Category Archives: Chumash

Sacred Violence

Posted on January 29, 2013 | 5 Comments

The Torah is filled with violence, although it doesn’t always seem real to us. Imagine if there would be today a “splitting of the Red Sea,” and Egyptian soldiers would be killed by the thousands, even myriads. Wouldn’t it be unseemly to sing and dance over their destruction –“the horse and its rider were tossed in the sea… the mighty sank in the water like lead”? I am not referring to the Talmudic comment that G-d admonished the angels for singing; that is a different point – in the ideal world, every human being would be engaged in Divine service and to that extent the death of every human being is a loss. But we recite Az Yashir ¬– Moshe’s song celebrating the miracle at the Red Sea and the destruction of the Pharaoh’s forces – every day. Every day we recount the downfall of our enemy. But how do we react to the violence? How do we not become desensitized to it?
It is not the first or last time this matter is confronted in the Torah. In Sh’mot, Moshe saw an Egyptian beating a Jew – and he killed him, buried him in the sand, and the next day had to flee Egypt. Moshe killed him. Who kills people? The Torah doesn’t even say that the Egyptian was trying to kill the Jew, only that he was hitting him. For that you kill someone?
And all the accounts of the plagues visited upon Egypt – one after another and culminating with the Red Sea – begs the question: does anyone feel sorry for them, at any point? Should we? Does the Torah ever command us to feel sympathy for our enemies? (Mishlei 24:17 deals with personal enemies, not national ones; besides, numerous other verses contradict it – e.g., Mishlei 11:10). There’s even a children’s song I remember that makes the divine plagues visited upon the Egyptians seem entertaining – about the frogs that afflicted the Egyptians. Or do we simply rely on G-d’s justice and exult in that “G-d is my might and my song, and He is a salvation for me… G-d is the Master of war, G-d is His name.”
Master of war? Rashi comments that G-d is the Master of War – and even when He takes vengeance on His enemies, still “G-d is His name,” He remains a merciful G-d who can wage war and provide for the domestic needs of His servants. But how do we even feel about G-d being “Master of war?” We are accustomed to depicting G-d as compassionate and gracious. But the “Master of war?” Why are we never commanded to have sympathy for these victims of sacred violence, of which there are legions in the Bible?
Sympathy is usually an unreliable tool to measure either people’s character or their moral aspirations. I’ve noticed over the years that, like many things in life, there is a Bell Curve that accurately charts the people’s parameters of sympathy for others. There are some who feel bad for everyone – or almost everyone; they are “extreme sympathizers.” Even if the predicament is of the person’s own making, they will still feel bad for them. They’ll even feel bad for bad people, although maybe not real evil people.
Others are at the opposite extreme – they are “sympathy-challenged.” They believe in self-help and initiative, that people naturally suffer for their own mistakes, and that most bad situations are avoidable – most, not all, and they reserve their sympathy for the absolutely unavoidable. And the majority of people are found somewhat in the middle of the Bell Curve – they’ll sympathize with most but not all victims, but with one remarkable dimension: very often reasonable people will differ as to whether some victims deserve sympathy or not.
Take this case: Do Pharaoh’s armies that drowned in the Red Sea deserve our sympathy? Each of them was certainly a child of someone, and probably a father and a husband as well. Their deaths were undoubtedly tragic for their families and communities. But they don’t seem real to us, and are ancient in any event. Nonetheless, more modern cases present: Gazan children killed inadvertently by Israeli rockets targeting terrorists who build their infrastructure in residential neighborhoods seem to provoke much more international sympathy (contrived and hypocritical, to be sure) than did the children of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or Dresden. Those killed – almost all civilians – did not seem to provoke as much hand-wringing then (less than seventy years ago) as they unquestionably would today. So, are we more moral – or less moral – than we were seventy or 3300 years ago? Are we more sensitive to human suffering or perhaps just less judgmental about absolute evil?
I think the latter, and the answer to all these questions comes down to values. American society is adrift in sporadic violence and seeming dysfunction, and not because there is more violence today than ever. It only seems that way, but in fact violent crime has dropped precipitously in the last two decades. What has changed is the type of violence – from violence directed at victims of crimes from which the perpetrator hoped to derive some material benefit to random shootings of strangers for no discernible reason. That dysfunction suggests that large sectors of a nation that has lost touch with the G-d of the Bible, and no longer perceives people as created in the image of G-d. That detachment nurtures an avalanche of violence in the culture – books, television, movies, video games – that has a greater impact on people, especially those with defective souls or defective minds, more than anything else. The killing doesn’t seem real to them, and just like the violence in the Bible, it doesn’t really register. The disconnect with G-d added to the cultural celebration of violence and combined with one other volatile ingredient – that fame is more important than accomplishment, regardless how the fame is achieved – engender these sporadic eruptions of violence. If self-debasement is the ticket to fame, so be it; violence is just another form of self-abasement.
But the Bible contains epic scenes of violence; how is it then that Jewish society is less violent than others – still – and even with our children being reared on the stories in the Torah? It is not that there is no violence in Jewish life, but it is exceedingly rare and always lamentable. I think it is because we are also taught the value of every human being created in the image of
G-d, and especially because we internalize “G-d as the Master of war.” We have been given a system of absolute good and absolute evil and the capacity to distinguish them – and therefore we also recognize that reckless compassion and wanton sympathy are inherently dangerous: “He who is compassionate to the cruel will eventually be cruel to the compassionate” (Midrash Kohelet Rabba 7:16; Tanchuma Metzora 1) – and that distorts our entire value system.
And one more reason – we have been given the gift of optimism, of looking forward to a brighter and more peaceful era.
In one of the cryptic questions posed by the Wise Men of Athens in the Talmud to R. Yehoshua, trying to test his wisdom and to concede the superiority of Roman culture and values over those of the Torah – they asked (Bechorot 8b): “How do you cut a field of knives or swords? He answered: “with the horn of a donkey.” They retorted, “does a donkey have horns?” to which R. Yehoshua replied, in classic Jewish fashion, “Is there a field that grows knives?”
The dialogue is enigmatic but brilliant. Of course, our world today is a field of knives and swords and guns and weapons. Mankind has always struggled with a disregard for human life; we are just more aware of its failings today because they are broadcast into our homes. What keeps us striving, and what gives us confidence that goodness will ultimately prevail, is the horn of the donkey – the donkey that brings Messiah, who “rides on a donkey,” and whose “horn” (pride) will be uplifted and symbolize our salvation and that of the world. The Messiah re-introduces to the world the notion of an objective morality – absolute good and absolute evil. It is the task of good people even today to enunciate those values. Civilization is undermined when such people are timid, reticent and withdraw from the fray.
That is why our spiritual giants were always warriors – despite rumors we hear today from some quarters – Avraham, Moshe, Yehoshua, David and others. They did not hesitate to take up arms and to act forcefully when necessary. The Jewish spiritual heroes were always warriors – but always reluctant warriors. They embodied a code that has a great respect for all life but also great contempt for injustice and evil. That is why we sing daily of the death of the wicked at the Red Sea, and the wicked everywhere, not because they died but because we saw evil perish and justice triumph – and why, even today, with each such triumph over evil, we move the world ever closer to the day of when “G-d will reign forever.”

