This week's portion: Walking the walk
September 27, 2006
This week -- Shabbat Shuvah; the Shabbat of Re/Turn, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur -- we're reading parashat Haazinu, in which Moses urges the children of Israel to take the words of the Teaching to heart and to make them our very life.
In this week's post over at Radical Torah, I started riffing on what this instruction might and might not mean, and I wound up with something that feels as much like a prose poem as a d'var Torah:
It doesn't mean skipping over the boring or confusing parts, or the parts that contradict other parts. It doesn't mean accepting anybody else's interpretation, necessarily, but it also doesn't mean always feeling compelled to come up with your own, either. It doesn't mean watching other people engage with the text while remaining at a safe distance, comfortably aloof.
It doesn't mean limiting your understanding of "Torah" to just the Chumash, or just the Tanakh, or just the Written + Oral Torahs, or just the feminist commentaries on the Torah, or just the non-feminist ones. It doesn't mean squeezing Torah into any kind of glass slippers that would require you to trim a toe here and a slice of heel there in order to fake a comfortable fit.
Writing this felt like dancing.This might be my favorite thing I've written for RT this year. Read the whole thing here: Walking the walk.