Timeless Torah

Maybe you haven’t heard, but recently I was in New York and had a harrowing experience. At first, everything seemed normal. Downtown was bustling. Skyscrapers were being built higher than ever, Broadway was giddy with a new musical, and street hawkers were doing a brisk business from unsuspecting, gullible tourists. But when I reached a residential neighborhood I noticed, for the first time, something missing. There were no….

chools. Upon asking a local I was informed that there were indeed several academies for the wealthy and well-born, but education for the masses simply did not exist. Now that I was paying more attention, it soon became obvious that there seemed to be no public hospitals either. Once again, I was told, “Medical care was available for those who could afford it.”
Now I was beginning to feel really weird. Perhaps I was having hallucinations. So I quickly headed over to First Avenue and 46th Street to be calmed by the familiar landmark of the United Nations. But it was gone. Neither could I find Lady Liberty beckoning from the harbor. Had the terrorists destroyed all that made New York famous? Bewildered, I asked a native, “Where are the words, ‘Give me your tired, your poor...yearning to breathe free?’ Or the prophet’s vision, ‘They shall beat their swords into plowshares...nations shall not lift up sword against nations. Neither shall they learn war anymore?’”
The New Yorker looked at me strangely, “No war! Why not? War is the noblest endeavor of man. It spawns mighty warriors and allows nations to expand their borders.”
“Have you never heard of Isaiah, the Bible, the Ten Commandments?” I shot back.
“What are those?” he asked innocently enough.
It suddenly struck me. I was in an alternate universe…a world that had never experienced Sinai. Of course, I had witnessed technology, art, and commerce. These could flourish without the interference of Torah. But public education is altogether an implausible notion in a pagan world, where the literacy rate was generally 1/10 of 1%. Even ancient Rome, which needed a literate ruling class to administer its far-flung empire, boasted a literacy rate of only 10-15%. Not only did ancient ‘democracies’ not deem it beneficial to educate the masses, they viewed it as a potential threat to their position in the hierarchy.
It was the Torah which specifically commanded parents to educate their children. In fact, a code of law as intricate as the Torah and obligatory on all members of society, inherently required its adherents to study. After all, if a Jew didn’t know what all the commandments entailed, how could he fulfill them?
What about hospitals? No society before Torah or without its view on the intrinsic value of the individual would spend its resources to preserve life. On the contrary, infanticide of undesirable babies was universally practiced and endorsed by such “enlightened” thinkers as Aristotle. Indeed, the most popular amusement in ancient Rome was watching criminals, slaves, and POWs fed to the lions. Lest the crowd get bored, there were routine executions by burning, beheading, and gladiators fighting to the death during intermission. Into such a world, the Torah introduced the concept of the sacredness of life, for all human beings were holy since they were created in the image of G-d.
Would our substitute New York possess courts? When the Torah stated, “You shall not favor the poor and you shall not honor the mighty,” the world must have laughed. According to the Torah, even a king is not above the law, nor is a slave below it. By contrast, ancient Athens, the so-called cradle of democracy, extended full legal rights to only a few thousand men who owned land, leaving all of its other residents with no recourse to the law.
However the most conspicuous difference was in a low-income district. The streets were lined with the blind, crippled, and starving, hopelessly reminiscent of the poor in India. Where were the orphanages? The social service agencies and the rehabilitation centers?
In a world where laws were written solely to prevent anti-social behaviors, the Torah preached a proactive good. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and “Do not stand by your neighbor’s blood,” charged humankind with social responsibility, an idea that a sans-Torah society would never have dreamed of. The Torah, which Thomas Huxley called, “The Magna Carta of the poor and of the oppressed,” drove this point home with a multitude of commandments providing aid to the impoverished, the widow, the orphan, and the alien.
If we lived in a world in which the Torah had never been given, we would be unrecognizable to ourselves. It is important to keep in mind that all these ‘Jewish’ innovations have their source not in the Jews themselves, but in a Divine revelation. The lever which lifted the planet had to be positioned outside it.
On Shavuos the infinite G-d burst through the barrier of human finitude. It is no accident that this great revelation occurred in a mountainous desert, far from civilization, in a place as unlike the lush predictabilities and comforts of the Nile. If there was any possibility that earth-bound mortals would hear the Real, One G-d it could only happen in a place stripped of all cultural reference points, where even nature seemed absent. Only amid inhuman rock and dust could this fallible collection of human beings with their preconceived petty notions of morality become human in a completely new way. This year when you listen to the Decalogue, consider what your world would look like without it...and once again proudly accept your role as, “A light unto the nations.”