This week’s Torah portion, Ki Tisa, contains the famous 13 Attributes of Mercy. We say them on fast days, and on Yom Kippur we say them over and over in an attempt to beseech God for mercy. As the Talmud says in Rosh Hashanah, 17b, “God appeared to Moses and taught him the 13 Attributes, saying: “Whenever Israel sins, let them recite this [the Thirteen Attributes] in its proper order and I will forgive them.” Thus this appeal to God’s mercy reassures us that repentance is always possible and that God always awaits our return.“
If we look closely at these two verses they really are not 13 attributes of mercy, they are 12 attributes of mercy and one of judgment, for, the end of the verse says that God does not cleanse sin and visits the sins of the ancestors upon the children: “The Lord, the Lord, a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; and cleanses sin he does not cleanse, but visits the iniquity of parents upon children and children’s children, upon the third and fourth generations.”
How is it that in our prayers we have made this verse into one that is purely about mercy? The answer is we play a grammatical game. When we recite these verses as part of our selichot we leave out the last few words of the verse, rendering it’s meaning – “God entirely cleanses sin” – instead of what it actually says, which is, “God does not cleanse our sins.” By leaving out the last two words we change the meaning to its opposite, from an attribute of judgment to an attribute of mercy. It’s actually worse than that, since the Talmud says that one is not allowed to divide up a verse differently than the way in which it’s divided by Moshe in the Torah, which is precisely what we do here. This reading is beautiful, but is it legitimate?
The Talmud (Yoma 86a) itself is bothered by this question, “Rabbi Eliezer said, one cannot say that God cleanses sin because it says in the verse God does not cleanse sin, and one cannot say God does not cleanse sin because it says God does cleanse sin. How then do we understand this verse? The answer is that one refers to a case in which the perpetrator did teshuvah and one refers to a case in which the perpetrator did not do teshuvah.”
This is a tidy answer, but the reality is still that no matter whether we have done tishvah or not, we misread the verse in our liturgy to mean the opposite of what it means in the torah, we read it only one way in our davening, that God does indeed, without qualification, cleanse sin. How can we do this?
We assume that a text is solid and clear, that there is a correct and incorrect way to read a text. Nechama Leibowitz once said to me, “How do you know that the Torah says “Do not kill”, maybe the Torah says the opposite “No, …kill!” It all depends on where one places the comma, and the Torah has no commas. How we read a text is then very much a matter of perspective. Without a tradition regarding how to read the Torah, or perhaps any text for that matter, one has no idea what it means. It could mean any number of things.
Rav Kook writes that before one does teshuvah we perceive the sins we did as a matter of choice, after we do teshuvah though, our perspective changes and often, he says, we then see it as if we had no choice. Are neither true? Are they both true? Does perspective matter? Is there a real reality outside of perspective? I do not want here to wade into the complex tides of postmodernism, but I think this is one of many instances in which we are invited by our tradition to read the Torah in more than one way. Indeed, we are a unique people who cherish diversity and perspective but at the same time are deeply tied to the veracity of our tradition and the law. In the immortal words of Rabbi Norman Lamm, “The Torah has 70 faces, it does not have 71 but it also does not have 69.”