Tahrif Is Not Jewish But Midrash Is

The Qur’an declares that Allah could have made all of us monotheists, a single religious community, but didn’t in order to test our commitment to the religion that each of us have been given by God. “If Allah had so willed, He would have made you a single people, but (God’s plan is) to test you in what He has given you: so compete in all virtues as in a race. The goal of you all is to (please) Allah who will (at Judgement Day-Qiyamah) show you the truth of the matters in which you dispute.” (Qur’an 5:48)

This means that religious pluralism is the will of God. Yet for centuries many believers in one God have chided and depreciated each other’s religions, and some believers have even resorted to forced conversions, expulsions and inquisitions. Monotheists all pray to the same God, and all prophets of monotheistic faiths are inspired by the same God.

Yet in the past, many religious scholars and leaders often claimed that only their own Sacred Scriptures, and only the way they interpreted their own Sacred Scriptures, were 100% true. The Hebrew Bible has very little of this because for over 12 centuries Jews were the only ongoing monotheists on Planet Earth.

Because the Gospels and the early Christians, who were mostly Jewish, believed that dozens of verses in the Hebrew Bible predicted that Jesus was the Son of God, Paul and others taught that Jesus was a part of a worldwide Trinity who could overcome all original sin.

Because the Qur’an has only one ongoing Prophet, the Qur’an does have many religious scholars and leaders, to often claimed that only their own Sacred Scriptures, and only the way Christians interpreted their own Sacred Scriptures, was 100% true. But many Muslim religious scholars and leaders often claimed that only their own Sacred Scriptures, and only the way they interpreted their own Sacred Scriptures, was Tahrif to be 100% true.

After the Roman’s destruction of Jerusalem, the Priests no longer worked in the Temple, and the Sages turned into the Rabbis who began to change things for the new religious ways. One example was the week long pilgrimage festival of Sukkot.

Professor Rabbi Jeffrey L. Rubenstein points out that the description of the observance of the Festival of Sukkot in Leviticus 23, the Torah ordains two rituals apart from the sacrifices and prohibition on labor, the four (vegetation) species (Lev 23:39-41) and the sukkah (Lev 23:42-43). The commandment of the ritual sukkah reads: “You shall live in sukkot for seven days; all citizens in Israel shall live in sukkot, 43 in order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in sukkot when I brought them out of the land of Egypt, I am the Lord your God.”

In contrast to the ritual of the four species or lulav and etrog, the Torah here provides an explanation for the commandment. At first glance nothing could be more straightforward. The Israelites are commanded to reside in sukkot (literally “booths”) to recall the sukkot in which their ancestors resided during the exodus from Egypt. We today dwell in sukkot just as they dwelled in sukkot in the wilderness wanderings.

The rabbis, however, debated the meaning of these verses: In order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in sukkot (Lev 23:43.Rabbi Eliezer says: “They were real sukkot.” Rabbi Akiba says: “They were the clouds of glory.” (Sifra 17:11, ed. I. Weiss, 103a-b)

In Rabbi Eliezer’s view the Israelites dwelled in real sukkot when they came forth from Egypt, and the annual ritual observance reenacts this dimension of the Exodus. For R. Akiba, the Israelites did not build and live in booths made of wood and vegetation. Rather they resided in booths formed of the supernatural “clouds of glory,” and ritual observance today commemorates, but does not reenact, this dimension of the Exodus. The sukkot we construct and inhabit symbolize the very different kind of sukkah that sheltered our ancestors in the desert.

Eliezer’s opinion is readily understandable. We know what a sukkah is, and if the Torah states that the Israelites dwelled in sukkot throughout their desert sojourn, then so be it, though that tradition is found nowhere else in the Bible. Rabbi Akiba’s view seems to require explanation. At first Rabbi Akiva’s position appears to be a type of fanciful midrash that opposes the literal articulated by this colleague. Nevertheless, a case can be made that R. Akiba provides us with a contextual explanation—of the meaning of the verse. To interpret the “sukkot” of Lev 23:43 as real sukkot is not as simple as it may seem.

