David Hazony

But Is It Really About Lies?

Response to Avraham Burg's commentary on Parashat Toldot, Genesis 25:19 - 28-9. To read Burg's piece, click here.

Do you remember when Ross Perot, in a debate against Al Gore back in the early 1990s, got flustered by something Gore said, maybe about NAFTA or Perot’s computer company, and at a certain point he started yelling out, “Now you’re lying!” “He’s lying!” Nobody could tell who was right at that moment. But everybody knew that Perot had lost the debate. The accusation, it turned out, revealed more than did the deception itself.

Avraham Burg, of course, is no Ross Perot. Yet we ought to be exceptionally careful when we focus too intently on the falsehoods that biblical characters allow themselves. Our reaction may say more about us than them.

To understand what’s troubling in Burg’s approach, we should start by taking note of the one “liar” that he oddly neglects to mention: God. God, after all, deceives twice. He famously twists Sarah’s words when asking Abraham why she laughed at the prospect of having a baby at her age (she had actually laughed about Abraham’s age, not hers). And he later deceives Abraham into thinking that he would have to kill his own son in the Binding of Isaac. In both cases, God’s example points to a problem in Burg’s reasoning: If deception equals corruption, then God too is corrupt, and we have a lot more to worry about than Jacob’s character.

The trouble is, neither of God’s lies are really “dishonest” in the way we usually think of the term. One was meant to protect Sarah’s dignity in Abraham’s eyes, the other to test Abraham’s commitment. Yet the same can be said for many of the “lies” Burg tallies. Rebecca and Jacob deceive Isaac into getting the blessing meant for Esau — but only after God had sworn to Rebecca that the “older [Esau] would serve the younger [Jacob].” Yes, Simeon and Levi deceive everyone before killing off Shechem — but that’s in retaliation for the rape and kidnapping of their sister Dina, which Burg neglects to mention. Their evil, such as it was, was in their vengefulness and violence, much more than their deception.

And clearly, what Burg points to as the “family’s greatest lie of all” is anything but. Jacob’s sons committed a great and stupid evil in brutally selling their brother Joseph to slavery. Yet even if we condemn their decision to hide it from Jacob, we can also understand their motivation. They truly wanted to protect their father from the horrible deed. Again, the cover-up pales in light of the crime.

The rabbis taught us that in rare cases you are allowed to lie — such as if a groom asks you on his wedding day what you think of his bride. And the Ten Commandments are oddly lacking the line “Thou Shalt Not Lie.” Instead we are told to “Distance yourself from the lying word,” and to be honest in your business dealings. Lying is a very bad habit; but not every deception is inherently evil, nor is every truthful statement worth saying. To lump them together, ignoring the subtleties of the actual motivations or results, branding the whole patriarchal world a “culture of lies and deceit”—is to reveal our own bugaboos more than to understand a difficult text we call our own.

To read this as it originally appeared at the Forward, click here.

The Blinding of Isaac

If you take a fresh, unadorned look at the life of Isaac, son of Abraham, you might feel like you've walked into a bad remake of a great film. Many of the same plot lines are there, but without much of the magic.

Isaac's whole adult life is covered in this week's reading—and all of it a pale reflection of his father's adventures. Like Abraham's wife Sarah, Isaac's wife Rebecca is barren until the intervention of the Divine. When she finally gives birth to twins, Isaac prefers the (slightly) older Esau while Rebecca prefers Jacob—mirroring Abraham's preference for the older Ishmael over Sarah's preference for Isaac. God clearly sides with the women in both cases: He tells Abraham to "harken to [Sarah's] voice," while in our reading he tells Rebecca that "the older [Esau] shall serve the younger [Jacob]."

Soon after, God speaks to Isaac (the only such direct communication he receives) and tells him not to go to Egypt despite the famine, but rather to stay "in this land . . . and I will perform the oath which I swore to Abraham your father; and I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven . . . " Again, the parallel to God's promise to Abraham is sharp and clear.

The parallels continue with Isaac's encounter with Avimelekh, King of Gerar. To protect his life, Isaac lies to Avimelekh, telling him that Rebecca is his sister—just as Abraham did with Sarah. (This time around, however, Avimelekh doesn't take the bait.) Isaac grows rich under Avimelekh's protection—as did his father. Then he re-digs the same wells that Abraham did in his day. Finally, Isaac makes a deal with Avimelekh, taking an oath of alliance, as his father did, and even naming the city of Beersheva after the oath, as his father likewise did. 

