In my previous couple of posts, I reviewed those texts that the Torah itself identified as central to the lived experience of a Jewish life. I might also have turned to the selections from Deuteronomy read every seven years at the national gathering called Hakhel; since these are a Torah-ordained “refresher course” of faith, they might be instructive. In the event, though, they echo much we have seen, so I leave them for another time.

The end of the Biblical period, though, did not end God’s direct communication with us, and later Scriptures also emphasize core ideas that would shape a mission of Judaism. Like the Torah itself—even more so—that corpus of texts is too large to absorb in its entirety, so we once again have to find ways to identify that which is most essential from within those texts. Fortunately, the Talmud and Jewish tradition have each provided a way, which we will begin looking at today.

Prophetic Theology, the Talmudic Perspective

To get a sense of what the Talmud saw as those texts that lay out the essential aspects of Judaism, I turn to the end of Makkot. The passage is most famous because it is the source of the tradition that the Torah contains 613 commandments, the exact elucidation of which spawned the extensive genre known as ספרי מצוות, books of the commandments. Even though the continuation has been little noted or commented-on, I turn to it because it builds directly on that previous text, which is clearly central to Jewish ideas of how God constructed the religion.

After discussing the 613 mitzvot and their breakdown into obligations and prohibitions, the Talmud reads verses from later in history as having reduced those commandments to more manageable proportions, King David to eleven, Isaiah to six, Micah to three, Isaiah (again) to two, and Chabakuk to one. The Talmudic phrase for what they intended by phrasing all the mitzvot in smaller numbers— “בא…והעמידן על, so-and-so came and established them on”— is obscure, but Rashi, s.v. והעמידו, understood these smaller lists to offer ways to fulfill a representative sample of the Torah, even if a person failed to keep almost all of the Torah’s commandments.

Writing three hundred years later, Ran explains it in what seems to me as another way of saying the same thing. For him, the various prophets were identifying those mitzvot that would lead most directly to the World to Come. Once we remember that the World to Come is the reward for fulfillment of the Torah, that these mitzvot lead most directly to it suggests that they are, for Ran, the core mission of the religion.

If Rashi and Ran are not enough to establish that interpretation of the Talmud as unequivocal (I know of no competing ones), let me note the flow of the discussion itself. When trying to identify a prophet who reduced the commandments to one, the Talmud suggested Amos’ call (5:4) to “seek Me and live.” R. Nachman b. Yitzchak objects that “seek Me” might mean by keeping all the other mitzvot. From the objection, which is accepted as valid and leads the Talmud to offer an alternative verse as the single linchpin of a relationship with God, we seem to be looking for statements that do not simply assume the other commandments.

This is not to say, of course, that the Talmud, Rashi, or Ran thought the Prophets were guaranteeing religious success by fulfilling these commandments even accompanied by willful violation of any of the others. Few of the lists mention murder explicitly, for example, yet it is hard to imagine anyone would understand the Talmud to mean that a murderer could adhere to one of these shortened lists and qualify as a valid servant of God. The advantage is only that the person who actively and punctiliously seeks to fulfill these eleven, or six or one, will have a whole and meaningful religiosity, without needing to constantly consult a longer list of mitzvot.

Elaborating on all the lists would be lengthy, sometimes redundant, and necessarily interpretive, so I will restrict myself to the last three entries for insight into what the Talmud understood to be the Prophets’ vision of indispensable observance.

Justice, Charity, and Privacy

At the point where the discussion turns to a prophet who captured all of mitzvot in three dicta, the Talmud cites Micah 6:8: “הגיד לך אדם מה טוב ומה ה’ דורש ממך כי אם עשות משפט ואהבת חסד והצנע לכת עם אלוקיך, He has showed you, man, what is good and what God requires of you, to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” The Talmud interprets the first two of the three as justice and acts of kindness, and the third as a preference for privacy over publicity. The pungent Talmudic expression, which I paraphrase for brevity, goes: And walk humbly–these are weddings and funerals; and if that is true of these, which are generally done in public, all the more so that private matters should be enacted in private.

