAM - אדם. The first translation is as a generic “man,” and the second translation avoids to word entirely.  

Some ask the question, why ADAM (אדם) instead of ISH (איש), which is the more common word for “a person”? Our second translation opens up the possibility that אדם is a more gender neutral term, something more compatible with contemporary egalitarian thinking.  I would imagine they might justify that based on the verse “And G-d created אדם...male and female” (Genesis 1:27), such that Adam is a word not subject to the gender binary, whereas Eesh (איש) is explicitly gendered.

Another nice twist is the acronym given for אדם by Rabbi Yochanan in a discussion on what a person does/is when they are haughty (Talmud Bavli, Sotah 5b) - aleph (א) for אפר aphar, meaning dust; dalet (ד) for דם dam, meaning blood; and mem (מ . ם) for מרה marah, meaning bile. An act of repentance or turning from haughtiness - a base, physical act - could be an offering, an attempt to turn away from the physical ADAM and to “draw near” to one’s spiritual self through an act of קרבן korban, the type of offering here, which is connected in its root to קרב karov, literally to draw near.

Those who read Torah, who are knowledgable in the Hebrew especially, have the power to be, as all Torah commentators throughout the centuries have been, nothing less than Super Readers, with the power to transform the meaning of our text for our own and future generations.