The final story of Isaac, in which Jacob tricks Isaac into giving him a blessing that he had intended for Esau, may not seem at first like a replay of an episode in Abraham's life. But in some ways it is. We may call it "the Blinding of Isaac," for the similarities it shares with Abraham's Binding of Isaac. Again, we have a story in which the patriarch is deceived: Abraham by God, into putting Isaac on the altar; Isaac by Jacob and Rebecca, who swindle Esau's blessing out of him. In both cases, what's at stake is a father sacrificing his beloved son.

And yet, despite the parallels, all along the way we have a sense that Isaac is no Abraham.

Isaac never clashes with Rebecca over their two children, the way Abraham does with Sarah. When Abraham goes to Avimelekh and lies about his wife, he packs it with a moral punch: "Because I thought, Surely the fear of God is not in this place." Isaac merely says, "Because I said, Lest I die for her." Abraham digs new wells, while Isaac merely re-digs old ones—a striking symbol of the original, creative actor versus the pale imitator. Abraham makes his wealth as a freewheeling shepherd, while Isaac makes his as a farmer. (The Bible everywhere prefers the shepherd over the farmer; think Cain and Abel.) Isaac speaks with God just once, while Abraham has various, fascinating discussions with the Divine.

The difference is clearest in the final story: While Abraham plays an active role in the Binding of Isaac, Isaac's role in his final story is passive, that of the dupe. While Abraham passes his test, Isaac fails his. Indeed, the symbolism in the stories couldn't be more striking: While Abraham's story invokes vision—Abraham "lifted up his eyes" to see the mountain, and then again "lifted up his eyes" to see the angel—Isaac is blind.

Indeed, we are left with two strikingly different figures, whose differences are made all the more apparent by their similarities. In many ways Isaac is the anti-Abraham, passive, imitative, and cautious where his father was active, original, and bold even to a fault.

These are the two figures that Jacob carries with him as he begins his own tale, two paradigms that end up laying the groundwork for the whole Israelite nation. In everything he does, Jacob will be choosing between Abraham and Isaac—creating a tumultuous, complex, and ferociously contradictory inner story of Israel that resonates throughout the Bible, and onward in history.

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

The Binding of Abraham

Our weekly reading gives us two radically different stories about Abraham—with two contradictory messages.

First, God decides to destroy the evil cities of Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone. When He tells Abraham of his plan, Abraham jumps to their defense: "Will you destroy the righteous with the wicked? Perhaps there are fifty righteous people in the city . . . Shall the judge of all the world not do justice?" This is followed by a famous bargaining session, with Abraham lowering the threshold at every step. In the end, God agrees to spare the cities even if they have only ten righteous men (which, apparently, they don't).

The message here is that man is so independent in his moral thinking, so alive and judgmental and grand, that even God must come under his critical gaze.

But then, at the end of this week's reading, we have what feels like the opposite story. God "tested Abraham," telling him to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham rushes to do the deed. At the last minute, an angel appears, telling him to stay his hand, "for now I know that you fear God."

The message here is that man should be so subservient to God in his moral thinking that he will do even transparently abhorrent things if it's what God instructs. 

How can we reconcile the two? Should we rise up to challenge God's injustice, or defer meekly, and accept God's will?

Here's one easy answer: These two stories are talking about two different matters. Sodom is about a man's thoughts, the Binding of Isaac about a man's actions. Think independently, we are being told, but as soon as it comes to acting on God's will, we must suppress our concerns, even moral ones, and get moving.

I don't buy that answer. First, because you can't really separate thought from action this way. In the episode with Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham wasn't just thinking, he was acting—attempting to prevent the actual destruction of the cities through an appeal to God's sense of justice. Second, in our lives, God doesn't actually tell us what to do. As none of us—including the intended readers of these stories—is a prophet, the possibility of having something "revealed" to you that contradicts your understanding of right and wrong is zero. As thinking people, all we have are traditions of right and wrong that we believe coincide with God's will. So unless this was meant to be a moral lesson for future prophets only, we'll need a better answer.

The answer, I suggest, is revealed by a third Abraham story in this week's reading, one which appears between the other two.

In this third story, Abraham travels to the Philistine city of Gerar, visiting the local King Avimelekh. Out of fear that the king will kill him to take his wife Sarah, Abraham tells Avimelekh that Sarah is his sister—whereupon the king takes Sarah to bed with him. Fortunately, he prematurely passes out before completing his conquest. That night, God comes to Avimelekh in a dream, and tells him to give her back, as she's really Abraham's wife. Avimelekh pleads ignorance, and innocence, and God tells him: I know you're innocent, just give her back.

