So Many Commandments

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, February 25, 2006

When you have a Torah portion as full of mitzvoth, commandments as Leah's, you need some way to sort out and organize all the different bits of information. Traditionally there have been several different ways of organizing the commandments.

In the Talmud the commandments are sometimes divided between those which are anchored to a specific time for their observance, like lighting Shabbat candles, and those not associated with a specific time, like giving tzedakah. Traditionally in Orthodox Jewish law, women were released from the obligation to perform some of the time bound commandments in order that they have time for their family duties. Public prayer was one of those commandments from which women were traditionally released. Thankfully that is not the approach we take at Shir Hadash today.

Another way the commandments were organized was by the reasoning behind them. Some medieval Jewish writers spoke about commandments which were sichliot- that is that could be arrived at by the practice of reason, and those that were chukkim, those whose reason remains a mystery. They believed that many commandments had a social benefit and thus if the Torah had not provided these laws, human society would have invented them. These sichliut range from the general, like "Thou Shalt Not Murder", to the more specific, like putting a fence on the roof so no one falls off or not removing your neighbors landmark to steal his property. Chukkim, like Kashrut, were understood to be those laws whose reason we might never understand but which are a mark of Jewish distinctiveness.

Maimonides divided commandments into the light and the serious. Interestingly, he viewed the commandments surrounding the holidays as light, and the mitzvah of learning Hebrew, as one of the serious commandments. This division worried other rabbis who feared that the average Jew might be tempted to pay less attention to those commandments considered lighter.

Another division of the commandments is between those which relate to the relations between people, bein adam lechaveiro and those related to relations with God, bein adam le Makom. Interestingly, even though we think of the Torah as a religious text, many more of the commandments are bein adam lechaveiro than bein adam le Makom.

Finally there is the division that Leah discussed, between negative and positive commandments. People are sometimes surprised by the large number of negative commandments, but consider the human imagination. For years I taught Confirmation without having a rule that stated that one couldn't sit one's little brother on the hood of your car and drive around the parking lot, until someone thought that was a lot of fun. Thankfully no one was hurt but we did discover that we needed one more rule.

Negative commandments aren't actually as bad as they might sound- they only tell you the one thing you can't do. You remain free to choose among all the things that you can do.

I think of the negative commandments as the base, while the positive commandments are like the icing on the cake. The negative commandments keep us from doing evil while the positive commandments provide opportunities to elevate our lives. We may obey the negative commandments just to stay out of trouble but usually there is a higher motivation for following the positive commandments.

Scholars argue about what to do when a negative and positive commandment conflict and have trouble deriving a general rule. For example, we are told Thou Shalt Not Steal and we are told to hold a Lulav in our hand on Succot when saying the blessing . Can you say the blessing on a stolen Lulav? No. But there are other cases where a positive commandment trumps a negative commandment, as where the commandment to preserve life trumps the commandment to fast on Yom Kippur, if you are ill or weak from age. In general positive commandments take precedence on our time, but violating a negative commandment is viewed as a more serious offense.

Recently a scholar looking carefully through the Sefer Hamitzvot, the book of the commandments, which lists all of the traditional 613 commandments, discovered that after removing the agricultural commandments, those relating just to the land of Israel, those relating to the priests, and to the animal sacrifices that Jews no longer made, there are really there are only 60 commandments which remain obligatory on the average Jew.

Leah, you have shown us that you don't operate on the base level, in only obeying the negative commandments in order to avoid trouble. Through this Bat Mitzvah and in the taking on of all many additional mitzvot, we see you chosing to live at the higher level, adopting positive commandments to elevate your own life and the life of the community.