Parshah Commentary

What is the point of a dvar Torah in the midst of a genocide? Writers for this parshah column—myself included—generally take for granted that Torah can offer something useful. This extends a general premise of a magazine like Jewish Currents, which assumes that there is some political utility to a finely honed essay or an artful cover on a print issue. But it is hard to insist on the importance of art or ancient texts in the face of mass death. Enough ink has been spilled over the past few years to drown an army, yet the war machine grinds on. Amid such carnage, do words—of Torah or any kind—even matter? What’s the point?

This week’s parshah, Behaalotecha, offers one way to think through this thicket of questions. It opens with God’s instructions to Moses—which he is meant to pass along to his brother Aaron—on how to proceed with the dedication of the Mishkan, the moveable sanctuary that will accompany the Israelites on their desert journey. “When you mount the lamps, let the seven lamps give light at the front of the lampstand,” God explains. Taken on its face, this directive might seem like little more than decorating advice—a tip on how to light the menorah to illuminate the inside quarters of the Tabernacle. But in a midrash in Breishit Rabbah, the Rabbis identify a theological problem: Why is it ritually mandated to light lamps? Does an omnipotent God need something as feeble as a candelabra? In other words: What is the point? 

The midrash answers by teaching that the lamps are lit by humans to “accord them merit”— positive spiritual rewards of some sort—not because God “needs the lamps that belong to flesh and blood.” The lights that we are commanded to kindle “for God” are really for us. 

This answer, however, could easily lead us back to futility: If nothing humans do affects God, why bother? The verse the midrash uses as its interpretive hook, however, points us in another direction. Per the genre conventions of this style of midrash, the text starts with a seemingly unrelated Biblical verse, in this case from Isaiah: “It pleased the Lord for the sake of His righteousness to make the Torah great and glorious.” The midrash glosses this as God being pleased when the Jewish people commit to fulfilling God’s commandments—to performing mitzvot. 

A noteworthy element of this explanation is that it contains an elision, one that a traditional reader might not even notice: There is no actual mention of mitzvot in the verse from Isaiah. Given that, why do the rabbis make this association? This raises the question of where the notion comes from. If God wants to make “the Torah” great and glorious, why is the way to do that through mitzvot? One could have ventured that the way to make Torah great is simply through its study. But there is a strong tendency in the Jewish tradition to treat “Torah” and “mitzvot” as inseparable—a single, unified concept. 

This integration of study and deed suggests a way of thinking about the question with which we began: What value can words generally, and the Torah more specifically, offer during a time of genocide?

The 20th-century Jewish scholar and philosopher Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner fleshes out this connection between study and deed in his collection the Pachad Yitzhak (Shavuot 13). He writes that the reason halachah mandates that one must get up from studying Torah to join a funeral procession or bridal party passing by (put differently, one must temporarily leave one’s intellectual pursuits to join comrades in the street in grief or in joy) is because “without the fulfillment of mitzvot, the vow to study Torah is not fulfilled, because it [Torah] is on the condition of active doing.” All our light, all our Torah, all our writing, is only meaningful if it shines outward, if it makes a mark on the world. 

This idea resonates with the work of Palestinian writers who have been at the forefront of thinking through the meaning of words in the shadow of annihilation. In late 2023, the Palestinian American performance artist Fargo Nissim Tbakhi argued in his lyrical essay “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide”: “What Palestine requires is an approach to writing whose primary purpose is to gather others up with us, to generate within them an energy which their bodies cannot translate into anything but revolutionary movement . . . We must be engaged in this kind of writing, which calls others into mobilization, generating feelings within our audiences that cannot be dispersed through the act of reading, but must be carried out into collective action.”

Applied to Torah, this framework means that our intellectual and spiritual explorations of text must lead to mitzvot—material endeavors in the world. Or as Tbakhi puts it, “We must write in such a way that there is no business, there is no usual.” We must create a world in which Torah without mitzvot is an absurdity. Those of us who teach Torah must make it such that the Torah we offer makes it impossible not to act—to look up from our books and screens and flow into the streets, not as a turning away from Torah but as its highest fulfillment. 

Avigayil Halpern is a rabbi and writer based in Washington, DC, whose work focuses on feminist and queer Torah. Read more of her writing here.