The Rest is Commentary

Dear Congregation Beth Emeth,

If someone stopped you on the street and asked, “What is Judaism all about?” How would you answer? It is a question our tradition has been asking for thousands of years.

The prophet Micah answered with three principles: Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly with your God. Rabbi Akiva pointed to a single verse: Love your neighbor as yourself.

Hillel went even further. Standing on one foot, he told a would-be convert, What is hateful to you, do not do to another. The rest is commentary. Go and learn. I love that story, not because Hillel reduced Judaism to a sentence, but because he didn’t.

Notice how he ends: The rest is commentary. Go and learn. In other words, the summary is not the destination. It is only an invitation.

Every generation tries to distill Judaism into a single principle, and each one captures something essential. But none of them contain the whole. I think that’s because Torah was never meant to be a slogan in the first place. It is a story.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once imagined a vast library, filled with books representing every philosophy and way of life humanity has produced. Somewhere on the shelves sits a book with your family’s name on the spine. You open it and find the story of the generations before you, written in many languages, by many different hands. You turn to the final page and find only a heading: your own name. The story isn’t finished.

That, Sacks suggests, is Judaism. Not a checklist of beliefs, not a set of rules to be memorized, but the ongoing story of a covenantal people. Other traditions hold real wisdom, and we should learn from them. But their story isn’t our story. Ours began at Sinai, and it hasn’t stopped. We inherit it, wrestle with it, add our own chapter, and pass it on to whoever comes after us.

Can 613 mitzvot, generations of interpretation, and countless stories of faith, failure, justice, compassion, exile, redemption, and covenant truly fit inside one sentence? I don’t think they can. A story that long, still being written, was never going to fit on one page.

This week’s Torah portion, Va-et’chanan, gathers together so many of Judaism’s defining moments: the retelling of the Ten Commandments, the words of the Sh’ma, the command to love God with all our heart, soul, and might, the reminder of our liberation from Egypt, and the charge to teach these words to our children.

If there were ever a Torah portion that could claim to summarize Judaism, this would be it.

Yet even here, Moses does not offer a neat conclusion. Instead, he calls on the people again and again to listen, remember, learn, and above all, walk. “Hear, O Israel” is not simply a command to believe something. It is an invitation into a conversation that began long before us and will continue long after us.

The Hebrew word halachah, our tradition of Jewish living, comes from the root meaning “to walk.” Torah is not simply something we believe. It is something we live by, one decision, one relationship, one act of compassion, one difficult conversation at a time. That is how a story gets written. Not all at once, but step by step, chapter by chapter, one generation adding its pages to the last.

So if someone asks me to summarize Judaism in one sentence, I might borrow Hillel’s wisdom, but I’d pay just as much attention to his final words: “The rest is commentary. Go and learn.”

Or perhaps, in the spirit of Va-et’chanan and the story we’re still writing: “The rest is walking.”

May we continue walking together, adding our own chapter, and discovering that every step has something new to teach us.

Shabbat Shalom, 

Rabbi Greg Weitzman