Mensch•Mark For Elul 23: To Determine Exactly what One Hears - Mechavayn et Sh'muato
Intergenerational transmission is especially powerful because for Jews immortality is measured less by the survival of the individual soul than by the survival of the Jewish people.
About the Mensch•Mark Series
The Talmudic tractate Avot, 6:6 provides a roadmap as to how to live an ethical life. This passage includes 48 middot (measures) through which we can “acquire Torah.” See the full list here. For each of these days of reflection, running from the first of Elul through Yom Kippur, I’m highlighting one of these middot, in order to assist each of us in the process of soul searching (“heshbon ha-nefesh”).
Today’s Middah:
To Determine Exactly what One Hears - Middah Mechavayn et Sh'muato
URJ’s Take
Text
"The one who understands his (her) lesson will not readily forget it." (Talmud Yerushalmi: Berakot, 5.1)Commentary
Many translations of Pirkei Avot have been published and in each edition the translator has added his or her own nuances to its meaning.Rabbi Susan Freeman, in her work Teaching Jewish Virtues, translates this middah as "being precise in transmitting what one has learned." Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, in Chapters of the Fathers, understands this middah as "he (or she) grasps and retains accurately what has been handed down to him (or her) by transmission." In the first translation, the individual is called upon to accurately transmit learning, in the second translation the individual is called upon to accurately understand and retain was has been transmitted. These two translations reflect the essence of Jewish learning and the transmission of Torah.
Pirkei Avot opens with the following teaching:
"Moses received the Torah at Sinai and conveyed it to Joshua; Joshua conveyed it to the Elders; the Elders conveyed it to the Prophets; and the Prophets conveyed it to the Men of the Great Assembly."
These individuals were our teachers and our leaders. They created the ongoing chain of Torah learning, passing Jewish learning and tradition from one generation to the next.
This is what makes Jewish learning a process and a product of thinking and acting. It is not simply a body of knowledge for an individual to absorb but a way of living both ethically and ritually. When we learn, the activity is more than mental gymnastics. Jewish learning engages our heart, our hands and our souls as well as our minds.
In this week's text the phrase reads, "The one who understands his (or her) lesson will not readily forget it." Clearly the rabbis of the Talmud knew that true learning comes when we go beyond mere memorization of information; true learning comes when we comprehend the meaning and message of what has been learned. We deepen our understanding and gain insights that will lead us to living lives imbued with Jewish values and ethics.
My Take: The Scribe and the Xerox Machine
People of a certain age will recall an old Xerox commercial featuring a monk named Brother Dominic.
As my rabbinical school teachers often reminded me, our sacred texts did not become completely fixed and consistent until the invention of the Xerox machine. Until then, each word was painstakingly copied, again and again, over the course of century upon century. (And it’s largely an untold story as to how many priceless Jewish texts survived only due to the painstaking efforts of Christian monks). So of course over the course of time there were slight errors and emendations, most of which soon became accepted as part of the canon. Within in few generations, the original text was forgotten.
It’s actually quite miraculous that our texts remained as consistent as they did, but if you look at the Dead Sea Scrolls from 2,000 years ago, and the Masoretic texts that emerged centuries later, in the middle ages, there are some significant differences. One of the best known is Psalm 145, commonly known as the Ashrei prayer, which is missing an entire verse. We know this because it is an acrostic and the verse beginning with the letter nun is not there. Except that in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is. At some point it just dropped away.
Biblical scholars and rabbis (both ancient and modern) feast on changes like this. And I love them too, because they demonstrate that religions are never fixed in stone. Judaism has been constantly evolving. Each generation brings with it brand new perspectives, new ways to read and reinvigorate ancient texts - and even the texts themselves change from time to time. We’ve seen that most recently with the introduction of a gender neutral Bible translation.
And, I should add, as the texts have changed, so have our concepts of God. That certainly has been true since the Holocaust, as seminal theologians like Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg have demonstrated, and as I also discussed in my book, “Embracing Auschwitz.”
Like Brother Dominic, we are looking for that carbon copy, in the hopes of handing down our tradition to our descendants exactly as we found it. But in fact each of us is reinventing that tradition, sometimes with small changes, but most often these days, what we hand down to the next generation may look a lot like what we received, but it will have been transformed immeasurably. If you think of all that has changed in our lives even since last October 7, how could that not happen?
In my mind this middah is calling on us to treat our tradition with the utmost of humility and respect. So many have died in defense of these values, and so many have been killed simply because they were Jews. Who am I to make flippant changes? So we need to understand simply what the text is saying, the Peshat, as we call it, and only then, divine what it is saying to us, in our day. That requires a solid background in those texts - preferably in the original - and a deep understanding. The texts need to be transmitted accurately - then reinterpreted authentically.
The Hebrew word dor, generation, appears often in the Bible as well as in Hebrew prayers, particularly in the form of dor l’dor or dor va-dor, from generation to generation.
The idea of transmission of our tradition from one generation to another has resonated to the point where that itself becomes a prime Jewish value - even eclipsing for some the content of that tradition itself. A claim can be made that simply to transmit a body of knowledge, belief or practice to the next generation, without regard for the content, is unsustainable.
But in the post Holocaust era, where so many questions cloud the future of Judaism and the Jewish people - questions both theological and demographic - and at a time where change is so frenetic, it makes some sense simply to keep the fires burning for another generation or two in the hopes that at some point in the future those questions might be answered. Intergenerational transmission is especially powerful for Jews because to a large degree, immortality is measured not in the survival of the individual soul, but in the survival of the Jewish people as a whole. A great example of this is the Passover Seder which includes the invocation that “in every generation (b’chol dor vador) all people (not just Jews) must see themselves as if they had experienced the Exodus from in Egypt - or on Hanukkah, when we sing in “Mi Yemalel,” “In every generation a hero arises to save our nation.” The expression “dor va dor” has given rise to some great songs, including this one by Josh Nelson:
We are gifts and we are blessings, we are history in song
We are hope and we are healing, we are learning to be strong
We are words and we are stories, we are pictures of the past
We are carriers of wisdom, not the first and not the last
L'dor vador nagid godlecha
L'dor vador... we protect this chain
From generation to generation
L'dor vador, we will praise Your name
So we carry the wisdom and we treasure the continuity. That’s what stands behind the power of prayers and rituals that are thousands of years. old. But we reserve the right to reinterpret them for our times. Even Brother Dominic made changes - until he found his way to Kinkos.
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