Exodus 35:1-38:20
The More Mitzvot
It is customary in different Jewish communities to recite regularly a certain rabbinic saying—a saying found in the Mishnah which, on reflection, seems a bit odd:
“Rabbi Ḥananya ben ‘Akashya said: ‘The Holy One sought to give merit to Israel. That is why He increased torah and mitzvot for them, as it is said (in Isaiah 42:21): ‘The Lord is concerned for His justice, making Torah great and mighty.’”
When exactly did God “increase” the Torah and its commandments (mitzvot)? And how does the verse cited from Isaiah support Rabbi Ḥananya’s contention that God “sought to give merit to Israel” when Israel isn’t even mentioned in the Isaiah verse? And for that matter, who is the author of this saying, Rabbi Ḥananya ben ‘Akashya?
Let us begin with the last question. Actually, Rabbi Ḥananya is virtually an unknown figure. Even the most basic facts of his biography are not known, and apart from the saying quoted above, he is not mentioned anywhere else in the Mishnah, nor, for that matter, in the Jerusalem or Babylonian Talmuds or the various compilations of rabbinic midrash. (His name does appear once more in passing in the Tosefta, on an unrelated matter.) So his saying did not become famous because he himself was a particularly influential teacher, at least judging by these facts.
As for the verse from Isaiah, it seems to have an entirely different meaning from the one attributed to it by Rabbi Ḥananya. The apparent meaning of “‘The Lord is concerned for His justice, making torah great and mighty’” seems to be quite straightforward: God has magnified and exalted the Torah out of a concern for justice, so that justice will be done by people respecting and keeping the Torah’s laws in their daily lives. If so, God did not “increase” the Torah as Rabbi Ḥananya’s saying asserts; He (God) magnified and exalted it.
Why, then, did Rabbi Ḥananya say what he said? The answer lies in a question that was apparently asked a great deal in the first few centuries of the common era: Why are there so many different commandments in the Torah—613, by the traditional count? Who can possibly carry out, or even remember, so many different mitzvot? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to whittle things down to a few basics and leave it at that?
One sort of answer was indeed to suggest that these numerous commandments could all be summarized in one or two. A famous story recounts that Hillel the Elder was asked to sum up the whole Torah in a sentence or two (literally, “while the questioner stood on one foot”). Hillel answered: “What is hateful to you do not do to your fellow. This is the whole Torah; the rest is its spelling out—now go and study it.” Somewhat later, Rabbi Akiva stated that a great governing principle (kelal gadol) of the Torah was contained in a single verse, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18). Others proposed that there are two “You shall love” commandments which, taken together, give the basic message of the whole Torah: “You shall love the Lord God with your whole heart and soul and might” (Deut 6:5) and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
None of these was Rabbi Ḥananya’s answer. On the contrary, he said that God gave Israel so many commandments because each one was an opportunity to find favor with Him—the more commandments, the more opportunities. To support this contention, Rabbi Hananya read the verse from Isaiah a bit differently from its apparent meaning, not: “The Lord is concerned for His justice,” but “The Lord wished to justify him,” namely, Israel. (The word justify here probably represents a different pronunciation of the text—not tzidko, “His justice,” but tsaddeko, “to justify him.”) By the same token, Rabbi Ḥananya took Isaiah’s phrase, “making torah great and mighty”: God “magnified” Torah by including in it so many mitzvot. Far from being a burden, the Torah and all its commandments are what allow Israel to acquire merit before God day by day.
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Although Rabbi Ḥananya did not connect his insight explicitly to this week’s Torah reading, he might well have. After all, why should the Torah have devoted five consecutive weekly readings to the mishkan, the moveable desert sanctuary that the people of Israel constructed in the wilderness? The whole thing could have been summarized in a single sentence: “God told Moses to tell the Israelites to build Him a sanctuary, and they did.”
If so, what was the point of listing all the little details that went into its construction—the different colored cloths, the curtains and the hooks, the planks, the screen, and so on and so on? And, having finished listing all these things, why should the Torah in this week’s reading turn around and basically repeat the whole inventory a second time, asserting this time that Israel had scrupulously carried each and every detail in the commandments?