Torah
In addition to a commitment to monotheism, Judaism also claims to be a “revealed” religion in that its most basic teachings are believed to be the result of divine revelation. Most of the twenty-four books that make up the Hebrew Bible advance this claim.
Furthermore, when Jews employ the Hebrew word Torah (Hebrew, “teaching”) in its most inclusive sense, they are referring to the totality of God’s revelation to the people of Israel. The very fact that Judaism possesses a sacred scripture presupposes a belief in divine-human communication, as well as a belief in the trustworthiness of those individuals—whether prophets or sages—who served as instruments of divine speech and understanding.Torah, however, has additional meanings that are crucial to an understanding of Jewish faith. Thus, when reference is made to the scrolls of the Torah (which Seth read from at the beginning of this chapter), what is meant are the parchment copies of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible (known in English as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). Such scrolls can be found in any synagogue in the world. Jews view this portion of Judaism’s ancient scriptures with particular reverence because these scrolls contain virtually all of the sacred legislation contained within the Hebrew Bible. Given the centrality of the idea of sacred law in traditional Judaism, the word Torah has often been translated as “the Law.”
An even more expansive use of the word Torah can be found in the practice of referring to a comprehensive collection of commentaries on biblical law as the “Oral Torah.” This multivolume anthology of interpretive and folkloristic writings, more commonly called the Talmud, represents the final extension in Jewish history of the idea of revelation. The teachers—known as rabbis—whose comments are preserved in these volumes claimed to be passing on the oral instructions of the biblical Moses, to whom God originally imparted his laws at Mount Sinai.
Though not every community of Jews has accepted this claim as historically or theologically valid, the vast majority of the world’s Jews have accorded to the Talmud a degree of sanctity and intellectual authority almost equal to that of the biblical Torah, thereby making the Talmud a virtual second scripture in Judaism. Much of the education of rabbis today consists of studying the Talmud, as well as a vast body of interpretive literature (commentaries on a commentary) that has grown up around the Talmud.Compare the idea of mitzvot in Judaism to the concept of divine commandments in Christianity and Islam.
Mitzvot
At the core of the Torah tradition lies the concept of the mitzvot (Hebrew, “commandments”). Judaism can be described as a religion of “divine commandments.” By the Rabbinic (or “Formative”) Age, the number of such commandments that can be found in the first five books of the Hebrew Bible was fixed at 613, and each of these mitzvot was viewed as an essential link in a chain of religious laws that could not be broken. Today, at least half of these laws are no longer applicable, either to contemporary society or to a Judaism without a temple in Jerusalem, and therefore without a priesthood and a system of animal sacrifice. At the heart of this vast network of sacred laws lie the Ten Commandments, which can be found in two slightly different forms in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. For Jews everywhere, these ten pronouncements have served not only as the bedrock of their faith but also as the basis of their social and philosophical ideals.
However, just like the term Torah, the word mitzvot (singular, mitzvah) has taken on another, more informal meaning—that of “good deeds.” In ordinary conversation, Jews routinely refer to any act of generosity or good will as a mitzvah. A glance at a traditional prayer book will reveal exactly which good deeds the rabbis expected every adult to feel especially bound by in everyday life. The list includes honoring one’s parents, visiting the sick, outfitting a bride, and peacefully resolving quarrels between neighbors.
But the greatest mitzvah, the rabbis go on to explain, is the study of Torah because it contains all the moral wisdom God has imparted to the Jewish people.Nevertheless, there are practical limits to how far anyone can go in performing a good deed or fulfilling a divine commandment. Those limits are formally acknowledged in rabbinic law under the principle of “the preservation of life.” Thus, the rabbis taught that whenever canying out a mitzvah entails imminent risk to one’s life or health, one is released from that obligation until the threat to life has passed. The only exceptions to this rule—and these exceptions became the basis for the concept of martyrdom in Judaism—are those situations in which a Jew is commanded to worship another god, to commit adultery, or to murder an innocent human being. In all other cases, the traditionalist view is that laws may be bent, but not permanently broken, to accommodate exigent circumstances.