Exodus chapter 10:1-13:16
Laws Endowed with Life
Chapter 12 of this week’s reading contains the first commandments given to the people of Israel, starting with the laws of the new month and then moving on to the laws of Passover.
The great medieval scholar Rashi began his commentary on the Torah by quoting a certain question concerning this arrangement: If the whole purpose of the Torah is to teach us what to do, then why didn’t the Torah start here, in Exodus chapter 12, with the first mitzvot, having skipped all the stories that precede them? No creation of the world, nor Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, or any of the others—just the do’s and don’ts of biblical law.
I believe that most readers today would be puzzled by the question itself. Surely there is, and always has been, more to the Torah than just a dry list of commandments. Not only are there all the narratives of Genesis that precede this week’s reading, but all the ones that follow: the rest of the exodus from Egypt, including the parting of the Red Sea and all that happened at Mount Sinai, plus the Golden Calf, Israel’s wilderness wanderings—in short, everything from Exodus to Deuteronomy and Moses’ last day of life. There seems to be something essential about telling these stories.
Long before Rashi, another great Jewish thinker had wrestled with the same question, the first-century Greek-speaking Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria. His answer to this question is surprising. The Torah’s laws, he says, are in a sense merely copies based on human originals—the virtuous heroes whose stories are recounted earlier in the Torah. In fact, Philo says, their stories took precedence over the laws themselves in two senses—not just precedence in time, but also (I think I’m reading him correctly) in quality, since any original is by nature truer than the copies it subsequently inspires. “For in these [human portraits]” Philo wrote, “we have laws endowed with life and reason.” In other words, the stories of biblical figures were something like a living, human embodiment of the lessons that were to follow.
Don‘t get me wrong; Jews love studying halakhah and putting its laws into practice. But sometimes we lose sight of their underlying purpose. To put the matter simply, Jews were not first and foremost commanded to worship the Torah. Rather—as Philo and subsequent thinkers have stressed—we were and are commanded to worship the Almighty. The laws that were given to us, starting with this week’s reading, are simply the means that were given to us to worship Him.