Category Archives: Chumash

The Changing World

Posted on October 25, 2009 | Comments Off

The Great Flood is re-visited annually in the Torah reading, and it is often helpful to return to basics and ask a simple question: why did all of mankind (except Noah and family) have to die? G-d promises the “end of all flesh” because of their wickedness, corruption and violence, but why? If a parent has five children, and four misbehave persistently and grievously, we don’t take the four out back and shoot them, and rebuild through the fifth! So why didn’t G-d talk to that generation, negotiate with them, dialogue with them – in our parlance, and try to solve the world’s problems without violence – instead of drowning away all His disappointments, so to speak? The answer reveals as much about our world as it does about theirs.

The story’s hero, of course, is the righteous Noah, but who are the villains? Everybody else? Eventually, yes, but the Torah focuses on two groups that led everyone down the primrose path to destruction. One was called the “Bane Healthy” – literally, the sons of G-d or the sons of the powerful, and they were influenced by the “Nefilim” – literally, the fallen ones, and together the devastated the world. But who were these two groups, and from where did the fallen ones fall?

Finally, G-d ultimately concluded that He must destroy them, because “I have reconsidered having made them.” But how does G-d reconsider anything? What happened that G-d, so to speak, did not anticipate?

There were two major changes that occurred after the flood that explain the “reconsideration” – and both for the identical reason. G-d created man as a being with free will, and with the scales of free choice evenly balanced. Adam stumbled, to be sure, but then man was placed in an environment where he could indulge his soul and pursue spiritual delights for centuries on end. He could sow once and have enough food to last forty years; he was living for 700-800-900 years in perfect health (without fear that politicians – income re-distributionists – would take away his Medicare advantage or otherwise bankrupt Social Security). Every need was taken care of – man had every possible opportunity to nurture the divine image within him – the tzelem elokim.

But it was too much – man had too much luxury and leisure, temptation was too great, and G-d’s moral strictures were perceived as both elective and ephemeral. It did not have to be like that – Noah was proof of that. But after the flood, the power of the instinctual forces were greatly diminished: the land was never again as fertile, and man would have to work, and work, hard, to earn a living; the change of seasons – cold and heat, summer and winter – were all challenges that man had to overcome in order to survive – and survive he would but for dramatically reduced life spans – from the high hundreds to the low hundreds, and then, for most, to less than 100 years. Longevity and leisure were inducements to sin. Nature itself changed – but man could not have survived the turbulence that accompanied the dramatic change of nature – effectively, a “new” creation – so it was a divine act of kindness that G-d took mankind at once in the flood. The global environment posed too difficult an obstacle for man to overcome – except for Noah, and a system that is adhered too by only one person cannot long endure.

And there was another great stumbling block – the Nefilim. Who were these fallen ones? Perhaps the following is plausible: there are, of course, credible accounts of what is called pre-historic man (man pre-Adam), which should not pose any problem to Torah Jews. The Ramban indicates that the unique creation of Adam was that he was a nefesh chaya, infused with a soul, with the divine image, that rendered him an ish acher, a different type of “man, in implied contrast to other beings that possessed a similar form to his – but were not created in G-d’s image. (Thus Chava could eat from the Tree of Knowledge, and give her husband to eat as well, Rashi says, for “fear that she would die and leave Adam to marry someone else.” But who else – the shidduch pool was very small ? And the answer would be one of these human-like creatures that looked the same, but was not endowed with a soul, with a tzelem elokim, and lacked any moral sensibility at all.

These were the Nefilim, “fallen ones” because they had never risen to Adam’s level – but they successfully corrupted the “Bnei Elohim,” the children of G-d, i.e., the descendants of Adam, and for the most obvious reason: a society cannot endure if it has different rules for different people, if the law doesn’t apply equally, if one group (Adam’s descendants) lives with moral restraint and another (the Nefilim) with immoral abandon.

G-d “reconsidered” the ground rules of creation, in the sense that the global environment and man’s social environment were hopelessly corrupted. Man’s “free choice” was mostly incapable of living in luxury and making virtuous choices, and it was untenable, in a sense, to ask beings with free choice and consequences for those choices to live in harmony with beings without free choice and no consequences for those choices. No one likes double standards – and a society that is founded on it cannot long sustain itself.

That is what Roman Polanski has just learned, to his utter surprise, and to the chagrin of the other inhabitants of his amoral Hollywood universe – civilized society does have rules – but that is what Jews live with constantly. And it makes life unpleasant.

What is the Goldstone Report? Rather than admit that Jews have a right to defend themselves, the world would rather completely transform the rules of war – essentially arguing that an attacked party cannot respond if civilians might be harmed (a most novel, unprecedented and bizarre interpretation – and one that no nation has any intention of ever applying elsewhere but to Israel. How obscene is it that Russia, that killed thousand of civilians in Chechnya, and Sudan, that has killed millions of civilians in Darfur, sit in judgment of Israel, and with a straight face, and without a hint of irony or shame. Mind-boggling.

It is hard to live in such a world – hard to maintain any aspirations for moral goodness in such a world. If Israel is to be criticized anyway even though it tried to avoid any civilian casualties, why bother making the effort? Do what all other nations do. It is hard to justify the continued existence of such a world. But Noah was spared, and in a sense, so are we, in generation after generation, century after century, in society after society across the globe, so we can continue to point out – often to the remnants of the amoral Nefilim who surround us – what is right and what is wrong, what is moral and what is immoral, what is the word of G-d and what is the falsification of the word of G-d.

That remains our mission, in this irrevocably hostile world, as Isaiah prophesied, to be “a witness to the nations and a commander to their regimes,” so that eventually they will join us to bring glory to our Creator.

