writing parshat naso is....

At present I'm writing parshat Naso.

Parshat Naso is very, very boring.

Now, you know normally I wouldn't say such a thing, because there's something interesting in nearly everything if you look for it, but this really is very boring.

Parshat Bemidbar, the one previous to Naso, had the census, which listed the leaders of the tribes and counted how many people were in the tribe. That wasn't so interesting, but it's okay; you can play the name game, so the leader of the tribe of Zevulun goes from being Eliav ben Helon to My-god-is-my-dad son of Window. Naso goes through all the same names again, though, and the name game's less fun when you only played it last week.

Worse, it does it like this: On the first day, the leader of the tribe of Yehudah, Nahshon ben Aminadav. His offering was one silver dish, of a hundred and thirty shekels' weight; one silver bowl, seventy shekels by the shekel of the sanctuary; both of them full of fine flour mixed with oil as a meal-offering. One spoon, ten gold, full of incense; one young bull, one ram, one lamb in its first year for an olah offering; one kid from the flock as a hatat offering; for the shelaimim offering, two oxen, five rams, five male goats, five lambs in their first year. This was the offering of Nahshon ben Aminadav.

OK, fine, right? Jolly interesting. But it says it TWELVE TIMES, once for each tribe. I tell you, after about the fourth time it's pretty old, and by the ninth time you're desperate for it to be over.

It's not just me, either. Here we have some pages from Torat Hayim, a set of books containing the Torah plus the traditional commentaries. The top image is what an average sort of page looks like; a couple of verses of Torah, the Aramaic translation of Onkelos (a throwback to the days when Aramaic was the vernacular), and a bunch of commentators' contributions, some wordier than others.The bottom image is what our section of Naso looks like - days three, four, five and six. You see the Torah text and the Aramaic translation? and NOTHING ELSE. Even Rashi couldn't find any nits to pick, and Rashi is Mr Nit-Picker Extraordinaire. Even the Ramban, who can sometimes take up a whole page just rambling on his own, couldn't find anything to say about this. No-one has anything to say at all! When even Rashi and the Ramban can't think of anything to say, you're pretty justified in thinking it dull.

In fact, it strikes me as like nothing so much as a temple honours list. You know when the shul does its thank-you list after the fundraising drive? And it says, "The following donations are gratefully acknowledged: Millie Cohen, twenty siddurim, in memory of Irving Cohen; Phil Stein, twenty siddurim, in memory of Sadie Leib; Valerie and Max Miller, twenty siddurim, in memory of Irving Miller," and so on. I've written a few of those, too, and there is not an awful lot of difference between that and this.

This feeds into another problem, which is better saved for another post. But I've written the other post already, so you don't have to wait for it. Here it is. Blogs being what they are, you probably read that one first.

(no subject)

This post is a sort-of continuation to this post.

The arch-traditional view holds that the entire text of the Torah was dictated to Moses on Mount Sinai in 1313 BCE by God; Moses copied it out a few times whilst on Sinai, and all subsequent copies have been made from those masters, the text remaining marvellously unaltered through several thousand years. You don't have to look very far to see that the text has rather suffered a few minor mutations since then, mostly yuds and vavs popping in and out. Yuds and vavs don't alter the meaning of the word per se, but in a theology which holds that every single letter of the Torah contains oodles of meaning, such that a law may be decided on the existence or lack thereof of a single yud or vav, that's a bit problematic. Nonetheless, the text is more or less intact.

Then you look a bit more closely, and just sometimes there are bits which look an awful lot like scribal errors. The homophones "lo" meaning "to him" or "to it" and "lo" meaning "not" get confused a few times; in Leviticus 25, for instance, the difference between a city which has unto it walls and a city which has not walls is considerable. It's exceedingly easy to make that kind of error in copying; on the other hand one might say that it is not an error but a deliberate message from the Holy One.

Then you look closely on a large scale, and sometimes there are Really Weird Things Going On. You get stories which contradict each other, different linguistic styles, that sort of thing. Higher biblical criticism posits that such Really Weird Things happen when you have several sets of canonical legends from different cultures which get combined into a single canon when the cultures merge, and tries to deduce which bits are from which sources. Higher biblical criticism is, obviously, Massively Problematic if you believe that God dictated the Torah to Moses complete on Mount Sinai.

