Going Off Page
The Torah as Russell's Paradox
[The daughters of Zelophehad] stood before Moses, Eleazar the priest, the chieftains, and the whole assembly, at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting, and they said, “Our father died in the wilderness. He was not one of the faction, Korah’s faction, which banded together against the LORD, but died for his own sin; and he has left no sons. Let not our father’s name be lost to his clan just because he had no son! Give us a holding among our father’s kinsmen!” Moses brought their case before the LORD. (Numbers 27:1-5)
Moses spoke to the LORD, saying, “Let the LORD, Source of the breath of all flesh, appoint someone over the community who shall go out before them and come in before them, and who shall take them out and bring them in, so that the LORD’s community may not be like sheep that have no shepherd.” (Numbers 27:15-17)
This week’s Torah reading, Pinchas (Numbers 25:10-30:1), is the one in which God tells Moses that he is not allowed enter the land, but must die overlooking it. Moses’s realization leads him to ask God to appoint his successor. Notably, the Torah places the story of Zelophehad’s daughters—a case of contested inheritance—right before telling us of Moses’s request. As if the case of Zelophehad’s daughters “triggers” Moses to consider his own legacy. In asking what to do in their case, Moses realizes he doesn’t know what will be done in his own case. It’s “meta”—because as Moses brings a case before the Lord about inheritance—he wonders, “Who will bring cases before the Lord when I am gone?”
The Torah’s juxtaposition of Moses and Zelophehad’s daughters highlights that it is not obvious who should replace Moses. How can anyone take his place? The most obvious candidate would be one of his sons, but the Torah rejects the notion that prophecy is passed on through family lineage. Priests are born of priests, but prophets are made, not born. Just as Zelophehad’s daughters may inherit their father’s land-claim (even though in a patriarchal society this is not obvious), so Joshua may inherit Moses’s station, his “inspiration” (ruach hakodesh), despite the fact that Moses has two sons. Rashi, following the Midrash, dramatizes Moses’s request by imagining that God explicitly rejects Moses’s request to pass on his prophetic lineage to one of his sons.
Earlier in the parashah, we read of the men of the tribe of Reuben and Gad who ask for permission to live outside the Promised Land. Inheritance is the organizing theme of the parashah. Pinchas, too, the namesake of the parashah, inherits “a covenant of peace.”
What do all these cases have in common? The most obvious principle connecting them is that we don’t know the law in advance. They are all cases where a historical event catalyzes a clarification of the law. Most of the Torah’s laws come in the form of statutes, but not cases. In fact, the laws relating to the land of Israel are given before the people enter the land. But there is no law given that says Gad and Reuven may dwell outside the land. There is no law given that says Pinchas’s actions are acceptable (on the contrary, what makes his high-wire act acceptable is it’s extra-legal status). Moses is not commanded to make Joshua his successor, but rather is told to do so only in response to Moses’s request. The daughters of Zelophehad create law, or, at least clarify it, by coming forward.
As the Book of Numbers draws to a close, we move from law in the abstract to law in application. The Torah reminds us that “law on the books” can never encompass the reality of “law on the streets.” Moses’s concern for the people after his death can thus be understood as a concern for how the teaching he has given, in principle, will find expression in the world.
Read allegorically, Moses can no more enter the Land than pure principle can enter messy reality. Principles can “watch” what we do, but only Action gets to do it. And Action re-makes principles in its own image. To ask who will continue the legacy of Moses and of Zelophehad is to ask what will become of Torah, of tradition, in an inevitably unprecedented world. The problem of inheritance captures the paradox of continuity amidst change and change amidst continuity.
The Torah anticipates a human truth about inheritance, too. Tradition finds continuity in unlikely places, but also loses it in unlikely places. Reuben is the first born son of Jacob, yet his tribe will choose not to live in the Land. The daughters of Zelophehad, meanwhile, inherit land even though typically daughters are passed over. The topsy-turvy pattern is a sign of a healthy tradition. A world in which all goes according to plan is lifeless.
The more unsettling, radical teaching of the text, though, is that the law, as given, can’t tell us everything. Moses must bring the case of Zelophehad’s daughters before God. Now, you could say—as the Midrash does—that this is a sign of Moses’s getting old and losing his power. But regardless of how you explain it, the fact that Moses has to ring God’s doorbell teaches that the law as we receive it is incomplete. The Torah is a set that is not a member of itself.
Bertrand Russell asks if the set of all sets that are not members of themselves is a member of itself. If it is, it isn’t; if it isn’t, it is. “Russell’s paradox” might well describe the Torah; the Torah simultaneously contains itself and cannot contain itself. It is a book about a book given by God that is also a book about the need to consult a God who cannot be found (exhaustively) in the book.
Moses’s act of bringing a case before God may be considered a kind of “oral Torah,” that is a teaching that is derived from a teacher-student relationship rather than a plain reading of the text. As Moses prepares to depart from the world, and to close a chapter, as it were, he models for us that we, too, must go off page.
It’s funny. Moses sets up a court system with the help of Yitro so as to spare himself the burden of having to decide cases all day, and the one case we are told of him settling is a case that the Midrash says is a relatively easy and straight forward one. But this only highlights the existential point that the real case—the case beneath the case—is the issue of Moses, himself. We can outsource any question to a lower court, but the issue of our own life, what it means, and what will become of it, we must answer ourselves. That case we must “bring before the Lord.”
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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