Ya gotta have a plan. If you want to build a house or even add to a house, you've got to have a plan. If you want to become CEO of your company, or put your kids through college, you've got to have a plan. If you want to escape from prison, ya gotta have a plan, and it had better be cleverer than the one dreamed up by a man named

Kourosh Bakhtiari [who] was arrested for masterminding a three-man escape from a New York City correctional center. In order to effect his escape Bakhtiari meticulously braided over fifteen rolls of unwaxed dental floss to make a rope strong enough to support a 190-pound man. However, he had neglected to plan for gloves; the floss so abraded his hands he had to be hospitalized for cuts to several tendons and ligaments. [King Duncan, Dynamic Preaching, Seven Worlds Corp. (Knoxville, Tenn., Jan/ Feb/ Mar/ 1996), "Loser."]

We Jews have a plan of our own, a creative, powerful, ethical core of teachings that form the underpinnings of everything we call Western Civilization. We call it Torah. It is a blueprint for a world of peace, morality, and human dignity. Our tradition even suggests that God, the divine architect, first created Torah and then, like a builder consulting the blueprints for a housing complex, created the universe.

Throughout our history we Jews have consulted this plan. It has taught us how to live, how to treat each other, how to act in the day to day world of earning a living, how to deal with government, crime, economics, marriage, family. - everything. "Turn it, turn it, for all is contained therein" says our tradition. It is the lens through which we approach reality, the plans we consult to build ourselves a place in the world.

For us to read this blueprint, this Torah to build our lives we need to understand its main dimensions: its height, its depth, and its width.

The height of Torah is found in its arguments. Yes, arguments. Abraham argues with God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in what has to be the first bidding war in history. God is going to bring about their destruction, and tells this to Abraham. Appalled, Abraham begins to argue with God:

"What if I can find fifty righteous people in the cities, will you spare the cities for their sake?"

If you can find fifty, I will," says God.

"And if there are only forty, will you spare them then?"

"Yes, even for forty," says God.

Abraham argues God down all the way to ten, but even ten righteous people are not to be found, so according to the legend, the evil cities are destroyed.

Moses argues with God and does even better than Abraham. Only weeks after being freed from Egyptian bondage with miraculous events at every turn, relates the story, Moses is atop a cloud-covered mountain receiving instructions directly from God. Moses returns bearing the tablets of the Ten Commandments, hears noise in the camp, and descends only to find the people worshipping an idol in drunken revelry. God is furious and tells Moses that the rebellious Hebrews are to be destroyed for their transgressions. Moses argues with God, and wins! God promises not to destroy the people.

Strange as it may seem, these two arguments and others like them elsewhere in our tradition represent one of the highest pinnacles of religious insight that human beings have ever attained! How so? Before our Torah, you couldn't ever argue with God and hope to win. For the pagan world ultimate reality was immutable and inexorable, steamrolling over our petty mortal wants and desires. Illness, war, famine, health, peace, prosperity - all were pre-ordained and there was nothing we could do to change it. Existence was an ever-turning circle, a kind of hamster's wheel in which we were forever trapped.

But what if you could create change? That's what our tales of Abraham and Moses arguing with God and convincing God to change actually mean. For the first time in human history our ancestors taught that change was possible. It might be agonizingly slow, but ultimately polio, smallpox, and so many other illnesses have been conquered. We now have the means to feed every last person on this planet, though our political and economic will haven't yet caught up.

Change, with our effort, is possible, even in the most seemingly intractable areas. That is the height dimension of our Torah blueprint.

The Torah's depths lie in an unceasing quest for an ethical and moral world:

A certain man had been a faithful builder for an employer for many years. His employer decided to take a world cruise. Before leaving he left his builder plans for an ideal house.

"Build it according to specification, spare no necessary expense. I want this house to be a good house for a special reason."

But the builder thought of the many years he had worked for small wages and decided to make a profit for himself, so he substituted cheap materials where it would not show.

On his return his employer observed the house with satisfaction and said, "You have served me well these many years. In reward I have planned this house for you. It is yours, to own, and to live in." [King Duncan, Lively Illustrations for Effective Preaching, Seven Worlds Pub.(Knoxville, Tenn., 1987),"Commitment".]

