Text isn't sacred
The Torah is words. Studying it means studying words. If you like reading words, you might like Torah. If you communicate in other ways—sorry, you’re out of luck! (This is true x1000 for Talmud, which has more words.) If you believe the Torah is from God, you believe that God privileged words over other forms of communication. You believe in the Word God.
But why is it words? Why isn’t it—say—a sound, or an image, or a film, or a feeling, or a smell, or a set of flashing lights? If you believe that revelation is a glimpse of something infinite, why do we collapse that infinite down to a set of characters, or speech?
This has been bothering me more and more, and because it’s almost Simchat Torah—the holiday where Jews celebrate restarting the Torah—I want to share it with you. The dumb but obvious answer is that Torah cannot be any of these other things because we only just figured out how to transmit things other than words faithfully, so revelation in any other medium would simply not have survived the generations. The result is that we double and triple down on text; we write texts about texts about texts, and we treat it as obvious that God, sitting up in heaven with His bifocals and huge library or whatever, just has a particular love of texts. This is silly and it gets sillier the more you think about it—and one of my life goals is to decenter text as the workhorse of holy information transfer and replace it with other things.
This is obvious easier said than done, but I think people want it done! There’s no particular reason why you couldn’t have a commentary on the Torah that is in the form of a graphic novel, or a series of sounds, or a set of films. There’s no particular reason why Youtube couldn’t be a publishing platform for amazing new Jewish ideas. It just takes a little time, and a little faith, and a vision for a Jewish tradition that isn’t restricted to ancient modes of information transfer.
Anyway—I’m telling you all of this because I want to share with you an audio commentary on the first seven days of creation, one that plays on the rabbinic idea that the world only has enough power to last a week and must be “recharged” every Shabbat.
Treat it as a proof of concept, but also treat it as an invitation. If you haven’t heard something like this before, if you’re having trouble figuring out how to catalog it in your head, or even what to call it (aural Torah?)—consider that this because you’ve been in the thrall of texts for your whole life, and it’s time to open your eyes (and ears) to other things. The only way that audio like this will become normalized is it more people make things like it.
Shabbat shalom! See you next week.