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Posted in Chumash, Contemporary Life, Current Events, Israel, Jewish History, Machshava/Jewish Thought

Time Release

Posted on September 25, 2012 | 2 Comments

The Torah summarizes the very essence of our lives at the end of Parshat Nitzavim (Devarim 30:20): “…to love G-d, to listen to His voice and to cleave to Him, for He is your life and the length of your days…” What a magnificent statement – that requires definition. The Netziv (Rav Naphtali Zvi Yehuda Berlin) comments that to love G-d and to listen to His voice means to immerse ourselves in Torah – to toil in Torah – whereas to cleave to G-d means to support Torah – not everyone can sit and learn, but they can acquire a love and an intimate connection to G-d by supporting Torah.

And not only that – but “He is your life and the length of your days.”  What’s the difference between “your life” and “the length of your days”? Many explain that “your life” means life itself in this world and “length of days” refer to one’s quality of life. But others (the Sforno, for one) explain that “your life” means eternal life, which makes sense. “And you who cleave to G-d are all alive today” (ibid 4:4) – cleaving to G-d grants us eternal life. But what then is “length of days” in reference to eternity?

Not long ago, the Jewish world marked the shloshim of Zev Wolfson a”h. When he died, I did not know much about his remarkable life except that he was a great philanthropist of Jewish causes. One of the distinguished Rabbis in Yerushalayim eulogized him as “the pillar of loving-kindness in our generation,” just like the recently-departed Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv zt”l was the “pillar of Torah in our generation.” All this I learned in a remarkable column in the Israeli weekly Besheva (August 23, 2012 edition) that had an interesting twist to it, well-written as always by their esteemed columnist Yedidya Meir. (http://www.inn.co.il/Besheva/Article.aspx/12227)