We have always known this, and the Torah has embodied it. The first story in the Torah, the creation story, is a morality play. Adam and Eve's sin is not sex, it is moral disobedience. They transgress God's decree of right and wrong. Read further and you come to the story of Cain and Abel, a tale of the immorality, the wrongness of murder. Go on to Noah, and you read that the world was to be flooded because of our moral transgressions. This is a far deeper and far different understanding than the pagan epic, Enumah Elish, on which the Noah story is based. There the gods were napping after their usual morning orgy and one of our noisy little wars down here on earth woke them up. Grumpy at being awakened, they capriciously decided to destroy humankind with a flood. When our tradition "borrowed" this story we changed it and added the moral dimension that is the depth of our teaching.

The Torah's width lies in a process of dialogic interpretation that was unique when we created it and has since been adapted by many of the world's religions. The issue is simple, the same problem faced by the

… man [who] had a great idea for his children's birthday. He ordered the plans for a tree house from a mail-order catalogue. He received instead the plans for a sailboat. His letter of complaint to the company brought this apologetic reply: "While we regret the inconvenience this mistake must have caused you, it is nothing compared to that of the man who is out on a lake somewhere trying to sail your tree house." [King Duncan, Mule Eggs and Topknots, Seven Worlds Corp. (Knoxville, Tenn., 1987),"Business".]

You'd have a tough time sailing a tree house and just as tough a time basing your business affairs as a computer consultant or an accountant on blueprints created by people who herded sheep and were just beginning to use iron-tipped plows.

By any stretch of the imagination our Torah should have become obsolete millennia ago. We can still use it, still learn from it, still consider it the sacred source of our morals and ethics, because we have been able to widen its focus. Think about the Torah, the Bible, that we use at our services. The Hebrew text is there, and there is also an English translation for those who don't understand the Hebrew. On each page various words, phrases, and concepts are explained in commentaries keyed to the individual sentences. Before each section there is in interpretive essay of about a page and a half, and after each section one to three pages of related material gleaned from other parts of Jewish tradition. There is a major essay at the beginning of each of the five books, and a major essay introducing the volume as a whole.

Some of that "extra" material, material that widens the scope of Torah so that it can include any possible sphere of concern, was written in the Middle Ages. Some was written in the Renaissance, some in the Enlightenment, some in the Romantic period, some in Colonial American times, some in the 19th century, some in the 20th. It was written in France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Poland, Egypt, Israel, the US, and almost any other place you can think of. We Jews rarely just use an unadorned Torah text. Instead, we learn it armed with commentaries, explanatory glosses, an incredibly huge body of interpretive literature that has been growing daily for over two thousand years and, with the availability of the internet, is now expanding exponentially.

In this tremendously wide sea of ideas, what is authentically Torah? What we people say it is. Oh, it's not done frivolously, or manipulatively by some small cabal. It's an inherently democratic process that has continued unabated for centuries. Who decided that the phrase in the Torah "you shall write them upon your houses" meant that each Jewish home should have a mezuzah on the doorpost? It wasn't the leadership. It was the people. The rabbis originally tried to ban them as superstitious amulets, good luck charms meant to chase away evil spirits. But the will of the people prevailed, and the use of the mezuzah is now Torah.

The English word for Torah, bible, is an apt one. A bible is a collection of books, and that is exactly what the Torah is, a collection that ranges far beyond the rollers on the scroll or the front and back covers of the book. It is an ancient yet ever-new blueprint for a dream: the heights of hope in which we try and tame an often hostile universe, a depth of moral purpose we apply to all humankind, and a democratic process of interpretation that provides a width of understanding capable of reaching anyone, anywhere. And that is just the beginning. As Albert Einstein said so beautifully:

We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child is aware that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books--a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects." ["LectionAid," July/Aug/Sept. 1995.]

We are that child, just entering into the library we call Torah. We have not been here all that long. We suspect there is so much more to learn, and we are right. There can be an order and a beauty to human life. L'amrot ha'kol, in spite of everything, in spite of the evil and the terror, it is still possible. When will we use that blueprint to build an abiding house of peace for us all? It depends on how hard we are willing to study, and how quickly we are willing to learn.