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Parsha Ponderings – Va’eschanan + = – (so I failed math…)


לא תוסיפו על הדבר אשר אנכי מצוה אתכם ולא תגרעו ממנו


You shall not add to that which I command you, nor shall you subtract from it


In a perplexing introduction to a forthcoming cautionary address, Moshe, who had communicated God’s Torah to the Jewish nation for decades, now warns them not to add or subtract any commandments from it.

While we can understand the part about not adding, which enlightens us to the fact that even adding commandments while leaving the Torah intact is prohibited, shouldn’t the part about not subtracting from the Torah be obvious? Wouldn’t all the Torah Moshe had taught be rendered meaningless  were we able to shave off commandments at will?

Bothered by this question, Kli Yakar suggests a novel interpretation of our verse. The verse, says Kli Yakar, is to be translated not as “You shall not add to that which I command you, nor shall you subtract from it”, but rather as follows: “You shall not add to that which I command you, thus [i.e. by refraining from adding commandments] not subtracting from it”.

Simply understood, this means that by adding commandments to the Torah, one is essentially subtracting from Torah, for he is stating that the Torah itself is incomplete, and therefore needs additional commandments. Only by refraining from such “improvements” does one truly leave the Torah intact, giving expression to the fact that the Torah is inherently complete and therefore unimprovable as well as untrimmable.

Yet perhaps a deeper look at what sets Torah apart from all other worldly pursuits will yield a more profound dimension to Kli Yakar’s explanation.

Any honest reckoning of worldly pursuits would be forced to concede that much, if not all, the exhilaration we experience, derives from the fact that we are utterly convinced that the true object of our lust lies just beyond our reach. It is the very pursuit after that ever-elusive object, that tease of our desire dangling right before our eyes yet forever evading our grasp, which infatuates us so. It is thus that we are unfailingly disappointed when we finally do catch up with our game, for we then realize that it tastes nothing like what it was cranked up to be. And indeed, reality cannot possibly live up to our fantasies, for our lusts are inherently bland, propped up by nothing other than the poetic license that out-of-reach-ness (yes, I made that up) affords an overactive imagination.

Yet Torah, by contrast, lies at the exact opposite end of the spectrum. Torah is reality, not fantasy. Torah is sanity, not vanity. Torah is fulfillment because it connects us with something real, rather than subjecting us to something fake. As the Torah continues not two verses later:

ואתם הדבקים בד’ אלקיכם חיים כלכם היום

But you, who cleave to God, you are all alive today

The life, the zest, which cleaving to God provides, derives from the today, not the tomorrow. It derives from grasping something fulfilling today, rather than grasping for something tantalizing with the hope of catching up with it tomorrow.

To add to the Torah would be to subtract from the Torah. It would ascribe to the Torah an element of unachievability (I may have made that one up as well), an element of perpetual inaccessibility similar to that of other pursuits, thus downgrading Torah’s status to that of yet another of the world’s fancies. Yet that is simply not the case. The enjoyment we derive from Torah is inherent, while the “enjoyment” we derive from other pursuits is inherently extrinsic, for they are just that… pursuits, and nothing more.

When it comes to nothing, you see, being further from that nothing is what makes it feel like truth, but when it comes to truth……. well, nothing could be further from the truth.


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