I had the pleasure of being at a Bar Mitzvah in Northwest Indiana last weekend, and, of course, there was the Bar Mitzvah of our own Abraham Levine just the week before that. As has become traditional, we passed the Torah from grandfather to father to son – from generation to generation. How truly symbolic of our obsession with our children and of our commitment to Judaism’s survival!
But what is this book that we so lovingly preserve and pass on to our children?
Maybe we can best understand the question by deciding what the Torah is not and then decide what it is.
The Torah contains 613 Mitzvot, or Laws, Commandments we are obligated to fulfill. That makes Torah a law book. Yet, that alone is not all Torah is. If it were, we would need to be a nation of lawyers. It is, indeed, possible to be absolutely meticulous in how we observe Judaism’s legal obligations and yet to be totally devoid of any moral compass. So the Torah must be more than just a law book.
In order to give some moral guidance to all those laws, Torah contains stories that teach us how our ancestors treated one another. But these stories are there solely to add the surrounding principles, the legal format which created the situations portrayed in the Torah. So Torah contains stories but is more than just a collection of stories.
The same can be said about the teachings of philosophy so common in modern interpretations of Torah. Yes, Torah contains philosophy, but it is not a philosophy book.
So what is Torah?
I would suggest that Torah is none of the above, but instead is, in fact, a Guide Book on how to live a good and proper life. Torah teaches us how to develop relationships between individuals, between ourselves and the environment and between ourselves and the Divine. The truths of these relationships are buried deep in the stories and laws and philosophy. Our job is to diligently and lovingly search them out.
B’Shalom
Rabbi Stanley Halpern