Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17
Waiting for the “Day of Revenge”
“You are children of the Lord your God,” it says in this week’s Torah reading (Deut 14:1). But what could this possibly mean? In what sense can God be said to have children of any sort, and if this expression is intended metaphorically, what exactly is it referring to?
A similar problem was posed, perhaps even more sharply, by an earlier verse. In Exodus 4:22, God instructs Moses to go to Pharaoh and say, “Thus says the Lord: ‘Israel is my firstborn son.’” Again, what could this mean? Even if it is not taken as a statement of the people’s actual, biological beginnings, how can Israel in any sense—even metaphorically—be conceived of as a firstborn? After all, we are said to be the descendants of Jacob, who was the son of Isaac, who was the son of Abraham—and before Abraham came fully twenty generations of human beings. So how, metaphorical or otherwise, could Israel be called a firstborn? This tiny nation was just a little twig on the great tree of humanity.
Ancient interpreters came up with a good answer. Israel was not created as God’s “firstborn.” Rather, this term was used specifically with regard to what ultimately distinguished Israel from all other peoples, its having accepted the Torah. Like a father, God had presented a list of do’s and don’ts—the Torah—at Mount Sinai. Once the people of Israel had officially accepted these rules, they were promoted to the rank of a firstborn.
But this still doesn’t explain why the people of Israel should be called the “children of the Lord” in this week’s reading. There’s no hint that this has anything to do with accepting the Torah. Many scholars have suggested that Israel’s being “children of the Lord” is to be understood in light of the words that follow in this verse, “You shall not gash yourselves or shave the front of your heads because of the dead.” Gashing the arms with knives or shaving off the hair at the front of the forehead were signs of mourning used by Israel’s neighbors; presumably, these measures were intended to attract the deity’s attention, just as the self-gashing prophets of Baal sought to do in 1 Kings 18:28. But Israel did not need any such extreme acts of self-mortification, because “You are children of the Lord your God,” as close to God as children are to their father.
Along with this, however, the Rabbis of the Talmud offered another interpretation. The word for “gash yourselves” (titgoddedu) sounded as if it came from the same Hebrew root as the word for “groups” (agudot). They therefore said on the basis of this verse, “Don’t form yourselves into different groups” (see b. Yebamot, 14a).
This explanation actually works quite well with the injunction immediately preceding it. Since “You are [all] children of the Lord your God,” there is no basis for creating different groups among yourselves, each of them claiming its own, separate religious authority and often looking down on other Jews as “not really Jewish.”
The Dead Sea Scrolls give us a detailed picture of one such group. Its members did everything they could to distance themselves from other Jews. They wore special clothes, all of them white, so that everyone could tell at a glance, “He’s a member of that group.” They had their own rules—of ritual purity, the Sabbath, and other matters—and regarded anyone who did not observe these rules as in error. At the same time, they purposely refrained from passing on their “true” interpretations of the Torah to non-members, lest they end up doing the right thing. The reason was their anticipation of the “Day of Revenge,” when other Jews would be destroyed for their errors—except for members of the Dead Sea Scrolls community; they alone would survive as God’s chosen ones.
That group no longer exists, but the same mentality has reemerged again and again in Jewish history, so that the message of this week’s Torah reading is, alas, still relevant: “Don’t form yourselves into different groups,” since you are all “children of the Lord your God.”