Two Tanchuma Petichtas on Discipline and the Misused Offering

Midrash Tanchuma preserves two openings, Toldot 12 and Terumah 1, that begin from very different verses but build toward the same rabbinic concern. Both passages press a question about the disciplines a person can choose and the disciplines that, once neglected, become dangers to others.

The Six Organs of the Human Body

The Toldot passage opens with Isaac trembling at his discovery of Jacob's deception in Genesis 27:33. Rather than parse Isaac's tremor itself, the midrash pivots to Proverbs 20:12, The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the Lord hath made even both of them. The question is grammatical. Why does the verse name only the eye and the ear when God made every part of the body?

The answer becomes the spine of the passage. Three organs are under a person's control. Three are not. The controlled organs are the hands, the mouth, and the feet. The uncontrolled organs are the eyes, the ears, and the nose.

The controlled organs can be turned toward either pole. Hands can build a sukkah, fashion a lulav or shofar, tie tzitzit, or write the parchments for tefillin and mezuzot. The same hands can steal, shed blood, or attack travelers. The mouth can study Torah, speak kindly, praise God, or sing psalms. The same mouth can slander, blaspheme, or swear falsely. The feet can carry a person to visit the sick, comfort mourners, or bury the dead. The same feet can carry that person toward adultery, murder, or theft.

The uncontrolled organs operate without consent. A person passing through a marketplace sees what he would prefer not to see. He hears blasphemous remarks he does not wish to hear. He smells unclean cooking or street filth or idolatrous incense as he walks. The eyes, the ears, and the nose receive whatever the environment presents. The choice is not the person's to make.

The passage then collapses even that distinction. When God wills it, the controlled organs can be taken out of a person's control. Moses tried for seven days to refuse the burning bush. Balaam's mouth produced blessings he did not intend. Jonah's feet carried him toward a destination he resisted. The category of controlled organs is real but conditional.

The Surplus Offering and the Ignorant Priest

The Terumah passage opens with Exodus 25:2, the verse instructing Israel to take an offering for the building of the tabernacle. The midrash asks a procedural question that the Torah itself does not answer. What happened to the surplus offering, the portion of contributed funds that was not needed for the tabernacle's construction?

The answer is that the surplus was used to fashion the hammered gold overlay for the Holy of Holies. The leftover became the inmost surface of the inmost chamber. The midrash then pivots to a parallel observation. God established two offerings called terumah: the one set aside for the building of the sanctuary, and the priestly offering set aside for the support of the priests. The two are bound together by their shared name.

The priestly offering, the passage explains, was given to enable the priests to study Torah. Rabbi Yannai then offers a startling ruling. Any priest who is not a student of the law forfeits the priestly offering so completely that it is permitted to eat the offering on his grave. The reasoning is layered. An ignorant priest could not have collected his dues properly, so what reaches him is presumed to be common rather than holy, and the rules of priestly purity that would ordinarily forbid eating in a cemetery do not apply.

Rabbi Isaac in the name of Rabbi Johanan extends the indictment. He cites Ezekiel 22:26: The priests have done violence to my law, and have profaned my holy things, they have not distinguished between the holy and the common, neither have they taught differences between the unclean and the clean. The teaching the passage derives is unsparing. A priest who has not studied the law cannot tell the holy from the profane and so cannot perform the function for which the priesthood exists.

The Shared Concern

Read together, the two passages from Midrash Tanchuma press the same question at two different scales. The Toldot passage asks what a person does with the organs that are under his control. The Terumah passage asks what a priest does with the position that is under his control. In both cases, the rabbinic answer is that the disciplines of study and good action are not optional ornamentation on top of an otherwise fixed identity.

The hands can build a sukkah or rob a traveler. The priest can study the law or render himself eligible to have his offering eaten on his grave. The teaching, in both passages, is that the controlled choice carries the religious weight. The uncontrolled receivers, the eyes and ears and nose, are not the field of moral judgment. The hands, the mouth, the feet, the priestly office held by a literate guardian, are.

What the Compilers Wanted Held Together

The editors of Tanchuma placed these two petichtas in two different parshiyot, but their shared logic surfaces when they are read in proximity. The opening of Toldot dissects the human body into controlled and uncontrolled domains. The opening of Terumah dissects the priestly economy into two offerings, one for the building and one for the studying priest. Both passages conclude that the controlled domain, the one the actor could shape with study and intention, is the domain on which the tradition's judgment falls.

What Tanchuma preserves, by opening two parshiyot with this same concern, is the rabbinic conviction that responsibility resides in the controllable. The reading the compilers wanted readers to carry forward was simple. The body's actions and the priesthood's competence both depended on the discipline of the agent, and the tradition would judge each by what the agent had chosen to do with the latitude he had.