We Will Do, and We Will Hear
Speaking from my perspective as a Jewish person of European descent — but having done extensive ancestral work on this lineage and others into which I am initiated — I have noticed that the imposed concept of “religion” onto my culture creates a mistake of form for content.
I’m not saying someone else imposed the concept — certainly it has been willingly self-imposed for centuries — but it creates an error that is at odds with the natural way of living out this culture, in my experience, which is unfortunately codified in the transmitted texts.
(Transmitted texts are intentional attempts to reconstruct a culture’s natural ways from a particular time and place by particular authors with particular objectives, which may indeed be to transmit one frozen culture-performance throughout time, but that is impossible.)
The sages make much of the moment in Torah when Moshe our teacher reads the covenant to the people assembled at the foot of the mountain, and they respond, “We will do, and we will hear,” in that order. I’m pointing to an error in internalizing this story.
This error seems inescapable when bound to a concept of “religion” treating the essential transmission of lineages as specific memetic content that is “heard,” not ways of living, which are “done.”
Na’aseh v’nishmah, in contrast, means, “Do the way of life, then reflect on it.”
If you take particular words in a particular language to be immutable in meaning throughout time, you are already lost in an inescapable philosophical matrix of your own devising, but since people clearly like to do that to themselves, let’s take that as a given.
In order to deal with the manifest reality that culture — that is, biological life forms — change over time and adapt to changing conditions, living in such a matrix then requires constant litigation and legal expertise in order to sustain the culture, which I find unnatural.
The particulars of many cultural behaviors transmitted by text become unwieldy over time — even absurd — as conditions complicate their observance or entirely resolve the condition to which they once responded. It requires a whole industry of legal authorities just to keep up.
There is a less exhausting way to propagate a culture, though. Simply dispense with the idea that the words on the page are more important than the life-ways they describe, and follow the ways of the culture you live in, seeking its resonances with the artifacts you’ve received.
The example I offer is from my own life.
This morning, I awoke before dawn to study the writings of sages, as my culture is replete with exhortations to do.
But I was not studying a daf of Talmud, or any Jewish sources at all. The wisdom I need right now is elsewhere. I was learning medieval Islamicate astrological texts, with which — in my defense — a luminary of Torah no lesser than Rav Avraham ben Meir Ibn Ezra would have been intimately familiar.
Was it a technical fulfillment of the rabbinic mitzvah to study Torah every day for me to learn these texts? No.
Was it an activity around which the souls of my forefathers gathered arm in arm to watch lovingly as I wrestled with it? Emphatically, yes.
From the perspective of my own soul and its lineages, I have engaged with my Jewish life to the fullest possible extent this morning by enacting the ACTIVITY of learning ancient wisdom at dawn.
And now, as I transition into engaging with my Jewish life by caring for my children and household, I do so not in emulation of some recorded Jewish life in antiquity, but in enactment of the one I have. The one I am.
