This week’s Torah portion contains one of those verses that appears, at first glance, to close the door firmly against religious change (Deut. 4:2):

“You shall not add anything to what I command you or take anything away from it, but shall keep the commandments of the Eternal your God.”

The instruction seems unequivocal. Torah has been given; our task is to preserve it intact. Do not add - do not subtract - do not touch.

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And yet almost everything we recognise as Jewish life has emerged through interpretation. The Torah does not tell us precisely how to light Shabbat candles, how to celebrate a bat mitzvah, what words to recite beneath a chuppah or how a synagogue service should unfold. Even practices that feel ancient and immutable have been shaped, refined and sometimes transformed by successive generations.

The rabbis were alert to this apparent contradiction and struggled how to make sense of it. The medieval commentator Rashi interprets the prohibition rather narrowly:

We must not change the basic form of a commandment: we cannot place five passages in the tefillin rather than four, take five species on Sukkot rather than four, or add a fifth fringe to a garment.

The problem, according to Rashi, is not that Judaism develops. It is that we must not alter a commandment and then pretend that our alteration was part of the original instruction.

Maimonides takes the point further. A rabbinic court, he says, may create new prohibitions and safeguards. It may even establish them for generations. What it may not do is claim that its own ruling was written into Torah from the beginning. The human contribution is legitimate; disguising it as divine is not.

Perhaps, then, the command not to add or subtract is not a demand that Torah remain frozen. It is a demand for humility and honesty: to distinguish between what we have inherited, what we have interpreted and what we are choosing anew.

Indeed, Deuteronomy itself makes this point in a rather wonderful way. The book presents Moses retelling Israel’s journey and restating its laws to a new generation. But he does not simply reproduce what came before. He selects, reframes and interprets the past in order to speak to people standing at a different moment in history. As The Torah: A Women’s Commentary observes, Moses’ speeches “retell—and reinterpret—the formative events in Israel’s journey” for multiple audiences: those standing before him, the generations for whom the book was shaped, and all subsequent readers.

The book that tells us not to change Torah is itself an example of Torah being retold.

Our siddur expresses this paradox beautifully:

“Sinai was only the beginning. The Torah has never ceased to grow. In every age it has been refined and enlarged. It has a permanent core and an expanding periphery. It expands as the horizon of human vision grows.”

It then draws on a teaching from the Talmud, Chagigah 3b:

“As plants are fruitful and multiply, so the words of Torah are fruitful and multiply.”

The rabbis of the Talmud teach us that Torah is not a museum object, preserved because nobody is permitted to touch it. It is more like a living plant. It remains rooted, but it grows. It sends out new branches. It produces fruit that did not exist in precisely that form before, yet which could only have emerged from those roots.

Progressive Judaism has sometimes been accused of subtracting from Torah. And, at times, we may be tempted to answer by insisting that we have changed nothing at all—that equality, feminism and inclusion were always fully visible within the tradition. But that answer does not quite honour the truth. New experience has enlarged our horizon. Voices once excluded from the conversation have taught us to notice dimensions of Torah that previous generations could not, or would not, see.

We have added voices of those previously marginalised. We have removed barriers that denied people full dignity. We have created new rituals for human experiences that earlier generations did not publicly acknowledge. These are human acts of interpretation. But they need not be acts of unfaithfulness.

The more difficult question is not simply whether we add or subtract. Every Jewish community does both. The question is what guides us as we do so.

Do our interpretations deepen human dignity? Do they help us hear the enduring demands of justice and compassion? Do they allow Torah to speak honestly to the world in which we live? And are we humble enough to acknowledge that what seems clear to us may yet be enlarged by generations still to come?

Sinai was only the beginning. The revelation was given, but its possibilities were not exhausted. Our task is neither to preserve Torah beneath glass nor to reshape it in our own image. It is to tend it: protecting its roots, pruning what prevents life and making room for new branches to grow.

For the words of Torah are fruitful and multiply—and we are entrusted with helping them bear good fruit.

Shabbat Shalom

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