Mitzvot

What Do Jews Believe? - The Mitzvot

David S. Ariel

Spirituality is to be found not in what you feel but in what you do. According to Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the leading contemporary spokesman for halakha [Jewish law] and modern Orthodoxy, the only real expression of one's deepest convictions is how one acts in the world on a consistent basis. Halakhah is not about enforced conformity, which stifles the individual's autonomy and creativity. Rather, it is within the very realm of Jewish law that the fullest expression of human autonomy and creativity is to be found. Halakhah deals with real-life issues of economics, work, social and family relations, sexual behavior and personal ethics--every area of life.

Abraham Joshuah Heschel

We should... not evaluate the mitzvot... by the amount of rational meaning we may discover at their basis. Religion is not within but beyond the limits of mere reason. Its task is not to compete with reason, to be a source of speculative ideas, but to aid us where reason gives us only partial aid. Its meaning must be understood in terms compatible with the sense of the ineffable. Frequently where concepts fail, where rational understanding ends, the meaning of observance begins. Its purpose is not essentially to serve hygiene, happiness or the vitality of man; its purpose is to add holiness to hygiene, grandeur to happiness, spirit to vitality.

Spiritual meaning is not always limpid; transparency is the quality of glass, while diamonds are distinguished by refractive power and the play of prismatic colors.

Indeed, any reason we may advance for our loyalty to the Jewish order of living merely points to one of its many facets. To say that the mitzvoth have meaning is less accurate than saying that they lead us to wells of emergent meaning, to experiences which are full of hidden brilliance of the holy, suddenly blazing in our thoughts....

Works of piety are like works of art. They are functional, they serve a purpose, but their essence is intrinsic, their value is in what they are in themselves.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Faith does not come to an end with attaining certainty of God’s existence. Faith is the beginning of intense craving to enter an active relationship with Him who is beyond the mystery, to bring together all the might that is within us with all that is spiritual beyond us. At the root of our yearning for integrity is a stir of the inexpressible within us to commune with the ineffable beyond us. But what is the language of that communion, without which our impulse remains inarticulate?

We are taught that what God asks of man is more than an inner attitude, that He gives man not only life but also a law, that His will is to be served not only adored, obeyed not only worshiped. Faith comes over us like a force urging to action. We respond by pledging ourselves to constancy of devotion, committing us to the presence of God. This remains a life allegiance involving restraint, submission, self-control and courage. Judaism insists upon establishing a unity of faith and creed, of piety and halacha (law), of devotion and deed. Faith is but a seed, while the deed is its growth or decay. Faith disembodied, faith that tries to grow in splendid isolation, is but a ghost, for which there is no place in our psychophysical world.

Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition

Rabbi Arthur Green

[T]he silently spoken divine “Where are you?” is the essence of revelation. To be a religious human being is to recognize that call and to seek to respond to it. It is given new iteration in Sinai's two commandments “I am” and “Worship nothing else,” but it essentially remains unchanged. All the rest of Torah (here used in the broadest sense), with all of its shaping and patterning of our lives, with all its intricacies and ambiguities of language, is a traditional storehouse out of which we form and enrich our response to that challenge. The question addressed to us is indeed a silent one, but it calls forth from us all of our most refined and subtle uses of language...

All of religion can be seen as a series of ongoing and evolving human responses to the silent “Where are you?” that we hear or feel welling up inside us... What does the innermost One “want” in calling out to us?...

Its primary “commandment” is to know, to awaken to the presence and the call of the One within us. Religious teachers as varied as Valentinius the Gnostic, Maimonides, and the Buddha have (in different ways) understood this: there is a deeper truth that calls out to us to know it; hearing this call and responding to it is the beginning point of religion. But in order to succeed in this ongoing quest, both individuals and societies need guideposts and reminders. We may have moments of great insight, but we are humans. We backslide, we forget. The oneness of Being is not immediately obvious to us on the plane of existence where we live most of our lives.

Religions emerge to create forms that serve as such reminders. I do not know a God who “commands” or cares about the fulfillment of specific rites. I understand that all religious practices are of human origin and evolve within religious communities through history. But I am suggesting that the creation of such ritual forms is indeed our human response to an authentic single mitzvah, a divine imperative of the immanent presence, a wordless calling forth within us that says: “Know Me!” “Wake up!” “Be aware!” “I am Y-H-W-H your God.” ..

