Why Would the Rabbis Change a Verse?

A Disturbing Side to Monotheism

Marc Brettler (45-46)

“Makes peace and creates everything” Except for the last word, this is a quotation from Isa. 45:7, which reads hara, “trouble,” not hakol, “everything.” The biblical context makes “trouble” a better translation then the usual word, “evil,” because it is juxtaposed with shalom, “peace” in the sense of tranquility. The “Isaiah” passage is really by an anonymous prophet whose work is appended to Isaiah, and more properly called Second- or Deutero-Isaiah. He was active in the Babylonian exile (586-538 B.C.E.), when various forms of Persian dualism, including Zoroastrianism, became the norm. Our verse is thus polemical, emphasizing Judaism’s monotheistic faith, according to which a single deity must be responsible for the opposites of light and darkness, peace and trouble. This polemic served little function in later periods, where, if anything, it was problematic, since it explicitly attributes the creation of trouble to God, and for this reason, was revised in the liturgy. Though deeply indebted to biblical precedents, the liturgy is not enslaved to the Bible, which it regularly revises to fit the changed needs of worshippers.

Lawrence A Hoffman (50)

“Who forms light and creates darkness” Each of the Sh’ma’s blessings responds to a specific philosophic topic that exercised thinkers in late antiquity, thereby commenting implicitly on how Jewish belief differed from that of others at the time. Our benediction on creation emphasizes light, in particular, because the ancients saw the universe divided into light and darkness, two realms that they identified further with good and bad, or sometimes, spirit and matter. An extreme form of this dualism led to the notion that there must be two gods, or at least, an all-powerful god and a lesser power called a demiurge. The demiurge, or second deity, was regarded as the source of darkness, materiality and evil. While Jews too associated God primarily with the light of the universe, they stopped short of the radical dualism that would have compromised the principle of monotheism. They therefore attributed not just light but darkness also to God. But they were ambivalent about God’s role in “creating darkness,” so in the final line of the blessing, the chatimah, they mention only, “Blessed are You, Adonai, creator of the lights.

Judith Plaskow (48, 53-54)

“Makes peace and creates everything” The blessings surrounding the Sh’ma are replete with images of divine power. But here, the liturgy sidesteps the ultimate expression of that power: God’s responsibility for evil. In rendering Isaiah 45:7, “I form light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil” as “who forms light and creates darkness, makes peace and creates everything,” the Rabbis introduce a euphemism that avoids attributing evil to God. Of course, it is true that “everything” includes woe and evil, but the word conjures—and is probably meant to conjure—the plenitude of creation, rather than its destructive or negative aspects.

This alteration of Isaiah raises the question of truth in liturgy. Do we want a liturgy that names the truths of our lives, however painful or difficult they may be, or do we want a liturgy that elevates and empowers, that focuses on the wondrous aspects of creation alone? Are these goals in conflict, or can hearing truth itself be empowering? In The Book of Blessings, Marcia Falk comes down on the side of truth. If God is all in all, she argues, then the divine domain must include the “bad,” and the bad ought to be named. Her blessing here says, “Let us bless the source of life/ source of darkness and light/ heart of harmony and chaos,/ creativity and creation.

What does it mean, however, to pray to a God who is “heart of chaos”? The naming of this truth—that if one God is responsible for the universe, then that God must be responsible for evil—surely elicits feelings of protest as much as reverence. “Shall not the judge of all earth do right?” Abraham asks God, arguing over the intended destruction of Sodom and Gemorrah (Gen. 18:25). We might pose analogous questions in the context of and in relation to the liturgy as a whole. Shall not the king leave room for his subjects? Shall not the father honor the independence of his children? Is it not our obligation to struggle against the “bad” in the universe, whatever its origins? Thus our prayer might need to be expanded in the direction of protest. The masculine and hierarchical images of the prayer book in many ways capture the truth of our social and religious structures. We can seek to change those images as a step toward change in the structures, or we can name them as evil and woe and, in the context of a covenantal relationship, protest against them.