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Posted in Chumash, Contemporary Life, Current Events, Israel

Repentance and Ted Kennedy

Posted on September 13, 2009 | Comments Off

We are all about to be judged by the King of Kings, as “all inhabitants of the universe pass before Him like a flock of sheep.” That is both good news and bad news.

The good news is that our Sages teach that we are judged by the preponderance of our deeds. In Rambam’s words (Laws of Repentance, Chapter 2) “every human being has merits and demerits. If his good deeds outnumber his sins, then he is deemed righteous; if his sins outnumber his virtues, then he is deemed wicked.” In other words, majority good, we are meritorious; majority evil, we are guilty. By that calculation, most of us fare very well, because most people are casual sinners but basically good.

The bad news is that we are incapable of making these calculations, as Rambam continues: “There are some individual merits that outweigh even a multitude of sins, and some sins so heinous that they outweigh even a multitude of merits, and only the knowledge of the Knower of All can assess these individual acts.” Ouch.

The question that I have been pondering is: do we judge a person based on one or two atrocious acts ? Can they overshadow even a large number of good acts ? Are we defined by the one big thing, or by a host of small things ?

In truth, the recent death of Ted Kennedy started me thinking along these lines, because he is an excellent example of this conundrum. Obituaries always tend to glamorize and exaggerate a person’s virtues, and most of the tributes to him were glowing, even if they did acknowledge (sometimes in passing) the one bad deed. It was, as if, “even though, Chap-a-qui-dick, nevertheless, he was a great legislator, the liberal lion, etc.”

Let’s face it – he killed a woman (directly or indirectly), drove off a bridge (probably while intoxicated), ran past four houses at which he could have summoned help, made no timely effort to rescue her, didn’t report it to the authorities for ten hours, allegedly tried to get a friend to claim that the friend was really the driver, was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor because of the peculiarities of Massachusetts politics, and re-elected seven times because of the peculiarities of Massachusetts voters. (And I omit some of the more lurid rumors associated with this episode.) The penance, we are told, was that he did not become president – as if he had some prior claim to the presidency because his brother had been president and had been killed, and a second brother had been killed while running for office.

And yet… By all accounts, he was a very decent person. People who knew him, privately, even political opponents, or strangers with whom he had casual encounters, reported that he was decent, humble, generous, kind and sensitive. Certainly his politics, not my cup of tea or bowl of chowder, represented the old-school noblesse oblige – that those of noble origin are obligated to help those less fortunate. He was a strident political partisan, to be sure, but was always personally gracious to staffers, underlings and others not of his social class – even assisting strangers who would only later realize that it was Ted Kennedy who had helped them.

So now G-d judges.

But our question is: can a person overcome the effects of even one hideous act through a multitude of good acts ? And the answer is, perhaps surprisingly so: yes. In this morning’s Torah portion, we read (Devarim 29) that the covenant was ratified, the sojourn in the wilderness was almost complete, and life in the holy land was about to begin – and only one thing could derail G-d’s plans for the Jewish people, the one weak link: “lest there be among you a man, woman, family or tribe whose heart will turn away from our G-d in order to go and serve the gods of the nations.” The heinous crime of idolatry – of ascribing divine powers to nature or the creations of our own hands – has the capacity to ruin everything. But then the Torah adds something else “lest there be among you a root flourishing with worm and gall wood,” a poison, a rot, a bacteria in the body politic of Israel. What does this add to the mix ? Idolatry stands by itself ?

There is no worse sin than idolatry; it destroys our whole reason for existence – but it is not the simple act of idolatry that the Torah cautions against, but “a root flourishing with worm and gall wood.” The real measure of each person is whether evil has taken root, whether it is ingrained, habitual, a pattern of odious conduct – or it is aberrational, a bizarre exception to the person’s normal mode of conduct. That is the key. A person is defined by what he does consistently – what his personality is – and not by his momentary lapses.

There is a phrase for this in Hebrew – “ba’al” – meaning, “master of..”. “Ba’al” means that one is in control, one dominates a particular area. One can be a “Ba’al tzedaka” (defined as charitable), a “Ba’al chesed” (defined as kind), or conversely a “Ba’al lashon hara” (an habitual slanderer), a “Ba’al dibur” in shul (a persistent talker, who comes to shul only to socialize), the latter two in contradistinction to the occasional gossiper or the talker). Persistent patterns of conduct define the person, not the exceptions. Just like we are not judged by what we say during moments of great stress (Bava Batra 16b) – so too we are not judged ultimately by anomalies, but by the norms of our lives, to what we are dedicated, about what we are passionate, by our persistent patterns of conduct.

The flip side of this – and because of this principle – is that we are taught never to despair, never to feel that we have sinned so grievously that repentance is impossible or unwelcome, never to think that we are too far gone ever to return. Certainly every sin and every bad act has to be atoned for, but there are no obstacles to repentance. Man sins. But man is given the mitzva of repentance as well.

That is why Ted Kennedy could be, properly, rehabilitated (even if his politics remained irredeemable !) – and that is why as we look at some of the miscreants of the past year who disgraced our world, we might wish to gaze a little more benignly, and recognize that there is a difference between the sinner and the “root flourishing with worm and gall wood”, that we too are in need of divine compassion and that the challenge is before us is not to gloat or condescend – but to cultivate good traits and deeds, to keep our aberrations to a bare minimum, and to uproot entrenched areas of rebellion – in our personal and family lives, professionally and spiritually, in our shul or community, so that we may be defined as “masters of good character and good deeds, of charity and kindness.”

And then we will merit life and all of G-d’s blessings, and soon behold the day when all will perceive us as a holy people, worthy of divine redemption.