Stringing the Pearls: How to Read the Weekly Torah Portion

3. On Hearing

42 READING AND HEARING 3. On Hearing One of the greatest transformations Judaism ever underwent was when it became a textual religion. Stories and laws that had been transmitted orally and received aurally were written down to be interpreted by reading. We don’t know exactly when this metamorphosis of spoken word to written text occurred. Was it when the Judeans went into exile? Or during the exile? Or perhaps when Ezra brought a (the?) Torah document from Babylon to Judea (then called Yehud) in 458 B.C.E.? Perhaps the beginnings of this sea change in biblical religion predate the exile; the book of Deuteronomy (622 B.C.E.) already speaks of the Torah as a text, even though the will of God was still being proclaimed in mantic utterances by the prophets as God’s appointed spokesmen (a few of whom were women). Whenever it was, by the end of the Babylonian exile the effect of the change was consequential . By then, even though there were still a few late prophets who would be heard from, God’s will was securely installed in the written word to be explicated by God-inspired authorized interpreters. In time, the rabbi replaced the prophet, Judaism became a religion of reading, and the Jews became the People of the Book. We should, therefore, always bear in mind that the Torah was spoken and heard before it was written and read. This observation accords with all the otherwise conflicting understandings of the Pentateuch; modern historical criticism, on the one hand, and the great medieval commentators and the Rabbinic tradition, on the other, agree with it. It is also how the Torah understands itself. The book of Exodus presents the Sinai event as a dialectic between hearing and seeing. In the passage just after the Ten Commandments we read, “All the people witnessed the thunder and 43 ON HEARING lightning” . . . (Exod. 20:15). A few verses later God says to Moses: “Thus shall you say to the Israelites: You yourselves saw that I spoke to you from the very heavens” (20:19). Both senses, seeing and hearing, are in play here. But we get the idea that seeing is primary. This seems to be confirmed a bit later on. In the account of the miraculous deliverance at the Sea of Reeds, seeing is believing : “And when Israel saw the wondrous power which the LORD had wielded against the Egyptians . . . they had faith in the LORD and His servant Moses” (14:31). Over against this is a strong strand of biblical thinking that regards hearing, not seeing, as the royal road to belief. The fundamental creedal affirmation of the Torah is couched in auditory terms: “Shema Yisra’el, Hear O Israel, The LORD is our God, the LORD alone” (Deut. 6:4). In fact, the opening words of each of the first two paragraphs of the Shema (6:4 and 11:13) stress the necessity of hearing. There are many other passages from all over the TANAKH that I could cite that make it clear that in biblical religion hearing is something far more than an auditory experience. It is an act of absorbing words and language and introjecting their import into our very being. We are probably on firmer ground if we say that the Bible privileges both hearing and seeing.5 If the first two paragraphs of the Shema foreground hearing, the third paragraph, which details the commandment to “see” the tzitzit (Num. 15:37–41), balances things off by holding up seeing as the pathway to awareness. Both cognitive modes lead in different ways to understanding, or at least to the beginning of an understanding, of what the world presents to us, what the world means, indeed what the nature of the reality into which we were cast when we were born means. We have an interesting debate on this matter in the Midrash, between the two major schools of Rabbinic interpretation, that of Rabbi Ishmael and that of Rabbi Akiva. Rabbi Ishmael reads Exod. 19:15, “All the people witnessed the thunder and lightning ,” as an elliptical statement: “They [the Israelites] saw what was visible and heard what was audible.” Rabbi Akiva parses the verse quite differently: it is telling us that the people “saw and heard what was visible.”6 For Rabbi Ishmael both cognitive modes functioned at Sinai in tandem, on an equal basis. For Rabbi Akiva the experience was beyond the cognitive. At Sinai the peo- [18.119...