Reading Beyond the Literal: In Memory of Rabbi Neil Gillman

Vayishlach 5778 / 2 December 2017

Vzot hatorah asher sam Moshe lifnei bnei Yisrael al pe Adonai byad Moshe.

This is the Torah that Moses put before the Children of Israel; from the mouth of God by the hand of Moses.

Each week we direct our attention to the scroll of the Torah and affirm that it is exactly the same Torah that Moshe received from the mouth of God and put before the people of Israel.  For the Rabbis who crafted that assertion into the heart of the Shabbat service, the purpose was not to suggest that Torah did not change.  On the contrary, it was to fix the text of the Torah so that their ability to continually expand the content of Torah would forever have the authority of the written text to support it.  If your major intellectual and spiritual pursuit is interpretation, then the consistency of what you are interpreting is crucial.  If it were not so then we might imagine our current generation wanting to rid the Torah of passages such as the one we encounter at the beginning of Parshat Vayishlach.  A literal wrestling match between Jacob and an angel would be one of many such passages that could not have been any more believable to our ancestors than it is for us.  But they were not concerned with the factuality of the Torah.  They were interested in its truth.  Truth does not depend on facts, but on the interpretation of facts.  For this reason the Rabbis had to safeguard the text of the Torah so that they would forever have facts to interpret.  The writers of the Torah text itself seem unconcerned with the conventional facticity of their narrative.  They too were interested in truth and not facts.

This distinction between truth and facts in Jewish tradition, as well as in other religious traditions, is so obvious as to hardly need stating.  The centrality of Midrash and the ongoing practice of textual interpretation down to and including what I am doing here, and rabbis around the globe are doing, is established and so present that it almost becomes invisible.  However, the risk implicit in its becoming invisible is the rise of a kind of textual literalism that threatens the very heart of our millennial civilization.  The fact that this risk had already turned into a reality among a large segment of our community, and that the consequence of this literalism was not so much the rise of a literalist sect among us, they will be of no long term significance.  Rather, the fact that such literalism drove away large swaths of contemporary Jews, is what motivated the world of my teacher, colleague and friend, Rabbi Neil Gillman.  Trying to push, in particular, the contemporary Conservative Jewish world to encounter the power of religious language properly understood, and the Divinity behind that language, was Neil’s goal right up to his passing a week ago on Shabbat, zichrono L’vracha.

In his efforts to teach what should have been obvious, Neil spoke a lot about myth and the power of myth to convey truth and the metaphoric nature of religious language.  His influence on my work was profound. The need for continuing to pound away at these themes has, unfortunately, not diminished over the years.  Yet we read a section in the Torah like Jacob’s wrestling with an angel and we know almost instinctively that its meaning is diminished precisely in proportion to how literally we take it.  We know almost instinctively that we are meant to ask ourselves questions: What does the angel represent?  Why does Jacob have to be alone?  Why does it happen at night?  What happens at sunrise that causes the angel to need to flee?  Why does the angel refuse to be named while at the same time changing Jacob’s name to Israel?  The questions are almost infinite – and that’s the point.

Answering such questions is the fun of Judaism and describes its encounter with the infinite.  For example, the Slonimer Rebbe, Rabbi Shalom Noach Barzovsky, derives from the fact that the angel is anxious to flee as soon as the sun begins to rise, that each day God creates a new contingent of angels specific to that day and that day only.  This is an example of how one metaphor or myth yields another in the course of the search for meaning.  Furthermore, the Slonimer brings forward a related teaching already hinted at in the Tanach, but amplified in Rabbinic literature and coming to full maturity in Kabbalah that each day is created anew – from scratch one might say.  Creation is not a one-time affair.  Obviously then, each human being is created anew each day and moreover the task of each human being for that day is created especially for that day.  We cannot, says the Slonimer, take on anyone’s task but our own and only the one for that day.  Today’s task, if put off for tomorrow, would be the wrong task for tomorrow and would interfere with our meeting the responsibility of tomorrow’s task.  To derive this notion from our text suggests two important truths.  First, that we each have a task and obligation waiting for us to meet each and every day. Part of being human is to seek out today’s task and to meet it.  In addition, and perhaps more importantly, the fact that today is an entirely new beginning, provides the existential justification for the efficacy of tshuva – repentance.  Each day is an opportunity to begin anew.  What we did or didn’t do yesterday will bear on who we are today, but it will not define us.  Taken together, these two ideas constitute profound meaning-making concepts that in turn imply something about the mysterious nature of the Divine.  First is that the relationship between the human and the Divine is expressed in terms of meeting the responsibilities that we are confronted with each day.  Second is that there exists in the universe the possibility of forgiveness for when we fail to meet those responsibilities.  Both together yield hope and specifically hope in a potentially improving world.

In order for these powerful truths about the meaning of human life not to be abstractions, our tradition robed them in very human narratives, including today’s parsha, about the existential struggle all of us have at transitional moments in our lives.  Jacob needs to seek both forgiveness and to look forward with hope to the future.  Neil Gillman wanted to help a generation jaded by literalism to discover what already existed within a mature reading of classical texts.  He did not complete that work.  But that’s okay.  We who were privileged to learn from him, myself, some of my colleagues who are here today and many members of Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel who had the privilege of worshiping with Neil during the years that he was the Rabbi for our Kahaner High Holy Day services, now have the age old task of the new day ahead of us.  May his memory be a blessing for us all.