The Torah was revealed piecemeal, before Mount Sinai, at Mount Sinai, and after Mount Sinai. Did this make the Torah “back to the future” or “forward to the past?” Or both? Put differently, has anything changed in the status of the Torah? This issue resides in a shadow of the Torah, Exodus 12:19.
The verse also affects the status of faith. Faith has no rational foundation. But can there be faith without any foundation at all?
Shadow in the Torah: Two-word time warp
I cannot think of a more innocent two-word phrase in the Hebrew Bible that is more laden with perplexity and meaning. A shadow in the Torah indeed, and so very easy to skip over. A phrase whose meaning seems obvious but which poses a thicket of problems and yields a plethora of insights — if you stop to notice it.
The short phrase is an obscure time warp, a verse in Exodus about the laws of Passover. G-d tells Moses and Aaron when they are on the cusp of the Exodus: “For seven days, leaven may not be found in your houses, for anyone who eats anything that leavens — that soul shall be cut off from the community of Israel, whether a convert or a native of the land” (Exodus 12:19). The problematic phrase in the verse is “[whether] a convert.” What could be problematic here? This seems straightforward enough. Judaism accepts converts as full fledged Jews. Whatever rights and responsibilities a born Jew has, so too a convert. The laws of Passover draw no distinction between a “native of the land” and a “convert.” So what’s the problem?
It is this. When G-d told Moses and Aaron the laws of Passover, encompassing the convert, there was nothing to convert to! Judaism did not exist! There was no Torah yet. There was no Jewish people yet. At this point in history, the only Divine commandments were reproduction (“be fruitful and multiply”), circumcision, not to eat the sciatic nerve, and Passover. There was no Jewish religion per se — not yet. It was the revelation at Sinai that created the Torah. It was the liberation from Egypt that transformed a slave people into a nation with a Divine mission. Before all that, what was a “convert?” It was a mystery to the first recipients of G-d’s instructions for Passover — the Israelites who had witnessed the first nine plagues but not yet the tenth.
Observe: the revelation of the Ten Commandments and the Torah at Mount Sinai effectuated a mass conversion of the Israelites. They converted to being Jews. They accepted upon themselves the system of mitzvot, commandments. In fact, the essential laws of conversion are derived from the Sinai experience itself. Only thereafter was there conversion to Judaism. But the problematic verse’s application of the laws of Passover to the “native” and the “convert” occurred earlier. A convert? What could that word have meant to Moses and the Israelites at that earlier time? It was like a reference to Major League Baseball’s Most Valuable Player before baseball was invented. An MVP was meaningless before Abner Doubleday devised the game. So too a “convert” was meaningless before the Torah existed. Yet, there it is in the verse, “whether a convert or a native.”
Mass conversion at Mount Sinai: Back to the future
At a minimum the verse meant this: There is punishment for not observing the laws of Passover for the native of the land and for . . . someone else. Who that someone else was, was not yet known, but it is clear that the laws of Passover extended beyond the immediate recipient, the “native.” The mention of “convert” tells Moses, Aaron and the Israelites that they are not the sole object of G-d’s concern, they do not exhaust His attention. The laws of Passover apply to a group larger than they.
G-d’s mention of an unknown recipient of these laws conveyed a message: With everything going on — plagues against the Egyptians, and matzah and Pascal lamb for the Israelites — there was still more going on. G-d sent a signal: All that you see, dramatic as it is, is just the beginning.
Mention of this unknown “convert” must have triggered curiosity. Who is this person, along with us natives, who is commanded all these Passover laws?
Of course, Abner Doubleday did invent baseball and there is something called a Most Valuable Player. The Israelites did receive the Torah and there is something called a convert. The Israelites themselves were converts! At Mount Sinai, they passed through three of the four essential stages of conversion: 1. commitment to the commandments of the Torah; 2. immersion in a mikveh; and 3. animal sacrifice. The conversion requirement of a sacrifice is suspended now due to the absence of the Holy Temple of Jerusalem. Back then, the fourth requirement — circumcision — had been known since the time of Abraham (Gen. 17:9-14, 23-26). In fact, it was circumcision that hinted to the Israelites, before their conversion at Sinai, what G-d’s reference to “convert” means. At the end of G-d’s instructions about Passover, there is a second mention of “convert.” G-d says that a future “convert” may offer the Pascal lamb, provided he becomes circumcised (Exodus 12:48-49). This would transform him into a “native of the land” — but it would not transform him into a convert to Judaism, a recipient and practitioner of the Torah.
