David Hazony

Speak, Memory

Last week's Torah reading contained a couple of verses destined to thrill theologians for generations to come. God's laws, Moses tells the Israelites, are "your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, who shall hear all these statutes, and say . . . , ‘what nation is so great . . . that has statutes and judgments so righteous as all this Torah?'"

Now that's a powerful assertion: the biblical laws are not merely right by God's authority, they're so self-evidently right that the nations of the world will be blown away by their wisdom. Indeed, religious philosophers have repeatedly cited this passage to justify the claim that sincere philosophical exploration will uncover the universal truth of the biblical commandments.

Perhaps the Torah does contain universal wisdom. But in fact that is not the main thrust of either last week's or this week's reading. Both focus on something entirely different: namely, the importance of memory in the formation of human goodness.  Immediately after these verses, for example, we read: "Only take heed to yourself . . .  lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen." The horrible consequence of such forgetfulness is that the Israelites will come to imitate the idolatrous and corrupt nations they are displacing.

This week's reading presents no fewer than four key reasons to rely not on righteous laws but on a strong memory:  

1. Memory helps overcome fear. The Israelites, about to invade the Promised Land, are terrified at the prospect of their first-ever war of conquest. The last time they'd considered it, their loss of will was punished by forty years of wandering. Now God tells them not to be afraid, but to "well remember what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt." In overcoming fright, no amount of abstract reasoning can uplift the spirit so well as the memory of past success.

2. Memory motivates good behavior. After the horrors of Egypt, and the trials of the desert, Israel accepted the Ten Commandments at Sinai and committed themselves to Moses' moral leadership. "Your fathers went down to Egypt," Moses now reminds them, "with seventy persons; and now the Lord your God has made you as the stars of Heaven for multitude. Therefore you shall love the Lord your God, and keep His charge." The key word is "therefore": the commitment to goodness begins with gratitude and the recollection of salvation.

3. Memory gives humility. "And you shall remember all the way which the Lord your God led you these forty years in the wilderness," we read, "and fed you with manna . . . that He might make you know that . . . by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord does man live." Goodness is not found in the human mind but exists outside us—a fact, it seems, that can't be known by people who, forgetting the humbling experiences of life, come to believe that they themselves are the measure of all things. Especially in times of prosperity, the temptation is to "say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.' But you shall remember the Lord your God."

4. Memory gives love. "Love therefore the stranger," we are told, "for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." This commandment appears so often in the Torah that one wonders if it, rather than the Ten Commandments, is not the moral core of the entire biblical program. It is grounded in the memory of enslavement—without which, it suggests, love itself is impossible.

The central message, it seems, is that codes of law, no matter how self-evidently true, are useless unless accompanied by a rich battery of memories and experience. And so we learn that "when your son asks you" the meaning of the commandments, the correct reply is neither that God said so, nor that these are the best possible laws, but rather that "we were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt; and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand." The apparent non-sequitur can be understood only as declaring the priority of memory over simple obedience to authority, including the authority of our own reason, in spreading goodness to others, beginning with our children.

Why so? Part of the answer is surely that reason and logic offer the weakest motivation for being good. Unless you are a Vulcan or a computer, life is a complex jumble of emotions, burdens, and aspirations—products of the very irrational thing that is life itself. As even Kant taught, good rules may come from reason, but the motivation to follow them has to come from somewhere else—somewhere transcending reason.

There is a deeper answer. Without memory, experience, and the wisdom that come from them, we can't begin to know how to be good. True, not everybody has the experience of being a stranger, or of having his property stolen, or of worshiping idols. But that is where tradition, and the relentless telling of stories that dominates the Bible, come in. And both these stories and the laws accompanying them have to be repeated at virtually every moment of our lives: "And you shall lay up these My words in your heart and in your soul, and you shall teach them to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up."

Is forgetfulness the true root of evil on this earth, and wise and informed memory the true source of good? So it would seem.

To see the original piece at Jewish Ideas Daily, click here.

The Ten Commandments: Booklist Starred Review!

I just received word that Booklist has given The Ten Commandments a Starred Review! Here's what they wrote:

In the Supreme Court’s legalistic rulings on public display of the Ten Commandments, Hazony finds disturbing evidence that even when the Decalogue stirs up controversy, it does not receive serious scrutiny. Dispelling the common misconception that it is an irrelevant artifact of a theocratic age, Hazony shows that this set of biblical commandments fosters social health in ways that should matter even to the secularly minded. Even the first commandment—the warning against putting any god above the God of Abraham—yields a social imperative when Hazony draws from it a humane moral vision that will sustain redemptive action in an oppressive world. Similarly insightful readings open up the second commandment’s prohibition against graven images into an invitation into the richer life that awaits those who will smash the narcissistic idols of wealth and fashion; similarly, Hazony converts the fifth commandment’s injunction to honor our parents into a basis for intergenerational moral understanding. And in the final commandment’s admonition against covetousness, readers will discover a shelter against insecurity and a harbor of peace. Ultimately, Hazony finds in the Ten Commandments not a reason for discouragement because of our inevitable individual failings but, rather, a source for renewal of vibrant communities. A timely reappropriation of ancient moral wisdom.