The word mitzvah is usually translated as “commandment.” As traditional Judaism meets the modern world, it often founders on the question “Who commands?” Do we believe in a personal God who demands that we perform certain rites, recite certain words, acknowledge “Him” in established ways? If not, the fear is that nothing will be left of Judaism, that the authority that stands behind tradition will be shattered, and with that Judaism will come to an end.

The forms we know as Judaism developed over a long period, often in response to circumstances now lost to us. Some practices were magical in origin, given a more historical or “spiritual” meaning only by later interpreters. Some of these transformations reach back so far that they are already found in the Torah text, where they are presented as the word of God. Others emerged only later, codified by the rabbis in explaining either obligatory laws or optional customs. But all of the forms came about at one time or another as products of human innovation and the ensuing evolution of religion, rather than as dictated by the will of God.

Such an admission need not spell the end of Judaism, however...

Doing the mitzvah is the will of God, in the sense that it is the way we as a religious community respond to the One that calls out to us, that seeks to have us know it, ever awaiting our response. This particular form of response rather than another is sanctified by the canonizing power of the Jewish people, an ancient community that bears much wisdom about how to bring divine awareness into everyday life. The mitzvah is holy because Jews do it, because they have done it for such a long time, and because they have invested it with a depth of kavvanah, or spiritual energy, that is never lost but only builds in intensity over the course of centuries. The fullness of that energy is the divine presence that lies within it, waiting to be uncovered anew in each generation... We have declared it holy, and so it is. Hasidic tradition reads the word mitzvah to mean “a place of encounter,” a form in which the divine and the human meet and are joined together. Its mystery and power, reinforced by antiquity and the very absence of obvious meaning, remain in force despite the fact that it originates within history. It is an act in which we open ourselves to Y-H-W-H, a moment, a “place,” or a deed of awareness and response. Each mitzvah is an opportunity for encounter between the silent divine presence and the human soul that seeks to articulate it.

The Past Has A Vote, Not A Veto

Rebecca T. Alpert and Jacob Staub

"The past has a vote not a veto." That is the answer to the question: what is the authority of the past? Preceding generations attributed the authority of the tradition to divine revelation. The Written and Oral Torah were seen as the record of God's will as it was revealed to Moses and Israel at Mt. Sinai. Thus, the very notion of innovation was discouraged. Ancient and medieval commentators claimed—and believed—that they were but recovering and restoring the original meaning of the Sinaitic revelation. As the Jewish people adapted to new, changing circumstances, and Jewish civilization evolved, our ancestors engaged in what is known as "transvaluation"—claiming ancient authority for new insights.

Today, our awareness of historical forces is radically discontinuous with the ahistorical consciousness of our ancestors. To claim that Judaism is an evolving situation is to acknowledge that people and traditions change in response to historical circumstances. We innovate consciously today with the awareness that we ourselves are shaped by our milieu, just as our ancestors were shaped by theirs. We engage in conscious revaluation rather than transvaluation.

The value of the past is considerable. The Jewish tradition is a record of the insights of prophets and sages through the generations. Neither human nature nor the nature of the divine has changed over the millennia; only the concepts and idioms through which Jews understand the world has evolved. Thus, we strive to translate the insights we have inherited from the Jewish past into our own terms. We thereby revalue inherited beliefs and practices so that we can enrich our own lives through them...

The process of revaluation is no simple task. For all the brilliance and depth of insight of our ancestors, their values are often not applicable today in a straightforward way. They are occasionally even repugnant from our perspective. [Rabbi Mordecai] Kaplan insisted that we preserve and observe Jewish customs and values as long as they continue to serve as vehicles towards salvation--the enhancement of the meaning and purposefulness of our existence.

When a particular Jewish value or custom is found wanting in this respect, it is our obligation as Jews to find a means to reconstruct it--to adopt innovative practices or find new meaning in old ones. That the past has a vote means that we must struggle to hear the voices of our ancestors. What did this custom or that idea mean to them? How did they see the presence of God in it? How can we retain or regain its importance in our own lives? That the past does not have a veto means that we must work to hear our own voices as distinct from theirs. What might this custom or that idea mean to us today? As participants in a secular civilization, how can we incorporate our values into our lives as Jews?

It is clear that our ties to the Jewish past and our sense of the secular present often pull us in opposite directions. [We] seek to find ways to merge these sensibilities while remaining faithful to both of them. That the past does not have a veto implies that tradition is susceptible to adaptation. Innovation need not entail the destruction of tradition; on the contrary, change is an important part of keeping tradition alive as it has been throughout Jewish history.