Torah On The Cutting Room Floor

Editing Out Jewish Particularity and the Liberties We Take With Our Sacred Texts

The Rabbis cherry-picked all the time. In both Talmud and Midrash, they would take little or big bits of text from one part of Torah to make sense of another part. For the Rabbis, Torah is one perfect text made by a perfect author, G-d, and so it is constantly in conversation with itself. For this reason, they felt comfortable and even called to chop up verses and use the pieces as keys to unlock hidden meanings in other parts of the Torah.

When I teach my students, I also have to choose what texts to pick out of the whole. Obviously I can’t read the entire Torah every time I want to talk about one particular law or scene. But often I’m faced with the question of where to cut off the text and put in an ellipsis. What part of the text is the point and which parts are just unnecessary details? As I type this I am aware that it feels presumptuous for someone to decide what is the important part of the text and what to leave on the cutting room floor. If the Torah is made by a perfect author, we had better know whatever it is we leave off. What we determine to be the scraps are still sacred. 

Now, on to some examples. 

The first piece of Torah is one you will recognize. Even the least Jewishly learned will have heard it many times. Ready? The first text we are looking at is:

Let my people go!

Yep, I told you you’d know it. G-d tells Moses to go to Pharaoh and tell him to Let my people go… But wait, there’s more. That is just the first part. Here are five separate occurrences of this famous text in all its glory: 

And say to him, Adonai, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you to say, Let My people go that they may worship Me in the wilderness. (Exodus 7:16)

Adonai said to Moses, Go to Pharaoh and say to him, Thus says Adonai, Let My people go that they may worship Me. (Exodus 7:26)

And Adonai said to Moses, Early in the morning present yourself to Pharaoh, as he is coming out to the water, and say to him, Thus says Adonai: Let My people go that they may worship Me. (Exodus 8:16)

Adonai said to Moses, Go to Pharaoh and say to him, Thus says Adonai, the God of the Hebrews: Let My people go to worship Me. (Exodus 9:1)

Adonai said to Moses, Early in the morning present yourself to Pharaoh and say to him, Thus says Adonai the God of the Hebrews: Let My people go to worship Me. (Exodus 9:13)

I hope the point is obvious. We quote the Let my people go part and not the that they may worship Me part. Now, I should be clear, when I say we, I am talking about the people with whom I have spent my Jewish life, and these people tend to be very progressive, Reform or Reform-inspired, and less comfortable with G-d or worship language. 

Why do we splice the text before it says that they may worship Me? And regardless of why, what is the effect of this edit?

Perhaps we shorten this text because the  Let my people go part is the crux of it. No matter what the people are going to go and do, it is the liberation that is the point. The going. The asking Pharaoh to free the Hebrew slaves. Let my people go! It’s punchy. It’s strong. It’s exclamatory and it doesn’t need a final destination. We can all get behind freeing captives, but freeing the Hebrew captives so they can worship their specific and kind-of-high-maintenance G-d in the woods? By stopping at Let my people go, we leave the Israelite religion out of it. Let my people go becomes a cry for liberation everywhere, not for the Hebrews specifically, captive in Egypt specifically. Now, using the text in this way is extremely common and totally valid–I might even say using the text this way is great! And also, it is a choice. Editing is interpretation. 

Here is another example. In the Talmud we get a great story about a potential convert who goes to Shammai and Hillel asking each of them to tell him the entire Torah while standing on one foot. When he goes to Hillel the Elder, our oft-quoted¹ sage says, 

That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study. (Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 31a)

The part we often leave off, the Go study, may be the whole point. See, Hillel was asked to do a ridiculous thing–sum up the entirety of Torah in a matter of seconds. And so, he finds a loophole, to take a few of his precious seconds to give the asker an assignment. He starts with a lovely universal text, That which is hateful to you do not do to another, and then ends with the particular– the rest is its interpretation. Go study. The rest is what the Jewish people have taught over the generations. The rest is the great depth of our tradition. Go study is the plea for the particular. Dig into Torah and you will learn that the studying’s the thing. 

Beyond truncating texts, there are times when we also simply omit Jewish particularity. 

There is a beautiful idea that comes from the Mishnah that says, whoever saves a single life is considered to have saved the whole world. The only problem is that isn’t really what the Mishnah says. Here is the text:

Therefore, Adam the first man was created alone, to teach you that with regard to anyone who destroys one soul from the Jewish people, i.e., kills one Jew, the verse ascribes him blame as if he destroyed an entire world, as Adam was one person, from whom the population of an entire world came forth. And conversely, anyone who sustains one soul from the Jewish people, the verse ascribes him credit as if he sustained an entire world. (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4, but this text is also repeated in Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 37a, and more obscurely, Jerusalem Talmud Sanhedrin 4:9)

The Mishnah says he who saves the life of a Jew it is as if he has saved the entire world. Now, someone may not like this text or find it exclusive and that is all well and good. That same person may feel ashamed of this text or sour on the idea that the Mishnah privileges the lives of Jews. But then, you have to remember that this is the Mishnah, not a humanist document about everyone living together in harmony. It is a religious text from a time and place of exile, tasked with applying and interpreting the laws of the Torah.  