— Bryce Christensen

Untimely Farewell

Standing in the desert of Moav, poised to send the Israelites into the Promised Land without his own titanic presence to lead the way, Moses begins his last and greatest speech.

The preliminary parts of his farewell address take up the entirety of this week's reading. He opens by recapping much of what the Israelites have been through over the preceding forty years. Oddly, he skips many of the most crucial parts of the biblical story: not just the creation of the universe and the tales of the patriarchs but the descent into Egypt and even the fact that they were slaves. Nor is there a word about God's most important miracles: the Ten Plagues, the escape from Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, or the wonders leading up to Mount Sinai.

Rather, Moses starts with what for us is the middle of the story: "The Lord our God spoke to us [at Mount Sinai], saying, ‘You have dwelt long enough in this mountain: turn, and take your journey . . . behold, I have set the land before you: go in and possess the land which the Lord swore to your fathers." (Deuteronomy 1: 6-8)

Why begin there?

First, we need to recall the audience. These were not the same Israelites who had been born and raised as slaves, cowering under the twin terrors of Pharaoh's edicts and God's miracles. Nor were they the anxious masses who balked at every military engagement and desert hardship, begging Moses to lead them back to Egypt. They were, rather, a new generation—a generation of warriors, schooled in self-affirmation and the art of survival. Most had been born in the desert, hardened shepherd-souls longing to fulfill their ancestral promise.

So Moses' unusual opening was tailored to the task at hand. Instead of dwelling on the parents' suffering and helplessness, it starts with how the children were launched out of Sinai like a rocket toward Canaan. From there Moses proceeds to recount their previous efforts at war and nation-building, from the Sin of the Spies to the latest victories against the Emorite kings Sihon and Og.

But there is more to it than that. Many nations are forged in war: struggles for independence that not only define their future mode of governance but also create the conditions of their national identity. Americans fought off the British in 1776 under the banner of freedom, but it took decades, perhaps a whole century, before their identity would be cemented as "one nation, under God." For the Israelites, by contrast, identity preceded independence.

Israel was founded not in war but in the revelation at Mount Sinai, where the people were transformed from a mass of slaves related by common ancestry into a nation bound by a covenantal vision. That vision was one not only of political independence and prosperity but of a "holy nation" that would serve as a light to the world. It was a vision, in other words, for all mankind.

Moses' unusual opening points us to the most important thing there is to know about Jewish identity. In many ways, leaving Mount Sinai was the real beginning of the national story, a journey that throughout history has embodied the foundational memory of Jewish peoplehood.

This is true not just for biblical literalists but even for those who understand the experience of revelation as a product of human genius. Even if you decline to view the events at Sinai as historically accurate, the myth-or-memory of the vision emerging from Sinai—more so than the experience of God's miracles or of Pharaoh's wrath—defines Judaism as a faith, and the Jews as a people, infused with divine content and with a promise for humanity.

The real core of Jewish identity, Moses teaches here, is the common experience not of suffering but of inspiration.

To read the original post at Jewish Ideas Daily, click here.

The Good, the Bad, and Nicholas Kristof

This is really quite amazing. The New York Times’s Nick Kristof, never much of a fan of Zionist self-affirmation, has published a column so transparent in its underlying philosophy as to qualify almost as a classic. It’s called “In Israel, the Noble vs. the Ugly,” and it contains all the predictable adulation of the weak, glorified Palestinians and their Israeli advocates (the “noble”) versus the nasty, thuggish settlers (”the ugly”). Leaving aside the question of aesthetics (is no noble person ugly?), the piece winds up and delivers with this zinger of a paragraph showing how wonderful Israel is because it has so many “noble” Israelis:

This “other Israel” extends far beyond Rabbis for Human Rights. The most cogent critiques of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians invariably come from Israel’s own human rights organizations. The most lucid unraveling of Israel’s founding mythology comes from Israeli historians. The deepest critiques of Israel’s historical claims come from Israeli archeologists…. This more noble Israel, refusing to retreat from its values even in times of fear and stress, is a model for the world.

So there it is: he begins with the claim that nobility is defined not by honor, bravery, creativity, honesty, or constructive achievement but by Israelis critiquing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Now, I can sort of accept how a reasonable, sensitive, if ill-informed, person might say that. But then he takes us two steps further. Nobility, we learn, is further defined by the “lucid unraveling of Israel’s founding mythology,” and finally by the “deepest critiques of Israel’s historical claims.”

This is the point where Kristof leaves reasoned discourse and falls down the rabbit hole of rabid anti-Zionism before spiraling into self-attacking universalism. I used to think that for an intellectual like Kristof, nobility should be defined not as attacking all self-affirming beliefs but rather as being willing to sacrifice myths when the facts dictate otherwise. But not, apparently, for Kristof, who seems to be saying that any affirmation of either the Zionist narrative (you know, the Jews were in exile for thousands of years, suffered because they had no political power, and have a right to their own state) or Israel’s historical claims (you know, that there were once a lot of Israelites in the Holy Land) is by definition not noble but ugly.