The column framed a minimized page of obituaries from the Israeli Yated Neeman, right in the middle of the page, placed in Yated by some of the yeshivot that Zev Wolfson supported – in Beer Yaakov, in Yerushalayim – yeshivot I also never heard of. Then the article described him – his simplicity, directness, utter selflessness and dedication to the Jewish people, and especially his willingness to invest in a Jewish cause or organization if there was a plan and a definable objective. Each day he would implore everyone to do something for Klal Yisrael – the most important concern in life

He supported hundreds of organizations, and was obsessed in his later years with bridging the gap between secular Israeli youth and the Jewish people, not necessarily to bring them to observance in a traditional sense but to enhance their Jewish identity and give them a connection to the Jewish people. So, about a decade ago he started funding drop-in centers in Tel Aviv, for young people, called Nefesh Yehudi. Thousands have attended – and the columnist wrote about one of them, a young woman named Keren Svistov who worked as a planner at a major advertising firm in Tel Aviv.

Apparently, there was a buzz in Israel back in February when Keren Svistov updated her Facebook page, and columnist Meir decided to save it for a column in the month Elul. In February, she wrote on her Facebook page that “the time has come to speak about this teshuva (repentance) of mine. People keep sending me worrisome emails – ‘what’s happened to you? Are you freaking out? Such an intelligent girl. Is it because you haven’t found a husband, or because your father died of cancer?”

She was raised secular, and maintained a customary Tel Avivi lifestyle. Yet, for 3½ years, she had been learning at one center in Tel Aviv – once a week, for 4½ hours at a time. I paraphrase some selections (translation mine): “I’m touching the truth, understanding it and denying it, getting close to it and then fleeing from it. I don’t want the light to close me in. I don’t want to think my whole prior life was false. Yet, slowly, Torah enters.”

     “Where do I start? Sometimes I think my return was rational and logical, not spiritual. That my mind, trained to acquire degrees, to be analytical, sees that there must be logic in the universe – and Torah, science, our history, ending with the question: ‘why are we here? Why are we members of the Jewish people?’ And then I am told that such a repentance sounds like one is embarrassed about one’s Jewishness, which I am not. Repentance need not be purely logical.”

      “And each morning I thank G-d, for I believe I will be able to chip away some more of the shell and return to myself and to You. I gave up my immodest dress, and the cloak of sarcasm that I also wore. And sometimes it is a struggle – how do you nurture a princess when my entire essence still cries out for materialism? Pride, beauty, shopping, money, honor, and control. The instinctual drive always leads me on a more enjoyable, comfortable path… Sometimes the sins I think I had eradicated return with a vengeance. Master of the universe, what a long road it is to You! Yet another day of repentance begins.” It was posted at 2:41 AM in February 2012.

But that’s not the end of her story. This was in February. Meir filed it away for use in Elul – and then, he noticed in Yated, on that page of obituary notices for Zev Wolfson, there were engagement announcements in the upper corner of the same page –  and, lo and behold, Keren Svistov (now of Netiv Bina, a seminary in Givatayim) became engaged to be married to another Tel Avivian, Daniel Machnes, now learning at a yeshiva in Tel Aviv.

How is that for coincidence? The death of the benefactor mourned, and the lives of his beneficiaries celebrated, on the same page. Blessed is the Judge of Truth, and Mazal Tov, in the same corner.

“For He is your life and the length of your days.” G-d not only gives us eternal life but also “length of our days” What is “length of days”? The capacity to live beyond our sojourn on earth, certainly to leave behind children and families, but especially good deeds and acts of kindness that render us immortal, that continue to take effect years beyond our lifespan.

We are able to touch people in such a way that long after we are gone, they can say about us “but for him or her, my life would have been lost, or different, or unfulfilled.” We can make each day count – not only when we are alive but by doing something virtuous that will pay dividends in generations yet to come.

That we can do even if we are not multi-millionaires; and that we can try to do every day, for “He is your life and the length of your days.” Then we too will have a share in the flourishing of repentance, the national renaissance that is prophesied for the end of days; then, our enemies will tremble before us, and we will again be called “G-d’s holy nation, redeemed.”

Shana tova to all !

 

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Posted in Chumash, Contemporary Life, Current Events, Machshava/Jewish Thought

THE SUCCESSFUL

Posted on August 10, 2012 | 9 Comments

     Like a skilled acrobat, President Obama is tying to extricate himself from his unguarded but truthful statement several weeks ago. As part of his effort to incite class warfare and raise taxes on the “rich” to some unspecified amount that will constitute “fairness,” he veered from his teleprompter and exclaimed, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” “If you’re successful, it’s not because you work hard – a lot of people work hard.” It’s something else – not the village – but, apparently, government, and especially all others who created the infrastructure that facilitated your success. (Of course, those others, for some indeterminate reason, did not achieve the same success as did the protagonist; evidently, that is the “unfairness” at the heart of the system, notwithstanding that the successful” also paid for the infrastructure but perhaps utilized it more productively. No matter.)