The next day, Avimelekh confronts Abraham to ask him why he lied.  Abraham says: "Because I thought, Surely the fear of God is not in this place; and they will slay me for my wife's sake."

This is not really a good answer. Effectively, Abraham is saying: I thought you were evil, so I lied and tricked you into (almost) committing adultery. Avimelekh responds by sending Abraham away, with some lovely parting gifts to keep things civil. Yet there is something very troubling about this story.

Abraham, it seems, misjudged Avimelekh. He assumed his host was thoroughly evil, and as a result, he ended up deceiving the king and sacrificing his innocent wife, all to save himself from a wrongheaded fear.  In other words, he did precisely what he accused God of doing to Sodom and Gomorrah—judging without doing justice. Having gone head-to-head with God over morality, we now suspect Abraham's morality has gone to his head.

God seems to share in this suspicion as well. Later on, Abraham and Avimelekh reconcile over a seven-lamb dinner, followed immediately by the Binding of Isaac episode. 

Is it possible that God is responding to the Avimelekh debacle by testing Abraham? The text gives us a clue. Both episodes speak of the "fear of God"—a term very rarely used in the Books of Moses.  Abraham, we surmise, sinned because he wrongfully presumed that Avimelekh had no fear of God, so God tests Abraham to see if he, who so blithely issued judgments of others, has that fear himself.

I have often heard it suggested that Abraham knew all along that he was being tested, and that in the end he wouldn't have to sacrifice his son. I can accept that, for it's the only way to believe that the Abraham who challenged God over Sodom is the same man as the one who gets up early in the morning to slay his own son at God's instruction. At the same time, we have to assume that even if he did know how it would all turn out, the experience must still have been utterly horrifying—and exceptionally humbling. Having accused the world of lacking the fear of God, he now has to prove his own, in the most awful way.

What we're left with, in other words, is a case of character development. Over the course of three stories, Abraham grapples with his own moral independence and outrage, and discovers that sometimes the very act of judging others risks making you worse than them. In his failure, Abraham discovers that life's burdens are far too complex to allow us to turn moral judgment into a discus that we hurl at other people to affirm our own stature.  And that in the end, when God tests us, the test is often a direct consequence of our own actions.

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

Tower of Power

What's wrong with the Tower of Babel?

At first glance, the famous story that closes out this week's reading seems pretty
straightforward. The men of Babel build a tower to Heaven. God doesn't like being challenged this way, so He disperses them and confounds their tongues. It's a parable, a story of origins—of human language and perhaps of Babylonia—as well as a rejection of hubris.

But as so often happens with these ultra-concise biblical tales, the closer you read it, the weirder it gets.

First of all, I could be wrong, but this might be the only story in the entire Bible (other than the first days of Creation) in which there are absolutely no individual human beings. Decisions and actions in Babel are undertaken by an unnamed, collective mass acting in perfect unity. The people of Babel "say to each other": Let's build a tower! So they do, and God responds.

A second issue concerns the text's bizarre focus on materials. For a story just nine verses long, why focus a particularly long one on the bricks they used to build the Tower? "And they said to one another, Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar" (Genesis 11:3). 

Lastly is a far more difficult problem which has troubled me for years: The text never tells us what's so bad about what they did. The men of Babel never say they want to challenge God, only that they want to "build us a city and a tower whose top may reach to heaven," so that they could "make a name" for themselves (Genesis 11:4). But is that so bad? What's so wrong with unifying mankind, with joining together to reach the heavens? Isn't harmony an ideal, and discord a curse?

To begin to answer these questions, we look to parallels. The obvious one is to the Garden of Eden. There, too, mankind (at this point, made up entirely of Adam and Eve) sins together by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, embraces powers beyond their legitimate ken, threatens to break through the impossible barrier between man and God, and is punished with exile. That's a tough story to parse as well, but what seems to emerge is a warning against trying too hard to be too powerful, against seeing ourselves as gods. ("Like one of us," God says in Genesis 3:22.)  

So part of the problem in the Tower of Babel is clearly the classic warning against arrogance, the sheer cheek of thinking that if there are no humans to oppose us, then we might as well be gods.

But I think there is more to the Tower of Babel. While Adam and Eve are individual humans, the people of Babel are so unified as to eliminate any sense of their individuality, their capacity for thinking or acting independently. The Bible is telling us that we must never allow ourselves to be cogs in a machine, to act in absolute collective coordination. The story suggests that perfect unity is evil—that the future of mankind rests not in our ability to work together but rather to (in the current parlance) "think different," to hold on to our differentiating, individuating, sore-thumb selves. This is, in a sense, a total repudiation of some of the most devastating cultural and political forces over the last few centuries, and it's pretty amazing to see it so clearly in a text so old. 