Lest you think Kristof is a wielder of anti-Zionist double-standards, holding such definitions of nobility only where Israelis are concerned, he ends by saying that noble Israelis should be a model for the world. So I wonder: does that include the Palestinians as well? I mean, where are their critiques of Palestinian treatment of Israelis, their historians challenging the reigning Palestinian myths, or their archaeologists challenging Palestinian claims?

To see the original post at Contentions, click here.

Ten Commandments on Facebook!

As pre-orders for my upcoming book on the Ten Commandments have begun rolling in, I've launched a Facebook fan page for the book. Click here to get updates on events, reviews, or just join the conversation! Remember to click "like" when you're there -- and you can also spread the word by suggesting the page to your friends. 

And while we're on the subject, you should know that both Amazon and Barnes & Noble are offering major discounts (over 30%) to people who pre-order right now. I don't know how long that will last! 

Moses' Democratic Moment

There is something bizarre, even clumsy, about the transition of power from Moses to his right-hand man Joshua in this week's Torah reading. God tells Moses that he has reached the end of his life, instructing him to climb the mountain of Avarim and die there. But who will take over?

God doesn't even raise the subject until Moses implores: "Let the Lord . . . set a man over the congregation, . . . that the congregation of the Lord be not as sheep that have no shepherd" (Numbers 27:16–17). Only then, accepting Moses' request, does God appoint Joshua, "a man in whom is spirit," to succeed him. The fact that Moses has to ask, and in such strong language, suggests that the divine decision is almost an afterthought. Could it be that the sheep really didn't need a shepherd?

God's hesitation suggests that the question is far from a simple one, and His answer turns out to be more complex than Moses may have expected. While command of the military, and executive leadership more generally, will be handed over to the loyal Joshua, the power that God gives him is far from absolute. Before any military campaign can be launched, Joshua—and, we presume, future leaders—will need to seek the approval of the urim v'tumim: a kind of oracle under authority of the High Priest, "who shall ask counsel for him . . . before the Lord."

This is not the first or the last time the Bible calls into question the idea of absolute human authority. Soon after crossing the Red Sea, Moses himself is forced to delegate his own judicial control to a whole system of lower-level courts; later on, he is similarly compelled to share the powers of prophecy with the seventy elders of Israel. In Deuteronomy, God insists that strict limits be placed on the power of kings lest they accumulate too much wealth or war-making power.

Once the Israelites occupy the land, the very idea of absolute rule is repeatedly challenged—the most famous case being when, after centuries of rule by ad-hoc "judges," the Israelites turn to the prophet Samuel to give them a king. Samuel complains to God, Who answers: "Hearken to the voice of the people in all that they say to you: For they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them." Here and elsewhere the institution of absolute rule, so critical to the political theologies of other ancient peoples, is perceived as competing with God Himself. And indeed the period of the kings, after the glory years of David and Solomon, is marked by an overall sense of prolonged political failure; bad royal decisions result in the division of Israel into two competing kingdoms, ultimately issuing in iniquity, corruption, collapse, and destruction.

All of this seems to point to a broad critique of political power—or, more precisely, a critique of the kind of centralized power that will rival God's presence on earth. And this is not so hard to understand: the Bible's messages are aimed, first of all, to each of us as independent, thinking individuals. The Ten Commandments are written in the second-person-singular: you, the individual, shall not murder or steal. What makes the prophets great is their willingness to challenge the authority of kings. The biblical ideal is not the king but the shepherd, a strong individual who depends on no one else for his sustenance and therefore has no fear of political authorities. Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and David are all shepherds.

Ancient Israel was by no means a democratic regime as the term is understood today. There was no universal suffrage, slavery was still institutionalized, and the separation of powers was in its infancy. Yet by calling into question the absolute regimes that dominated the ancient world, by challenging the logic of control that gave rulers sanction to oppress, displace, or even kill individuals at will, the Bible set into play what is surely the cornerstone of democratic thinking: the idea that what happens in the world is not just the whim of whoever holds power but in the first instance a product of  our private lives as thinking, feeling, moral beings—and that each of us has a duty to take responsibility for our world.

This also may help explain another oddity in the transition from Moses to Joshua. God instructs Moses to lay his "hand" on Joshua's head. But Moses, we read, laid his "hands"—plural—on him: a shift that was not lost on the rabbinical commentators. Rashi suggests that Moses was going beyond God's orders in a show of ebullient devotion. Yet, in the wake of the all too recent incident when, instead of speaking as commanded, Moses struck the rock and thereby earned the punishment that has led to the very ceremony now taking place, it is hard to read this passage so simply.

Perhaps Moses was sending Joshua a message: the truly bold shepherd of Israel, as an indelible mark of his humanity, will at one point or another need to act on his own, ignoring even God's authority. Sometimes, as in the incident of the rock, he will have every reason to regret it. But sometimes—as when Moses smashed the tablets of the covenant—it is exactly what is needed.

To see the original post at Jewish Ideas Daily, click here.