Rabbi Jeffrey L. Rubenstein says the Torah, in fact, never refers to the Israelites residing in sukkot apart from this passage. Throughout the narrative of the exodus recounted in the rest of the Torah, the Israelites are described as living in tents, as is indeed typical of desert travelers and dwellers. Thus when Bilaam surveys the camp of the Israelites he states, How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, Your dwellings O Israel! (Num 24:5), not “How goodly are your sukkot, Jacob.”

Likewise, the Torah relates when Moses would go into the “Tent of Meeting ” the Israelites would “rise and stand, each at the entrance of his tent, and gaze after Moses” (Exodus33:8), and not “each at the entrance of his sukkah.” And the prophet Hosea (12:10) speaks of Israel dwelling in tents in the wilderness. Why does Lev 23:43 refer to the Israelites’ dwellings as sukkot when the rest of the Torah does not say this.

It is also possible that R. Akiba was influenced by the curious formulation of Lev 23:43, “I made the Israelite people live in sukkot,” with God as the verb’s subject, rather than with Israel as the subject. We might have expected “in order that future generations may know that the Israelite people lived in sukkot” but the Torah states that God “made” or caused them to dwell in sukkot. This wording suggests that God provided the sukkot, and therefore, they were not mundane and ordinary booths.

Rabbi Jeffrey L. Rubenstein Points out Sukkah as “Clouds” in the Bible.The Bible occasionally uses the term sukkah to refer to clouds or to God’s celestial dwelling-place as manifested among clouds. The Psalmist describes his vision of the divine: “He made darkness his screen; dark thunderbolts, dense clouds of the sky were his sukkah round about him” (Psalm 18:12).[6] Both meanings devolve from the base meaning of the root“to cover,” as both clouds and booths provide shade and covering from the sun.

And divine clouds routinely appear around the camp of the Israelites in the desert, namely the “pillar of cloud” that guides the Israelites on their way (e.g. Exod 33:9-10), and the cloud in which God reveals himself within the Tabernacle (Lev 16:2). Rabbi Akiba probably asked himself which meaning of sukkot best fits the usage in Lev 23:43 and concluded that it made better sense to understand the term as “clouds (of God’s glory)” then as “(real) booths,” since the Torah does record the Israelites being surrounded by clouds but never mentions booths anywhere in the narrative.

The “clouds of glory” formed a protective force-field around the Israelites as they moved through the wilderness. Some rabbis imagined seven clouds, one on each side of the Israelite camp, one above, one below, and one—the Bible’s “pillar of cloud”—going before them and blazing the path (Tosefta Sotah 4:2).[9] These clouds protected them from the hot sands below, the burning sun above, scorpions and snakes and even the assaults of their enemies. The clouds thus symbolize God’s consummate protective presence, care and love for his people. In this respect, the sukkot evoke the “honeymoon” view of the relationship between the Israelites and God during the wilderness sojourn.

As opposed to the main narrative of the Torah, which recalls a fraught relationship where the Israelites constantly complained, disobeyed, and sinned, some prophets remembered this time as a harmonious, “honeymoon” period when the Israelites faithfully and devotedly followed their God in a trek to the Promised Land. Thus, Jeremiah prophesies: “I remember for you the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride; how you followed Me in the wilderness, in a land not sown” (Jeremiah 2:2). In return, God sheltered them within the intimate presence of the clouds of glory, almost a nuptial chamber where bride and groom coexisted intimately.

For Rabbi Akiba, the ritual of dwelling in the sukkah evokes this sensibility through its symbolism of the clouds of glory and the experience of the sukkah’s shade, which connects more tangibly to the protective shade bestowed by clouds. In the hot, Mediterranean sun, shade was the outstanding symbol of protection. Psalms 91 opens: “O you who dwell in the shelter of the Most High, and abide in the shade of Shaddai (tsel shaddai); I say of the Lord, my refuge and stronghold, my God in whom I trust.” Divine protection from the sun is the major theme of Psalm 121, especially, v. 5: “The Lord is your guardian; the Lord is your shade at your right hand.”

In this sukkah shade, we experience the divine shade, the “shade of Shaddai,” and feel the consummate protection of God’s sheltering presence.

The changes are not Tahrif which is foreign to Judaism. The changes help a very old religion keep being an ongoing religion of Judaism that is vital and alive to this day.