Again we find our text in dialogue with the Garden of Eden. "It is not good for man to be alone," Genesis teaches us (2:18). For the first man, multiplicity was the solution to loneliness. In the Tower of Babel, it's the solution to blindness, one that comes from subordinating our will and conscience to that of the masses. Elsewhere the Torah warns judges never to follow the will of the mob. The Israelites were not an undifferentiated nation, but individuals divided into twelve tribes, their nation a linked federation, their stories the stories of individual prophets and kings and judges, their kingdom divided for most of their history. 

Now, add to it the question of the material, the bizarre focus on the bricks, and suddenly you have a commentary that sounds eerily post-modern. "Bricks for stone"—the men of Babel saw their power as expressed in their technology. The invention of brick was probably for them like flight was a century ago. Suddenly buildings could soar to heaven! All hail the works of our hands! If modernity is about technological progress leading to moral progress, this story says: Not so fast. Sometimes, technology can be our own undoing. 

Ultimately, of course, these two issues—the loss of individuality and the reverence for technology—are two sides of a coin. For when we believe we are all part of a great big machine or that we may be easily explained through the mechanistic eye of science, love and passion and creativity become but an illusion. In nine short verses, the Tower of Babel exposes these beliefs as a threat to our very humanity, to love, to individual passion, and to the deepest, most divine truths about our special, creative, human souls.

The Tower of Babel is at once comedy, tragedy, and devastating critique. Comedy, because of its farcical treatment of man's caprice and hubris; tragedy, because we all know about the horrific effects of a whole society reaching too far and falling over. 

Above all, though, it's the critique that grabs us. This critique tells us that in unity we are not always at peace, but sometimes at war with God; not always good, but sometimes deeply evil; not always our true selves, but sometimes trying too hard to be someone else. Our inventions, from gadgets to grand systems of governance, may well empower us, but as soon as we let them overtake our judgment and humility and humanity, let them convince us we can achieve anything as long as we submit wholly to their magic—then we begin climbing a tower so tall that we might just run out of oxygen before we get anywhere close to Heaven.

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

 

Moses' Other Song

It’s one of the least-sung songs in the Bible. Known as the “Song of Moses,” or shirat ha’azinu among traditional Jews, the poem that takes up almost the entirety of this week’s Torah reading is twice as long as Moses’ better-known Song of the Sea, which appears right after the parting of the Red Sea in Exodus and is part of Judaism’s traditional daily morning prayers. If the Song of the Sea was Moses’ hit single, the Song of Moses was the B-side.

Yet in many ways, the Song of Moses is by far the more important of the two. Nearing the end of his final address to Israel, just after being told he is about to die, Moses calls upon the Israelites “to write this poem for yourselves, and teach it the children of Israel; put it in their mouths, that this poem may be a witness for me against the children of Israel” (Deuteronomy 31:19).

Witness, indeed. On the cusp of the Promised Land and what looks like the end of their seemingly endless trials, Moses serves up a shocking warning to the Israelites: My song may be over, but yours is just beginning. If today you have learned to revere God and accept his leadership, tomorrow you will inevitably slip up, forgetting the eternal truths that brought you here and taking everything your forefathers struggled to achieve for granted.

Though its language is lofty, the song’s central themes are straightforward. After some preliminaries (“My doctrine shall drop as the rain / my speech shall distil as the dew” (32:2), Moses recaps all of human history as a tale of love and betrayal between Israel and God.

At first, God lovingly cared for the Children of Israel (“He kept them as the apple of his eye. / As an eagle stirs up her nest, / broods over her young… / so the Lord alone did lead him, / there was no strange God with him”). But Israel couldn’t keep its head clear, and began following false gods (“With abominations they provoked him to anger. / They sacrificed to powerless spirits; to gods whom they knew not” (32:16-17). God withdrew his protective cover, and the Israelites were left to the mercy of other powers. The Israelites were devastated and scattered by cruel nations whose “grapes are the grapes of wrath,” and God is left wishing that his people had a little more wisdom, gratitude and memory. The song concludes with a reminder of who God really is: “See now that I, even I, am He / and there is no god with me. / I kill, and make alive; / I wound, and I heal. / Neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand” (32:39).