     Winston Churchill once said that the difference between socialists and liberals (he meant the classical liberals of his day, those who loved liberty, akin to today’s libertarians) is that the socialist wants to tear down the rich, whereas the liberal wants to build up the poor. In a nutshell, Churchill defined not only his era but also the primary issue before the American electorate this year.

       One potential problem in criticizing the Obama philosophy is an allusion to such an approach in this week’s Torah reading (!): “And you will say in your heart, it is my might and the power of my hand that has afforded me this great wealth. And you should remember G-d, for it is G-d who has given you the power to achieve this wealth” (Devarim 8:17-18).

      In other words, it is not you! Many people may work hard, many people may be educated – but their success is not due to their own efforts but to G-d’s will. Obama meant government as that unseen force, and if he had substituted “G-d” for “government,” his argument would have met little objection except from diehard secularists. And he would have flabbergasted his supporters and opponents alike – but for wholly different reasons. Is there some merit to this argument? Is the contention that “my might and the power of my hand have afforded me this great wealth” inherently arrogant? If so, where is there room for human endeavor, ingenuity and effort? Are we not allowed some personal satisfaction in the wake of any achievement?

       As always, the Torah penetrates to the depths of our thoughts. At the beginning of the Torah reading (7:17), we are enjoined that “if you say to your heart” that the nations around us are too powerful, then do not fear, and later (9:4) we are admonished “do not say in your heart” that G-d gave us the land because of our righteousness. Note the difference in phraseology: If you say, or do not say… as opposed to here, where the Torah writes “and you will say” when you see the great abundance and physical blessings of the land of Israel, that “my strength and my might made me all this wealth.”

      Is this latter statement positive or negative statement? We widely interpret it as negative, the height of arrogance, as if to say, it is all me, I did it. But if it is negative, then why doesn’t the Torah use the other locutions, “if you say,” or “don’t say.” Here, the Torah emphasizes “you will say.” Furthermore, how can a person who builds an organization, a building, a home, a family, a successful business – how can he not feel that but for him, it would not have occurred? The Torah’s prescription would seem to be a recipe for passivity or even apathy – “I didn’t do it, it’s all from G-d.” But if it is all from G-d, then why should we do anything?

    The “Ran” (Rabbenu Nissim, 14th Century, Gerona, Spain) comments in his tenth sermon that “you will say” is meant literally – you will say it, because you should say it. Every person should feel that there are things that only he or she can do – there is no one else to do it; it is my responsibility. The truth is that people have “segulot meyuchadot,” special abilities and talents, so that the successful person should say “it is my might and the power of my hand” that have accomplished my goals. There is only one caveat, one limitation: “remember G-d,” remember as well that G-d is the ultimate source of your talents and abilities, that the forces that inhere in you all come from G-d.

    There are times when a person must say, in the language of our Sages, “ein hadavar talui eleh bi,” it is all up to me. And what a delicate balance that is – between the arrogant form of “my might and the power of my hand” and the weighty realization that “everything is my responsibility.” How do we distance one and bring near the other? Through remembering G-d.

     Countries are not built, wars are not won, communities are not founded, and organizations are not sustained by the passive or the reactive, but rather by the activists, the strong, the leaders, the fearless – especially those who don’t fear failure or success, and by those who are willing to take personal responsibility for failure. Successful businesses are not built by the timid, and great advances in civilization are not the product of the diffident – and nor, for that matter, are they the product of government but of people, entrepreneurs, independent thinkers, creative souls.

    The catalyst for all success is “and you will say” and “you will remember         G-d” – to do our share, to take responsibility for our own destiny, to know that G-d has given each of us the tools to accomplish great things in life, each of us in accordance with our own personalities. It is what built Israel, it is what built America, and is at the heart of the challenge facing civilization today – the war of the timorous and the brave, the struggle between those who crave dependency and those who love freedom, and the battle between those prone to concession and weakness and those with strength of spirit and character. It is that spirit that will sustain even through difficult times – as we await the great and awesome days of complete redemption.

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Posted in Chumash, Contemporary Life, Current Events, Israel

The Holy Life

Posted on May 7, 2012 | 2 Comments

    The Torah’s sublime challenge to the Jewish people – Kedoshim tihiyu, “be holy,” – is a remarkable demand, compounded by the fact that the Torah does not give us any overt guidelines as to how a person becomes holy. We have some clues; Rashi comments that holiness is a byproduct of abstention from immorality and sin. But that is still not a definition. It is certainly possible for a person to abstain from immorality and sin and not be holy. So what is it that we are being asked – and clearly something at the very essence of Jewish life?

