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© 2016 John D. Brey.

R. Judah b. Nahmani the public orator of R. Simeon b. Lakish discoursed as follows: It is written, Write thou these words, and it is written, For according to the mouth of these words. 'What are we to make of this? — It means: The words which are written thou art not at liberty to say by heart, and the words transmitted orally thou art not at liberty to recite from writing. A Tanna of the school of R. Ishmael taught: [It is written] These: these thou mayest write, but thou mayest not write halachoth [oral Torah]. R. Johanan said: God made a covenant with Israel only for the sake of that which was transmitted orally, as it says, For by the mouth of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel.

Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 60b.

In a general sense Gittin 60b says that one is not allowed to write oral Torah nor memorize in order to recite by memory written Torah. -----More importantly Gittin 60b points out that by the mouth, that is the oral part of these words (Torah), God made his covenant with Israel. If we take Gittin 60b at its word, precisely the oral part, not the written part, then we wouldn't want to interpret Gittin 60b as the heathen would, as though the written Gittin (so to say) does anything more than hide what the oral is Gittin at.

What's the oral Gittin, at 60b, saying? -----It's deciphering the written Torah, where it gives the genesis of the oral Torah, not in Genesis, but in Deuteronomy. -----Deutoronomy 31:16 speaks (so to say) of the day when Israel will "break the covenant I made with them." -----Gittin 60b says the covenant he made with them is the oral part of the Torah. . . Which clues us in that when they break the covenant he made with them, they're breaking the oral Torah, since that's the genesis of the covenant he made with them.

How, precisely, do they break the oral Torah?

That's what Gittin 60b is getting at. Three verses after God claims Israel will break the oral Torah, Deuteronomy 31:16 (which is the covenant he made with them) we read, Deuteronomy 31:19, "Now write down for yourselves this song and teach it to the Israelites and have them sing it, so that it may be a witness for me against them.". .Three more verses down we read:

So Moses wrote down this song that day and taught it to the Israelites. . . After finishing writing in a book the words of this law from beginning to end, he gave this command to the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God: Take this book of the Law and place it beside the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God. There it will remain as a witness against you. . . Assemble before me all the elders of your tribes and all your officials, so that I can speak these words in their hearing and call heaven and earth to testify against them. . . And Moses recited the words of this song from beginning to end in the hearing of the whole assembly of Israel.

Many things are no doubt taking place in these words. The Song is allegedly being given as a curse against Israel. And yet Moses has already told his heavenly interlocutor that if Israel's cursing is unto death, then remove the name of Moses from the writing of the Torah-text. And yet Moses' name is still in the Torah-text. So Israel's cursing is not unto death, as the text of the Song, at places tries to imply.

A ginormous battle is taking place between the lines of the very Torah-text that's trying, in it's written version, to curse the hell out of Israel (i.e., the text of the Song). Moses stands in the gap. He's literally torn between heaven and earth, between his divine interlocutor and Israel whom he loves more than his divine interlocutor. Nachmanides implies that Moses has serious doubts concerning the motives and actions of his divine interlocutor (see Ramban at Exodus 23:20).

A great paradox exists in the writing of the Song. Rabbi Elie Munk puts it this way:

Rashi notes that heaven and earth were particularly appropriate witnesses for Hashem's Covenant with His people. After Moses' death the Jew's might be tempted to forsake the Covenant, but heaven and earth would always be there to remind them of their commitment. . . But this poses a problem: how can one understand Israel's deliverance in Messianic times if these two witnesses are always present to bring accusations against the Jews?

The problem is manifold since the very Song that calls heaven and earth to witness against Israel is given under the pretense that Moses' divine interlocutor already knows, based on Israel's actions through-out the desert, that Israel is going to break the covenant. In other words, far from the witness of heaven and earth motivating Israel not to break the covenant in Moses' absence, the text of the Torah-text claims it's already known by Moses' interlocutor that Israel will break the covenant. The Song, that witnesses for heaven and earth, is, in effect, a death-sentence for Israel (contrary to Moses' plea to have his name removed if in fact that's what it is).

A battle of cosmic proportions is taking place between Moses (earth) and his divine interlocutor (heaven), in between the lines of the Torah-text. One is dying to curse Israel unto death (Ex. 23:23), while the other is trying to save Israel without the whole attempt collapsing in on him. He, Moses, must become the slyest (and the most humble) man on earth. . . He doesn't have to outsmart his divine interlocutor, since that would be almost impossible. He merely needs to save Israel from the dire consequences of the curse of the Song until such a time as one greater than Moses arrives on the scene.

And how, per se, does Moses postpone the final solution (Isa. 65:5; Deut. 32:35) to Israel's imperfections ----as that solution is writ large in the Song given to Moses as a curse against Israel? He appeals to the spirit of 1 Peter 1:12. He realizes that his interlocutor, like Israel, doesn't (can't) distinguish between the written word and the spirit of the written word. So he writes the Song as the cantillation for the Law, the Torah, the written-text, therein condemning the Law, the written-Torah, with the same condemnation the Song intended for Israel.

Moses turns the curse from heaven on its head by interspersing the cantillation of the Song with the text of the written-Torah therein cursing the written-text of the Torah-text with the very death-dealing hatred and love of death that Moses' interlocutor intended for Israel.

But this poses a problem: how can one understand Israel's deliverance in Messianic times if these two witnesses are always present to bring accusations against the Jews? That is why Targum Yonasan speaks of a "new heaven" which will be established then and will not be able to bring accusations. Similarly, the prophet Isaiah declares: For behold! I create new heavens and a new earth, so that the former things shall not be remembered, nor come at all to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in that which I create. For behold! I create a Jerusalem of rejoicing, and of her people a source of joy! (65:17-18).