There’s enough in the Song of Moses to keep theologians busy for millennia. What’s missing? No mention of keeping mitzvot per se, nor even of the covenant in its formal sense. In this final song-as-witness, the Ten Commandments are but a vague memory, the Tabernacle and its services suddenly trivial. Only one thing is important: a deep, emotional, unbreakable loyalty to God. That is, the subordination of all our calculations to Him, the absolute and unconditional refusal to bring “other gods” into the picture.

Scholars often have a hard time with the Song of Moses. For some, who scour the Torah for legal jots and tittles, there is little of interest here. Others will quickly point to the stylistic differences with the rest of Deuteronomy, and they too will avert their gaze from the contents because questions of authorship and dating are more meaningful to them. 

These scholars ignore the contents of the Song of Moses at their own expense. What we have is a soaring song, unparalleled in its scope and expressiveness, positioned in such a way as to make it the bottom line of the whole Torah, a declaration of eternal verities, a cornerstone of faith, a motion to adjourn. With it comes a message no modern-day Child of Israel can ignore, regardless of denomination or ideology: Without gratitude to the Creator we are nothing; without loyalty to him we are tossed to the winds; without the hope he gives us, we are left relying solely on our own works—and against the roaring tide of human history, these are but dust. 

Can a more powerful message be voiced just days before Yom Kippur?

 

 

Defending Human Dignity

From beginning to end, this week's reading offers a catalog of value-laden statements about how the ancient Israelites were to become a good people.

But because many of these commandments address a world that oscillated between nomadic and agrarian, a world that saw women as chattel, it's too easy to miss the larger meaning. Almost all the commandments are, at heart, about human dignity, and their overall effect is to place the individual on a higher pedestal than anything known in the ancient world.

Most of the commandments are aimed at extreme cases, safeguarding the dignity of the lowliest members of society.

First, the poor. Few things in life are as damaging to dignity as poverty. The poor are subject to the fear of creditors and of the future, the shame of relying on favors, and the panic and reversion to our animalistic survival instincts. While the Torah concedes that poverty itself can never be eradicated ("for the poor shall not disappear from the earth," Deuteronomy 15:11), this week's reading offers a reminder that if we can't solve poverty, at least we can minimize its indignities. We are forbidden from taking advantage of poor people's desperation by charging interest, or forcing them to sleep uncovered because we've taken their clothes as collateral. When we come to take their pledge, we must respect the privacy of their home, waiting outside rather than barging in on them. If they wander among our crops to find food, we must let them eat rather than making them beg for food. And we must pay a day laborer on the day he works, rather than making him wait and worry.

Second, women. In a world where muscle mattered most, guarding the honor of women was a crucial way of enshrining human dignity in general. So we find a string of laws protecting women against defamation (such as a husband's trying to get out of a marriage by claiming that his wife-to-be wasn't a virgin), wartime rape (by forcing the rapist to marry the woman and support her) and wife-swapping (by banning remarrying a woman who had married and divorced a different man in the interim).

Third, criminals. For a society seeking order, nothing is more tempting than to use the body of an executed criminal as an enduring symbol of what happens when one runs afoul of the authorities. Indeed, in some countries today it's still common to see hanging bodies. Yet the Torah places strict limits on this, insisting that even capital criminals deserve dignity and a quick burial—"for a hanging body is a curse to God." For lesser criminals, too, there are strict limits on punishment, such as the law that lashes cannot exceed a nonlethal forty—not so much out of a sense of mercy, but of dignity: "lest your brother become vile in your eyes."

Again, some of these laws today seem outdated, and some of them self-evident to the point of absurd (such as the obligation to go outside the military camp in order to defecate, taking a shovel with you). Yet we are lucky to live in a world where dignity is self-evident and privacy is grounded in law, and we should never make light of our ancient teachings that helped us get here—and that continue to guide us.

In not only celebrating liberty but also enshrining it in law and the notion of "unalienable rights," modern democracy has taken strides that go beyond the Torah's specific laws in safeguarding this idea of human dignity. For centuries now, we have prided ourselves on knowing what for ancient Israelites, raised in the pharaonic slave machine, may have been a radical idea: That every one of us, created in the image of God, deserves a measure of honor, privacy, and dignity.

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

The First Step in Living Nobly

Think back, if you will, to a time when we didn't have scientists using a fairly reliable system of knowledge to uncover the secrets of the universe. When we didn't believe in a single God giving order and law and hope to the world. When life was chaos.

