One of the core features of the Bar Mitzvah is when a student offers his own teaching, his own D’var Torah—words of Torah reflecting his interpretation of his Torah portion after a period of wrestling with it.
As Rabbis Arthur Waskow and Phyllis Berman put it, “This is the core of the Bar Mitzvah event, the moment at the heart of the ritual when there is the deepest and closest encounter with God, or with the young person’s own wrestling with their life. It crystalizes the lifepath that Jews have been ideally expected to walk: not only hearing God’s Voice through the words of Torah and the Prophets, but also engaging with these words—wrestling with them—so as to bring into the world their own new Torah.”
“Their own new Torah.” Perhaps that sounds paradoxical. New Torah? Isn’t there only one Torah, one moment of Jewish revelation, thousands of years ago, that we have simply wrestled with ever since?
Yes and no. Yes in the sense that Torah—Jewish tradition—serves as the instrument, the vessel through which we Jews have sought to gain new insight about how to approach the world.
And yet, Torah can be new. In fact there is an ancient rabbinic teaching which suggests new insights generated in each generation can also be traced back to Sinai; new insights generated by us in this community, and by our young people, can also be considered a part of the canon, part of the sacred collection of Jewish teachings.
But it actually goes even further than that. The Zohar, the central text of Kabbalah, of Jewish mysticism, teaches that the moment that a new word of Torah originates from the mouth of a human being, the saying rises up, is adorned with a crown, and then stands before Hakadosh Baruch Hu; the Blessed Holy One, who then guards that saying and keeps it hidden, and shelters the person who said it, until a new heaven and a new earth are created from that saying. God constantly creates new heavens and a new earth from the new meanings that are discovered in the Torah.
What possible understandings could this give us, other than a feel-good, fanciful experience?
Folklorist Howard Schwartz, suggests this is true not only in a mystical sense, but in a very real sense: “the new interpretations that arise about the meanings of the Torah so radically change the perspective and understanding of those who receive them, that the heavens and earth seem new to them.”
Once again I want to emphasize that this is not only true of Torah in the narrow definition of the Five Books of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In a wider understanding, “Torah” really means all of Jewish wisdom and tradition, and frankly, all of life.
The Kabbalists were Jewish mystics believed the earth itself had the capacity to teach us, life itself, and all of jewish tradition, lend us new insights, new learnings. If we bring to bear our kavanah, our sacred intention, to the texts, the traditions, the human beings we encounter, then we can open up to the new insights they can yield for us.
In other words, Torah learning is not just reserved for the yeshivah bocher—the people engaged with formal Jewish education all the time. Any time we light a shabbat candle, any time we attend a service, any time we carry out a mitzvah like giving tzedakah, any time we refrain from eating one thing or choose to eat something else, any time we read a passage or listen to a podcast, in which we seek to discern, consciously or otherwise, the presence of God, the presence of the divine, a new world can be created; our world can change.
Each of us can probably identify a book we’ve read, a movie we’ve seen, an encounter we’ve had, in nature or with another human being, an insight we generated on a therapists couch, that changed us—that provided a new orientation towards how we see the world.
In a sense, that is Torah. Torah comes from the word, yarah, to cast—to cast a light. To paraphrase another tradition: where it once was dark, now I see.
Torah is as much a process, as it is a text. Yes there is a particular text that is the capital T-Torah, and I don’t want to understate how significant that text is to the unfolding insights generated throughout Jewish history. Those five books of Moses, and all the Jewish literature that has flowed from them—the Talmud, the Zohar, midrash, halakaha: all of these are formal ways in which there is a container for shared Jewish insights that build off one another.
But there is a process of Torah that is not limited to those formally initiated into a the box of a Jewish educational setting.
Torah is yielded by a particular approach to the world, of looking for the sacred, of looking for insights generated by those encounters with the sacred, and having them inform our lives ever after.
It’s not an easy task. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, “The immediate certainty that we attain in moments of insight does not retain its intensity after the moments are gone. Moreover, such experiences or inspirations are rare events. To some people they are like shooting stars, passing and unremembered. In others they kindle a light that is never quenched. The remembrance of that experience and the loyalty to the response of that moment are the forces that sustain our faith. In this sense, faith is faithfulness, loyalty to an event, loyalty to our response.”
All of us are capable of generating insights in the spaces we occupy, in which we are seeking to discern the sacred before us, articulating interpretations of that sacred—interpretations which then rise up, are adorned with crowns, and then stand before Hakadosh Baruch Hu; the Blessed Holy One, who creates new heavens and a new earths from those interpretations, those insights. Insight’s which so radically change the perspective and understanding of those who receive them, that the heavens and earth seem new to them.
And then, as Heschel lays, before us, faith is faithfulness, loyalty to an event, loyalty to our response.
Then it’s our job to follow through on the insight that’s been made, the world that’s been created, cultivating it, sewing seeds, preserving them in the future, laying the groundwork for generations to come.
May you create may new worlds in your life. May we all.
