Sermon Archives

When the Supreme Court overturned 40 years of Chevron deference earlier this summer in the case Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo, our regulatory agencies were actually not left without a leg to stand on. When Congress tells our administrative branch (and I use this phrase intentionally) that they have to go and produce clean water, the Environmental Protection Agency has to go and figure it out. Sure, Chevron deference might have made that easier. But the law never really tells us everything. So, even if you’re not a regulator but you are just watching from the sidelines, let me inform you that the end of Chevron deference is not the end of our courts allowing administrators to figure out what the law is—as administrative law experts will tell you, there are, in fact, other types of deference that are still in place.

If you don’t believe me that we always have deference to let us know what an unclear statute says, let’s just think about some of the commandments in this week’s Parasha. Because this week, we have a reprise of the 10 commandments from Parashat Yitro, which leaves us with some of the same questions. שמור את יום השבת לקדשו—Observe shabbat? What does that even mean? Of course, the commandment itself gives us a little bit of assistance: Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath. But again, this leaves me with all sorts of questions. I ask my students all the time to consider what the sabbath might look like for a college professor who enjoys cooking—is it really work for a historian with a love of patisserie to bake a cake?—and how that might compare to a pastry chef who likes to spend his weekends studying ancient or medieval history? Famously, the rabbis search for an interpretation of this ambiguous statute, and they come up with a solution: the Torah twice juxtaposes the imposition of shabbat with the instructions for building the mishkan, and so we may infer that the very definition of work is that which gave rise to the mishkan. The law itself is not really sufficiently specified—we might even say that the fourth commandment is a little bit ambiguous—and so the rabbis use the Torah itself to try to figure it out. Much of rabbinic literature, then, is not stuff that the rabbis made up when they were sitting in the ashes of the Bet ha-Miqdash trying to figure out how they could continue as a people. Rather, it is codified deference to the very ancient ways that we have understood the written Torah, even when the Torah doesn’t spell things out for us.

But this “figuring out” is truly a thicket, and this week’s parasha addresses this problem directly. לא תספו על הדבר אשר אנכי מצוה אתכם ולא תגרעו ממנו—Don’t add to what I am commanding you, and do not take away, says God. Yet how is it even possible for us to follow the commandments while being certain that we are running afoul of neither לא תספו, do not add, nor לא תגרעו, do not take away? And using the example I have just presented, when the Torah presents us with an unclear statute, such as the observance of Shabbat, how can we tell when we are adding to it or taking away from it?

Rashi, quoting the ancient commentary on Devarim called Sifre, explains that adding is “something like five parashiyyot in tefillin, or five species in the lulav, or five tzitziyot.” That is to say, even though the Torah does not specify in its statute that we need to have four paragraphs from the Torah on the scrolls in our tefillin, we cannot say that there are supposed to be five in there. The Torah is pretty clear about what species of plant are in the lulav, so while the Torah does not specifically say “four”, we can’t say that there are supposed to be five. Likewise with the tzitziyot on our garments: the Torah doesn’t say that there supposed to be four, but nevertheless we cannot say that there are supposed to be five without clearly adding to the Torah. Rashi is arguing that we should defer to our traditional interpretation of the statute. Fair enough, but that doesn’t really help us.

Rambam helps us a bit more in the Mishneh Torah. In short, he argues that the problem with adding to the Torah or taking away from it is not whether our contemporary authorities prohibit something that the Torah would otherwise permit or temporarily permit something that the Torah would otherwise forbid—yes, that’s right, Rambam does seem to argue that a contemporary Jewish court could open the door to bacon double cheeseburgers if they felt it was necessary to preserve our community—rather, the problem of bal tosif, of adding to the commandments, comes when we add or subtract from the Torah and then ascribe it to the Torah. As long as the courts say that they are instituting X or Y as a rabbinic decree, all is well. So the rabbis can say that chicken parm is off the table. But asserting that the prohibition of chicken parm came from the Torah itself is, as Rambam would have it, an illegitimate addition under בל תוסיף.

