Parshah Commentary

This week’s parshah focuses on the reach of human responsibility. The Torah makes clear that we are all accountable under the covenant, but the exact scope of that responsibility is left elusive. This uncertainty plays out in interpretations of a cryptic verse in our parshah: After warning the Israelites that they will be exiled if they violate the covenant, the Torah teaches that “hidden things are for YHWH our God; but revealed things are for us and for our descendants forever to do all the words of this Torah.”

The Rabbinic tradition records at least three explanations of what these hidden and revealed things are and in what way we might understand them as belonging to God or to “us.” The Yom Kippur liturgy interprets the hidden things as referring to harm each of us committed unknowingly and about which we remain unaware. Just after the confession of enumerated sins, the liturgy has us add a more general note to account for transgressions “that are revealed to us” as well as “those that are not revealed to us.” We recite: “Those revealed to us we have already said before You and admitted them to You. And those that are not revealed to us are revealed and known to You, according to the spoken word, ‘Hidden things are for YHWH our God; but revealed things are for us and for our descendants forever.’” In this reading, the verse serves to soften the terror of the warnings of doom if we violate the covenant, relieving our guilt and culpability for harm we’ve done that we don’t know about. According to the early midrashic work Sifrei Bemidbar the hidden things are obligations not perceivable in the Torah, which God has not yet shown us. Further intimacy with and knowledge of God will eventually grant us deeper human awareness and understanding of what it means to be responsible; in the meantime, we are on the hook only for what has already been revealed. Like the previous interpretation, this one reads the verse as diluting the threats of brutal punishment preceding it.

While both of these interpretations address the individual, limiting the personal scope of liability, the third and most prominent Rabbinic interpretation, in the Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin, understands the verse to address the body politic as a whole. This reading affirms that the community bears collective responsibility for the sins of its members in a case when the public knows about the misdeeds, but exonerates the community as a whole for individual transgressions that have been hidden from the public. This may be the most literarily compelling of the three readings, because the immediately preceding context shows extreme concern with just that question. The 12 curses ritually announced two chapters earlier in the covenant inauguration ceremony are, as Rashbam explains, directed toward those transgressing in private, the domain in which the judicial community is least empowered to intervene and in which the harm-doer is most likely to believe that they can get away with it. Just ten verses before our verse, the Torah describes such a character, imagining them delusionally announcing, “I’ll remain at peace, though acting with willful obstinance,” while bringing ruin on everyone.

Collective responsibility for the sin of an individual is, on the face of it, a scandalous proposition. Reacting to a threat in the Vayikra curses that after years of sin the people will suffer for both their own and their ancestors’ sins, the Midrash Sifra objects, “But hasn’t the Omnipresent One promised Israel not to punish parents via their children nor children via their parents? As is said [in a different Biblical verse]: ‘Parents shall not be put to death on account of children and children shall not be put to death on account of parents’!” The midrash resolves the contradiction by arguing that this intergenerational liability applies only “when they hold onto the deeds of their ancestors generation after generation.” In other words, people should never be held accountable for someone else’s harm if they did not participate. Similarly, another midrash in the Sifra unpacks a different curse, that “they shall stumble, one person by their kin,” to mean that one person will stumble through another person’s sin, and concludes that the overarching principle derived from this clause is that “all of Israel are liable for each other.” Both times this teaching is recorded in the Talmud, it includes the caveat that every Jew is responsible for the sins of any other Jew—but only in cases when “they had the ability to protest, but did not.” Harm done secretly in our midst, like much of the harm perpetrated by powerful people against those subordinate to them, goes on unprotested, which might raise anxiety that our whole society is responsible. On the face of it, our verse reassures us that it is unjust to hold us all accountable for crimes we don’t know about; had we known about them, maybe we would have protested.

There is an anomaly in our verse, though, that casts doubt about that reassurance. Our verse is written in the Torah with dots above its letters, one of ten verses in the Torah that must be written in this way, likely indicating scribal uncertainty regarding whether the words in question are even the ones meant to be written. Each of the possible interpretations of our verse therefore must account for what added uncertainty the dots are meant to refer to. According to the Talmud in this last reading, the dots indicate that the shape of public accountability was not static, but increased when the people crossed into the Land of Israel and were sworn to the covenant: National sovereignty entails more accountability. Within this reading, though, there is a profound dispute as to the scope of collective responsibility. Rabbi Yehudah explains that the verse as it appears applied before entering the land, but afterward, the Israelites became accountable even for hidden sins of individuals. As Rashi explains, the 11 dots written above the letters in our verse correspond to the 11 Hebrew letters comprising “for YHWH our God.” Though they were moved to another clause due to the impropriety of marking God’s name for erasure, they indicate that once the community has sovereignty, God no longer spares it from accountability for hidden transgressions. The dots tell us that the verse reads, “the hidden things and the revealed things are for us and for our descendants forever.” Rabbi Nechemia found Rabbi Yehudah’s explanation shocking: How could God punish us for hidden sins? Instead, he argues, before crossing into the land, the people were not collectively accountable for any individual transgression, no matter how public. Only when they crossed into the land were they communally on the hook for the public actions of individual members, though never for private, hidden harms done by individuals.

Rabbi Nechemia would seem to have the stronger case: How can the public be culpable for what individuals do in private? There are some textual problems with his position, though. For one thing, in the Book of Joshua, shortly after the inauguration of the covenant, one individual, ‘Akhan, steals proscribed wealth and hides it away. In response, God thunders that “Israel has sinned! They have broken the covenant by which I bound them. They have taken of the proscribed and put it in their vessels; they have stolen; they have broken faith!” It seems that God does hold the collective accountable for the hidden sin of an individual. Second, Rabbi Nechemiah doesn’t have a compelling reading of why the dots are situated where they are and how the verse should be read upon emendation. Third, the public recitation of the curses at the inauguration of the covenant in last week’s parshah highlights that private sins are of utmost public concern. Why pronounce curses against private sinners in the ceremony of pledging the community to the covenant if the people aren’t to be accountable for those private sinners?

In a probing essay on our verse and its interpretations, which thoroughly informed this dvar Torah, Devora Steinmetz suggests a few theories for the legal proposition that the whole community is answerable for transgressions about which they know nothing. Perhaps the community is accountable because “something in the communal structure or culture” enabled the private sin. Alternatively, even if the community did not enable the harm in any way, accountability is inseparable from impact: “Their fate is intertwined.”

We are not liable for the harm done by others when we object; we are liable when we do not object. But the case of not knowing about harm is also a case in which we did not object. Why didn’t we know about it? Was it, maybe, more convenient not to know? Was there some communal will in not knowing? The feminist movement has shown that it is the private sphere where the worst harm often is inflicted on the least protected citizens. As Catherine MacKinnon put it, “for women the measure of the intimacy has been the measure of the oppression. This is why feminism has had to explode the private.” Let this be the year in which all our communities embrace radical responsibility and create cultures of care that leave no hidden corners of neglect for harm to fester while we putter along not knowing.

Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein is a Torah teacher and political educator based in Chicago, where he directs the Avodah Justice Fellowship.