Don’t Diminish From Torah Its Renewal
Click here for the Hebrew text which comes from Yishmiru Daat, page 73.
Do not add to the word, etc., nor diminish from it, (Deuteronomy 4:2).
[We are invited to collaborate and participate in defining our Jewish practice in ways that are meaningful to us and yet, our text is clear: We are not to add to what was heard from Moshe and we are not to diminish from it. What gives here?]
Moshe Rabbeinu a‘h is saying, “When God commanded it to me, I said it to you, and now you wish to take what I said and hand it over to someone else referencing me as the source, then, Do not add to the word which I command, etc.”
Although according to the statement (Yerushalmi Megillah 28a) that everything taught for all future times by an advanced Torah scholar was already given on the level of Moshe on Sinai, regarding something that Moshe did not himself say and which the Torah scholar subsequently innovated, these are handed over in the name of the innovator, because he innovated, sorted it out and removed anything negative from off of the new Torah / teaching that he innovated.
And the person who says something in the name of the one who first said it (Mishneh Avot 6:6) brings into the world the freeing of humanity from bondage. And the person who hangs something which Moshe didn’t say off a tree as tall as Moshe Rabbeinu does the reverse, he enslaves humanity. And another case, whoever says a thing in the name of Moshe the faithful shepherd only saying a part of the thing, for example, hishamru lachem pen yifteh livavichem / beware lest your heart be misled [terrible things will happen to you], but he doesn’t say kimei hashamayim al haaretz / “Heavenly days right here on Earth” [if you follow the Mitzvot], this person is transgressing the commandment that you shouldn’t diminish the word.
For when you say the words of Moshe in their context without omissions and in the way they were meant to be understood, they are the Torah. And similarly (Tikkunei Zohar 114), the teachings of Moshe are not to be diminished in any generation, God forbid, from the second side of truth and the seventy faces of the Torah (Zohar I 47) forwards and backwards.
[Innovations based on Torah of Moshe together with perspectives of shifted paradigm, reality maps and our Emet / Truth as experienced in the present time are Torah from us.]