Life's Passages
Ten Measures of Speech

The writer sits at her desk, pen poised in her hand. The sheet of paper before her is blank.

How will the completed paper read? What message will it convey? Will it be powerful and effective? Will it be critical and condescending, or empathetic, helpful and constructive?

Many thoughts and ideas bombard her mind. Some must be discarded, others selected and developed, refined and expanded from a rough, basic outline into a comprehensive and useful idea.

Once the thoughts and ideas have been sorted out, the next stage begins—to convey the concept with words, sentences and paragraphs.

A mob of words and phrases crowd her mind. She must choose carefully. She focuses intently, trims off excess, and crosses out irrelevant passages. She gropes for clearer formulations as she fine-tunes her essay.

Finally, the final version is before her. She looks down at her paper with satisfaction.

The page is messy, full of blotches, scribbles and indentations strewn in every which direction. Arrows point to added-on words or sentences.

But with these words she has created—given birth to—her idea. With these words she will leave an impact on the reader, elicit an emotion, a response or reaction. For some, it may create a new understanding, and perhaps even change a mindset or a course of action. For others, it may evoke disagreement or anger.

But it is her own piece of writing, reflecting her very own instincts, ideas and personality. This is the power of words—a new creation that is only able to come into being through our personal, individualized creative process.

The writer sits back to contemplate her piece. She realizes how the entire process is a metaphor for life itself.

She began her journey through life like an empty sheet of paper that could have taken many different turns. There were many paths to choose; some she needed to discard, others she selected and developed. And then, daily crossroads needed her direction. There are so many mistakes and revisions, so many crossed-out false starts. There are perspectives or actions that are clumsily added on, in retrospect, like the asterisks on the side of her paper.

But the end result of a life lived well reflects the messy paper in her hand. Through her personal input, she has created something meaningful.

Each word has become a metaphor for how each of us creates our own impact in our world.

“These are the words which Moses spoke to all Israel . . .” (Deuteronomy 1:1)

With this sentence, the fifth book of the Torah, the book of Devarim (Deuteronomy), or “Words,” begins.

Although all the five books of the Bible were transcribed by Moses, the Talmud differentiates between the book of Devarim and the first four books: they were transcribed, word for word, as dictated by G‑d to Moses, while Devarim was written by Moses “in his own name.”1 Nevertheless, the book of Devarim is regarded as one of the five books of the “Written Torah,” implying that the even the words themselves (not only the concepts and ideas) are divinely given. This is because Moses had nullified his personal ego to be completely in tune with G‑d’s will, to the point that “the divine presence spoke from his mouth.”2

The Torah is comprised of two basic elements: the Written Torah (the five books of Moses) and the Oral Torah (Mishnah, Talmud, codes and commentaries).

Both the “Written Torah” and the “Oral Torah” derive from the revelation at Sinai. But while the Written Torah was set in writing at the time by Moses, the Oral Torah developed—and continues to develop—over the generations, as the Jewish people study and implement it.

Because of the unique way in which book of Devarim was transcribed—generated by the mind of Moses, yet at same time wholly and unequivocally the words of G‑d—it acts as a bridge between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah.

The Written and the Oral Torahs need this bridge, because they represent two dimensions of Torah and our developing relationship with it.

The Written Torah speaks with the voice of authority and transcendence. It is a voice that cannot be challenged or altered, but is a wholly perfect and complete product. Even a single letter cannot be contributed to it or erased from it.

The Oral Torah, on the other hand, is a continuing dialogue of constant growth, analysis and application. Though only great Torah scholars who have mastered the guidelines of Torah exegesis can add on to it, the Oral Torah goes back and forth in discussions and conclusions, adapting to situations as they arise.

Both the written and oral traditions are undeniably parts of the divine Torah. Both are G‑d’s voice on how to lead our lives to create a perfect world.