Rabbi Elie Munk, The Call of the Torah, Devarim, 32.

There are a couple ironic paradoxes, vertiginous double-entendres, complicating the understanding of the foregoing, so to say. By cursing the Torah-"text," placing the Song into the text, as the cantillation of the text, Moses is cursing Israel, therein seemingly acceding to the desire of his heavenly interlocutor? The addition of the Song, as the written cantillation determining the way the text will be read, implies that the "breath" or "spirit" of the Torah, represented by the written-Song, can be fixed, "written," just like the Torah-text that came from the pen of Moses' interlocutor. By writing the Song, with what the pen-is and represents in written communication, and this on the written text of the Torah, Moses condemns the written Torah-text (Midrash Rabbah Ecclesiastes, XI, 6; Midrash Rabbah, Genesis, XCVIII, 9; Midrash Rabbah, Leviticus, XIII, 3), and since that's the written constitution of Israel, he condemns Israel along with the Torah-text.

Someone will think that makes no sense. That by cursing the Torah-text by means of the curse designed for Israel Moses accomplishes nothing. He's just cursed Israel as his interlocutor desires. . . . But fortunately, Moses is smarter than that. 

Israel, like Adam (and they are alike, if only after circumcision, Sanhedrin 38b) preexist the Torah-scroll made for them by a heavenly scribe, surgeon, prosecutor and judge (Midrash Rabbah, Lamentations, II, 3). . . More importantly they will exist even when it’s removed (Gen. 17:10; Ex. 23:23), in a painful event circumscribed by the reality of the ritual marking their nature as Israel, and ritualizing their return to prelapsarian Adamic likeness. 

In his book, The Integrity of God, Col. Thieme describes in almost a parallel manner, the way that God defeats Adam's sin in the Garden. Rather than imputing the sin to Adam personally, which would send him straight to hell, God imputes the sin to the very flesh that was added to Adam (Gen. 2:21) in order to make the sin possible. According to Col. Thieme, God postpones Adam's utter demise by imputing his sin only to that part of his body that was not associated with the original creation, but intimately related to the original sin, the phallus and testes, such that rather than dying spiritually and physically, immediately, he (Adam) merely dies spiritually immediately (and is removed from the Garden) such that an interval of time can pass between spiritual death, and physical death.

In that interval, Adam comes to know and believe in the Gospel of Salvation, which, Gospel of Salvation, centers around the fact that by imputing Adam's sin only to the testes and their deliverer, the phallus, all of Adam's physical offspring (contaminated at physical conception) born as he exists when he’s removed from the Garden, will be given an opportunity during physical life to be re-born, not through the testes, or the phallus, but through faith, belief, in the firstborn of creation whose birth was aborted as part and parcel of the making of Eve and the phallus as described in Genesis 2:21.

After his sin, which is the conception of Cain, Adam was thrown out of the Garden, now being spiritually dead, at which time he had to come to know the Gospel of his Salvation, associated with the fact that prior to Genesis 2:21, he was already pregnant with the firstborn of creation, who was not conceived, as Cain was conceived, through the organ infected with the imputation of the sin conceived and implemented in the conception of Cain, but prior to the creation of that organ, and prior to the sin associated with that organ.

Adam merely had to believe that he was pregnant, as a Jew, a non-gendered mother, and that even though that birth was aborted, so that Eve and her bastard son Cain could bring chaos to God's original creation, nevertheless God had made arrangements for the firstborn of creation to appear stillborn and yet still be born in God’s good time. Adam merely needed to believe that God had made provisions for his great sin.

What Gittin 60b is getting at is that the oral Torah precedes the text that comes from what the pen-is and represents in the seminal act of writing. The Song Moses writes is spoken too many times throughout the first four books of the Torah for us to be surprised when a heavenly judge makes his last will and testament through Moses, a written version of what we already know about him, that he breathes and seethes hatred toward Israel even as he claims to be their protector.

In his Chumash, Rabbi Hirsch interprets Deut. 32:35 (which is part of the Song) "Mine is the office of avenger and retribution, At the appointed time their foot will slip. For the day of their smoke-cloud is near, It rushes toward them in events to come." Isaiah 65:5 pictures this heavenly judge hovering over Auschwitz taking in a breath of what to him . . . "smells like . . . . .victory."

Moses' true fear is not that Israel's foot will slip once he’s gone, for he knows their fragile understanding of God as well as does the heavenly judge. Moses' fear is of what the heavenly judge will do to Israel once Moses is gone. Nothing could visually and viscerally justify the foregoing like the scene in God on Trial where god-fearing Jews try to understand what's being pointed out in Gittin 60b. In the movie God on Trial, the Jewish speaker (giving the verdict) implies that the heavenly prosecutor has turned against Israel. But he (the Jewish speaker) couldn't be more wrong. He (the heavenly judge) always knew when he created the phallus, and the chaos that ensued, that God would send someone to right the wrong. He knew from the day Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees that a new prosecutor was on the way, and that this prosecutor would be prosecuting him, and the act whereby he transformed Adam from God's image (genderless) to his own, by means of the flesh created in his very image.

When Abraham took a knife and pierced the flesh created by this heavenly judge, juror, scribe, and surgeon (Gen. 2:21), he made the premise of the fore-going a foregone, so to say, conclusion. We are all, every one of us, writtin (per 60b Gitten) into this world as spiritually dead letters with mere physical life. It's up to all of us to read the dead-letter and hear the oral-voice of the Living God (Ex. 23:22). In this way we show, like Adam, Abraham, and Moses, that we're willing to transgress our physical birth, and the scroll we rode in on, for a new birth, a new heaven, a new earth.