MORE THAN JUST WORDS

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The Reformation firebrand Martin Luther was not a gentle soul. He was brilliant, courageous, and historically transformative, but he was also volatile, cruel, and spectacularly foul-mouthed. When Luther disliked someone, he didn’t merely disagree with them – he eviscerated them.

His pamphlets dripped with bile, his language was obscene, and when it came to Jews, his writings were vicious, laying the groundwork for some of the darkest chapters of later European history. None of this, to be clear, negates the fact that Luther correctly identified real corruption and hypocrisy within the Catholic Church of his day.

Luther’s stock response to his critics within the Church was deceptively simple: prove me wrong from the text of the Bible. If it wasn’t written explicitly in Scripture, he dismissed it as human invention, manmade directives masquerading as divine command.

He had no time for tradition, accumulated wisdom, or interpretation; everything was suspect unless it could be nailed down to “chapter and verse,” as he liked to put it. Luther’s position appeared principled and even pious, but it placed enormous – and ultimately destructive – weight on the written word alone.

Of course, as is often the case with sweeping theological positions, consistency proved difficult. At one point, Luther came up against a short New Testament text that stubbornly refused to cooperate with his theology. The Epistle of James insists that faith without works is dead, a line that clashed directly with Luther’s doctrine of salvation by faith alone.

In a telling moment, Luther remarked, “We should throw the Epistle of James out of this school, for it doesn’t amount to much.” Instead of wrestling with the verse or considering how generations of Christians had understood it, he dismissed the book altogether. And that was that. If it didn’t fit, it didn’t count.

The episode is almost comic, but it exposes the fatal fault line in Luther’s entire approach. A theology that insists on absolute fidelity to the text grants enormous power to the reader. When interpretation is denied, selection takes its place.

From a Jewish perspective, there is something eerily familiar about this obsession with textual literalism. The Second Temple–era Sadducees rejected ancient traditions and rabbinic interpretation in favor of the bare biblical text.

Centuries later, the Karaites would do the same, insisting that anything not spelled out explicitly in the Torah was illegitimate. Their position was internally consistent – and completely unworkable. A faith that forbids interpretation does not preserve religious observance; it paralyzes it.

The Torah reveals its intention regarding the centrality of interpretation at the very moment of revelation in Parshat Yitro. When God speaks at Sinai, He does not present the Jewish people with a comprehensive legal code, nor does He offer an exhaustively detailed constitution. Instead, He presents ten short statements – majestic and memorable, but remarkably sparse.

Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not commit adultery. Honor your parents. These are not radical moral breakthroughs. Any functioning society would struggle to survive without them.

Even the commandments that sound more overtly theological – belief in God, rejection of idolatry, observing Shabbat – are delivered with little definition or elaboration. What does it mean to believe? What counts as idolatry? What does remembering Shabbat actually require? The text does not say.

That silence is no oversight. If the Torah had intended to function as a closed book, the Ten Commandments as they are presented would be inexplicably inadequate. They contain no legal thresholds, no procedural detail, and no guidance for variation or complexity.

“Do not steal” tells us nothing about business partnerships, contracts, fraud, or intellectual property. “Do not murder” offers no framework for intent, self-defense, negligence, or the rules of war. “Remember the Sabbath day” may be stirring rhetoric, but as law, it is unusable. What, precisely, are we supposed to remember? And what are the practical applications?

The answer, of course, is that the Torah itself never expected these questions to be answered by the text alone. The Ten Commandments were never meant to stand by themselves. They are headline principles – foundational truths that demand explanation, expansion, and application.

And the Torah provides that expansion not in footnotes or appendices, but through an interpretive process that unfolds across generations. The law was not frozen at the moment of revelation; it was activated by it.

This is where Judaism parts ways decisively with Luther’s instinctive literalism. At Sinai, God makes clear that the written word is sacred – but it is not sufficient. Meaning is not trapped inside the text; it emerges only through engagement with it. So how does the Torah move from lofty principle to lived law?

The answer Judaism gives is Torah Shebaal Peh, the Oral Law. This is not a later workaround or a rabbinic ploy to fill in gaps, but an interpretive framework indicated by the way the text itself was given. The written Torah is the text God gave us at Sinai; the Oral Law is the method He gave us to understand it.

That method is neither whimsical nor arbitrary. It is disciplined, structured, and demanding. The Talmudic sage Rabbi Yishmael articulated thirteen interpretive principles – rules for extracting meaning from text through literary association, contextual reading, and logical deduction.

Verses illuminate one another. Words echo elsewhere. Broad principles generate specific applications. Law emerges not because it is spelled out, but because it is derived.

And then there is another category altogether: traditions that do not emerge from textual analysis at all. The Torah commands us to bind tefillin – but never tells us their shape, their color, or even how many compartments they should contain. These, too, are traditions transmitted through the Oral Law.

The Torah prohibits “work” on the seventh day but offers no definition of what work means – until the Oral Law teaches that the categories of creative labor are learned from the acts required to build the Tabernacle.

This is why the demand to “prove everything from the text” is not piety but misunderstanding. The Torah does not operate like a legal statute book, and it never pretended to be one.

Seen this way, the Ten Commandments are not deficient because they lack detail. They are magnificent precisely because they force us beyond the page. They announce that God speaks – and then expect human beings to listen, interpret, and take responsibility for what those words will mean in the real world.

Martin Luther believed that unless an idea could be anchored explicitly in the biblical text, it was suspect and therefore expendable. In theory, that sounds like reverence. In practice, it collapses the moment the text refuses to cooperate. Judaism chose a different path.

The Ten Commandments stand at the center of our faith not because they tell us everything we need to know, but because they tell us so little. They are moral declarations without detail, principles without procedure – and for that very reason, they demand interpretation rather than submission.

Faith, in Judaism, is not proven by quoting sacred words, but by grappling honestly with what those words require of us.

Ultimately, this is what the revelation at Sinai teaches us about Judaism. God gives us a text—but also a task. He entrusts human beings with the responsibility to interpret, apply, and live His word in a world that is endlessly complex and morally demanding.

The Torah is certainly sacred, but it is not self-sufficient. It comes alive only when it is studied, debated, transmitted, and lived.