      The injunction “Be holy,” for all its inscrutability, demands one thing of us that is in very short supply today, and at the heart of the moral malaise in society, the meanderings of our youth and to some extent all of us, and much of the discontent we feel: the obligation to create and nurture an inner world, an Olam Hapenimi, where the soul is really expressed and our values are located – the point of connection between the human being and G-d. For much of society today, Jewish and non-Jewish, the inner world is dormant, or worse, dead, and we have to revive it.

     What does it mean to lack an inner world? Take the Secret Service scandal, for instance. The problem was not their desire to expand the definition of “Service,” but their lack of understanding of “Secret,” the first word of their agency. This, and the rest of the shenanigans across the country, is a product of what Dan Henninger (WSJ) labeled our “Age of Indiscretion.” People are indiscreet not only in the sense that they don’t cover their tracks well, but rather that many people today choose to live their lives on public display. Many feel no need to cover their tracks, because their self-esteem is dependent on their public lives – on people reading about them and hearing about them, and knowing their every inconsequential thought and action.

    This refers not only to celebrities but to all of us and our children. It is easy to blame the technology, and undoubtedly technology has enabled greater access to private places than ever before. But technology is a tool – it’s morally neutral – and the limits and effects of the technology are choices that we make. Personally, I think that Facebook and its offshoots are some of the most harmful phenomena in our world today, not that my disapproval will cause them to lose a nickel off their impending IPO. Facebook and friends breed indiscretion, induces bad behavior, propagates superficial and artificial relationships – and, worst of all, they rob people of their inner world, their inner sanctum of thoughts, feelings, emotions – of the capacity to think, to be private, to look before you leap, to be a real person, and especially to connect to G-d.

     Do we wonder why davening is so difficult – for all of us, but especially for young people? Because we have no inner worlds. Kavana (concentration, focus, intention) is all about an inner world, and without cultivating an inner world, Kavana is impossible. Without an inner world, davening becomes all about “saying words,” and “saying words” will have a diminishing impact on people over time, especially saying the same words again and again. That is why people get easily distracted in prayer, seek comfort in inane conversation, and simply congregate in the halls. There are no “actions” in prayer, nothing to post about or tweet about; it is function of our inner world, and so it is rapidly being lost. Too often, our outside shakes, while our inside is inert.

      In another realm, what is tzniut, in a modern term, but discretion – judgment, reticence, the yearning to keep private what is private. Tzniut recognizes the dignity of every person; it is the veneer that shields our inner world, our holy of holies, from the prying world. So tzniut can nurture a real relationship of real people – i.e., people who relate and interact appropriately, not through texts and emails, but through actual conversation, not with flamboyance or braggadocio, but with humility. The extent to which people choose to communicate indirectly, through technology, and thereby avoid human contact, is astonishing, and debilitating to the nurturing of real human relationships.

      And what a disease is a lack of tzniut – indiscretion – whether it is found in adults who act like children and broadcast it, or in young people who know no limits and bare their deepest secrets (and more) to a world of strangers, or, for that matter, in a president who can’t stop using the word “I” in boasting about his accomplishments but never in acknowledging his failures. President Obama in that sense is quite representative of his generation. President Bush the First had an aversion to using the first-person pronoun, having been whacked at his home dinner table as a child every time he started a sentence with “I.” President Reagan recognized that there is no limit to what can be accomplished as long as no attention is paid to who gets the credit. And perhaps the best example of the ethos of a prior generation was President Kennedy who, after accepting full responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, stated that “success has many fathers, and failure is an orphan.” These days, success has only one author, and failure is a team effort, of just the previous guy’s fault.

      It is the presidency as reality TV, where only appearances count.

      Rashi continues that “wherever you find boundaries against indecency, you find holiness.” I.e., wherever you find boundaries, period, you will find holiness, maturity, and responsibility. And wherever there are no boundaries, human beings can descend to great depths.

     The Rambam wrote (Shoresh 4, Sefer HaMitzvot) that “Be holy” is not one of the 613 commandments, because we don’t count the “commandments that subsume the entire Torah.”  “Be holy” is not something to do, but something to be. It is that something that defines our lives as individuals, separates us from the nations, and is the hallmark of our people – to build an inner world that can connect directly to G-d. It is that uniqueness that can fortify our lives and give it depth and substance, as assuredly as it will render us worthy of the rebuilt Holy Temple, speedily and in our days.

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Posted in Chumash, Contemporary Life, Current Events, Machshava/Jewish Thought