Canter Bridge

Famously labeled ‘Torah’, the first five books of the Bible are received as Moses’, the lawgiver’s, legacy.

Yet ‘Torah’ relates the verb ‘to teach’, not ‘to legislate’. Torah is before anything else instruction.

The substantive legal component of this Mosaic anthology is embedded in the story of Israel’s origins, a genesis that this people shares with humanity itself. Common ancestry does not dawdle, however, and the story quickly particularizes its focus onto Abraham’s descendants and then those of Jacob himself. He is renamed Israel, for his habit and privilege of struggling with God.

Torah is the most remarkable of national stories. When the reader comes to Deuteronomy, he moves into a series of Mosaic exhortations as the lawgiver’s last words of exhortation—they are many—flow in this literary setting in full view of a land promised to Israel but withheld from the man who by force of his epic will turned slaves into a nation.

Moses tells their story. It is not for the faint of heart.

We are relearning in recent years to understand the power of story, to hear in its textures a definition of our singular lives, to comprehend ourselves as protagonists or at last bit players in a narrative considerably larger than ourselves. We are understanding once again how to find our own significance in a tale, to treasure rather than to disdain the lives of our forebears, to hope for some lingering residue of ourselves in the paths and decisions of those who will follow us after it has become impossible to recall our names.

Israel’s story is one of incessant stumbling, of a persistent refusal to cooperate, of a prolonged and grumbling complaint against any who would threaten the slaveries they had taught themselves to love.

Deuteronomy’s plot will restate the ten words that lie at the center of Israel’s communal life, but not before these moral vertebrae can be affixed to a history of liberation and divine summons.

It is always so in the Bible, where law is response rather than initiative, where humanity’s yes rises to a divine invitation rather than provoking a grudging divine assent. Legislation finds its place in a story of rescue and release. The composite becomes Torah: instruction rather than law, a compelling and so authoritative description of how things were, what has become of us, and the matters we must now decide, the facts to which we must cling.