When writing, I don't pick up so much on the large-scale oddities, nor really so much on the minor spelling things, but more on the tone of the parts I'm wriitng. My relationship with text is fairly experiential; if I'm reading fiction, I read not so much for the details of the story, more for the atmosphere one experiences whilst reading the story. If I'm writing Torah, I don't remember the precise words of the text necessarily, but whatever it was that that particular combination of words evoked in me. While I was writing Exodus, I was struck by the disproportionate amount of space given over to the minutae of the sanctuary tent, and how the holy shopping list at that point doesn't fit into the narrative very smoothly, and it made me think; if I wanted people to think that something was really important and they ought to donate lots of money to it, a lengthy description of how God commanded said thing and how our ancestors willingly donated to it would really be rather useful.

Earlier in Bemidbar, in chapter 3, there's a chunk detailing the division of the ritual duties amongst the sons of Aaron. By the way, I've theoretically read all this before a number of times, but it's very easy to skim-read this stuff and not pay detailed attention to every word. When you're writing, you have to pay attention to every word, so you see it in a different way, so this is actually the first time I've noticed some of this even though I've read it umpteen times. Anyway, this division of duties reminded me of a Mishnah which talks about the fierce competition amongst the priests for the temple duties. In particular, a certain part of the service could be performed by whoever got there first, and the duty priests would all gallop round the sanctuary and up the altar, pushing and shoving to get to the front. The altar being rather high and not having handrails, people quite often sustained injury (the point of the mishnah there is that eventually they instituted a safer way of allocating the work, as I recall). This image stayed with me, too; being willing to risk falling off the altar and breaking one's leg suggests a pretty high prestige on getting to do the parts of the service. The sort of thing, in fact, that would be hotly contested unless it was utterly inarguable. A legend suggesting divine origin for allocating different families to different jobs would, again, be rather useful.

And then shortly afterwards is the temple honours list - "The following donations are gratefully acknowledged: Millie Cohen, twenty siddurim, in memory of Irving Cohen; Phil Stein, twenty siddurim, in memory of Sadie Leib; Valerie and Max Miller, twenty siddurim, in memory of Irving Miller" - only it's actually "On the first day, the leader of the tribe of Yehudah, Nahshon ben Aminadav. His offering was one silver dish, of a hundred and thirty shekels' weight; one silver bowl, seventy shekels by the shekel of the sanctuary..." I can totally see that someone polishing up the canonical texts would be inclined to emphasise this sort of thing.

In historical context, the sacrificial cult which became rabbinic Judaism had been scattered over the land. At some point, the cult centralised in the Jerusalem temple, not without a lot of resistance; the Jerusalem priests I think claimed authenticity through lineage to Aaron. Also, the Temple required a good deal of taxation to fund its construction. King Solomon had pretty good statescraft, and when he built the temple was able to persuade people to cough up, but there's only so much coughing up a society can do, and a sacrificial cult is pretty expensive to maintain. Given this, the similarity of some of the priestly bits to some of the materials put out by shuls makes quite a lot of sense, in my head. Certainly makes it a bit less boring. This is a paragraph which could be expanded to a whole book, or several books. Of course it's a bit sketchy on the details.

Of course, then the question is: if this whole thing was written by people like me, why on earth do any of it? The answer to that could take a whole book, too, but basically: people need a sense of the awesomeness of the big picture, people need communal identity and social structure, and people need lifecycle structure. Rabbinic Judaism gives me that. And actually, rabbinic Judaism can do pretty much anything it damn well likes; it can contradict the Torah if it wants to, and sometimes it jolly well does. It's not really motivated by What God Said so much as by What People Do. Unless you're a hermit, you have to deal with What People Do no matter what standards you choose to live by; Judaism gives me a structure for dealing with that, one which enables me to work towards being a good person in a good society. If I can do that, it doesn't matter a great deal whether the inspiration for it came from a God on a Mountain or a Priest in a Temple.