One of the most challenging aspects of Jewish theology can be the notion of commandedness. Tetzaveh, the name of our parashah this week, means ‘command.’ You can hear the connection to the word ‘mitzvah,’ commandment. In the context of this week’s Torah reading, the word is used by God to tell Moshe to command the Israelites to carry out various rituals in the Mishkan. But the use of the word itself, especially as the name of our Torah reading this week, asks us to think about commandedness and the role that it plays in our Jewish identities.
Another way of thinking about commandedness is through the lens of obligation. What do I feel obligated to uphold? To what, and to whom, am I obligated? In a world where we often don’t feel material consequences of any religious actions, and I imagine most of us don’t believe in cosmic or theological consequences, where does obligation and commandedness fit into our religious framework? And finally, how do we view mitzvot and religious obligations in light of our own important sense of human autonomy?
One perspective, from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, understands God as constantly in search for human beings. As God loves us and seeks out a relationship with us, our way of finding God, meeting God, really, is through mitzvot. They are the pathway through which we enable ourselves to develop a relationship with God who is already desiring a relationship with us.
In many ways, Heschel’s theology resonates with me. But I would be kidding myself if I claimed that every time I ate kosher food, or every time I davened, or every time I visited someone in the hospital, I felt that I was tapping into my relationship with God. Of course, sometimes that sense of connectedness is present for me, and I can certainly see it as an ideal, but it’s not present in every single mitzvah that I carry out. What feels compelling to me from Heschel is the idea that relationships have claims on us. The obligation, and the actions that stem from that, are expressions of that relationship and the love and care that we have for that relationship.
So what is that relationship for me, and what does that relationship ask of me? For me, seeing myself as obligated is about offering myself a pathway. I view myself as obligated not just to mitzvot but to my own commitments as a religious discipline. I view myself as obligated to my community and to other Jews and to humanity. I love community and I love other Jews and I love other human beings, and I believe that this love demands something from me. And in a different way, I have a loving relationship with God. Even if I don’t always feel it, I seek out that loving relationship, and I hope that mitzvot serve as an entree into that love.
I would be interested in hearing what a sense of obligation and commandedness means to you. It’s a beautiful thing that we live in a community where this notion means different things to different people, and that we each express our sense of religious commitments in different ways.