Taken together, the prophet seems to be telling us that a baseline relationship with God involves justice, kindness, and a sense of proper modesty, an avoidance of showiness or thrusting oneself into the public eye. With apologies for straying from my practice of leaving practical ramifications of these ideas for the posts at the end of this project, I cannot leave this unremarked.

First, although many speak of justice and kindness as characteristic of Jewish experience, I question whether they mean it as Micah does. Since he refers to what God wants from us, it seems plausible if not likely that he meant to define justice and kindness as God would, which would mean the halachic definition (not always the intuitive one). Much as Hillel told his convert to go and study to fully understand what it means not to do unto others, justice and kindness are terms that involve study, not intuition.

Even so, halachic justice and charity are close enough to the intuitive version that that is not such a divergence from common morality. The same is not true when it comes to “walking humbly with God,” if we take it to mean avoiding the public eye. In today’s world, even the Orthodox world, this value is turned on its head, where living in the public eye is the only way to validate oneself. This is a topic that bears greater investigation, since it is one of the central elements of a relationship with God, in the Talmud’s understanding of Micah, but to go any further necessarily involves personal interpretation of these norms. Instead, we will move on with the Talmudic discussion, to see the common denominators among the definitions offered.

The verse of Isaiah’s that the Talmud reads as encapsulating all of Judaism in two mitzvot—he had already been quoted for a six-mitzva presentation, where his call was to act justly, speak truthfully, reject all forms of financial chicanery, and abstain from listening to evil talk– refers only to observing justice and acting charitably. Here, the verse begins כה אמר ה’, Thus says the Lord, again reminding us that the definition of justice and charity comes from God.

What Kind of Ethics Over Ritual?

The paucity of ritual law in these verses is worth noting, as is their focus on interpersonal behavior, acting justly, charitably, and kindly, within the context of a relationship with God. Given that the Talmud sees the prophets cited later in its list as refining the earlier vision into ever-smaller groupings, not supplanting them, Chabakkuk’s call for faith would seem to also assume a faith that leads to the kinds of just, charitable, and kind actions referred to above.

If so, this section of the Talmud understands the Prophetic legacy as urging a faith in God that centers acting justly, charitably, and kindly. This might seem commonplace, but for two facts: First, that the morality being called for must originate in and be defined by God, and, second, the simple fact that many religious people, including but not limited to Jews, come to ritualize religiosity separate from their morality. Many of these people are indeed moral in their personal lives and some are not, but too few see that morality as a necessary, perhaps the necessary, expression of their faith.

I wonder, for example, how many Orthodox Jews see their careers, whether in medicine, law, business, or education, as opportunities for expression of their fidelity to God. Would a lawyer who refrains from dubious billing practices express that as an extension of his or her relationship with God, or as an expression of a basic human commitment to honesty? Would a doctor who heals the sick see that as a privileged opportunity to extend kindness as God does, or, again, an ordinary if laudable human activity?

I suspect that for many, those are instances of acting appropriately, but are not nearly as ‘religious’ as the acts of laying tefillin, shaking a lulav, or hearing the shofar. The Prophets’ words and the Talmudic interpretation argue for a shift in what we define as ‘religious’ activity, turning what is now the ordinary human into the backbone of what defines a relationship with God.

The Talmud clearly cherry-picked prophetic verses, so we might choose to strike this passage for having too clear a program. Besides, some might argue, since this text has no halachic ramifications, it might be just another aggadic source, of the kind I said we should not use. By analyzing a much broader segment of the Prophets, those read as haftarot, we will see that the messages attentive Jews have heard weekly in synagogue have driven home many of these same points for hundreds if not thousands of years.