However, the 13^th century commentator Hezekiah b. Manoah suggests in his commentary Ḥizquni an entirely different meaning for the verse לא תספו על הדבר. Shockingly, and in apparent contradiction to our verse, Ḥizquni explains that in fact that the Sages of Israel can add to the Torah, and that deference to rabbinic legal creativity is central to the very idea of Judaism. Ḥizquni sees לא תספו in a totally different context. Pointing out that the prohibition לא תספו appears twice in the book of Deuteronomy, he notes that both times it is juxtaposed with the prohibition of worshipping other gods—in our parasha, in the two verses directly after לא תספו, the Torah says, “You saw with your own eyes what the Lord did in the matter of Baal-peor; while you, who held fast to the Lord your God, are all alive today.” With this in mind, Ḥizquni explains that לא תספו is not really about adding to the Torah at all. Rather, he explains, it is juxtaposed in both cases to acts of idolatry to teach us that the ultimate sin is to worship other than God. We are monotheists. That is to say, rather than being about the law, לא תספו is a central claim to monotheism. Not that we cannot add to the law, but what we cannot add to or subtract from is the worship of the one God.

What I like about Ḥizquni’s reading is that it relies on the rabbinic principle of juxtaposition. And so, if we can use juxtaposition to tell us a little bit more about what the halakha when we think about shabbat, we can also use it to tell us about Jewish theology. If we open up the aperture a bit wider, we can connect לא תספו with the rest of our parasha as well. Because Va-etḥanan contains not only לא תספו and the 10 commandments, it also contains the shemaʿ. If we apply the principle of juxtaposition here, then perhaps the message of the shemaʿ is not that God is one, as we were taught in ḥeder to translate the shemaʿ and even as it appears in the Koren siddur, but—in light of לא תספו—that God is god alone, there is no other. The difference here is important. לא תספו does not mean that we are prohibited from adding to the mitzvot, but rather that we do not recognize another divine force in the universe beyond God.

Thus, writes Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the father of modern orthodoxy, when we write the shemaʿ in the Torah, we write the dalet of אחד extra large, so that we don’t confuse אחד with אחר. Thinking about the shapes of the letters, Rav Hirsch writes, “Das ר des polytheistischen Gedankens ist gefügig rund.”—“The resh of polytheistic thought is compliantly round.” On the other hand, he explains that the angular dalet is uncompromising and angular. When we lose that sharpness, he explains, אחד becomes אחר, and we break down from worshipping God as one to God as simply “another”, אחר. To be abundantly clear about our theology, we make the dalet extra large. לא תספו at the beginning of our parasha, then, is simply Vorspeise, preparing us to recite the shemaʿ and to acknowledge that we worship God alone.

The idea that לא תספו should be understood as Rashi and Rambam understand it is certainly compelling to me—as a community, we want to be crystal clear as to where the Torah draws its lines and where we, as the recipients and bearers of that revelation, have built up fences to protect the Torah’s integrity. But Ḥizquni’s understanding that the rabbis have a much broader brief to interpret the Torah over time and that we can and must turn our attention to theology is no less important. If we accept it, then we may see in לא תספו a different and perhaps more important claim: to look no farther for the ultimate reality in our universe than God.

As a people, we spend much time thinking about the לא תספו of Rashi and Rambam, of how our communal lines are drawn based on halakha. But our twice-daily recitation of the shemaʿ suggests that it is no less important to think about theology. In all my years of rabbinical study, I took all of one course in Jewish theology. As Orthodox Jews, how much time do we spend on this? But in the Guide, Rambam explains that the very point of the shemaʿ is “constant mindfulness of God, in love and fear, holding fast to His commandments and believing what every person should believe of Him.” (Guide III:44) Seen through the eyes of Ḥizquni, we can have a more refined view of what that is: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord Alone.

Shabbat shalom.