Peace Be Upon You, Reader
Can Torah Make the World Less Violent?
“And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” (Isaiah 2:4)
“The thing that just stands out as the weirdest to get my head around is human sacrifice. So there was what was called the Axial Age or a period a few thousand years ago when most of the major religions in the world today formed. And most of those religions have a moralizing God who tells us to do good not to do bad, but who loves us in some ways. But apparently before then, the major kind of religion for human history, like I think 10,000 years ago until 3000 or 4000 years ago, was a different kind of religion centered around sacrifice, a communal sacrifice, where we all needed to placate angry gods, and angry gods who needed to be fed something to be placated, and often human lives were the thing fed. And this tended to go along with big communal meetings.” (Robin Hanson)
These are the laws and rules that you must carefully observe in the land that the Lord, God of your ancestors, is giving you to possess, as long as you live on earth. (Deuteronomy 12:1)
From the phrase “in the land [ba’aretz],” one might have thought that all commandments apply only in the land of Israel. Therefore, the verse also states “all the days that you live upon the earth,” i.e., wherever you live. Furthermore, if the Merciful One had written only the phrase “all the days,” one might have thought that all commandments should apply both in the land of Israel and outside the land of Israel. Therefore, the verse also states “in the land.” (Talmud Kiddushin 37a)
Take care not to sacrifice your burnt offerings in any place you like, but only in the place that the Lord will choose in one of your tribal territories. (Deuteronomy 12:13)
1.
The Torah enjoins us this week, in parashat Re’eh, to observe the law in the land and to observe it as long as we live on earth. These needn’t be contradictory demands, but the linguistic shift is jolting. Why not just say just one: either “these are the laws of the land” or “these are the laws you should keep while alive”? Why combine the two conditions? What are we to make of the shift in language from land to earth, and also from “in” (b-) to “living on” (chayim ba-)?
The Talmud “resolves” the disparity by claiming that some laws apply only in Israel, others in both Israel and Diaspora. Presciently, this reading anticipates the argument of Spinoza that the Torah is a blueprint of civic religion and that it can be abandoned to the extent that Jews no longer have sovereignty in their land. It also anticipates the inverse argument called shlilat ha-Gola (negation of Diaspora) made by some contemporary Zionists that you can’t be a good or full Jew outside the land of Israel. Note that we are reading this argument in the Babylonian Talmud which is a document of Exile. The Talmudic commentary seeks to balance two truths—the land and the sovereignty matter a great deal and Torah values are for all time regardless of where you are and what your political or cultural conditions may be. The Torah is a Torah of place and a Torah prepared for the inevitability of displacement. Finding the balance between these—between rootedness in one’s place and openness to movement—is the great challenge, one that we face in ways both micro and personal and macro and Zeitgeisty.
The tension between finding God in this place vs. anywhere is not just a question of Israel vs. Diaspora, but internal to the land of Israel itself. Thus, Deuteronomy 12:13 teaches that one can bring sacrifices to God only at specially designated sites.
2.
According to Robin Hanson, the end of human sacrifice roughly correlates with the rise of writing, and specifically of sacred writing, Scripture. Why? Because, he suggests, Scripture allows us to remember the past without having to re-enact it. Thus, we can say that founding sacrifices occurred once upon a time but no longer need to re-occur. Abraham offered Isaac, was willing to offer him. Now, we don’t need to because we learned the lesson. It is enough to read the story. With the rise of Scripture, the gods are no longer compulsively hungry, as it were, because writing creates a sense of endurance, a log, a record. With writing, the past can last. This is Herodotus’s opening argument for writing history—to save events from oblivion.
Torah as written text means the events described therein “count” every time we read of them. Thus, humanization tracks with writing. Compassion and forgiveness track with writing (and reading). Moral progress and compounding can occur once there is a ledger. Yes, writing alienates, as Socrates argues. But the externalized memory of terrible things also means that we don’t need to internalize them. Writing is perhaps the original store of value, finance being just a sophisticated form of book-keeping.
The power of writing to humanize society by allowing us to store up collective memory, putting our barbarism in the past and rendering it “primitive”
3.
