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AcAdemic SympoSium:
Jewish legal tradition, the Talmudic
legal tradition, is about discussion. It’s
about argument. It doesn’t necessarily
have to be friendly discussion, and it
wasn’t always friendly. But it’s about
discussion, argument, and debate. It’s
about making one’s case through the
use of reason and reasoned argument,
and attempting to persuade others
of the rightness of one’s views based
on having the most compelling
interpretation of our sacred texts.
This is how we should be relating to
each other, not by saying, “I’m with
this party and it represents what is
right. You are with that party, or that
tendency, or that perspective, and that
represents what is wrong.” I’d like
bringing in one of my favorite characters,
a rabbi from 16th-century Lublin,
Poland, named Rabbi Shlomo Luria.
As I always say to my students, I’m
in absolutely no hurry to get to the
next world. But when I do get there,
Luria is one of the people I would
like to meet. Luria writes in one of
his responsa (a learned answer to a
question that was posed to him)
about an issue involving a widow
in the city of Lublin.
This widow was being taken advantage
of financially by a man in the town.
We don’t need to be concerned right
now with the precise details. Luria
initially represents himself as hesitating
to get involved. He said, “Well, there
already is a judge on the case. It’s
not that nobody in Lublin knows
about this situation. There’s a judge
appointed, there’s a court that’s going
to be sitting to hear this widow’s case.”
He goes on to say, “You know, if I get
involved, it might offend that judge.
He might think: ‘Luria doesn’t think
I’m going to do the right thing by this
woman.’” Ultimately, Luria overcomes
his doubts and decides that he has to get
involved. Apropos, you may remember
the quote by the great sage and leader,
Spider-Man: “With great power comes
great responsibility.” Luria essentially
says something that comes down more
or less to: “With great learning comes
great responsibility.”
What Luria actually says is: “When
we go back to the Torah, we see that
there’s a covenant for the widow and
the orphan. God represents Godself
as being particularly interested in
what happens in society to the widow
and the orphan.” And Luria says, “It
is an obligation of anybody who has
knowledge of Jewish law, who has
knowledge of the Torah, and who is
able to use that knowledge to rescue
the vulnerable from someone who
would prey upon them, it’s incumbent
upon that person to do that.” So he
says, “Notwithstanding my concerns
about the little political difficulties
I might get myself into here in Lublin,
I’m going to get involved.”
What did Luria do? In our contemporary
terms, he represented truth to power
and got ready to speak truth to power.
He placed his responsibility to act on
behalf of a vulnerable widow above his
“
party,” as it were. Luria and the sitting
judge on the case were on the same
side. They were part of the same group,
the same “party,” so to speak: the learned
elite of Lublin. Luria was willing to risk
alienating someone from his own
“
party” in order to stand up as an
individual and do what he thought
was right. This is true heroism.
Thus far, we have discussed, in order:
study,
mitzvah
,
apoliticized (Judaism),
and, finally, heroism. If we move these
letters around a bit, we come up with
the transliteration of SHMA:
S
tudy,
h
eroism,
M
itzvah,
a
politicized.
SHMA (Deuteronomy 6:4) is the
fundamental statement of our belief
in God’s unity. For our purposes today,
maybe we can think of it in a different
way as well: as a shorthand expression
for a fundamental unity in Judaism,
a unity in which all the
mitzvot
have
importance, in which all the texts,
all the traditions, have importance.
Not that every text is uplifting, or
every ritual recoverable for the modern
liberal Jew. But everything in the
tradition equally deserves our attention.
Social responsibility is an important
mitzvah
,
a definite holy imperative.
But, again, it is one thread in the
larger tapestry which is Judaism.
This unity of the large tapestry of
Judaism is something that Tosafot
could indeed have imagined: a unified
Judaism in which all
mitzvot
,
all texts,
all practices are equally deserving of
our attention. This is something they
could have imagined and that they
practiced, and it is something that
we can imagine and practice as well.
Not Judaism as a window dressing for
ideas and beliefs and preconceptions
that we bring
to
it, but Judaism as
the foundation
from which
our own
dedication to social responsibility,
among other things, flows. SHMA.
Social responsibility is an important
mitzvah
,
a definite holy imperative. But it is one thread in the larger tapestry
which is Judaism. this unity of the large tapestry of Judaism is something that tosafot could indeed have imagined:
a unified Judaism in which all
mitzvot
,
all texts, all practices are equally deserving of our attention.