D'var Torah by Dr. Kalman Stein, Interim Head of School

Dear Hebrew Academy Community:

The literal meaning of the words of a Pasuk in Mishpatim is quite simple but the proper translation has been debated for millennia:

ויקח ספר הברית ויקרא באזני העם, ויאמרו כל אשר דבר ה' נעשה ונשמע 

“He (Moshe) took the Book of the Covenant and read it to the People, and they responded, ‘All that God has spoken we will do and we will hear’.” Or is it we will do, and we will obey? Or do and understand? Or do and listen? Or do the Mitzvot that we have already received and listen to and do any additional Mitzvot? The various interpretations of those two words and their implications have been discussed in thousands of pages going back at least to Talmudic times and have raised serious issues about, among other things, the performance of Mitzvot without understanding. I should like to offer my own take on what Na’aseh V’nishma could and ought to mean to us. 

In the 1980’s many schools experimented with “Values Clarification” based on Lawrence Kohlberg's theory that moral reasoning, which is the basis for ethical behavior, has six identifiable developmental stages. In brief, the idea was that adolescents should be presented with increasingly complex ethical dilemmas which they would discuss openly without any guidance about right and wrong. The expectation was that as the students dealt with these issues over a period of time, they would develop more refined moral reasoning.

A Jewish businessman who had given a great deal of money to Jewish schools came to Harvard to do a doctorate with Professor Kohlberg. He planned to prove that children in Jewish schools demonstrated a higher level of moral reasoning than children in the general population because they had spent years observing Mitzvot which govern interpersonal behavior. He chose several schools, including Maimonides School in Boston, to test his theory. After two months, having presented a series of ethical dilemmas to Grade Seven and Eight children in these schools he was devastated: He found that kids in Jewish schools seemed to think on the same unsophisticated and uninspiring moral level as any other children their age. Had all the money he had contributed to Jewish schools been wasted?

I suggested an experiment. Why not have the next dilemma in the series be presented to the class by their Gemara Rebbie? The Rebbie explained that he would be presenting the week’s discussion question and read the class the question that had been prepared for him, a question which was virtually identical to the last week’s dilemma. No one responded. “What’s going on, guys? Last week you heatedly discussed and debated the issue and now no one has an opinion?” One student responded, “Rabbi, I don’t understand the question. It’s very clear that it is Assur —forbidden— to do that. What’s there to discuss?” “But, responded the rabbi, last week you all had opinions about a very similar case. Wasn’t it equally Assur last week?” “You don’t understand, Rabbi. When Mr. Businessman presented the dilemma, we thought he wanted to know what we think. But when you, our rabbi, presented it we thought you wanted to know what we would do.”

Mr. Businessman was gratified: Jewish schools are teaching kids to behave appropriately even if their thought process had not caught up to their actions. Now it was my turn to be upset. The kids were in essence telling us that they had compartmentalized themselves. They were observant young Jews whose lives were governed by Torah and Mitzvot—as far as that is possible for young adolescents— but when they weren’t actively involved in specific religious performance they moved into a secular compartment in which they weren’t all that different from other kids in modern society. They had not allowed their religious practices to impact substantially on the rest of their lives.

This might be understandable for seventh and eighth graders. It should not be true of the rest of us. The Midrash on Parashat Shmini which asks why God cares about which animals we eat and how they are slaughtered, answers that all Mitzvot were given to refine human beings. Ramban in Parashat Va’Etchanan explains that the command to do that which is righteous and good means that we are instructed to take all of the interpersonal Mitzvot in the Torah and generalize from them to develop an instinct about how to behave even when there is no specific Mitzvah governing a specific interaction.

I’d like to think that our ancestors in the Sinai Desert were saying: Na’aseh —we will perform the Mitzvot —V’Nishma—and we will listen, we will pay attention to the message of the Mitzvot we are performing to make ourselves better people as Hashem and His Torah expect of us. 

Dr. Kalman Stein
Interim Head of School