It's a world that might have driven a modern person crazy. For every conceivable fear, there was some supernatural answer at hand. Magical practices appeased whimsical forces—sometimes. Worried about the rainfall? About dying in battle? Don't try to make sense out of things. Just give the local shaman your sheep, and hope for the best.

Although it's rarely read this way, this week's Torah reading describes nothing less than a revolution in the way human beings interacted with the unknown.

Usually we think of the Bible's big monotheistic revolution as one of centralization. Although every society had its priests, conjurers, and other intermediaries with the divine, in ancient Israel they were focused: a single God, a single cult, a single altar. We like to think of it as a philosophical unification of truth and morality under a single God.

But centralization had a flipside, as well: the effective elimination of the supernatural as something accessible to ordinary people on a daily basis. No longer were there local priests to handle sacrifices on easy-access altars. No more idols in your backyard. If you wanted to get close to anything otherworldly, you'd have to travel all the way to the Tabernacle.

In the meantime, day-to-day life became shockingly plain. Political leaders were revered for their wisdom in judgment and success in war—not so much for their mastery of the dark forces. The flipside of a centralized worship, in other words, was a radical bracketing out of the supernatural from ordinary life.

This week's reading gives us a list of ways in which Israelites hoped to achieve this.

First, there is the removal of all localized worship, not just of false gods but even of the God of Israel. "Take heed to yourself that you offer not your burnt offerings in every place that you see: but only in the place which the Lord shall choose in one of your tribes, there you shall offer your burnt offerings . . . "

This was a lot more radical than we usually think. It's hard to imagine Judaism without the synagogue, but our text gives us no reason to think that any organized worship of God took place outside the Tabernacle. Even individuals in the Bible saw prayer as something unusual and occasion-driven, rather than scheduled thrice daily. When Hannah, the mother of Samuel, wanted to pray for God's relief of her barrenness, she traveled to the Tabernacle to beseech God. Synagogues and prayer books would come much later.

Instead, for most people, biblical "religion" was expressed in behavior: dietary laws, Sabbath laws, submission to Mosaic civil law, and teaching of God's texts are pretty much all there was. The sense that we could somehow appease the crazy cosmos to improve our lives was suddenly gone, in a universe that was now, for the first time, supposed to make sense.

Second, there is the overwhelming dismissal of local prophets claiming to offer easy access to the supernatural. The Israelites are here instructed that "if there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and he give you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder come to pass, of which he spoke to you, saying, Let us go after other gods, which you have not known, and let us serve them, you shall not hearken to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams . . . " (Deuteronomy 13:1–3). The whole industry of idolatrous magicians and soothsayers would be eliminated. Only prophets of God would be suffered—and even they, as the Bible shows us, often had a hard time of it.

Third, there's an intensive effort to prevent people from reflexively backsliding to the chaotic world of the ever-present supernatural. Don't listen to your friends and relatives who tell you to worship other gods, we are told. Don't follow your curiosity to study the practices of the idolaters. If a whole city turns to idolatry, destroy it. In the Israelite state, all that supernatural stuff was ultra-taboo, for fear of bringing back the chaos that reigned before the revolution.

Still other passages point in the same direction. We are told to remember that the Levites aren't merely conduits for the supernatural, they're also real people who need to eat, and we aren't allowed to neglect them. And we're given practical, non-mystical solutions for people who live too far from the Tabernacle to bring sacrifices and tithes.

What emerges from all this is the incredible, extraordinary establishment of a way of life that most of us, religious and secular alike, would today find quite normal. In a few crucial ways, this new form of life was a precursor to what would eventually become the modern world. For the majority of humanity today, the universe is something inherently stable, governed by human wisdom and laws of nature, in which even the most powerful people can be held accountable for their successes and failures; in which you can't just petition the gods at an altar every time you're worried about your future; in which people have to plan ahead and take responsibility for themselves and others; in which ordinary people have the luxury of focusing far less energy on appeasing forces beyond their comprehension—and far more energy on the art of living nobly.

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

Why Hamas Plays the Terror Card

One of the big questions in Israel following today’s coordinated terror attack near Eilat in which six Israeli civilians and one Israel Defense Force soldier were murdered is this: Since Hamas controls the Gaza Strip and has a great deal of influence over whether other terror groups there launch attacks, why would they allow it? After all, the reasoning goes, at such a sensitive time in negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, as well as talks heating up over the possible release of Gilad Shalit, shouldn’t they want to keep things quiet?