There are real arguments to be made for reframing the text into the universal version referenced above. First, we are all made b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of the Divine. Second, there is evidence that this text we find in the Mishnah today is not the original version. Some very early codices of the Mishnah actually present the universal version–whoever saves a life it is as if they have saved the entire world–suggesting that it is the particular version that is only about Jews that is the first edit!² I love a good plot twist! And yet, if we are teaching and learning what the Mishnah says now then we have to do that. If we are teaching and learning the older version, that’s great, but again, let’s know what we are teaching and learning (and bonus points for knowing why it changed in the first place).³

To give another example, the following is a text from the Talmud that I have also heard universalized:

What does G-d pray? Rav Zutra bar Tovia said that Rav said: God says: May it be My will that My mercy will overcome My anger towards Israel for their transgressions, and may My mercy prevail over My other attributes through which Israel is punished, and may I conduct myself toward My children, Israel, with the attribute of mercy, and may I enter before them beyond the letter of the law. (Babylonian Talmud Brachot 7a)

This is a great text about G-d praying (think about that). When told in its edited version, yep, you guessed it, it isn’t about Israel. 

For the sake of this textual exploration, it’s important to note that the Torah and Talmud alike contain laws and verses that are both clearly universal and about the good of humanity and clearly particular to the Hebrews. Here is a text that I think points to this duality perfectly:

Our Rabbis taught: We sustain the non-Jewish poor with the Jewish poor, visit the non-Jewish sick with the Jewish sick, and bury the non-Jewish dead with the Jewish dead, for the sake of peace. (Babylonian Talmud Gittin 61a)

In other words, Judaism is a combination of these two ideas–being for and about ourselves and being for and about the whole world. This is essentially Hillel’s other great teaching: 

He [Hillel] used to say: If I am not for me, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, then when? (Pirkei Avot 1:14)

And Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch spoke to this point beautifully when, in a conversation about how Gen Z Jews understand their Jewishness, he said:

Judaism is a blend between Jewish particularism and what we call universalism, which today is often characterized by the term tikkun olam, which is a Hebrew phrase, which means repair of the world. Both are fundamental to Judaism. If you take one of those elements away or diminish one of those elements in favor of the other, you have truncated Judaism and made it into something that is much smaller than it is and that it always saw itself to be.⁴

But what happens when we take a text that is particular and make it universal—when we take a text about Jews and make it about everyone?

To me one clear downside is quite literal: we erase ourselves. We erase what makes us uniquely us. Our name. The whole world is not the Jewish people and the Jewish people are not the whole world and it has to be okay for the sacred texts of the Jewish people to be about... wait for it… the Jewish people. Judaism is not only about repairing the world. It is also about keeping alive the quirky and flavorful and ever-evolving traditions of a unique people. It has to be both. 

In my opinion, the main benefit is inclusion. Many of us Jews today (myself included) have loving friends and family (even spouses and children) who are not Jewish and who we want to participate in Jewish life with us—who we want to see included in our Torah. And of course we can interpret particularistic texts in universal ways to speak to our 21st century Jewish communities. 

But interpreting a text in a certain way and straight up misquoting it are two different things. 

As I write, I realize that this essay does not want to be only a discussion of the particular and the universal elements of Judaism, but about what liberties we take (or think we can take) when engaging with our sacred texts. Perhaps I should heed the advice to turn this into two or three essays. Instead I’ll come to a close and say that I am walking away from this essay, more than anything, reflecting on the gap between what we want our texts to say and what they actually do.

It is my opinion that we mind this gap very very carefully. In the end, we are the People of the Book, and I believe that this text is the one thing keeping the Jewish people together. As journalist Matti Friedman writes, 

There was no precedent for a scattered people’s remaining a people; dispersion meant disappearance. If the Jews were to be an exception, instead of being bound by a king, a temple, or a geography, they needed to be bound by something else, something portable. What emerged was the idea that a people could be held together by words.⁵

When it comes to Torah, there is no cutting room floor. There is the beit midrash and the constant call of Hillel. Go study.  

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1.  First of all, this text is often misquoted to be Do unto others as you would have them do unto you which it is decidedly not. Loving the way you want to be loved and not being hated the way you don’t want to be hated are different things. But that’s not the point here.

2. Philologos, The Origins of the Precept "Whoever Saves a Life Saves the World": And what they tell us about particularism and universalism in Jewish. Mosaic Magazine. October 31, 2016. <https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/history-ideas/2016/10/the-origins-of-the-precept-whoever-saves-a-life-saves-the-world/>

3. Read the article linked above

4. from:

5. Matti Friedman, The Aleppo Codex: In Pursuit of One of the World’s Most Coveted, Sacred, and Mysterious Books (Algonquin Books: Chapel Hill, 2013), 28.