The Haftarot and Their Theology

The haftarot, sections of Prophets read after Torah readings on Sabbaths, holidays, and other special occasions, are like the Shema, the Exodus, and the Revelation at Sinai, in that these texts would have repeatedly come to the attention of ordinary Jews more often than the rest of the Prophetic corpus. It is not clear when they developed, but Mishnayot in Megilla already know of some, so it is a fairly ancient practice.

Since these are briefer than Torah readings, and specifically selected from within a larger corpus, we can expect that they have messages of particular interest. Analyzing all of them is too lengthy a process to engage here–although I have done so elsewhere, in a book entitled Educating a People: An Haftarah Companion As a Way of Finding a Theology of Judaism available at www.lookstein.org/resources/haftarot_book.pdf– but by focusing only on the most prevalent and recurring ideas and themes, we find another avenue to a Jewish mission statement.

To avoid imposing my own vision on the haftarot literature, I have chosen to read through the eyes of Prof. Michael Fishbane, whose JPS translation and commentary is one of the few full-length English language discussions of these texts. Since he wrote for a broad (mostly non-Orthodox) audience, and has little theological axe to grind, the themes he identifies as repetitive would seem to be those so obvious and central that they should be agreed upon by all.

Limiting ourselves in this way leaves only a few ideas. Fishbane notes that national redemption figures greatly in the seven haftarot read following the Ninth of Av, and it appears in at least four other haftarot as well(1). More central, to Fishbane, is the focus on historical parallels, that we read the Song that Deborah sings after the defeat of Sisera in conjunction with the Song sung at the Sea, the incident with the Golden Calf is conjoined to Elijah on Mount Carmel, and the Exodus from Egypt (with its Paschal sacrifice) parallels the first one celebrated in Canaan, for just a few examples.

Although he does not make the connection, this concern with historical symmetries, as he calls them, fits well another theme he returns to often, Divine Providence. Both on a national and personal level, the haftarot speak of God as punishing sinners, forgiving the penitent, and, eventually, redeeming the people. In several of those, the haftara makes the crucial point that divine justice is meted out “measure for measure” (as the Talmud itself does several times, e.g. Sanhedrin 90a), meaning there is a parallel between the reward or punishment administered and the deeds that merited or incurred it.

To land on the positive side of Providence, the haftarot speak of recognizing one’s sinfulness (as a people and as individuals) and repenting, with emphasis on the moral as opposed to the ritual, on social justice rather than sacrificial practices. One clear exception is the Sabbath which, as Professor Fishbane notes, is greatly emphasized, and whose desecration is singled out as “one of the reasons for the exile.”

In his summary, Fishbane highlights “the strong emphasis …on moral right (even over sacral rite)…that the fate of the nation depends upon the covenant obedience of the people…and that the cycle of sin and punishment may be broken by obedience.” On the more positive side, he notes that the prophets also “proclaim a future restoration and utopia…a new spirit and knowledge of the Lord… obedience to God will not be learned but a matter of instinct.”

Taken together, these themes match well those we found in the Biblical texts already discussed, in the verses of the Prophets the Talmud noted, and that combine to set up a fundamental agenda for the Jewish people: recognizing a unique and unitary God Who oversees the world, rewards and punishes according to people’s actions, awaits obedience and repentance to bring eras of bounty and blessing, intends to eventually produce a restored and revivified Jewish commonwealth, and lays out commandments that lead people in these directions.

The content of those commandments, of course, is found in the realm of mitzvot, and we will soon turn to that world to get a sense of whether and which of those are given more emphasis than others. The final step before doing that, though, is to take on the post-Talmudic perspective of central aspects of faith, to see what has been accepted by rabbinic scholars throughout history as the defining core, and mission, of a Jew in his or her approach to the world.

(1) See Michael Fishbane, The JPS Bible Commentary: The Haftarot (JPS: Philadelphia, 2002), in the discussion of the haftarot to Bereishit, p. 4, Lech Lecha, p. 18, Vaera, p. 88, and Mishpatim, p. 115.