You could, obviously, conclude that this attack, apparently carried out by the Popular Resistance Committee (PRC), took place over Hamas’ objections. This is apparently the position of the Israeli government, which retaliated by taking out the top three leaders of the PRC in Gaza via air strikes a few hours ago. In a short statement by Prime Minister Netanyahu in the last hour, he seemed to suggest that there wouldn’t be any further response. (“The people who ordered the attack, and those who carried it out, are no longer alive,” he declared.) It was the PRC, not Hamas, that needed to pay a price.

But there’s another possibility, which is that Hamas has a huge reason to escalate violence from Gaza right now. It’s all about Syria. While President Bashar Assad has continued to slaughter his own people — including Palestinians — the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank has been blasting the Assad regime. Hamas, on the other hand, has been totally mum, for the simple reason that they are headquartered in Damascus and rely on the Assad regime. So the PA has taken full advantage of an opportunity to cast itself as the true protectors of Palestinians. Hamas, which has always claimed that protecting Palestinians can happen only through terror, has to remind its people that there’s a war on against Israel, and that we shouldn’t let their silence over Assad’s brutality against Palestinians let anyone get confused as to what’s really important: Brutality against Israelis.

UPDATE 22 Aug: As if to prove my point, Haaretz reported yesterday that Iran apparently has cut off aid to Hamas because of its failure to support the Assad regime, precipitating a serious fiscal crisis among the terrorists.

To see the original piece at Contentions, click here.

The Memory in Our Tablets

In reviewing this week's Torah reading, a competent editor might have asked Moses what he really needs it all for. Much of the speechifying, the recounting of what has already been counted, seems excessive in a book so concise in its delivery of stories and laws. Do we really need to hear the Ten Commandments a second time?

True, there are some juicy novellae this week for the philosophically inclined: God's unity, in what would become the famous Shema prayer; reward and punishment; the perfection of the Torah; and more all make their appearance.

But the core of the reading is in the repetition of the Ten Commandments. Scholars and commentators have always scoured this week's version of the Decalogue for all the minor textual variations from the one appearing in Exodus 20, in the reading known as Yitro. The ninth commandment, we discover, talks about the "vain" witness rather than the false witness; the tenth commandment's prohibition on coveting presents a slightly different list of things not to be coveted; and the fourth commandment offers a new rationale for keeping the Sabbath, recalling the exodus from Egypt rather than the creation of the universe. 

However, the most important difference is not in the text, but in the context. The first time the Ten Commandments appears, it is in the story of the revelation at Sinai. This time, it's in Moses'retelling of that story. And there's the rub.

This is, after all, the Torah, in which nothing is supposed to be extraneous. So we have to conclude that according to the Bible, the retelling of a story is no less important than the original event itself. As if to prove the point, Moses prefaces this week's recitation of the Ten Commandments with the following:

Only take heed to yourself, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things which your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. But teach them to your sons, and your sons' sons—the day that you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb . . .

As if that's not enough, just before the Ten Commandments themselves, he adds this:

The Lord made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day. The Lord talked with you face to face in the mountain out of the midst of the fire . . .

This is remarkable, because most of the hundreds of thousands who stood listening to Moses' speech hadn't actually been at Sinai. Clearly there is something more profound at work. In a crucial sense, this is the beginning of Judaism.

On some level, Judaism is not about the events of Mount Sinai, but their recollection and eternal rediscovery through texts and memorial ritual, creating a living community of remembrance. It is not the encounter with the One God so much as the teaching about that encounter to subsequent generations. It is not hearing God in the fire, wondering whether one will survive it, as much as the retelling of the story of the fire. For what happened in Yitro happened once, while what happens in Va'ethanan happens every day of our lives.

Today, the most popular claims against Judaism are about the "unlikelihood" of the "hypothesis" of a single, caring God who intervenes in history. Under the influence of Christianity, which from its origins was much more about beliefs, argumentation and proof, a great many writers and thinkers put Judaism to an intellectual test. Where Judaism is found wanting, it is on the battlefield of rational discourse.

Yet nothing in human experience is as irrational as experience itself. The crises we endure, the people we meet, the wisdom we earn have little to do with theories or beliefs. Our modes of commitment, love, caution, and sacrifice are a lot less about philosophy and a lot more about what we ourselves, "all of us here alive this day," have seen, felt, and done.

For this reason, Judaism is primarily about collective experience, and any attempt to describe it solely in terms of faith, belief, or ideas inevitably distorts its essence. Not that Judaism has no core principles, but to the faithful Jew, each such principle owes its force not so much to its self-evident truth or its philosophical superiority (nor even its revelation per se, since who among us has experienced revelation?) as to its place in our collective memory.