Before Sinai, G-d’s reference to a convert’s circumcision and Pascal lamb imparted only a pale reflection of what a “convert” would come to connote. Only after Sinai could the Israelites grasp the term, due to their own revelatory conversion experience at Sinai, with its heavy cloud, thunder, lightning, fire and smoke, not to mention G-d’s own voice.
Faith’s personal validation: Even faith itself
After Sinai, the newly converted Jews could look back at G-d’s delivery of the laws of Passover to the Israelites, “whether a convert or a native of the land,” and realize: Not everything that G-d says is immediately understood. The Divine word can be mysterious. The Divine intent can be inaccessible.
We have here a “back to the future” sequence — a Divine instruction received now, but understood only later, only retrospectively. We have here a primary experience of faith. In retrospect, the Israelites’ curiosity aroused by G-d’s initial, mysterious reference to an unknown status (a “convert”) confirmed that G-d does not speak nonsensibly. G-d is not absurd. What G-d meant by “convert” was later made clear to the Israelites. Its meaning was revealed and experientially confirmed.
This raises a question. What if one does not experience a confirmation of one’s faith — not even once? Could such a faith be sustained, especially in the face of evil and misfortune? Faith needs personal confirmation, at least once. This confirmation might be recovery from illness, the silence of a shimmering mountain lake, the ex- perience of Shabbos, a parent’s firm faith or, as my late college friend Willie Helmreich once told me, his survival alongside someone else who was cut down by a bullet. Pure faith with no confirmation whatsoever is an impossibility. G-d may trigger curiosity with an initial, obscure Passover command to a “convert,” but curiosity alone will not sustain faith in the Commander.
When Moses asked the Israelites before the revelation at Sinai whether they would accept the Torah, the Israelites famously replied, “We will do and we will hear.” We will commit to obeying the Torah (“doing”) even without understanding it (“hearing”); we commit to it now even though we will grasp its rationale only after studying it.
How could the Israelites undertake this great declaration of faith?
It was because earlier their faith had been confirmed through the miracles of Exodus — their liberation from tyranny and their miraculous salvation at the splitting of the Reed Sea. Their faith was not absent confirmation; they had had a deep experience of G-d. On this basis, they could make a comprehensive declaration of faith in the Torah.
Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein put this poignantly when he wrote that the foundation of faith is . . . faith itself. “At the level of rational demonstration, this is, of course, patently circular,” he wrote. Nonetheless, the experience of G-d in prayer, nature, trust, family or halachic observance is the firmest confirmation of faith. “In the final analysis, the primary human source of faith is faith itself.”
The nature of Jewish scripture: Forward to the past
A critical question remains. The ancient Israelites lived in a time warp. We don’t. To the ancient Israelites, the originally mysterious meaning of “convert” was clarified after their own conversion experience at Mount Sinai, followed by Moses’ teaching them the rest of the Torah during their 40-year trek in the wilderness. But for us there is no mystery. When we read Exodus 12:19 — “whether a convert or a native of the land” — we know immediately what “convert” refers to. This raises the question: For us, as opposed to the original Israelites, what is the status of the Torah’s original reference to a “convert?” What is the status of the Torah? What is Jewish scripture?
Think it through. The Torah’s reference to a convert was not understandable to its Israelite recipients, but to us it is understandable. This is because for us the Torah is not “in process,” as it was for the ancient Israelites. For us, the Torah is not received piecemeal. The Torah is received complete. For us, the Torah may be unpacked by all of the hermeneutical methods integral to it. We may deduce from the phrase, “whether a convert or a native of the land,” that converts and born Jews should be treated as equals. For us, the Torah is the authoritative Divine teaching, both in its definitive meaning and in its infinite levels of additional meaning.
We are not handicapped, as were the ancient Israelites prior to Sinai, by partial meaning and piecemeal revelation. As Rabbi Yechiel Perr put it, once a story or a law or an apparently odd term is enshrined in the Torah, its meaning is no longer limited to its original context. We are free to probe the Hebrew text of the Torah in all its layers of meaning. The Torah is the eternal teacher once its Author revealed it en toto.
For the ancient Israelites, the Torah’s original reference to a “convert” required a “back to the future,” a subsequent revelation of its meaning. For all Jews who came after the revelation, the Torah’s original reference a “convert” enjoyed an expansive “forward to the past,” an application of the subsequent hermeneutics of the Torah to the text as it was given, in order to provide us with its full meaning; for example, the equality of the convert and the born Jew. For us, Jewish scripture is both clear and fertile.
“G-d spoke once, I heard twice.” — Psalms 62:2.
