Bamidbar - Everything Has Its Place

In Parshas Bamidbar we read of how God chose the tribe of Levi to be His, to a degree above and beyond the rest of the Jewish people. Originally, the Temple service was to have been performed by the first-born sons of the entire nation. When the people sinned with the golden calf, they lost this privilege and it was given to the tribe of Levi. The tribe of Levi was chosen because, at the time of the sin of the golden calf, they answered Moses' cry of "Whoever is for God, to me!" and took up their swords to punish the worshippers of the calf.

In his commentary on Bamidbar, Rav Avigdor Miller notes a surprising irony in this. At the end of his life, Jacob admonished his sons Shimon and Levi for the violent manner in which they avenged the honor of their sister, Dinah. Yet now the descendants of Levi were being rewarded for engaging in a violent battle against their fellow Jews!

Rav Miller explains that this teaches us an important lesson:

...we learn that no natural emotion or character-trait is intrinsically evil: "God made the Man right" (Koheles 7:29), but good or evil depends on the manner in which these emotions and character-traits are exercised. Anger and even cruelty, jealousy and ambition, indulgence and temperance, indolence and alacrity: each has its proper place, and when employed in Hashem's service all of these motivations gain recompense in this life and everlasting reward in the Afterlife. The anger which endangered Jacob's family was cursed and was punished by landlessness, but when the anger was utilized to combat idolatry it was rewarded by an eternal covenant: "The Levites shall be Mine."

This is an important lesson as we come into Shavuos, the festival of Matan Torah (the Giving of the Torah). One of the most basic messages of the Torah is that every aspect of human life has the potential for holiness. Judaism teaches us not to reject our natural drives and desires, but to channel them into the service of God. This is one of the basic symbolic messages of circumcision, which the Jewish people had to undergo before they could receive the Torah, and which every male convert must undergo to enter into the Jewish covenant with God. As Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch writes (Collected Writings III, pp. 78-79 - emphasis added):

All the physical aspects of of our earthly existence, with all its impulses and forces, its riches and pleasures, must be brought under the firm control of the holy will of God. This sign [of circumcision] poses, as the first and indispensable condition for our covenant with God that we must circumcise the ערלה [uncontrolled nature (lit. "foreskin)] of the physical aspect of our body. It is not the consecration of the spirit but the consecration of the body that marks the entry into the covenant of Abraham. This covenant categorically rejects the erroneous concepts of both extremes. It does not condone a mortification of the flesh one earth for the purpose of gaining life in the world to come. But it also rejects the worship of physical appetites and the cult of "beautiful" sensualism.

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What is the Torah?

On the festival of Shavuos we celebrate the event of Matan Torah - the Giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. This was the foundational event of Judaism, from which all else follows. It was at Sinai that God made the Jewish people into His nation, and gave us His Torah.

But what, exactly, is the Torah? By this, I am not asking about the simple definition of the Torah - i.e. the five books of Moses - or even the broader definition of the complete corpus of the Written and Oral Law. I am asking, what kind of "book" is the Torah? Specifically, what kind of information did God intend to reveal to us through the Torah and what kinds of expectations can we reasonably have when studying it?

To clarify, in order to productively read a book, we need to have a reasonably good idea as to what the author is attempting to do. If our understanding of the author's intent is significantly flawed, then our ability to understand and use the book will be, at best, equally flawed. Our understanding of the author's intent causes us to have specific expectations from the book and it is the author's success in satisfying those expectations that we use in assessing the quality of the book. Thus, we have very different expectations from a history book than we have from a cookbook, or a book on car repair, or a medical textbook, or a dictionary.

The same is true for the Torah. In order for us to properly study the Torah, we first need to clarify what the Author of the Torah is trying to accomplish. What is the intended function of the Torah? Thankfully, the Torah itself is fairly clear on what its purpose is; the function of the Torah is to instruct, i.e. to tell us what to do with our lives. As the Torah (Exodus 24:12) says, "And Hashem said to Moses: 'Come up to Me, to the mountain, and stay there; and I will give you the tablets of stone, and the Torah and the commandment, which I have written to instruct them.'" One of the most basic themes throughout the Torah is the absolute importance of obeying God's commands, as given to us in the Torah.

Everything in the Torah is there for the purpose of instruction. This is true not only for the mitzvos, but even for the stories found in the Torah.  The stories in the Torah are intended to teach us lessons, and are presented in the manner that best serve God's educational purposes. They are not there for our entertainment, or even to teach us history, but, like the mitzvos, to teach us how to properly live our lives.

This is an important principle, because it tells us two critical concepts:

• There is nothing extraneous in the Torah. Everything, down to the details of every story, is there to teach us something or it would not have been included.
• The Torah does not include information that is unrelated to its purpose. While there is historical information in the Torah, it is usually vague at best. The Torah is not a history book, or a science book, or even a philosophical work. (It also isn't a cookbook or a book on how to manage your money. But you already knew that.) It is book of Divine instruction.

Much to the disappointment of many a yeshiva student, God did not give us the Torah so that we wouldn't have to study history, or science, or math (or any other area of human study). The Torah is intended to answer questions that we can't really answer for ourselves: What are we here for? How do we fulfill our purpose?

Sometimes people ask why God didn't include scientific or medical information in the Torah, or why He didn't provide more precise historical information. Such questions are no more reasonable with regard to the Torah than they would be with regard to a cookbook (which is also a book of instruction). When we study the Torah, it is perfectly legitimate to ask what we are supposed to learn from a given story, or even a specific detail within the story. It is not legitimate to ask why God omitted the cure for cancer or the Grand Unified Theory for physics.

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