And so, we have our strangely repetitive text. A philosophical truth need be expressed only once. A memory must be repeated—not just from generation to generation, but from day to day, "as you sit in your house, as your go on your way, as you lie down and as you rise up."

To read the original piece in Jewish Ideas Daily, click here.

 

The Death of Peoplehood?

Recently I had an upsetting e-mail exchange with an old friend. A prominent, politically active Jewish conservative, he told me that he had long ago given up trying to convince American Jews on the left to support Israel. “I don’t really see them as family anymore,” he wrote. “I’ve found a new family, the American Right.”

Heavy words — words that many Jews on the left can relate to, as well. Long sensitized to anything that smells of “neocons” and “Likud politics,” they, too, have cut themselves off from their conservative kinsmen, disavowing any sense of common destiny or “family” that once gave the word “Jewish” its most poignant, deepest valences.

But I just can’t swallow it. Maybe I’m naive, but I’ll never accept what looks a lot like the end of Jewish peoplehood.

I know, I’m oversimplifying. With so many Jewish “umbrella” groups, Jewish community centers, federations and so on, it’s easy to believe that, at least on the face of things, Jewish peoplehood in America is thriving. Yet, something does seem to be dying in the American Jewish fire. The infighting among Jewish groups, the polarization on Israel and the willingness to demonize whole communities of fellow Jews have become so extreme that one begins to wonder what, exactly, is left of the Jewish family.

Alienation from Israel is only the most blatant example. For decades, American and Israeli Jews have been growing apart, separated by radically different experiences and by cultural developments. But as Shmuel Rosner points out in his new book, “Shtetl, Bagel, Baseball” — it’s in Hebrew and a best-seller in Israel — most American Jews have little or no awareness of the experience of Jews today anywhere outside the United States.

But that’s only the beginning. Take religion. In many non-Orthodox communities, the focus on universal values threatens to eclipse any passionate concern for the fate of fellow Jews not just in Israel, but also in France or Argentina or anywhere else; among the Orthodox, religious practice and the repudiation of “modernity” have become a litmus test for inclusion, turning peoplehood into a distant memory. For these Orthodox Jews, there is no Jewish people, only frum people.

But as my friend’s e-mail shows, the problem may be at its worst when it comes to politics. Here, American Jews are ferociously divided, with each side accusing the other of fraternizing with a perceived enemy.

For Jews on the left, conservatives have joined forces with that most fearsome part of America, conservative Christians, to undermine the liberal, secular space that Jews have worked so hard to carve out for themselves as the real solution to the Jewish problem.

For Jews on the right, liberals have joined forces with pro-Palestinian activists, universalists and others who threaten the Jewish state that we worked so hard to create and protect as the real solution to the Jewish problem.

Jewish identity used to be about putting peoplehood first. In the Bible, we were a people before we had a religion. In the Talmud, the rabbis said that “baseless hatred” among Jews was the true cause of our exile. After the Holocaust, Jews rallied together to help build Israel and then, later, to save a million of their brethren from Soviet oppression. Today, it feels like Jewish identity is defined by our ability to write off other Jews.

Okay, you say, enough carping. What’s to be done?

The answer, of course, begins first with recognizing the depth of the problem. The word “Jewish” has become a shadow of its former self and needs to be reinvigorated with profound, inclusive meaning. To overcome the religious divide, it needs to reflect attention to a collective tradition, biblical and rabbinic, bracketing out the bitter disagreements over authority and authorship of texts. To overcome the political divide, it needs to suggest a family bond, and a deeper set of cultural traditions and instincts that transcend mutual fear and distrust, the idea that there’s nothing wrong with seeing our Jewish political adversaries as “crazy cousins” whom, despite our disagreements, we love nonetheless.

And to overcome the geographical divide, it needs a serious effort of translation, an assertion that the experiences of Jews elsewhere in the world, both positive and negative, are not less valuable just because they take place in a foreign language.

All these have sharp policy implications for rabbis, lay leaders, educators, philanthropists and other decision makers. But first we need to agree on what was once axiomatic: Peoplehood before politics, before religion, before geography. That is the Jewish way, and our only way forward.

The Talmud teaches that, like traditional Jews, God, has a pair of tefillin that he puts on every day. Yet instead of “Hear O Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One,” the verse inscribed in God’s tefillin is a different one: “Who is like your people, O Israel, one nation on earth?” Our monotheism, the rabbis taught, is met by God’s mono-nationalism. Will we ever feel that good about ourselves again?

To read the original piece at The Forward, click here.