Everybody Must Get Stoned
Ki Tavo and the Commandment to Make One's Life A Commentary
As soon as you have crossed the Jordan into the land that the LORD your God is giving you, you shall set up large stones. Coat them with plaster and inscribe upon them all the words of this Teaching… (Deuteronomy 27:2-3)
And on those stones you shall inscribe every word of this Teaching (kol divrei haTorah hazot) clearly elucidated. (Deuteronomy 27:8)
The people wrote on it all of the words of the Torah in seventy languages, as it is stated: “And you shall write on the stones all the words of this law clearly elucidated” (Deuteronomy 27:8)
—Talmud Sotah 32a
It is likely that either these stones were huge, or it was a miraculous event [that the entire Torah from Genesis 1:1 to Deuteronomy 34:12 was written on them].
—Nachmanides on Deut. 27:3
The first thing the Israelites are commanded to do upon entry into the land is set up large stones on which they shall write “this Teaching.” The Torah does not specify which teaching they are meant to inscribe, but some commentators take it to mean the entire Torah itself, or at least most of it. In addition, the teaching is to be well elucidated (be’er hetev), creating another interpretive ambiguity. Does the text mean to say that the words are to appear clearly, referring to the physicality of the written word, or that they are to be intelligible, referring to their intangible quality, or meaning. The latter possibility leads the Talmud, and Rashi, to view these stones as a kind of Rosetta Stone, a teaching translated into every language.
Nachmanides doubles down on the strangeness of this law. Either the stones must be so big as to have room for all the words and translations or the writing must be tiny. I suppose there is a third possibility and that is that the writing defies the laws of physics, appearing normally sized on large, but not humongous stones, an optical illusion of sorts, except not an illusion but a miracle.
Going a more allegorical-associative route, we find a reference in the Torah’s command not simply to Torah, but to words of Torah/divrei Torah. A d’var Torah is a synonym for a homily, sermon, or commentary, such as the one you are reading now. So the command is not simply to have the Law mark the entrance to the land, but the commentary as well. We no longer have the land as described in the Torah; we no longer have the stones or the plaster. But we have the d’var Torah. Sometimes all that is left of a place is the lintel of the city gate. And sometimes not even that, just the marking on the gate, the last traces of the welcome mat.
The stones were to stand alongside an altar made of stone. The Torah’s universe is one dominated by sacrifice. Yet the disproportionately large and erect stones bearing the law loom over the side-lying stones of the altar. As an architectural statement, the stones of the law are given priority over the stones of the altar. This is Devarim’s / Deuteronomy’s rejoinder to Vayikra / Leviticus: the focus is the Teaching, not the Altar. It is this sentiment that makes Judaism a portable and flexible tradition, one that can endure outside the land, in Diaspora. The command to write it in 70 languages, as Rashi understands it, might be understood as an intimation that one will have to bring the Torah with one, even as one lives in foreign lands and engages with foreign cultures.
My reading is certainly biased as I write these words in Diaspora. The Kedushat Levi and numerous commentators offer a more particularistic account as to why the Teaching should be written in 70 languages: it’s to let the nations of the world know of Israel’s right to exist, the people’s right to the land. The stones are a kind of title deed to the land. The stones are as much for the Israelite onlooker as for the non-Israelite neighbor. If we imagine these stones to be extremely large, we might think of them as a kind of billboard. Whether you like or agree with this interpretation, it’s good to ask who the stones are for? What messages do we put out into the world for ourselves, for others, or for our own internalized sense of the other’s gaze?
Large stones written in 70 languages evokes the Torah’s origin story of the rise of languages and nations, namely the Tower of Babel. Instead of a tower reaching to the sky, we have an inverted tower reaching to earth. The large stones bear the Law reminding the people of their everyday responsibility; they are large, for there is a transcendence to existence itself; no need to escape. The Tower of Babel is the result of groupthink but it’s also the cause of it, the institution around which everyone gathers. The Torah written on stone is to be contrasted with this structure. Instead of homogenous interpretation and obedience, the Torah should proliferate into 70 faces. God speaks “the Word,” but out come divrei Torah, multitudinous and various words.
One way to think of the translation or exposition of the Teaching into 70 languages is that it is an attempt to undo the aftermath of Babel, to revert to a single language, a common meaning. But recognizing that translation is commentary and commentary translation, I see a different message—to avoid the fate of the tower builders, readers of Torah must affirm the diversity of approaches to Torah; to be a nation apart and a holy people, the Israelites must be a tribe of singularities, a collective of individuals. Jean-Luc Nancy, who died this week, would say our being is at once “singular and plural.” The Law itself is singular and plural, as it contains its own excess, the law is incomplete without commentary, and commentary is always open to another word. The stones are large, but not as large as the infinite conversation. The transcript of history will never fit on any form. No book or tablet can encompass life.
Thus, the stones, if you will, represent the Written Torah, while the land in which the people live, represents Oral Torah, commentary. Oral Torah needs a reference point, a north star. But the stones are dumb unless we beatify them with our own words of Torah, our own point of view, filtered through history and lived experience.
Heidegger, following the Scholastics writes that “the stone lacks a world.” Aristotle says that human beings are distinguished by the fact that we possess logos, the word. And Heidegger agrees, writing that “the human being is world building.” The placement of words upon stone is the unification of the human and inanimate world, the world-builder and the world-lacker. It is the task of bringing and finding meaning where it didn’t exist. It is the act of recognizing that our task is “to be a chiddush,” or as Nietzsche would say, to make our lives a work of art. But the stones are old. The Stone Age precedes us, reminding us to be humble about our origins, to respect that our language and our law and our technology rests atop a story that is beyond us.
More difficult than pulling Excalibur from the stone is finding our own voice, our own way within an old tradition, eliciting Oral law from Written law. For the (s)word will not come loose simply by pulling harder.
As we move through Elul towards the Days of Awe, we should consider what divrei Torah we would like to make of our lives, what elucidations we’d like to add to the guest book signed by our ancestors.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
P.S.—I will be leading a conversation on Heidegger and art over zoom on September 9. Sign up here.
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