But while the Written Torah takes the “masculine” form in speaking to us from above, the Oral Torah takes the “feminine” approach in speaking through us. Both work jointly to express G‑d’s will for our world, and to create the Judaism that adapts to every circumstance without inherent change; but only the second aspect of the Torah, the feminine Oral Torah, involves our participation as it emerges and develops through time.

The Talmud states that “ten measures of speech were given to the world, and nine of them were allocated to women.”3 Some would see this statement as praiseworthy to women, others as derogatory to the more talkative gender; in truth, it simply teaches the feminine power of expression, dialogue and communication.

The masculine Written Torah and the feminine Oral Tradition represent two phases in our relationship with the Torah.

On the first level, the mind is preoccupied with the Torah as an intellectual performance. The relationship at this level can be compared to a subject-object encounter, an “I” facing “it.” The second level emerges when Torah becomes not just an acquisition of knowledge but a personal meeting place, an “I” facing “you,” or better yet, a “we” relationship.

While our relationship with Torah might begin as an intellectual activity which requires exertion, concentration and absorption, this is not the ultimate intent. Only in the second stage, that of the Oral Torah, have we reached the point where we have entered into a personal experience and relationship with Torah.

G‑d wanted us to be His partners in creation. He wanted us to grow to the second level, where we are not only transcribing His will to our world, but where His will has become an intrinsic part of our personality, so that we can use our own words and actions to express it. We are no longer like a student mechanically writing notes on a lecture, but rather like a student so bound up with his mentor that his own words perfectly reflect the ideas, positions and philosophies of his teacher.

The sages tell us that Moses did not speak only these words when he communicated the book of Devarim, but that at this point he also translated the entire Torah into the seventy languages of the original seventy nations of the world.4

This translation not only reflects the bridge that the book of Devarim forms to the Oral Tradition, but it also opened up of the entire Torah to future translations. It represents the personal communication and understanding of all of Torah by all kinds of people at all times with different needs and questions.

Moses’ translation of the Torah into the seventy languages was the key to the communication of Torah in every time period, by all kinds of Jews, all over the world.

The book of Devarim was addressed to the generation who were about to enter the Holy Land. The translation reflected what this generation, and each successive generation, would need—the personal experience of Torah—in a way that the previous generation did not.

Their parents had left Egypt forty years before, and witnessed the wondrous giving of the Torah, in the miraculous, secluded, spiritual setting of the wilderness. But this new generation was the one that would enter the Land of Israel to live a natural, material existence. Precisely because they would be touched by the responsibilities of the physical world, the Torah could not remain a closed spiritual/intellectual exercise outside of themselves—as something that they had objectively witnessed—but rather it needed to become something intimate that they would communicate amongst themselves, within the context of their new circumstances, in their own country.

This could only happen if they learned from their leader, Moses, how to use their own words to create a G‑dly communication. Moses demonstrated to them how to experience Torah by tasting it in one’s own language, in one’s own words. He was the bridge from the masculine, objective experience of the Written Torah to their more personal, feminine experience of the Oral Tradition.

While the translation and opening up of the Torah to our own dialogue might seem like a detraction from the holiness and divine absoluteness of Torah, in truth this is the ultimate elevation of Torah. G‑d desires that Torah become a part of our experience, which is ultimately far more intimate and meaningful than the objective study of a static text.

That is why this section of the Torah is always read on the Shabbat before the Ninth of Av, the saddest day on our national calendar. It reminds us that, like the “opening up” and the translation of the Torah, the loss of the Temples and the subsequent exile will also result in a greater elevation. In the final redemption, in the Messianic era at the end of our journey, we too will experience a more intimate relationship with G‑d, precisely because of our encounters within exile.

The message of Devarim is that through an apparent descent of the Torah comes the ultimate ascent. By making Torah a personal experience, by “translating” it into our own language and by communicating it in our own words, we fulfill the ultimate intent of our world, of reaching a relationship of “us” with the Torah.

Devarim, “Words,” teaches us the power of our words, in being used as an ongoing G‑dly dialogue with our world.