The Torah teaches that we can humanize land and earth by following laws which are written down. We can humanize land earth only by cultivating memory, in part by forming a community around a common sacred writ, a canon. I will go farther: an important purpose of settling the land is the acquisition of an environmental mnemonic—the feel of the soil, the smell of air, the vision of the landscape shape the sensory experience of the dwellers in such a way that they viscerally know their place in the world and remember where they’ve come from; text and land infuse one another. It is the observance of law and the study of its foundations and the retelling of one’s stories that enables the land to become a place of peace, rather than one ruled by ritualized violence. The relegation of animal sacrifice to specific places is a moral step forward not just from human sacrifice but from ongoing animal bloodshed conducted wherever, whenever. The designation of specific places for specific sacrifices is a function of the move from a “never-ending now” to one where violence is increasingly regulated and constrained—set aside for holy moments in holy spaces. Specificity is a bulwark against forgetting.
4.
But the problem with specificity is that places are vulnerable. Sites can be destroyed, countries conquered. Calendars and Scriptures are less tangible and thus less vulnerable. The concept of Sukkot cannot be vanquished. The words of Genesis do not burn even when a Torah scroll is desecrated. Legal memory is preserved through teacher-student relations and maasei-rav (stories of rabbinic deeds) even when books are lost. And when the Holocaust destroyed generations of practitioners, the mass dissemination of books allowed generations to recover and reconstruct—to use the language of R. Haym Soloveitchik—learning that had been lost. Thus, Moses’s words intimate a diversification strategy for survival. Invest in specific places and sites, but don’t over-invest in them. Invest in teachers and sages, but also use books to supplement when generational memories are ruptured. Invest in book learning but also inhale the air.
Here’s a strange thought: what if the leap from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice was a greater moral delta than any other we have since witnessed? And what if the greatest moral delta ahead will rely, in part, on a similar technological and cultural shift as the one enabled by invention of writing and the creation of a sacred canon?
Re’eh. The word means “see”. But what are the people looking at? Two mountains? No. Are we looking at those mountains now? No. You are reading this on a page or on a screen, perhaps looking up at a window or a table. The people are instructed to look at blessings and curses—abstractions, futures. The blessing if the people remember, if we remember. A curse, if we forget. The cursed life lacks a sense of past and future. The blessed life acknowledges past sacrifices so as to avoid redundancy. But it also looks to the future asking what sacrifices it can make so that subsequent generations won’t have to. The blessed life takes the long-view.
One of the best ways we have to cultivate a long-view is to do and talk about things that we’ve been doing and talking about for thousands of years. Another is to ask what we can do and talk about now that we would like others to continue doing and talking about in thousands of years. In his recent book, What We Owe the Future, William MacAskill compares the present epoch to a teenager with most of its life still ahead of it. We should make choices as a planet not just that we can enjoy today but that future generations might enjoy much later in our planetary life.
The tension between now and much later is evident, I think, in Moses’s injunction to obey the law “in the land” and “as long as you live on earth.” Strikingly, it is ambiguous which is which. “In the land” might be the short-termist view and “as long as you live on earth” the long-termist one. But it could also be that “as long as you live on earth” is the short-termist view and “in the land” is the long-termist one, referring to a messianic vision, as for example, that of Isaiah, who imagines a future in which the people are returned to the land and there is peace on earth.
5.
If Hanson is right that sacred writing is a key to relative peace and prosperity, we should ask how we can cultivate an appreciation for sacred writing even in a secular age. We should ask how we can maintain a literary and poetic sensibility in a time dominated by Tiktok, 24 hour news cycles, and a culture that produces cultural goods as if they were consumer goods—cheap to make, cheap to break, cheap to replace. The Torah is given to last. It is a bulwark not just against exile from land, but also exile from attention. Torah anchors us in what would otherwise be a sea of constant content. Ironically, Torah is needed not just to shift us morally from a primitive age to an Axial one, but to protect us from various existential risks that we now face.
While “longtermists” tend to focus on X-risks to humanity like hostile AI, pandemics, climate catastrophe, population collapse, and more, I contend that the loss of our minds to “Recency bias,” the capture of our attention by addictive algorithms, clickbait engines, and news designed to outrage, is also an existential risk. It is a threat both to our surviving and our flourishing. A culture that reads the Torah portion each week—or whatever its equivalent might be—is significantly advantaged over one that is simply reactive to social media. But just as Moses prepares us for a Torah based in land and a Torah based in earth, a Torah based in place and in dispersion, a Torah based in the current moment and the very long term, we need to cultivate a Torah that can travel with us in our post-literary, digital age, without succumbing to “audience capture.”
Re’eh. Look. See the blessing. Can’t you see it? It’s right here, ricocheting from the past, arriving from the distant future, asking us, telling us, cooing at us, and consoling us: this, too, is Torah and you need to study it.
Shabbat Shalom and Chodesh Tov,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh