TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1. – DEVARIM
The Case of the Missing Prayer
The Book of Deuteronomy is the summation of Moses’ teaching. What narrative there is unfolds sometime in January, in the winter of 1273 b.c.e., thirty-six short days before his death. Indeed it is Moses’ death, looming like an imminent avalanche, which dictates the mood of finality about this book.
It is no coincidence that the Sidra of Devarim always coincides with Shabbat Chazon, the week of the Ninth of Av Fast: the darkest days in the Jewish calendar.
I recall, as a child standing beside my father in Shul on Simchat Torah, while Reb Wolf Dresdner the cantor read the final paragraphs of the last chapter in the Five Books of Moses. The verses describe Moses’ death at the very location we find ourselves in this week’s Sidra: on Mount Nebo, in the Plains of Moab by the River Jordan, across from the city of Jericho. The last verses of the Torah are read but once a year, amid festivities, rejoicing and dancing. When Reb Wolf came to the words, ‘And Moses died…’ he began sobbing piteously. The entire congregation caught its breath; old men wiped gathering tears from their eyes. The grip my father held on my hand tightened painfully, perhaps he wanted me to note the conscious moment, perhaps his eyes spilled over, too. Whatever connection I still have to Moses and his Torah I date back to that poignant moment; to that sense of immediate and irreplaceable loss.
There are two sorts of people to whom it never occurs to pray, says the Izbicy[1]: those to whom God will not listen even when they do pray, and those who have already been heard and answered[2].
The rest of us need to pray.
Now the question is, why didn’t we pray for Moses the way he did for us? Why did we not, even once, demand of God that Moses be allowed to lead us into the Promised Land? Where does such insensibility originate?
How could we be so deaf? In the Book of Deuteronomy Moses makes broad hints to us to intercede on his behalf. He practically begs us to show God that we want him. But we, in our responses, pretended we didn’t get any of his hints, nudges and winks. We acted oblivious even when he pointed it out to us, showed us to our faces that he saw through our act. We went on blithely, without paying attention to his calls for help.
It’s a disgrace. There is not one mention in the entire Torah of us Jews praying or speaking up for Moses. Where does such supreme insensitivity, selfishness and inattention originate?
Well, it originates with God.
One of the oldest works of Midrashic literature is that of Eichah Rabbah, the commentary to the Megillah of Lamentations. The first quarter of the work comprises 36 consecutive prefaces (Petichta), The following is from the second Petichta:
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Watching God throwing the words of His Torah to the ground prompted the prophet Jeremiah to lament. ‘Thus says the Lord of Hosts, “Consider, and call for the wailing women, that they may come, and send for the skilful women, that they may come; and let them make haste, and take up a dirge for us, that our eyes may run down with tears, and our eyelids pour forth waters.”’ (Jer. 9:16-17)
R. Johanan and R. Simeon ben Lakish and the Rabbis each gave their interpretation.
Rabbi Yochanan described a parable. There was a king who had two sons. He grew angry at the first son, took a stick, beat him with it, then exiled him, saying ‘Woe to my son; see from what a tranquil life he has been driven.’ He then grew angry at his second son, took the stick, beat him with it and exiled him. Later the king is heard asking, ‘Where, O where is that ill-bred son of mine?’ So it was with God. When the Ten Tribes were exiled, God quoted this verse at them: ‘Woe to them that were driven away from Me.’ (Hos. 7:13) Once the tribes of Judah and Benjamin were exiled, God, as it were, lamented His loss, saying. ‘Woe is Me, for My brokenness.’ (Jer. 10:19)
R. Simeon ben Lakish described a parable. There was a king who had two sons. He grew angry at the first, took a stick and beat him until he went into convulsions and died; then the king began lamenting his loss. Subsequently he grew angry at his second son, took the stick and beat him into convulsions and death. ‘I no longer have the strength to lament their deaths,’ said the king. ‘Call for the wailing women that they may come…’ So it was when the Ten Tribes were exiled, God began lamenting them, as it is written, ‘Hear this word which I take up for a lamentation over you, O house of Israel.’ (Amos 5:1) But once the tribes of Judah and Benjamin were exiled, it was as though God said He no longer had the strength to mourn. That’s when he said, ‘Call for the wailing women that they may come… let them make haste, and take up a wailing for us, that our eyes may run down with tears, and our eyelids pour forth waters.’ Notice it does not say ‘a wailing for them’ but ‘for us’ for Me and for them. Notice it does not say ‘that their eyes may run down with tears’, but ‘our eyes’, Mine and theirs. Notice it does not say ‘and their eyelids pour forth waters’, but ‘our eyelids’, Mine and theirs.
The rabbis described a parable. There was a king who had twelve sons. Two of them died, and he began comforting himself with the ten remaining sons. Two more died, and the king began comforting himself with his eight remaining sons. Two died, and the king began comforting himself with his six remaining sons. Two died and the king began comforting himself with his four remaining sons. Two died and the king began comforting himself with his two remaining sons, but once the last two died, he began lamenting them, ‘How lonely sits the city that was full of people!’ (Lam. 1:1)
Now let us look carefully at the architecture of the Midrash. It began as an exegesis on the verse from Jeremiah, ‘Thus says the Lord of Hosts, “Consider, and call for the wailing women… and let them make haste… that our eyes may run down with tears, and our eyelids pour forth waters.’” (Jer. 9:16-17) The Midrash told us there were three interpretations, that of R. Johanan, that of R. Simeon ben Lakish and that of the Rabanan (Rabbis), but after reading the piece, the Rabanan didn’t actually treat the verse from Jeremiah, at all. They don’t mention it or use it in their parable the way R. Simeon ben Lakish does. They don’t talk about a king who hits his boys with a stick; the king in the Rabanan parable loses his boys in some unspecified tragic way. Why, then, does the Midrash stick the Rabanan on the end as though their reading of the text is somehow adjacent or connected to those of R. Johanan and R. Simeon?
The author of the Midrash knew very well what he was doing. He juxtaposes the Rabanan with the previous two exegetes precisely so that you and I might ask this question. Because what the author of the Midrash Eicha Rabbah wants to say, cannot be said explicitly. It is too controversial, confrontational and subversive. Nevertheless it needs saying. So he cleverly places the Midrashim side by side, telling us they’re connected and leaving us to fill in the blanks and make the connection.
The first two boys to die in the Rabanan parable correspond to the first ten tribes in R. Johanan’s parable; the next two to go correspond to the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. We’re down to eight now. The third two boys to die correspond to the first ten tribes of R. Simeon ben Lakish; the next two to go are his Judah and Benjamin. We’re down to four now. At this point R. Simeon ben Lakish brings Jeremiah quote about God calling for those wailing women. But the Rabanan keep on killing off another pair of boys and then another pair, the last and final two. Now there are no wailing women left and, naturally, no servants left to go calling for anyone. That’s why the Rabanan end with the opening verse of Lamentations: ‘How lonely sits the city.’
In the Rabanan parable the king has killed even his wailing women, he has no one to mourn with him or on his behalf He sits on a throne in an empty palace, in a city bereft even of wailers, alone and lonely and mourning on his own behalf: ‘Why is this metropolis so empty? Why isn’t anyone taking care of me and my feelings? Why are there no official wailers to do the royal mourning for me?’ he cries.
What miserable sarcasm the author of the Midrash pokes at God, what morbid wit! The way he has constructed the Midrash demands that God explain the opening, ‘How lonely sits the city.’
‘God, what do You mean ‘how? How lonely sits the city?’ You know perfectly well how! You killed everyone off, that’s how. Don’t pretend this comes as a shock, out of the blue; ‘Lo, an empty city, I wonder how that happened?’ You emptied it, one pair of dead boys at a time! You beat them with sticks until they convulsed like butterflies, expiring on the ground. Jeremiah isn’t making up these words of his own accord - this is a book of prophecy. He’s Your prophet; these are Your words, God.’
In the Book of Deuteronomy Moses reaches his apotheosis and is elevated to the rank of Yechida – Singularity[3]. Now, Yechida - singularity really has no place in this world of illusion which we inhabit. Moses is the only person said to have achieved the level of Yechida during his lifetime, because even while living in this world he was a man of truth, with no illusions.
The verse says: ‘I told you at that time, saying, “I cannot carry you alone, … Bring yourselves people, wise, understanding and knowing.”’ (Deut 1:9-13)
The Izbicy rebbe explains it thus: When they were close to entering the Land of Israel, Moses began to sense God’s will that Joshua be the one to lead Israel into their inheritance. So Moses tried to get the Jewish people to pray to God, to tell Him they don’t want to be lead by any other leader. This is what he meant when he said, ‘I cannot carry you alone’. He told them this, because he was trying to make them understand that he needed their prayers, at that very moment.
This verse is the ninth verse from the beginning from the Sidra, and the ninth verse always has hidden depths, as was explained in dealing with Balaam[4]. But the Jewish people didn’t understand what Moses was hinting to them. We simply responded saying ‘Fine. Good.’ (Ibid. 14) And that is why, afterwards, Moses says ‘I gathered from among you wise and knowing men.’ (Ibid. 15) About which our sages of blessed memory remark, ‘The reason the text does not mention Moses finding men of understanding is because he found no men of understanding.’ (Nedarim 20b)
When Moses said he found no men of understanding, he meant to hint that none of them had understood his real meaning. ‘You didn’t get my hint,’ said Moses, ‘because had you understood my meaning, you would have prayed on my behalf. And who knows, perhaps you would have been successful in petitioning for me to enter the Land?’
And who, indeed, can say what might have happened had we not ignored all Moses’ frantic signals to us, for to help him?
I cannot help though, but feel that something akin to God’s surprise, as described in the Petichta to the Midrash above, is happening here. There was no one left to pray. Everyone who knew Moses well enough to feel connected to him in love and friendship had died during the forty years of wandering. Anyone with sufficient courage to argue with Moses had been rooted out and killed. Those who remained simply accepted everything Moses said as the truth, done and finished. When Moses told us Joshua would take over, we nodded and did as we were told without arguing. It could be no other way. There’s a price for that kind of power, you can’t really complain when there’s no one to take care of you or your feelings.
Reb Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev (1740–1809) used to say, ‘Master of the Universe! They say that You cry. It’s true. You have plenty to cry for. And it’s forbidden to have compassion on You, because You could help Yourself anytime You want to. You’re not a Nebekh.’
CHAPTER 2. – VAETCHANAN
The Prayer That Did No Good
‘I pleaded with God at that time, saying,’ (Deut. 3:23). Thus begins this week’s Sidra. The Hebrew word VAETCHANAN translated here as ‘I pleaded’, should really be translated as ‘I became prayerful’.
Someone walks up to me on the street, a man dressed in a stylish three-piece suit with a carefully folded kerchief in his breast pocket; he sticks out his hand asking for Tzedaka – Charity. I notice his fingernails are neatly tended and manicured, so I ask him politely, ‘What are you collecting for?’ Perhaps he’ll tell me he’s collecting for a poor family, for marrying off brides, for the sick, for widows and orphans? Perhaps he’s collecting for himself, who knows? Maybe he simply lost his wallet and needs bus-fare home? I will listen and use my judgment.
But when someone approaches me with his hand out, and I see his gaunt and haggard face lined with pain and worry; I see his clothes are old, ragged and worn out, his feet are bare and his hands covered in sores and blisters, there are no teeth in his mouth - I don’t ask him, ‘What are you collecting for?’
King David said, ‘I am prayer.’ (Psa.109:4) The Holy Yid (Yaakov Yitzchak Rabinowicz of Przysucha 1766–1813) explained it thus: David was saying, ‘Lord, just look at me. Do I need to tell anyone what I need and what I pray for? Just look at me, I am become a prayer, my needs are written all over me from head to toe, need I even ask? Is it not enough for me just to stand here before You and stretch out my hand in supplication?’
This is how Moses felt when he described himself as ‘having become prayerful’; as though his entire body were overcome and wrapt in the desire to pray. He found he could do nothing but plead and beg to be allowed into the Land of Canaan; no other thought or feeling came to mind.
As has been said previously (see Sidra Devarim), there are two sorts of people to whom it never occurs to pray: those to whom God will not listen even when they do pray, and those who have already been heard and answered. As a rule, though, it is a strongly held Jewish belief that when the desire to pray courses through a person’s body it is a sign that God wants them to ask and plead for their needs, so that He might answer positively, and in such a way that the answer seems in response to their prayer.
The Izbicy says that before God gives Salvation to someone, He brings him to a point of brokenness where there is nothing left to do but heartfelt crying, so that his salvation can be attributed to his own effort and prayer; to be counted as a well-deserved reward[5].
Why then does Moses tell us of all these prayers he offered that were not received and not answered? Why would the Torah give such a negative message about Moses’ prayers being futile, despite the fact that his urge to pray came as a gift from heaven?
The complete verse reads: ‘I pleaded with God at that time, saying,’ as though the particulars of the time were of significance. What was that time? Well, in the verses immediately preceding this one, at the end of last week’s Sidra, Moses told us: ‘At that time I commanded Joshua: “You have seen with your own eyes all that God has done to these two kings. God will do the same to all the kingdoms over there where you are going. Do not be afraid of them; God himself will fight for you.”’ (Ibid. 21-22)
So, Moses had already confirmed the handover of authority and power to his successor. He had made it publicly known that upon his death Joshua would lead the people into the land. In this week’s Sidra Moses tells us that it was only after that acknowledgement, and after blessing Joshua with success and glory, without the slightest reservation, resentment or withholding, that Moses was suddenly overcome with the need and desire to pray once more to be allowed into the Promised Land. There are two obvious questions:
God swore to Moses that he would never enter the Promised Land, and Moses took care of his succession to ensure the continuity of leadership, by grooming Joshua and ordaining him. In other words, Moses’ death was a God-sworn surety, a done deal. What purpose could it serve to argue it with God, yet again?
After God confirmed Moses’ death sentence and Moses invested Joshua with the mantle of leadership, Moses was suddenly filled with the desire to pray for the decree to be lifted – a desire that came as a gift from heaven; he became prayerful. Why did God fill Moses with prayer when the answer was going to be another resounding No!?
There is an interesting story told in Scripture:
In those days Hezekiah became ill and was at the point of death. The prophet Isaiah son of Amoz went to him and said, ‘This is what God says: “Put your house in order, because you are going to die; you will not recover.”’
Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to God, ‘Remember, God, how I walked before You faithfully and with wholehearted devotion and have done what is good in Your eyes.’ And Hezekiah wept bitterly.
Then the word of God came to Isaiah: ‘Go and tell Hezekiah, “This is what the LORD, the God of your father David, says: I have heard your prayer and seen your tears; I will add fifteen years to your life.”’ (Isa. 38:1-5)
The Talmud discusses this encounter between the Prophet Isaiah and King Hezekiah, adding some fascinating detail. When the prophet finished his predictions of gloom and doom, the king turned to him, saying, ‘Son of Amoz, be done with your prophecy and go. There is a tradition I have from the house of my ancestor, David: Even if a sharp sword rests upon a man's neck, he should not desist from prayer.’ (Berachoth 10a)
The Mishna adds:
It was related of R. Hanina b. Dosa that he used to pray for the sick and say, ‘This one will die, but this one will not die.’ They asked him, ‘How do you know?’ He replied, ‘If my prayers come fluently in my mouth, I know it is accepted, but if not - I know the sick man is dying.’ (Mishna – Berachoth 5:5)
These stories illustrate how we, Jews, have related to prayer since ancient times, yet the narrative in our Sidra contradicts all our long-cherished belief concerning prayer. Here Moses’ mouth is filled with prayer, but God interrupts him, saying, ‘Enough! Do not speak to Me about this matter anymore!’ (Deut. 3:26)
The futility of Moses’ prayer has to be understood in context.
King David refers to God as NORA ALILA – The Terrifying Schemer, as we read, ‘Go, look at the actions of God, awesome in His plotting and scheming over people.’ (Ps. 66:5) The Midrash uses this verse as a stepping stone to launch a very plainly stated critique of Free-Will vs Determinism. How much free will do we have, in reality? Why do we get blamed for events over which we have no control?
R. Yehoshua b. Korcha said: ‘Even the wonderful things You do for us, God, are brought about through schemes, plots and conspiracy.’
Come and see. From the first day God created the world He already created the Angel of Death, as it is written, ‘And darkness on the face of the water,’ (Gen. 1:2) which, as R. B’rachya explains, refers to the Angel of Death who blackens the face of all creatures. Adam wasn’t created until the sixth day, yet he is libeled as the one who is responsible for the Angel of Death, as it is written, ‘For on the day you eat of it you will surely die.’ (Ibid. 2:17)
Do you know what it resembles most? It’s like someone who wanted to divorce his wife. So, on his way home from work he dropped into the scribe’s office and had him write her a bill of divorce. He walked into the house with the divorce in his hand (and his friends to act as witnesses) looking for an excuse to hand it to her.
‘Pour me a drink,’ he said to her. She brought him the drink.
‘Here, this is your divorce,’ he said, taking the drink from her hand.
‘What did I do wrong?’ she asked.
‘Leave my house,’ he replied. ‘This drink is tepid.’
‘How did you know,’ she asked him, ‘that I would pour you a lukewarm drink, that you came home with a bill of divorce all ready and prepared?’
That’s what Adam said to God. ‘Master of the Universe,’ he complained. ‘Two thousand years before the world was created, the Torah was already your plaything. And in Your Torah it is written, ‘This is the law when a man dies in a tent.’ (Num. 19:14) Now, if You hadn’t already decreed death upon Your creatures, would You have written it into the Torah?’
‘Obviously this is a conspiracy to find an excuse to blame ‘Death’ on me,’ said Adam to God. This is what the verse refers to when it says ‘Go, look at the actions of God, awesome in plotting and scheming over people.’
Similarly we find God saying to Moses, ‘Not a man of this evil generation shall see the good land I swore to give your forefathers,’ (Deut.1:35) where ‘a man’ refers to Moses himself, for we often find Moses referred to in the Torah as ‘the man’. If we go back and look more closely at the text, we find God was already hinting to Moses that while he would witness the downfall of Pharaoh, he would not live to see the war against the kings who ruled Canaan when Joshua conquered it. God said to Moses in their first encounter at the Burning Bush, ‘Now you will see what I do to Pharaoh,’ (Ex. 6:1) i.e. to Pharaoh and not to the kings of Canaan.
Yet as soon as Moses rebuked the people, saying, ‘Listen you rebels,’ (Num. 20:10) God told him, ‘Therefore you will not lead the congregation into the land.’ (Ibid. 12) Again, God is awesome in His plotting and scheming.
You find the same thing with Joseph. The Torah tells us his brothers saw that their father favored him. Now was it a few ounces of purple wool with which their father made Joseph a striped tunic that brought about all that fraud and deception?
It was really God who brought the entire calamity upon them. He arranged for Jacob to love Joseph more than his brothers, who therefore resented him and sold him to the Ishmaelites who took him down to Egypt. So that Jacob, who would eventually hear that Joseph was alive in Egypt, might take his entire family down there to be enslaved. Don’t read the verse, ‘Joseph was brought down to Egypt,’ (Gen 39:1) but rather read it, ‘Joseph brought his father and the tribes down to Egypt.’
R. Tanhuma said, ‘Do you know what this is like? It’s like a cow that refused to allow the farmer to put a yoke over her shoulders. You know what they did? They dragged her calf from her side and put it in the field the farmer wanted to plow. The calf stood there lowing and calling for its mother. The cow, hearing its calf in distress, allowed itself to be yoked just to get access to the field to join her calf. So it was. God wanted to fulfill His decree to enslave Abraham’s grandchildren, so what did He do? He manipulated all these events in order to bring them down into Egypt, for them to redeem the pledge; the oath He had made to Abraham, ‘Know that your seed will be strangers in a land not their own, and they will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years.’ (Gen. 15:13) (Tanchuma - Vayeshev 4)
Having said all this, the question only becomes stronger; why does God fill Moses’ mouth with the fluency of entreaty like R. Hanina b. Dosa, and his body with the desire to pray like King Hezekiah, if the only purpose is to thwart him and say No? Does it make sense?
The Izbicy explains it thus[6]: God doesn’t say No to Moses, He says Yes. But Moses going into the Promised Land doesn’t happen the way Moses expects it to, on foot. Moses’ physical body, his outer garment, is laid to rest in Trans-Jordan while his essence is absorbed into the entire Jewish Nation. Moses’ mind, heart and genius are our shared genetic heritage; we each have Moses within us. He’s our Teacher and will remain our Teacher forever. As has been said in previous Sidras, the Chokhma - Wisdom in every Jew is the Moses in us.
If Moses is our Teacher, what is it that he teaches us every day, all the time, for all eternity?
This very crucial and fundamental teaching: no prayer ever goes to waste, unanswered and unacknowledged. This is the basis of Jewish survival through the ages and is central to our understanding of God and the Universe. Prayers do work.
But what about the billions of unanswered prayers - the untold millions of Jews sobbing out their hearts to God from their prisons and ghettos, mothers nursing dying babies and fathers digging their own graves with the melodies of these psalms on their lips - how can one say prayer works?
You’re reading this, aren’t you?
CHAPTER 3. – EIKEV
Irrational & Unconditional Love
‘He brought forth water from the flinty rock for you!’ (Deut. 8:15) Are flints drier than ordinary rocks? Probably not, but because they have that waxy, water-repellant appearance about them; they may look as though they don’t even desire water!
It’s hard for us to even imagine things that are fundamentally repelled by water. Everything we live with needs water. Even the earth we stand on can suffer drought for lack of water, it looks parched when dry and responds to rain like man dying of thirst. When Moses tells us that God produced water for us from the flinty rock, he was telling us something beyond the obvious. We all knew God brought forth water from a rock; we were there watching when it happened. Moses must be adding something more profound than mere repetition.
The Prophet Isaiah says:
‘Look unto the rock whence you were hewn, and to the gaping pit from which you were hollowed out. Look to Abraham your father, and to Sarah who bore you: for when he was but one I called him, I blessed him and made him many. For God shall comfort Zion: He will comfort all her ruins; He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; in her shall be found joy and gladness, thanksgiving, and the voice of song. (Isa. 51:1-3)
The Talmud is very clear on this issue: Abraham and Sarah were both congenitally sterile, born without normal, healthy genitalia. (Yebamoth 64a) This what Isaiah was referring to when he said that Abraham was ‘one’ before he was called by God. God carved Abraham a penis out of his flesh the way a sculptor might do to a statue out of rock. Similarly, The Talmud reads the verse referring to Sarah, that she was not only barren, but lacking the basic necessities of motherhood: ovaries, fallopian tubes and a womb. God had to carve a hole into the pit from which we, her children, were later dug.
This explains the link between the two halves of the prophecy: if Abraham and Sarah who, by nature, never should have nor could have given birth to children, were made fertile because God wanted us to come into existence, it stands to reason that which has already existed once in nature (Zion and the Land of Israel have already flourished once) will surely be comforted, be healed, and blossom again.
Why did Abraham and Sarah have to be reconstructed as adults and given primary sexual organs? Why weren’t they created whole from the outset?
One way of understanding this is suggested in the Talmud. It is connected to God’s deepest desires. The only real lust that our sages ascribe to God is a craving for the prayers of the righteous; and that’s why God made our ancestors barren, so He could enjoy their prayers (Ibid.). This idea that God lusts after prayer is also discussed in relation to water and rain.
It is written, ‘And no plant of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up: for God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; but a mist rose from the earth, and irrigated the whole surface of the ground.’ (Gen. 2:5-6)
Plants were created on the third day, but the narrative in the verse above is describing events happening on the sixth day, the eve of the Sabbath, teaching us that all plants went and stood at the gates of Earth, waiting for Adam to arrive and beg God for mercy, for rain to fall on them so that they might flourish. This teaches us that God craves the prayers of the Righteous. (Chulin 60b)
In this reading of the Creation story, the mist rising from the ground represents Adam’s prayers for rain on behalf of the plants, which are nothing more than a natural response to God’s craving for Adam’s prayer. The reason the metaphors of mist and irrigation are used, is because water itself is a metaphor for longing. The mist rising from the earth represents a woman’s desire, while the rain coming down from above represents man’s desire, as the Zohar explains: ‘A mist rose from the earth,’ this is the fixing of below, ‘and irrigated the whole surface of the ground.’ The mist is the female water, rising towards the male in order to stimulate the rain.’ (Zohar Vol. I 35a) Prayer is a sexual metaphor.
So this week’s Sidra talks of bringing forth water from flinty rock; Abraham being the flinty rock in the metaphor, because flint doesn’t even want water. Water here represents Abraham’s prayers, but Abraham wasn’t even inclined to pray. Abraham had no sexual desires because he had no genitalia, meaning he had no desire for God until God gave him the physical apparatus of lust. Before Abraham could even begin to feel a desire to want to pray for children, God had to make him a sexual being. Before he could pray for children, God had to arouse the desire for desire in him.
Moses is telling us how far God goes in order to bring us closer to Him. If it means changing the physical body of a man and woman just to get them to want to have desires, then that’s just for starters. Every time a desire to pray is felt bubbling up inside us, it is because God is in a state of Desire for our prayer. God changing us, altering our inner processes, manipulating and stimulating our desires, is something that happens all the time. All the time!
Are we implying and saying that God is manipulative? Isn’t being manipulative a negative trait, a character defect? Aren’t we all agreed that pulling people’s strings to make them feel certain things, getting them to do certain things they hadn’t thought about doing, is unethical and immoral?
This question brings us to the most astonishing idea put forward in the Torah in this week’s Sidra. If there were a contest for the most provocative statement in the entire Torah, I, personally, would suggest this following one. And the reason most people are blissfully unaware of it, is because all English versions of the Bible invariably mistranslate it so as to filter out dark aspects of the unacceptable truth.
After the Lord your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, ‘God brought me here to inherit this land because of my righteousness,’ and [it is] on account of the wickedness of these nations God is going to drive them out before you.
It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but because of the wickedness of these nations God will drive them out before you, to accomplish what he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. (Deut 9:4-5)
The two verses above are contradictory. On the one hand we are told not to gloat and say that it is because they are so wicked and we are so just, that the nations have been driven out of the land. On the other hand, we are told that it is because of their wickedness that they will be driven out.
Translators have dealt with the problem in the text by fiddling with punctuation and grammar, sticking ‘but’s and ‘because’s where they think it will make the text sound acceptable. A cursory look at any English version of the text should show you what I am talking about.
The fact is that God commanded us to slaughter the indigenous inhabitants of the Land of Canaan – men, women and children - without mercy or compassion. We were warned not to treat them with kindness, and to offer them no quarter, but to chase after them, hunt them down and exterminate them like vermin. Even though the Torah makes it clear that God hates nations that are cruel, ruthless and unrelenting, still God commanded us to be cruel, ruthless and unrelenting.
The second verse is clear, ‘It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; because of the wickedness of these nations God will drive them out before you.’
It is only because we are obeying God, adopting the wickedness of these nations and doing Un-Jewish behaviors, that we will merit inheriting the Land the nations once occupied. It is not because of our righteousness and integrity, but because of our acting with the wickedness of these nations, that God will drive them out.
What about right and wrong? What about our self-image as a compassionate people, a loving and humble folk? Precisely what sort of message is the Torah trying to convey in these two verses?
The Izbicy is very clear and concise about it. These are his words:
God chose Israel regardless of their deeds, because they are a part of Him. Deep inside them they are part God, while deep in God He is partly them. The very same act which is considered evil when the gentiles do it, is good when Israel does it, because God bears witness about everything Israel does, that it is His desire they are carrying out. This is the meaning of the verse ‘because of the wickedness of these nations God will drive them out before you’, because with the very action by which the gentiles are considered wicked and evil against God, when Jewish People do this thing they are called those ‘who carry out God’s will’ [7].
What is the deeper message of this teaching, and how does it further the frontiers of our understanding of our own selves?
It runs very much counter to our commonly-accepted view of our history: After discovering Abraham was a righteous and kind person, God began testing him to discover whether he was fit to be father of the nation that would carry God’s Light unto the nations or not. This finding and testing happens on a personal level with every individual down through history. God finds us and tests us to see if we are fit to carry His Light, Everything we go through in life is a part of that testing process.
The Izbicy rejects that narrative causality altogether, and posits a completely different reading of history. He says:
God desires you for no reason. Even when you do the same things that the nations do, God still desires you. This explains that second verse; ‘because of the wickedness of the nations’. The word because was chosen specifically! This is precisely the reason! Because you are God’s portion and so whatever you do, God agrees and says, ‘I like what you did!’
This idea that the Jewish People are part God is not a new or radical one. And yet it never fails to shock when the implications of the statement sink in. We have an explicit statement later in the Book of Deuteronomy, ‘His people are a part of God, Jacob the demesne of His inheritance[8].’ (32:9)
What is the definition of the Compassion we consider an essential Jewish trait? The compassion whose opposite, Wickedness, is always antithetical to our values, but which is required in order to gain possession of the Promised Land?
The Hebrew word for compassion is the same as the word for womb – RECHEM, telling us that the paradigm, the standard and ideal for compassion is that of a mother for her offspring. We therefore tend to judge compassion in those terms: would your average mother act that way or this in a given situation?
There seems to be a universal concept of motherhood as the paradigm of RACHAMANUT – Compassion. Naturally it ignores a history of cruelty from mothers to their offspring, just as long and ancient as the much vaunted gentleness and caring. The truth is that nature has no compassion, nor does it have cruelty. Living creatures with volition and choice obey their instincts. We like to interpret mother-offspring interactions as rooted in some divinely ordered and universal compassion, deriving its solemn substance from God’s Compassion. But these are constructs and cultural artifacts. They may be useful, but don’t really tell us much about those who claim compassion as a guiding principle. As Shlomo reminded me on a number of occasions, in the Third Reich between 1933 and 1945 the laws, against cruelty to animals and penalties for infringement grew ever stricter. By the end of WWII a man could go to prison for beating his horse or kicking his dog.
In our modern world concepts and constructs like compassion, love, equality and fairness have been elevated to divine attributes and are worshiped for the cultural weight they have attained. We pretend they are universal and innate ideas, when in fact they are nothing but modern forms of wish-fulfillment. No matter how much power we give them, they cannot shut the door on humankind’s oldest question: why do bad things happen to good people? Bad things go on happening regardless of how highly I value compassion, and how much of it I attribute to God. So I challenge God, asking, ‘How can You allow so much pain, where is Your much-vaunted, divine compassion?’
The answer is not comforting. ‘All that opens the RECHEM - Womb is mine,’ says God, (Ex. 34:19) ‘you have no business telling Me what compassion ought to look like and be.’
In order to take possession of the Promised Land there are certain illusions we cannot afford. One of them is the belief that the nations of the world have anything to teach us about compassion, whether individually or severally. As I write these words rockets from the Islamists in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza rain down upon our heads, while the Arabs of Hebron stand on their rooftops to catch sight of the destruction of Tel Aviv that their Arabic radios promised them for this evening’s entertainment. But the laws of compassion dictate that we continue to supply the Arabs with water and electricity, because it would be cruel to withhold them and we are a compassionate people.
Have we forgotten the Word of God?
CHAPTER 4. – RE’EH
Light & Dark Sides
‘Behold I place before you this day, a blessing and a curse!’ (Deut. 11:26) It’s easiest to think of the two sides as opposites, either a blessing or a curse, but it is a great mistake to do so.
Shlomo used to refer to the Izbicy rebbe (Mordechai Yosef Leiner, 1801-1854) as the New Age Rebbe, because his teachings anticipate and presage many 20th century changes to the way we think about ourselves. One of the Izbicy’s most modern ideas is this one: Wherever God puts His unique and divine imprint upon us, He covers us with shadow[9], as it is written, ‘I have put My words in your mouth, and covered you with the shadow of My hand, to plant heavens, and to lay the foundations of earth, and to tell you, Zion, that you are my people.’ (Isa. 51:16) In the area we are most gifted, we are most inclined to darkness.
What does it mean when God puts His words in our mouths? It means that we become creative – ‘to plant heavens, and to lay the foundations of earth’ - the way God is creative.
What are God’s words? Well, words represent our entire understanding of God and who God is. God is a Word and so is all Creation. We are words – God’s words[10]. To be told that God is putting His words inside us so that we might speak, is to be told we are godlike.
Inside each of us is a spark of divinity, a unique expression of God, an iteration of God. To iterate is either to say something repeatedly, or to do something over and over again. But God never, ever repeats Himself. It’s axiomatic that everything in Creation is unique and no two things are identical, because God is infinitely creative. Saying that God puts Himself inside every individual is to say that no two people can possibly be identical. No matter how lacking in creativity a man may seem, he is still a unique expression of God, the Word of God is in him therefore he must be different from every other man.
Shlomo used to say: Why are we Jews so connected to the moon? Because the moon never looks the same twice. Whereas the sun is the sun and if you’ve seen it once you’ve seen it, the moon is constantly changing, from minute to minute, waxing or waning, never stationary, never predictable and never repetitive. And so are we, because God is speaking His words through us and He never repeats Himself. Every word is new, every Jew is a once-in-history expression of God’s creativity. It means that no matter how great Jacob, Moses, David and Rabbi Akiba were, in one respect I am greater than them, because I express an aspect of God they could not even understand, let alone emulate or replicate.
But here’s the rub: the gifts we have received are always covered in such a manner that they appear the opposite of what they are. So while God puts His words in my mouth, I appear to all the world as nothing but a blasphemer.
When Dathan and Abiram joined Korah’s rebellion against Moses, we read in Sidra Korah:
‘They came together to confront Moses and Aaron and said to them, ‘You've gone far enough! Everyone in the whole community is holy, and God is among them. Why do you set yourselves above God’s assembly?’ (Num. 15:3)
Now I ask you, when the Torah tells us numerous times and in no uncertain terms that Moses is the most humble man in the world, is it smart to accuse him of arrogance? And why not simply charge him with nepotism, corruption or treason? Why pick on the one unassailable virtue Moses did possess, and deny he has it?
Because Moses’ humility was Godly and so remained invisible to others, it was his divine gift. Moses is the most humble person to walk the Earth, but only on Earth, for there is One who is even more humble than Moses and that is God in Heaven[11]. Moses’ humility is the Word of God inside him which is covered in the shadow of God’s hand and so appears to the whole world as its exact opposite. To look at Moses, was an arrogant and haughty man. We all thought so, that’s why we didn’t burst into derisory laughter when Korah and his band of rebels accused Moses of lording it over us. It seemed a plausible enough accusation to us, we could all believe Moses was a conceited man.
Traditionally the Jewish approach to the development of Midot Tovot – Virtues, and the elimination of Midot Ra’ot – Vices, has assumed the existence of a split in the psyche. Man has an evil inclination which enters him at birth. The child is socialized, educated and trained and approaches puberty, at which time the good inclination also takes up residence in him. So the evil inclination inside everyone is thirteen years older than the good inclination[12]. What follows is a never-ending life and death struggle to overpower one’s evil inclination, to choose the right and proper over the selfish and sinful.
This classical view of Jewish ethics has man stuck between these two choices: the path leading toward perfection of his Self, and the pathway to perdition and damnation[13]. Life forces a man to maintain a constant battle with his evil side just to be allowed to choose what is virtuous.
Izbicy teaches a far less wasteful path to self-realization and perfection. Before investing massive portions of time and energy in a fight against one’s inner wickedness and its inclination, the nature of one’s inner wickedness and its inclination need to be examined and understood.
‘I have put My words in your mouth, and covered you with the shadow of My hand,’ says God to every person.
Instead of seeing ourselves as at least half evil (or so inclined), in need of a constant inner warrior to be permanently on guard against the menace of the evil Self, God invites us to see our shadow side as nothing more than camouflage obscuring His divine gifts.
How is a person to know whether he is fooling himself about his dark side and the gifts it obscures, or not?
Judaism has a simple and foolproof test for such criteria: Ask yourself at any time: ‘Where is my source of joy?’
In the silent meditation known as the Eighteen Blessings (Amida) we pray: ‘Restore our judges as before and our councilors as they used to be, and rid me of gloom and depression.’ The two halves of this sentence are inextricably connected. The second half is the test of the first. If they make you depressed then they are not the judges and councilors God gave you.
Your judges are the trio of Hesed, Gevurah and Tifferet – Lovingkindness, Withholding and Mercy: in a word, your heart.
Your councilors are Netzach, Hod and Yesod – Eagerness, Caution and Control: in a word, your instincts.
The only way to deal with ourselves, to manage our gifts, to uncover our light and develop our potential is to restore the role of our own inner judges and councilors. When they do their jobs and operate as they are supposed to, as they used to do, then the result is the eradication of depression, pessimism, gloom and desperation. If you cannot access the source of joy within your own soul, then your judges are not the ones God gave you. They’re useless and fraudulent substitutes for the real thing.
This is what we have become. Our inner landscape consists of shaming-rooms where hanging-judges preside over politically motivated mock trials, and crippling-rooms where sadistic double-binds and one-size-fits-all racks adjust our thinking and modify our behaviors according to the council of learned men. God is excluded, and all is done in the name of God.
Instead of perceiving our darkness as a covering put there by God to both conceal and emphasize our gifts, we focus all our attention on eradicating those dark parts of ourselves. Huge chunks of our life are spent on the effort to manage, control and fight the unacceptable elements of our own personalities. Tremendous energies are wasted trying to fight our character defects and contain our shortcomings, instead of examining them to see how those shortcomings, in fact, contain our virtues and talents.
Let us examine Moses’ humility and we will see how his supposed arrogance was the shell (in kabbalistic parlance the Klippa) surrounding, nurturing and protecting his humility.
The purpose of a shell, skin or peel is to provide a safe and natural environment for the development and growth of the fruit within it. We are given a Yetzer Hara – Evil Inclination thirteen years before the Yetzer Tov - Good Inclination arrives, so that we can develop a hard and resilient exterior. What does the Torah mean when it says that Moses was the most humble man on earth?
Moses understood that he was the least. The least talented, the least worthy, the least outstanding Israelite - and that’s why he was chosen to be the receiver and giver of Torah, so that any Jew might say to himself, ‘Well, if Moses can do it, I most certainly can.’
That was lesson Moses learned from Sinai, as the Mishna says, ‘Moses received the Torah from Sinai.’ (Avot 1:1) It does not say ‘on Sinai’ but ‘from Sinai’. He understood that Sinai was chosen because it was the least impressive mountain on the whole peninsula. No one had ever bothered to build an altar or cairn on it in honor of any god, no one had ever made a sacrifice to some pagan diety there, it just didn’t inspire anyone. No one on Sinai was ever struck by any sense of the divine presence; it simply felt like jagged geography, nothing more. No one had ever climbed up there because they felt the need to worship on it. So, God chose it to be the mountain on which He revealed Himself[14]. Moses understood from this that he, too, was chosen because he was the least impressive Jew; he hadn’t even risen to the level of slavery endured by his brethren.
In order to be able to deal with such a self-evaluation and self-image, a person needs a very strong and stable sense of self. He has to be able to say, ‘But I am enough, the way I am. I accept me.’ Any other person would have been unable to bear the weight of such feelings of ordinariness, of not being able to find even one thing that separates or distinguishes him. Moses never once complained, ‘God, why did you make me so devoid of talent or worthiness?’ He understood his own personal mission, which was to bear the weight of this mediocrity without complaint. He understood his challenge in life was to live with himself, without complaining about having to live with such an undistinguished specimen of a man.
To be able to bear such burdensome humility required that Moses’ ego have a very tough shell. For thirteen years before his humility and forbearance manifested, Moses grew up in the royal palace, fostered by Pharaoh’s daughter. He grew up a prince.
The shell always grows before the fruit, to protect and nurture it. The shell is both a blessing and a curse. The more abundantly the nut is invested with nutrients, fats and proteins, the harder the shell needs to be.
Joseph spent a lot of time and energy taking care of and paying attention to the way his hair looked. All his brothers saw was a vain and supercilious young man, they could not look beyond it to the holy man, and could not see through Joseph’s outer appearance to his continence and self-restraint; his sexual abstinence. To all outward appearances Joseph’s behavior pointed to a sexual conceit, to vanity and narcissism.
No one looking at King David’s, martial façade, his military demeanor and warlike qualities could see through they to the Lover. ‘Always ready for a fight,’ they said about him, not realizing that David was brimming with love beyond measure.
I have digressed somewhat to emphasize the crucial importance of looking at our own individual darkness without disgust or contempt. When self-rejection creeps into our thinking we have to be able to head it off and see that the reason God made us with such a tough shell, so hard and unyielding was because He has hidden Himself in us. His words inform our every breath. We are His divine expression, His unique and matchless manifestation in this world. You are a one-time-only appearance of God; just today, one show and that’s it.
We waste so much time bewildered and confused by our badness, our bad habits and bad nature, by our bad thoughts and bad behaviors, that we never stop to look at the divinity it cloaks. God is in me, and I waste all that precious time shooting at demons and liliths.
A blessing which is a curse – a curse which is really a blessing.
CHAPTER 5. – SHOFTIM
Praying to God, or to a Feature of God?
‘Do not plant for yourselves an Asherah of any kind of tree next to the altar of God, which you make for yourselves.’ (Deut. 16:21) In ancient times the pagan cult of Asherah was the worship of a tree or wooden pole. Here the Torah commands us explicitly not to set up the worship of Asherah adjacent to the worship of God. How does Asherah-worship manifest in this day and age? Of what significance is this law for us?
Today we pray formally in public places such as synagogues and study-houses. Our liturgy has replaced Temple worship which was discontinued around the year 70 C.E. There are separate and distinct prayers for different times of the day as well as for various occasions such as weekdays, the Sabbath and festivals, corresponding to the different, mostly animal sacrifices that were offered on the Great Altar in the Tabernacle and later in the Temple at Jerusalem.
Today, instead of priestly rituals and offerings, every individual develops a language of personal prayer to God. The prohibition against planting an Asherah next to the altar helps us put aside those prayers which do more harm than good.
There are two misconceptions that interfere with our prayer. The first is our mistaken perception of who God is, and the second, our own mistaken perception of what we are.
Who are we praying to when we say, ‘Blessed are You, God?’
This is not at all an easy question to answer, mostly because speaking to God happens in verbal and non-verbal parts of our mind; in both left and right brains. While we can describe what happens in words, we cannot write about those interactions which exist outside the verbal areas any more than you can describe what happens when you look straight into someone eyes and meet their gaze staring back at you and something clicks; some sort of communication that cannot be described occurs.
There is a well known rabbinic teaching on the verse, ‘For what great nation is there that has God so near to it as the LORD our God is to us, whenever we call upon Him?’ (Deut. 4:7) ‘We call upon Him,’ say the rabbis, ‘not on His attributes.’[15]
The Hebrew word for attributes is MIDOT. Midot are measures, amounts, quantities and dimensions. The Sephirot are often referred to as God’s Midot. We do not pray to God’s Midot, which is to say we do not pray to God’s compassion or His justice, to His love or His wrath, beauty, glory, wisdom or understanding. When a man sits on a horse, although the horse might look far more powerful and intimidating to you than the rider, you would not address your requests to the horse but its rider. God rides the Sephirot like a man on a chariot, but He is not the chariot.
When you talk to one of your parents on the telephone, are you talking to their voice or to something or someone else? It’s difficult to define what we mean when we say we are talking to someone. When I write a letter to a friend, he might just as well be sitting opposite me at the table, because I feel I am addressing my words directly to him, and yet ‘he’ is not there. He may not even exist.
It could be argued that I am talking to myself as I sit here writing. And yet, when you read this sentence you might be justified in thinking I wrote these words to you, just as much as it can be argued that I wrote to myself. I could digress here and discuss the possible distinction between me writing to you, per se, or to your intelligence and wit; to the You who understands me, as opposed to the person you simply are.
When it comes to talking to God through worship and prayer, this distinction is a profound one, and needs to be addressed.
What’s wrong with praying to the God of my understanding as I understand Him now, with the caveat that as my understanding of Him evolves and develops, so will my prayers? What’s so wrong in praying, ‘O dear and loving God, dear and beautiful God, dear and gentle God hear my prayers!’?
The Izbicy explains it thus: When I pray to the God of my understanding, the God I am praying to is only as great as the extent of my understanding. But God who relates to me and my prayers is infinitely greater than my understanding.
I cannot pray unless I am ready to put my words into such a place where I can no longer follow their path, into the dark, so to speak, into the impenetrable beyond. Because God answers me from that impenetrable beyond; God is that impenetrable beyond. If I am not talking to Him there where He is, I am not talking to Him, I’m talking to myself and to my image of what I think God is.[16] Salvation comes from God in a creative act as a response to my prayers. It is not a continuation of something previous, just as a new baby is not merely the seed of the father grown in the dark of the mother’s womb into something large. A baby is an entirely new creation, something made up of the DNA of both parents, unique and individual. When I pray for salvation God takes my prayer and uses it to create something which has never existed before, the way my seed becomes an inextricable half of the zygote that becomes the embryo which in turn becomes the fetus that will become my child. When I pray, I am sowing words as seed in my union with God who uses them to form a new creation called Salvation. I cannot create anything new through masturbation, nor can I learn how to be a lover by practicing on a plastic figurine. Similarl, I cannot learn to pray to God by practicing on myself, praying to some construct inside my head, some imagined being.
If I refuse to allow my words to fall into the impenetrable dark, they will not germinate. Or, put another way, God is asking me to give Him my words, and not give them to some idea of him inside my head. Giving them to God means putting them where I cannot touch or feel them, where my imagination does not stretch or reach; my words must go into trust, into faith and letting go, to the God beyond my understanding; for that is the only way to pray directly to Him, not to pray to myself.[17]
It is a great challenge to cleanse our minds of imaginary gods, to avoid praying to aspects of God that we absorb through our discourse and learning. The Bible is filled with descriptions of God, how then to choose which words are acceptable and which are unbecoming when praying to God?
Moses used three words as a description of God, three words that have become the bedrock and essential starting point for all our prayer and liturgy: GADOL, GIBOR, NORA – Great, Powerful and Terrifying. As Moses said: ‘For the LORD your God, he is God of gods, and Lord of lords, the great God, the mighty, and the terrible, who favors no person, nor takes any bribes.’ (Deut. 10:17)
In the Talmud (Berachoth 33b) there is a discussion of these three adjectives, where it is said they were not accepted and integrated into Jewish forms of public worship and ritual until the time of the Men of the Great Assembly (c.a.400 B.C.E.) It seems to me that these three descriptions of God differ from say, God the Compassionate, God the Glorious, and God the Judge, in that the latter three adjectives are subjective assessments, given to argument and discussion. You and I may disagree about the rightness of a judgment and about what is beautiful or glorious, because these concepts use words.
But even a lizard that sits on a rock or a bird in the sky knows when it encounters something great, powerful and terrifying. It knows because it has reflexes, involuntary responses to certain stimuli which do not require thinking. We are not lizards or fish or birds, nor are we beasts of the field or jungle, we have words and complex thoughts. But there are parts of our mind which know things without thinking, and without words. We share those reflexive responses with primitive living creatures. Moses identified them as the Great, the Powerful and the Terrifying[18]. Generally speaking, I know when I am in the presence of something greater than me. I know when I am in the grip of something more powerful than me, and I know when I am terrified of what may happen to me next. Each and all of these are natural responses to an authentic awareness of God, according to Moses whose judgment and vocabulary we trust in this matter.
Above, we said that there are two misconceptions interfering with our prayer, the second being our mistaken perception of what we are. This brings us to the verse quoted above, ‘Do not plant for yourselves an Asherah of any kind of tree next to the altar of God.’ The altar is where we made animal sacrifices in the Temple, that are replaced these days by prayers.
‘When I pray,’ says the Izbicy, ‘that God should make me as wise as my teacher or as holy as a certain saint, all I’m doing is the mirror image of praying to God’s Midot – attributes, I’m addressing the finite and not the infinite[19].’
To extend the metaphor used above, I would be praying for a clone rather than a new baby. Salvation is something brand new. It comes into being from the source of salvation which is God who never repeats Himself. God takes my prayer and does something with it akin to the unfolding and recombination of DNA that makes up an entirely new person from the genetic material of two parents. Salvation means God gives me back my prayer in a completely new form, like a newborn child, made partly of me and partly of Him.
Even if I could design my baby, I ought not.
Only God knows how to make people. People designed and created by people are monsters, and the same applies to Salvation. Approaching God in prayer, I need to let go of my self-image; it isn’t helpful. Thinking of myself and how I might look to God, imagining myself as other than I am, awareness of me watching myself interferes with prayer, either because my self-image is negative or else because my self-image is positive. Just as thinking of myself and how I might look to my wife, imagining myself as other than I am with her and my awareness of me watching myself, all prevent true intimacy.
Planting an Asherah tree or pole next to the altar means that I am distracted by details. In dictating to God what I think the answers to my prayers ought to be, I have disconnected myself from the source of that very answer. I’m not actually on the altar making an act of sacrifice; instead I’m on the ground bowing to my vision of how things ought to be.
This far we have spoken only about our prayers to God, and how holding onto our image of God can ruin process. What we have not discussed is the fact that it is a two-way process. As we learn in the Talmud, God prays as fervently as we do[20]. God’s prayer essentially says, ‘Please pray to Me, put your words into REALLY-ME, so that I am empowered to create a fresh and new Salvation for us!’
CHAPTER 6. – KI TETZE
On Beauty and Desire
‘When you go out to war against your enemies, and God has delivered them into your hands, and you capture their captive; and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire her, and you take her as your wife…’ (Deut. 21:10-11).
This week’s Sidra opens with a ‘what-happens-when’ question. What happens when you go to war and win, and then in the heat of victory, you espy among the vanquished enemy a beautiful captive woman for whom you feel overwhelming lust, and you cannot resist your desire to possess her?
From the Torah’s reference to the perceived beauty of the captive woman, the Talmud deduces that the whole chapter is nothing but a concession to the Yetzer Hara – Evil Inclination (Kiddushin 21b). Since we have no objective definitions of beauty (for as every culture evolves its ideas of beauty evolve and change) and since the Torah does not tell us what it means by the phrase ‘you see among the captives a beautiful woman’, why is the word ‘beautiful’ there in the text, at all? To emphasize, says the Talmud, that what is being addressed here is one soldier’s perception, for even if everyone else thinks she’s hideous or repellent, he has to deal with his overwhelming sensations, and in this case feeling inescapably drawn to her.
The standard reading of this Talmudic reasoning is that in a situation like this one, where a man’s sexual desire is too powerful to deny, the Torah provides a relief mechanism, so to speak, to deal with his lust. By formalizing the rape and post-rape protocols into a fixed set of rules and ordinances, the Torah both permits and limits the sin. The uncontrollable has been managed, and that’s the best we can hope to achieve when dealing with exultant and triumphal soldiers in the aftermath of a bloody victory. This is a problematic reading of the text.
The Izbicy rebbe wonders why no such concession is made elsewhere else in the Torah, under any circumstances[21]? We don’t hear about someone craving a bagel on Pesach or Yom Kippur and being given way to eat it within the law, as a concession to their Yetzer Hara – Evil Inclination. Nor do we find concession to theft, murder, bribery, gossip or any of a myriad sins, venial or mortal. Throughout the Torah we are challenged again and again to confront our own Evil Inclination and overcome it. There are no such things as concession to the Evil Desire, what good could come of making such concessions? Surely it would only encourage evil?
The Izbicy’s answer is so bizarre as to be completely incomprehensible without a thorough understanding of Izbicy theology.
Sometimes a man’s desires overwhelm him to the point where he cannot move or escape. At that point it becomes clear that the impulse comes from God, as we find with Judah [and Tamar[22]]. The Torah reveals this here, so that the person committing the act should not despair.
While a full exposition of the Izbicy weltanschauung and its consequential reinterpretation of the Torah is beyond the scope of this essay, this much can be stated:
When you look at someone and she appears beautiful, especially if you are the only one who sees and appreciates that beauty, it means there is some way in which you are connected to that woman and she to you. Because whenever something gentile has Chen – finds favor in Jewish eyes, it means there is some spark of goodness in that thing. The challenge is to determine whether the goodness is intrinsic, or merely in outward appearance.
When something about that beauty inflames your desire, it means that you have touched upon the divine, because desire is the language of the divine. The Hebrew word the Torah chose for desire in this context is CHESHEK. Not only does it mean desire, it also means to attach and bind like a hook. Only if a man discovers that the captive woman’s beauty has bound and attached him to her, depriving him of the option to walk away, does the Law of the Beautiful Captive apply to him.
‘When you capture their captive,’ the text tells us, because the captive woman is merely the representative for the real captive. She is carrying something that binds you to her, and what is that captive thing? It is the genius in the woman that you perceive as her beauty, the distinctive character or spirit of her people. According to Izbicy every nation has its divine spark, a peculiar genius which manifests in its desires, yearnings and aspirations (collective unconscious), not in its cultural or technological achievements. This is its CHESHEK. As long as this desire and aspiration is in the gentile nation, it is captive. It can only be freed from captivity by being adopted and absorbed into the Jewish People. For example, indigenous Australians aspire to dream, they revere their Dreamtime. It may be said to be their genius, but it is in captivity among the aboriginals until we adopt and absorb their genius, as it is written:
And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out My spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. (Joel 3:1)
It may be argued that the last place on Earth to which the Jews were dragged in chains is the Land of Australia. When I was there I never once heard anyone ask, ‘Why were we driven here?’ To me it seemed so obvious, ‘Because there is something so important to learn here, we absolutely must be in this place.’ But no one I encountered in the Jewish community ever showed awareness of that beauty, or strove to learn any native skills. According to the Izbicy, it is not their music we need to learn, their bush survival skills or their stories. It’s the desire inside them that we absolutely must have. I suspect we will not relearn prophecy until we absorb that aboriginal genius that we lost somewhere along the way in our history. I use the Aboriginal Australian experience as an example here because their culture is so stark compared to others that have become mixed and diverse. We in the West live in melting pots among many cultures that have amalgamated, making it difficult to find a pure and unadulterated genius. In Australia, it is still possible to discern something extremely ancient and pristine. I’m sure it was like that in the ancient Land of Canaan, too.
Desire is the language of the divine. I explain the essence of this statement at some length in my book Sefer Yetzira: Chronicles of Desire. Desire is the stuff of which the fabric of the universe is woven. When we experience desire, especially those lower desires down in the belly where the viscera roil in hunger, thirst and longing, where laughter and lust have their seat, what we are feeling is mostly reflexive and instinctual. These are desires God programmed into our bodies, without which there could be no life or growth. Our thoughts and emotions are cultural artifacts. We have constructed them and trained our children to feel them and think them, through habit and nurturing. But instinctual drives are God’s direct imprint in our flesh; they are the epitome of His creativity, nature designed by God alone. When we are creative, we mirror divine creativity and when we are in states of desire, we mirror divine desire. All humans, Jews and gentiles alike, reflect divine desire. We each carry a spark of unique individuality representing another facet of God, as was discussed previously (see Radical Re’eh).
Procreative desire i.e. the sexual impulse is the most primal form of that desire. It mirrors God’s Simple Desire for us, whereby and because of which we were brought into being as the last act in the Six Days of Creation. Individuals became families, who became tribes that became great kingdoms and nations, all carrying and expressing variations of that primal spark of longing and creativity. According to the Izbicy rebbe, it is mainly the women of a folk, and especially their princesses, who embody that spark of longing[23].
The reason God exiled us among the nations was to promote assimilation. By which He did not mean for us to become assimilated, rather, for us to assimilate and absorb the genius of divine longing inside the longing and desire of each people. As long as that holy spark lies dormant and hidden within any gentile nation it is said to be in exile – Captive. This is the meaning of the phrase in the text: ‘When you capture their captive’.
Rahab carries one such spark, the essential genius of the Canaanites. Once she is assimilated into the Jewish nation, Canaan falls to Joshua and the Israelites (Jos. Cap. 6). The Book of Ruth describes the assimilation into Israel of Eglon, King of Moab’s daughter. It is an example of a princess carrying with her the hopes, aspirations and projected dreams of a People.
As far as the Izbicy is concerned, the ultimate example of this principle manifests in the story of Judah and Tamar, mentioned in Genesis chapter twenty eight. Tamar carried in her the seeds of royalty, the Messianic Light which could only come into being through her coupling with Judah, as we read:
She removed her widow’s garments and covered herself with a veil, and wrapped herself, and sat in Petach-Enayim which is on the road to Timnah. When Judah saw her, he thought she was a prostitute, for she had covered her face. So he bent towards her on the road, and said, ‘Here now, let me come in to you,’ for he did not know that she was his daughter-in-law. And she said, ‘What will you give me, that you may come in to me?’ He said, ‘Therefore, I will send you a young goat from the flock.’ She said, moreover, ‘Will you give a pledge until you send it?’ He said, ‘What pledge should I give you?’ And she said, ‘Your seal and your cord, and your staff that is in your hand.’ So he gave them to her and went in to her, and she conceived by him. Then she arose and departed, and removed her veil and put on her widow’s garments. (Gen. 38: 14-19)
R. Yohanan said, ‘Judah wanted to ignore her, but God had prepared the Angel of Lust, who was sent to meet him. ‘Where are you going, Judah?’ the angel asked him, adding. ‘Where will kings come from and where will redeemers come from?’ Therefore the verse continues, ‘And he bent towards her on the road.’ It was against his will, without his consent that he was bent to her. (Gen. Rabba 85:8)
This, according to Izbicy, is the essential teaching of the Judah-Tamar story. When God wants us to do His will, especially in matters where the future of the world is at stake, there is no human power of will or determination that can prevent it from happening. Judah may not have wanted sex with a prostitute by the roadside, but his lust overpowered him and he was forced to become a pawn in God’s strategy for the evolution of the Messianic Light.
We each of us, perhaps may times in our lives, find ourselves looking back on events in which we have participated that resound to our dishonor or discredit. We have acted disgracefully. Yet when we look back at the action from the perspective of age or wisdom, we find it hard to see how we could have chosen differently at the time, given the facts and choices that were available to us. We acted on impulses that seemed to be hard-wired into our bodies – we had no other options.
It’s interesting that the Izbicy applies this rule to instincts like sexual desire, but rarely to intellectual choices. He says:
Frankly, what is rational man and what could he possibly achieve through his own intellect and with his own thoughts? On the other hand, what a person does with his natural inclination, in the grip of his instincts, is being done with the power that God put in him[24].
It is no coincidence that the Jews of Western Europe are descended mainly from the Tribe of Benjamin whose special gift is assimilation[25]. Europe was home to some of the most gifted civilizations of antiquity, each of which contained holy sparks of divine longing. Until 1939, it might be said, we needed to be there collecting those holy sparks. Sciences, medicine, technology, arts, enlightenment and modernity all bubbled to the surface there, in the vortex of dissolving Christian and feudal empires. Jews sifted through everything for two thousand years, selecting what was important and genuine until we picked their bones clean. Today, European cultures and countries have nothing of genuine worth left in them, certainly nothing worth wasting a lifetime in exile gathering.
Benjamin is the wolf that drags the spoils of conquest back to its cave to share and portion among its cubs. This tribe is best suited to judge the value of the kill – what to absorb and what to leave behind. So it is no wonder that Jews of the west bring the most massive spoils of conquest with them when they return to the Land. Whether it is an ivy-league education, a sizzling fashion sense, a command of English or the fundamentals of a democratic government - these are the fruits of God’s desire, the language of the divine.
CHAPTER 7. – KI TAVO
Blessings That Are Not Curses, and Curses That Are Not.
‘But it shall come to pass, if you will not listen to the voice of God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes which I command you this day; that all these curses shall come upon you, and overtake you.’ (Deut. 28:15)
There is a rule of exegesis often used in the Midrash: wherever a passage in Scripture opens with the phrase ‘but it shall come to pass’, it should be read as tidings of great joy[26]. How can we read the unspeakable curses in this Sidra as tidings of joy? Frankly, if any human being were to curse someone he loves with the curses written in this Sidra, we’d unhesitatingly conclude that the person doing the cursing is mentally ill. Read them for yourself.
Unfortunately they’ve already come true. We’ve been savoring their many sour and bitter flavors these last two thousand years, and for a thousand years before that, so their power to scare us has evaporated somewhat. Still, even a cursory reading of the text is sufficient to make any normal person’s skin crawl in horror.
My aim is not to mitigate or apologize for the text. It is what it is – Torah from Sinai. Our job is not to deny or evade, but to sweeten.
There is a matching verse earlier in the text, in the blessings which precede these curses. It says: ‘All these blessings shall come upon you, and overtake you, because you listen to the voice of God.’ (Ibid. 2) The Hebrew word HISIGUCHA is translated here as ‘overtake you’, and that is often the way it is used, but it has variants depending on context. Most properly, it means to reach and grasp. The blessing then reads, ‘these blessings shall come upon you, and reach you.’ The question is obvious: if the blessings have already come upon you, then obviously they reached you?
Here I must digress somewhat to provide background. Since the mid-seventeenth century there have been seven rabbis who were given the title ‘The Rebbe Reb’, indicating they were rebbes not only to their own Hasidim, but also to other rebbes. The last of these was the Polish rabbi, the Rebbe Reb Bunim of P’shischa (1762-1827). They used to say about him that he hid his seriousness behind a camouflage of witticisms and clever sayings – bon mots. His teachings, the profoundest and most radical reinterpretations of Torah, often consisted of no more than a single word or terse phrase. He was the main influence in the spiritual development of the Izbicy rebbe, whose Torah we drink so thirstily. According to Izbicy Hasidim, their rebbe was the only one who absorbed the whole gamut of the Rebbe Reb Bunim’s Torah. It was only Reb Mordechai Yosef who was never distracted by the lure of Lublin, Rimanov and Koznitz where other rebbes held court. Izbicy is the sole, natural heir to P’shischa, they say.
The Rebbe Reb Bunim had a few words to say about this week’s Sidra. To the verse, ‘these blessings shall come upon you and reach you,’ he added the phrase, ‘where you are.’ Vu du bist, that’s all he said.
Two hundred years, later those who study his Torah still find new facets to admire in the brilliance of his glittering wit.
The Izbicy explains it thus:
It means you will not be changed from who you were prior to receiving the blessing. Human nature is such that a person who is blessed starts to change as a result of the improvement and relief God sends him. Here God promises that along with the primary blessing there is another parallel blessing, a promise that the goodness inside his Jewish soul will not change or be altered by any aspect of his enlargement and abundance.
Reb Chanoch Henoch of Alexander (1798–1870, known as the Alexander Rebbe) presided over what was at the time the largest Hasidic group anywhere. He explained his teacher’s cryptic comment thus, ‘It means the blessings will find you in your place.’ He went on to explain what he thought the Rebbe Reb Bunim meant by the remark.
‘It happened to me once,’ he said. ‘I was among all the Hasidim whose custom it was to show ourselves to the Rebbe Reb Bunim on the eve of Yom Kippur, for each of us to mention his own name in the rebbe’s presence.’
Reb Henoch continued, ‘But I felt so bereft of virtue after taking some sort of personal inventory, I was simply too ashamed of myself; I dared not show my face before him, and found I could not enter and do the Hazkara alone. Excuses, though, were unacceptable - it had to be done. So I was resolved to appear among a band of my friends and present myself as part of a group, regardless of the way I felt, and to leave his presence as quickly as I might arrange it. And that is exactly what I did. I hid among the crowd entering the rebbe’s presence and tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible.’
‘Now,’ said Reb Henoch. ‘As soon as I turned to leave his presence, the Rebbe called me back to him. He wanted to see me. My heart exulted! He merely called my name and my heart filled with joy. But no sooner had my heart filled, when he told me he had no further need for me and that I could leave his presence. He would not even look at me anymore.’
Because he was no longer in that same place, because he’d been changed by the blessing, by having his rebbe notice him and call him by name, the blessing did not really reach him, for he was no longer there.
Reb Avrahamelle of Sochatshov (1838-1910) explained it thus:
What was Abel's sin? What did he do to merit being murdered by Cain? The Torah tells us that God heeded Abel's offering but paid no heed to Cain's offering (Gen. 4:4). The verse is telling us that Abel was blessed, but look what happened: Abel said to himself, ‘Oh well, I must have done something right!’ Now, the Rebbe Reb Bunim taught us that a real blessing reaches the blessed and finds him in exactly the same place as he was before receiving the blessing. But before the blessing Abel was humble, and now he was changed. To be changed by a blessing, is no blessing.
His son, the Shem Mishmuel of Sochatshov (1855-1926) explains it thus:
There is curious anomaly in the Torah when it talks about Isaac. The text says, ‘Isaac planted crops in that land and the same year reaped a hundredfold, because God blessed him. The man waxed great, and continued to grow and grow until he had grown mighty and great.’ (Gen. 26:12-13) Why does the Torah hide his name and refer to him obliquely as ‘the man’?
Because Isaac’s name means laughter, and as the Rebbe Reb Bunim stated, a blessing only reaches the person in the same place he was initially. Now, to begin with Isaac was not laughing, he was very broken-hearted, so the Torah tells us that even when he had become very, very wealthy, he remained the same humble man who befitted the blessings. He was not Isaac the laughing man; just a man.
Similarly we find the Torah still referring to Jacob as Jacob even after being given the name Israel. Because, as the Rebbe Reb Bunim says, the source of the blessing is in the humility and broken heartedness a person feels. So Jacob remained Jacob after being named Israel, otherwise the blessings could not have reached him.
The Chidushei HaRim (Yitzchak Meir Rotenberg 1798–1866) said he heard from his Rebbe Reb Bunim, that sometimes someone is given a blessing for which he has no appropriate vessel, so God also blesses him that the blessings should reach him. This is an extra blessing that he remain humble, because humility is the ultimate vessel for blessings.
The Rebbe of Plonsk (Tzvi Yechezkel Michelson 1863-1943) said in the name of the Rebbe Reb Bunim that there are always blessings flowing from the divine source, bestwoing abundance for every human on the planet. Sometimes, however, a person who is undeserving doesn’t receive his blessing because it goes to another address, someone else benefits from it. So the Torah promises that the blessing will ‘reach you’ and not someone else. That’s a real blessing.
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I have quoted the above without exhausting the sources. In the writings and oral tradition of the Polish Hasidic rebbes, there many, many more variants, interpretations of interpretations and reinterpretations of Reb Bunim’s quip. Anyone can read the phrase ‘there where you are’ in a personal way.
Essentially it means being centered in the self, being anchored in a solid identity and having the presence of mind to stay that way regardless of the impetus to change. For the Polish rebbes it was all about humility and broken-heartedness - that a man has to remain humble and broken despite being blessed, or else the blessing evaporates and morphs into something more like a curse.
There was one remark I heard from Reb Shlomo that I have struggled to understand many years, without much success. Shlomo said, ‘In June 1967 [the Six Day War] we were given so much, all the gates of heaven were opened to us. But we with our pettiness and small, closed-mindedness ruined everything, and now look.’
It’s easy to see the Torah of the Rebbe Reb Bunim in Shlomo’s remark. The blessing changed us and lo, it has become a curse. Where we had been humble and broken, we became proud and self-satisfied.
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Now let us return to the opening lines of this Torah and the sentence, ‘all these curses shall come upon you, and reach you.’
What does the phrase ‘reach you’ mean in light of the Rebbe Reb Bunim’s comment, that they will reach you ‘where you are’?
The simplest reading is this: When bad things happen and the curses come upon us we should change, because then the curses will no longer be curses, either because we no longer live at that address, or because we are not the same person anymore.
Only simplistic readings like this are clever word-plays, and don’t reflect reality or human nature.
I just heard on the news that another Jewish soldier was killed in Gaza. The death of a single Jew is a curse on me and us; tell me, how does becoming humble and broken change it into a blessing? If having lots of blessings (such as having lots of money) changes me into an undesirable person, I can accept that the money is no blessing. But if the death of someone changes me into a different person, how does that make his death a blessing? Besides, whoever heard of a fatal illness or hearing of someone’s death making someone else into a nicer person? That’s not how people are.
Now let’s throw in a gigantic curse, like the Holocaust. Assuming an attitude change was necessary, how would a change of attitude retroactively change the Holocaust into a blessing?
The only Hasidic rebbe who addresses my question is the Izbicy’s top student, R. Tzadok of Lublin (1823-1900). Among the suggestions he makes is that alongside the curses comes the blessing that we will not be changed by them. God promises us that we will not be ruined, corrupted or so damaged by the curses that they will make us turn against Him. The blessing is that we will remain in place for the curses to come upon us so that in the World-to-Come, we can receive our just reward for having endured[27].
I have been praying for twenty years for insight to understand Reb Bunim’s words and how they apply here. I don’t accept R. Tzadok’s interpretation, although I can see how he was forced into it. The mere fact that the Torah contains these repeated curses is problematic, never mind the added ‘will reach you’ phrase; so R. Tzadok introduces the ‘reward outside-this-world’ logic in order to make it all seem logical.
I want to understand it in the context of the here and now. Not to understand the curses, just the added ‘will reach you’ phrase.
Perhaps, and this is a big perhaps, what it means is this. ‘All these curses shall come upon you, and reach you’ because you are where you are, because you don’t change and because you are not growing beyond that place in which you are stuck.
Perhaps we are always being chased by curses; it’s the way of Nature to chase. We are under attack by our environment, by the microbes in the air and the food we eat. The reason we don’t succumb to every developing and evolving virus or calamity is because we are evolving as fast as the danger evolves. We don’t remain in the same place, we learn from our mistakes, we adapt, we fix and we move on.
When we don’t, we are overtaken and they reach us. Here in Israel we are in the midst of war. Five years ago the ‘experts’ were saying tanks are obsolete. The IDF should take all its mechanized artillery and house it in museums for posterity – they are expensive, unwieldy and lumbering behemoth, vulnerable to anti-tank missiles wielded by the most primitive enemy fighters. This week they are the unsung heroes of the war, mobile shelter for our troops as they search out the enemy. What changed? We invented an anti-anti-tank missile, and suddenly tanks are ‘in’ again.
What is true in the physical world is doubly so in the spiritual world. Adapt or succumb.
Elijah the Prophet was having a very difficult incarnation. It had all begun with a very bad day that dragged out into a very bad week that developed into a couple of bad months which added up to a very bad year. Nothing was going right, so naturally, he ran away to the wilderness.
God asked him, ‘Elijah, what are you doing here?’
Elijah replied, ‘I have been very zealous for You, God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.’
God said, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of God, for God is about to pass by.’ Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before God, but God was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but God was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. Then a voice said to him, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’
He replied, ‘I have been very zealous for You, God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.’ (I Kings 19:10-14)
Why does Elijah repeat himself?
He repeats himself for the same reason that he has to be shown God is neither in the whirlwind, the earthquake nor in the fire. Why would he think God is in the wind? Well, God was in the wind in Egypt, whether bringing the locusts or splitting the Red Sea to punish the Egyptians who rebelled against Him, why wouldn’t He be in the wind. Why would Elijah think God is in the earthquake? Well, Korah got his desserts in the earthquake when the ground swallowed him and his family who rebelled against God. Why the fire? Well, there were the deaths of Nadab and Abihu when the fire roared out of the sanctuary to kill them when they sinned against God; fire is always a good standby when a bit of smiting is called for. Elijah was sure that this was the way things had always worked, and what worked then, should surely work now?
Elijah felt all life’s curses were catching up with him, because he was stuck in one spiritual paradigm. God showed him how times were changing, and that He, was no longer in the hurricane, nor in the earthquake, nor the fire. It was the age of the still small voice! A prophet could no longer rely on tried and tested methods of leadership: first the shouting, arguing and stamping of feet, then the personal threats of mayhem and destruction. The age of the quiet, gentle chiding and urging voice had come.
It was a hard lesson.
CHAPTER 8. – NITZAVIM
Battered but Unbowed
‘You are standing to-day, all of you, before God - your heads, your tribes, your elders, and your authorities - every man of Israel; your infants, your wives, and the sojourner who is in the midst of your camp, from the hewer of wood to the drawer of water; that you may enter into covenant with God, and into His curse, which your God makes with you this day.’ (Deut. 29:9-11)
Notwithstanding the curses we read in last week’s Sidra, Moses reminds us that we are still standing. Although the curses were frightening enough to strike terror into our hearts, to cripple us and reduce us to a huddled mass of terrified beings, we did not succumb to panic but remained standing on our feet.
We didn’t rebel or refuse to accept the curses, we didn’t shrug them off; instead we stood before Moses in serried ranks of families, friends and tribes, soberly nodding our acceptance at the horrifying price of being a Jew. And to what purpose? Moses explains: ‘that you may enter into covenant with God.’
Covenants work both ways, as the verse above implies, a covenant with God and His curse, for whatever applies to us applies to Him. When we suffer, God suffers; when we are cursed, so is He, for we are Him incarnate.
Entering into covenant requires that the parties break something irreparably as a sign that the covenant cannot be undone. This is why in the coven when God forged a covenant with Abraham, He said, ‘Bring Me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon.’ Abram brought all these to Him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other; the birds, however, he did not cut in half. Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away. (Gen. 15:9-11)
Later, God made another covenant with Abraham in which he had to circumcise himself. Both covenants were sealed in ways that could not be undone. (Gen. Cap. 17)
The very first covenant in the Torah was made with Noah when God destroyed the whole world with a flood, through which Noah, his family and all the animals they had with them in the ark sailed safely as a rite of passage, the way Abraham walked through the lines of dead animals.
From the appalling and sickening nature of the curses we read in last week’s Sidra, we can infer what the stakes are in this game and how risky the gamble. The subtext of this whole exercise is God’s narrative. By tying Himself to us in an unbreakable covenant, God is putting Himself and His reputation, His glory and His eternity at risk. We hold God’s future in our hands. He sinks with us when we drown; He perishes with us when we die. If all the Jews disappear then God of the Jews and the Torah will disappear, too.
To my way of thinking, the ending to WWII is the nadir of God’s story. The Germans waged a war of annihilation against the Jewish People, all but obliterating every trace of our existence from Europe. What or who prevented Germans from achieving their final goal, and completing the job in North Africa, the Levant and the Far East? It was only the most godless nation on Earth – Russia, and the most Protestant nation on Earth – America. Was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob given any credit for the defeat of Nazi Germany, God’s most dedicated and ruthless enemy? I have never heard it claimed so. The history books don’t show it. Russians never said so, and the Americans have never written such a thing.
If Hitler had succeeded because Russia and Britain were defeated, there would be no State of Israel today, no enclave where millions of us flourish. Yet it is Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill who historically take credit; God - not so much.
God is undoubtedly the decider in every battle and the Master of War, of all the martial arts; surely nothing happens that He does not plan. Still, you have to admit that very little credit went to God of Israel in that encounter. You’d expect, in a situation where the very existence of the Jews hung in the balance, that God would step in and loudly claim His own, if only to protect His investment and put His unmistakable and indelible imprint on the outcome, so there would be no possibility of falsifying the record. But no – He remained and remains marginal, hidden, silent and seemingly inglorious, neither famous nor honored. I saw an elderly Holocaust survivor crippled by arthritis and a teenaged lifetime wasted in Bergen-Belsen, stumbling through the streets of Manchester on her way home from work, and I said to myself, ‘Saddam Hussein treats his army veterans more honorably than this.’
How far we are from those heady days during the Exodus when we read:
And Moses said to the people: ‘Fear not: stand and see the great wonders of God, which He will do this day: for the Egyptians, whom you see now, you shall see no more forever. God will fight for you while you keep silent.’
Then God said to Moses, ‘Why are you crying out to me? Tell the people to get moving! Raise your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea to divide the water so that the Israelites can go through the sea on dry ground…’ (Ex. 14:14-16)
The rest is history; we sing its song in our morning service. For in every moment of real existential crisis, in a do-or-die situation, God steps in and shows Himself, demonstrating to the entire world how important we Jews are to Him. Our Salvation is God’s salvation, for He depends on us to reveal His glory and sovereignty to the world. There are no other options; the instant we perish, He disappears from the world.
Except that when we are cursed, so is He. His power and might depend on our power and might. He redeems us and we redeem Him. When catastrophe befalls us, it happens to Him.
And yet, as Moses points out to us in this Sidra, we remain standing; still upright on our feet, today, all of us from our leaders to our water-carriers, undistinguished perhaps, but not extinguished.
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The Izbicy quotes a line from Proverbs in connection with this Sidra’s opening verses.
Three things are too wonderful for me; four, I do not know: The way of an eagle in the sky; the way of a serpent on a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maiden. (Prov 30:18-19)
The first three are juxtaposed. The eagle against the sky – a tiny, tightly focused predator set against the vast, amorphous expanse of the unfocused heavens; one is a living creature – a bird, the other is a silent, dead element – a world. The two interacting in ways that Solomon finds too wonderful for words.
The serpent on a rock parallels the eagle in the sky. As though the reptile were the living heart of the dead stone, they provide context for each other; they might have been made for one another. The same applies to the ship and the sea. They have nothing in common, apples-to-oranges, and yet they are perfectly matched; wedded to one another in ways that defy description.
It is the fourth couple that has Solomon saying simply, ‘I don’t know.’ This pair is not comprised of competing elements or conflicting worlds, man and maid are almost identical – human, alive and conscious. Man and maid were in fact made for one another, and yet, in some ways they are further apart and more disparate than the previous three couples, because man and maid can be compared, apples-to-apples.
The Hebrew words used for man and maid in this verse are GEVER & ALMA. There were so many available alternatives: ISH vs ISHA, ADAM vs BETULA, NAAR vs NAARA or BEN vs BAT, one has to assume these GEVER & ALMA were chosen for the ways in which they contrast and differ from the other.
According to the Izbicy the world ALMA was chosen because it suggests that which is most hidden. The word ALMA, referring to the maiden, is almost identical to the word OLAM meaning world, and ELEM meaning hidden. We live in the OLAM where God is most hidden; the very purpose of this world is to hide God so that we, through our lives and worship, might reveal Him.
To understand the significance in this choice of names, the Izbicy points to the Talmudic dictum: ‘Jephthah in his day was like Samuel in his day.’ (Rosh Hashana 25b) Samuel was one of the greatest leaders we ever had. In terms of spiritual, intellectual and prophetic prowess he was the equivalent of Moses and Aaron combined. Samuel bestrode his generation like a colossus. Jephthah was chosen to lead Israel at a time of war with its neighboring country, the Ammonites. He never achieved prophecy nor left any but the most negative impression on the spiritual life of the nation. His antecedents were of the coarsest, and he is introduced to us in the text thus:
Jephthah the Gileadite was a great warrior, but he was the son of a prostitute, and Gilead was his father. Gilead's wife bore him sons, and when they grew up, they drove Jephthah out and said to him, ‘You will have no inheritance in our father's house, because you are the son of another woman.’ So Jephthah fled from his brothers and lived in the land of Tob. Then some lawless men joined Jephthah and traveled with him. (Judg. 11:1-4)
And yet the Talmud is adamant that he was the equivalent of that most noble prophet, Samuel. The Izbicy interprets the Talmudic assertion as judgment of Jephthah’s personal success and not assessment of his leadership qualities. Jephthah accomplished in his lifetime everything God wanted from him, his life was therefore a triumph of self-realization and actualization. And that is the least and most God asks of each of us. Because the Self being actualized, is really the divine spark manifesting in the world (see Radical Ki Tavo).
As has been said previously, God writes Himself into each of us in a unique fashion, imprinting us with His word and covering us with shadow in that very place we are most Godly. When she acts the prostitute, Tamar actualizes the Light of the Messiah (Gen Cap. 38). This is what Solomon means when he says, ‘I don’t know’; I don’t know how God makes His way into the world – ‘the way of a man with a maid’.
The most hidden sparks are those in the soul of the ALMA – maid, because that is what her name signifies. But what does the phrase ‘most hidden’ actually mean, and how is the spark in the water-carrier more hidden than that inside Moses?
Statistically, the average Jew today lives somewhere in the Diaspora, has no knowledge of Hebrew and very little, if any, familiarity with Torah or Judaism. Most Jews today say they do not believe in God.
But the secret is this: The spark inside those alienated Jews today is brighter, stronger and a million times more vivid than the spark which shone in Moses or Aaron, King David or R. Akiba. The more God’s beauty is obscured by ugliness, by depravity and by shamelessness, the stronger and more radiant it becomes. In opposition to the inverse-square law - whereby brightness of light diminishes exponentially as the distance from its source increases - the Law of ELEM, OLAM & ALMA dictates that the further from its source a soul wanders, the brighter grows the light hidden within.
The Izbicy used to say that he heard from his teacher, the Rebbe Reb Bunim, that despite the fact that our souls grow smaller and smaller with each passing generation, and that spiritually measured, we are vastly diminished by comparison with even our recent ancestors, nevertheless, the spark at our center grows ever clearer, cleaner and more pure[28], because God hides himself ever more purely and brilliantly in those places, for a simple reason, as will be explained.
If I wanted you to come and settle in my town because I’d like you to live close to me, I would begin by making my town sound attractive to you. I’d write about its history, its beauty and charm, its facilities and infrastructure; I would do my best to describe it in such terms that, at a minimum, you’d be enticed to pay it a visit and consider it in your future plans. I could end up writing a novel, just to achieve those ends, and because I love words, a novel is probably what I’d end up writing, because I think you are worth my effort.
If I thought you would find it easier to make a living here because the economic opportunities are greater than your current situation, I would not write at any great length about its charms, instead I’d send you material concerning the industries and offices where you might ply your trade. My writing would be much less florid and expansive, because I know you need to be here, to find work. I’d send you the basic information and leave it to you to ask me for more as needed.
If I thought your life were in danger where you are because people are out to kill you, or you were at risk of contracting a fatal illness, I’d send you a brief note with directions to my house. My entire message would consist of two sentences.
There is the Word of God that He puts in each of us; every man according to his need. The word shapes us as humans, each of us according to God’s design. The word is also called Torah, and there are infinite varieties of Torah, to suit every kind of soul. God never repeats Himself, and the Torah is always fresh and novel. God hides Himself, so to speak, inside that individual Torah each person expresses.
But there is a greater level of hiddenness when God puts himself into the Word that animates the soul of someone destined to live in dangerous places. Such a soul needs a short set of instructions to survive, therefore his Torah may be a short phrase. And then there are the people who are in such jeopardy, their instruction consists of a single Divine Word, or even less than that; an urge, a command, an instinct wherein God Himself manifests, not trusting any Word to convey the message. Such Torahs are known as Sitrei Torah – Hidden Torahs; Torah so holy and concise, containing God so immanent that even words are not sufficient to carry the message. God Himself is the teaching – the Word[29].
The GEVER is in the ALMA, it is the way of a man and a maid. Solomon was aware how little he understood its working. And here in the opening lines of our Sidra, Moses also expresses his astonishment. From our headmen down to the water-carriers, we all carry God within us. And the water-carrier’s God-Word may be infinitely brighter than the headman’s, for the reason just explained.
The water-carrier, according to Izbicy, is the person with aberrant desires – that’s where the Urge of God is purest and cleanest, where the Sitrei Torah resides. And this is the jeopardy God put Himself into when He made His covenant with us. We carry Him into every place we go. He is your personal Torah; when you are dragged down, God is dragged down with you. When you stand upright, He stands straight. He animates you and you reveal Him, and you need to know all this.
CHAPTER 9. – VAYELECH
Desire fixes Desire – Future fixes Past
‘Moses went and spoke these words to all of Israel.’ (Deut. 31:1)
Nowhere in the text do we find any indication of a change in his location; all Israel remained in the very same place we found them at the beginning of the book of Deuteronomy, so where did Moses go to when he ‘went and spoke’?
The Izbicy says the phrase ‘Moses went’ hints at Moses’ extreme perturbation. He was restless, anxious and agitated.
Moses was worrying about the flaws we all carry around inside us, whether our own defects of character, or those we acquire from our sometimes dysfunctional environments; whether from parents who had ‘issues’, or from perverse and corrupt cultural norms. If they are so pervasive and powerful, how can we ever fix our world or be fixed ourselves? The complexes we develop as we grow through childhood to maturity are so ingrained; how can we possibly overcome their crippling effects?
One of the basic assumptions of Judaism is that we can be fixed and healed by performing the Commandments. This is the meaning of Teshuvah, which is commonly translated as Repentance but which really means Return. Each one of the 613 Mitzvot – Commandments affects a different part of the psyche, the body and the soul, and by fulfilling one Commandment at a time, we fix and strengthen some aspect of our personalities that requires healing, and so we are returned to our original pristine condition. Everyone can find a Mitzvah or Mitzvoth to suit their individual need for Teshuvah; an act, meditation or practice with the power to steer us back where we need to be.
Judaism is not plagued with the concept of Original Sin. We don’t believe that a soul born into this world is already besmirched with sin. And yet, there are enough verses advocating the idea that one might be excused for thinking it a part of our theology. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba, David said, ‘Behold, I was conceived in sin, and in the wicked heat of my mother’s arousal was I formed.’ (Psalm 51:7)
When chastising Israel, the Prophet Isaiah uttered the following: ‘You have neither heard nor understood; from of old your ears have not been open. Well do I know how treacherous you are; you were called a sinner from the womb.’ (Isa. 48:8)
Both David and Isaiah are talking about desire and the sins which come as a result of us chasing and indulging our desires. As our desires grow stronger, our self-centeredness and self-absorption take over the governance of our actions. But as has been emphasized previously (see Radical Ki Tetze), desire is also the language of the divine; desire is not original sin, it is the stuff of Creation and the one basic building-block of the Universe. Our instincts and urges are not evil. Quite the opposite, as we read previously (see Radical Ki Tetze), what a person does with his natural inclination, while in the grip of his instincts, is done with the power that God put in him.
Evil is Rage.
Rape, Robbery and Murder, Arrogance and the Lust for Power and Dominion are all bad. But none of these evils have taken root in the Jewish Soul. These is no sacred rage in Judaism, it is equated with a rejection of God[30]. Moses does not accuse us of it, nor does he suggest we are riddled with it. Rage is not desire. Rape, robbery, murder and arrogance are not desire; they are sins of the ‘left-side’.
What causes Moses so much concern and apprehension, is the realization that in spite of all we had heard and agreed to at Sinai and beyond, we remained subject to those very same ‘right-side’ instinctual desires which oppress us and suppress our virtuous inclinations. We have absorbed them from the very act of sex in which we were conceived, as David suggests. They are who we are. But where in the Torah are we given a healing balm to mitigate our desires? Moses was perturbed by the seeming absence of any Mitzva – Commandment directly designed to heal the ravages wrought by our desires. The tone and prediction of prophecies earlier in Deuteronomy, as well as those which come later in this chapter, all carry the same message:
God said to Moses: ‘You are going to rest with your ancestors, and these people will soon prostitute themselves to the foreign gods of the Land they are entering. They will forsake me and break the covenant I made with them.’ …After Moses finished writing in a book the words of this law from beginning to end, he gave this command to the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of God: ‘Take this Book of the Law and place it beside the ark of the covenant of God. There it will remain as a witness against you. For I know how rebellious and stiff-necked you are. For if you have been rebellious against God while I am still alive and with you, how much more will you rebel after I die!’ (Deut. 31:16-27)
The last 2 of the 613 Mitzvoth appear in this week’s Sidra. The final Mitzvah is the Commandment for every Jewish man to write a Torah for himself, and will be the subject of another essay. Here we are interested in the penultimate Mitzvah. The 612th Commandment obligates every Jewish man, woman and child to assemble in the Temple sanctuary on the second day of the Sukkoth Festival at the end of the Shmittah year, once every seven years. The Mishna describes the Assembly:
At the conclusion of the first day of the Festival [of Sukkot which is the beginning of] the eighth [year of the Shmittah cycle], they erect a wooden stage in the Temple Courtyard, upon which the king sits, as the Torah commands: ‘At the end of every seven years, in the set time ...’ (Deut. 31:10) The Chazan of the Assembly takes a Torah scroll and hands it to the President of the Assembly. The President of the Assembly in turn hands it to the deputy High Priest, who in turn hands it to the High Priest, who hands it to the king. The king stands to receive it, but sits down to read it. The reading begins with Deuteronomy 1:1 and includes various chapters from that book… (Sotah 7:8)
This, according to Izbicy, is the answer to Moses’ question of how can we fix the defects and shortcomings that we have inherited from our ancestors; selfish desires that were inculcated in us in the heat of our parents’ passion?
The Mitzvah of Hak’hel – Assembly fixes even those tendencies or weaknesses that we were born with, because the Assembly, as we will learn, expresses a desire, and every expression of true desire touches upon the Simple, divine Desire which brought us into being.
The Talmud queries:
The verse tells us: ‘Assemble all the people, men, women and infants, and the stranger that is in your gates, that they may hear and that they may learn, and fear God, and fulfill all the words of this law.’ (Deut. 31:12) Now, I understand why the men are commanded to assemble - in order to learn. I can also understand why the women are commanded to assemble - in order to listen. Why, though, are the infants brought to the assembly?
In order to reward those who bring them. (Chagiga 3a)
The standard reading of the text assumes that bringing their infants to the Assembly earns the parents a reward for having brought them. Izbicy reads the Talmud’s statement in a completely new and radical way: the desire I feel for the Torah, is the spark of Divine Light animating all my sexual desire, because all desire stems from Torah. When I express my desire for the Torah, especially when I express it in its purest form, in my desire to give Torah to my child, I am fixing all my desires, even those burning and troublesome sexual desires that I inherited from my parents in the heat of their concupiscent and orgasmic moment. In my desire to give the Torah to my child, I am fixing the desire my parents floundered in when I was conceived. My desire that Torah open itself inside my child retroactively fixes my past. When the Talmud asks: ‘Why are the infants brought to the assembly’, answering, ‘in order to reward those who bring them’, those who bring them refers to the parents of the parents who are bringing their child to the Assembly. Because desire to see someone else succeed in accessing their own sacred and divine truth - to discover their own Torah - mirrors the most selfless and adoring sexual foreplay.
The Izbicy rebbe derives this lesson directly from a discussion in the Talmud, where R. Shimon bar Yochai is quoted saying, ‘Greater is the foreplay of Torah than the studying of it.’ (Berachoth 7b) The Hebrew word for foreplay is SHIMUSH, which literally means ‘use’ or ‘service’. R. Shimon learns it from the events described in II Kings 3, which narrates how three allied kingdoms went to war against the Moabites but were almost defeated by drought and poor logistics during their march to war. When a decision was required about whether to advance or retreat, they sought help from a prophet, someone who could ask advice of God. ‘King Jehoshaphat said, “Isn’t there a prophet of God here? Let’s inquire of God through him.” One of the servants of the king of Israel answered, “Elisha son of Shaphat, who used to pour water on Elijah’s hands, is here.”’ (II Kings 3:11) R. Shimon observes that Elisha was not considered a worthy successor to Elijah the Prophet simply for having studied prophecy under him, but rather, for having washed Elijah’s hands. Therefore, R. Shimon says, we can learn that serving the Torah is greater than studying it.
The Izbicy sees the reference to hand-washing as a metaphor[31]. Elisha pouring water over Elijah’s hands should not be taken literally, but should be understood as the longing and desire Elisha had to see his master Elijah succeed. The metaphor meant that Elisha poured out his prayers and entreaties to God to help and strengthen Elijah’s ‘hands’, that God should crown his endeavors with success. Elisha’s ardent desires amount to more than his studies, because desire is infinite, boundless and ever-growing, while the act of studying and learning is always bound by the limits of the student or teacher; by their faculties or relationship, their learning skills or memory. When it comes to learning the Torah, you can only learn as much or as well as your scholarly potential permits. But the longing and desire you bring to Torah, the preparations you make - the romance, sentiment and emotion with which you approach the Torah itself can be infinite.
The Hebrew for sexual foreplay is TASHMISH. The word can also be used in reference to any accessory, subordinate or supplementary object. E.g. the velvet bag in which I store my Tefillin is considered a TASHMISH under Jewish ritual law, and because Tefillin are sacred objects and must be interred when they are no longer serviceable, the velvet bag also has to be buried when it is worn out. Because SHIMUSH and TASHMISH can be invested with infinite amounts of longing, desire, intentionality and meaning-making, whereas any act I perform can only be as great as I am, as skillful as I am, and as accomplished as I am.
Moses sees this Commandment to Assemble men, women and children in order to hear the King of Israel read the Torah, as a way to merge the desires in SHIMUSH and TASHMISH, because all desire flows from the Simple Desire. When Moses realized that this could happen, he began rejoicing. ‘Everything can be fixed, even retroactively. Even the desires my parents had, through which heat I was conceived, can be reconnected to the source of all desire. Which means that instead of me being irreparably flawed, ‘conceived in sin’ the way King David described himself, or ‘a sinner from the womb’ the way Isaiah told it, I and my antecedents can all be fixed simply by allowing my desire for Torah to flow into my child!’
CHAPTER 10. – HAAZINU
God Has Even More Faith In Us Than We Have In Him!
‘For God’s portion is His people; Jacob the demesne of His inheritance[32].’ (Deut. 32:9)
According to the Izbicy, this verse shapes the text of Sidra Haazinu, and Sidra Haazinu shapes the text of the entire Torah. If you were to boil the entire Five Books of Moses down to its essential matter, you would be left with Haazinu, and if you were to distil Haazinu down to its most basic component you would be left with this verse. Haazinu is a song, and that simple fact changes everything, because there is a fundamental distinction between a book of narrative or laws, and a book of song.
First of all, a page of writing conveys meaning only when the reader comprehends the language of all the words. Second, the meaning is wholly contained within the words and never in the space between the words or around the margins of the page. Songs are not like that. The silences between notes have equal weight and meaning. Spaces between notes create rhythms and waves of sound that are crucial to the music. Silences in the music are not merely there to provide the mind with spaces between sounds; silences are also music. This fundamental approach to the Torah as song is reflected in the Halacha – Ritual Law governing the definition of a kosher Torah scroll. If in the entire scroll there exists even one single letter which is not completely surrounded by clean white parchment, then that Torah is not kosher and may not be used. If the writing in the Torah scroll touches the edge of the parchment, or if one letter touches another letter, it is not a kosher Torah. Because the silences in the song have equal weight with its notes, they are just as musical.
This means that the Torah is a song[33] and not a book of writing, and it is not merely the knowledge of Torah which has meaning, ignorance of Torah has meaning too. Within this Torah song is a Song of Songs, the verse: ‘For God’s portion is His people; Jacob the demesne of His inheritance.’
Previously (see Radical Eikev) we examined this verse through a different lens. There we discussed the concept of Jews as God’s portion under the assumption that Jews are a part of God, literally a component, as it were, of the Godness of God. Here we will examine the background to that idea, and where it originated.
The Midrash[34] quotes R. Shimon:
While men toiled to construct the edifice later known as the Tower of Babel, the Holy, Blessed One called to all seventy angels [avatars of the seventy nations] who surround His Throne of Sovereignty. ‘Come,’ said God. ‘Let us all descend and turn the seventy languages of these seventy nations to babble.’
They cast lots among them, as it written, ‘When the most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of Adam...’ (Deut. 32:8) It so happened that Abraham and his seed fell to God in that lottery, as it is written, ‘For God’s portion is His people; Jacob the demesne of His inheritance.’ (Ibid. 9) When God saw the portion that had fallen to Him in the lottery, He said, ‘My soul is very content with the lot of inheritance I have just drawn, as it is written, “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance,” (Ps. 16:6).’
It has always seemed to me that this Midrash conceals a profound mystery. I see two ways this lottery might have been organized.
1.) The names of Israel and 70 nations were inscribed onto some material, let us call it Ǽther. All the 71 slabs of Ǽther were then thrown into a bag or box from which each angel picked out one name. Whatever name he or she picked became the nation over which he or she has dominion in this world. God was left holding the slab inscribed with the name Israel, and so we officially became His people. If this is what the lottery looked like, it was a set-up because God did not leave us to Chance. We were the idea that arose in the thought before Creation; we were not some unconsidered trifle that God accidentally acquired in a cosmic raffle during Abraham’s lifetime. If it looks like God actually gambled that Israel might fall to the lot of some gentile angel, then it’s an illusion. There was never any chance that we would not fall into His hands.
2.) It was not a pull-a-number-out-of-the-hat kind of raffle. It was a sudden-death, heads or tails, throw-you-for-it kind of gamble. God played dice against the 70 angels, one at a time. Highest number wins. RAHAB came and threw dice against God. Oops! God lost the throw, RAHAB got to choose. He said, ‘I’ll take the Egyptians – I reckon they’re going to be around a long time.’ SHIVA came and threw against God. Oops! God lost the throw, SHIVA got to choose. ‘I’ll take the Hindu – I think my cult of Death Worship is a very catchy and pervasive culture.’ ALBION came and threw dice against God. Oops! God lost the throw, ALBION got to choose. He said, ‘I’ll take the English – those playing-fields of Eton, don’t you know.’ And so on, and so on. And when it was all over, God was left holding the bag in which there remained only one insignificant and undesirable people: Israel. God was stuck with us, because everyone else thought we were born hopeless losers; even the angel of the Eskimos thought she’d got a better deal than God. But for God to have lost a throw of the dice 70 times in a row there must have been cheating of a high order going on, it’s a statistical improbability of such staggering proportions one would be foolish not to suspect some serious skullduggery…
The purpose of a lottery is to provide the appearance of impartiality. Nobody gets to choose the winner; it is decided by chance alone. The 70 angels walked away from the allocation in good spirits, by all accounts, no one complained, everyone was satisfied. The results of the first sort of lottery mentioned above are completely random, while the second has randomness in the win or lose, but choice built into the winner’s selection. Either way, God is depicted as the brand-new owner of a potential nation consisting of Abraham and the promise of his descendants.
It’s a pretty story, but there has to be a purpose to it, beyond the simple Midrashic play on words.
The Izbicy has told us that the verse ‘For God’s portion is His people; Jacob the demesne of His inheritance’ is the kernel of truth at the heart of the Torah. It is the shape of the world, because the Torah is the blueprint God uses to design the world with. And therefore it is also the shape of God Himself, because God and the Torah are one. The fact that Israel is God’s inheritance shapes both the Torah and God – just as the Torah and God shape Israel, for Israel is also one with God and the Torah[35].
Now let us look at God’s gamble with the 70 nations. What are the 70 angels who surround the Throne of Sovereignty? Note: The Midrash usually talks about the Throne of Glory, but not in this instance. Here we’re strictly talking about sovereignty. Who is going to sit on that throne; who will reign?
Well, obviously, God. God is King, who else?
This is the secret at which the Midrash hints. What would have happened if God had picked Egypt out of the hat? It would have resulted in God being ALLAH of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, that’s what. The gamble God takes around the time of the birth of Abraham is this: God challenges the 70 avatars – who will get to sit on this throne at the end of time? Who is going to define what sort of god I, GOD, am?
Well, let every nation decide for itself, and let the best nation win! God gambles His throne, his sovereignty – who is going to rule as God of the universe?
God puts His reputation, His posterity and face on the line, because thenation/avatar that wins history also wins the Godness of God. ‘I will be who I will be,’ says God to Moses when Moses asks for God’s name.
‘My name,’ God hints to Moses, ‘has not been decided. It all depends on whether the Jews will succeed in their mission to crown Me as King of the World.’
If they fail, and some other faith prevails, then God is forced - by the rules of the wager He made with the 70 avatars – to wear the face and personality of whatever abomination has crushed the Light and obliterated the Jews. For as long as Jews exist, God of Israel has a chance at winning.
ALLAH chose the Arabs to carry him to triumphal dominion, because he has faith in their willingness to die for him. ALLAH has faith that the Arabs will make him king through the sheer power of their commitment, by word, sword or martyrdom to will crown ALLAH in glory and triumph.
The hungry, dark and ancient gods of Europe have not died, nor have they abandoned faith in their people’s abilities to redeem their names and make them triumphant. Mithra still lives in Persia, as does the Baal in Turkey. Each avatar schemes and manipulates events with all its might to enable his folk to achieve an advantage.
Every avatar found something else to put its faith in. Mithra believes with every fiber of his being that Persians are the best plotters, schemers and strategists in the history of the world. He can’t lose.
Apollo is convinced that his people, those great thinkers, philosophers and statesmen who elevated him atop Mount Olympus - who raised him skyward from among the stinking morass of chthonic underworld brutes – that they with their technological superiority will overwhelm the competition and see him triumph.
I have no idea what Quetzalcoatl thought when he chose the Maya, though I have no doubt human sacrifice was somewhere on the list of qualities that would make him the meanest, hungriest and baddest god in the pantheon. Perhaps he believes in the sheer unquenchable bloodthirstiness of his precious Mayans?
So what does God believe in, what essential quality in the descendants of Abraham did God bet His kingdom on? What unbeatable quality do Jews have that will make God triumphant?
It’s simple, really. God has faith in us that we have faith in Him. That’s all. Jews have faith in God, such a powerful, cosmic and archetypal faith, it can only be compared to one other faith of its kind, and that is the powerful, cosmic and archetypal faith God has in us to make Him triumphant.
It was not the sword nor the brains, neither the commitment to live or die, nor the long strategy which caught God’s eye. We caught His eye because He dreamed us before the beginning, we arose in the thought[36].
When we said earlier that it is not merely the knowledge of Torah which has meaning, but that ignorance of Torah has meaning too, this is what we were referring to. The Torah is not a Book of Law, it is a song. Music does not have meaning in the sense that words have meaning. A book of music tells no tales, has no narrative and serves no purpose. A song is sung; beyond that there is nothing we can say about it.
If the Torah song has meaning, it is as a melody of faith. It drums this truth inside us, and trumpets it to the world. It harmonizes these tropes among us and resonates in our bones. It does not require knowledge, for it is a song. Its sole reason for being is to be sung. That’s why ignorance of the Torah is as significant as knowledge of it, for as has been demonstrated down the millennia, faith is not a function of knowledge. As a matter of fact it is often the opposite. The ignorant are often at an advantage when it comes to matters of Simple Faith, sometimes the less you know, the better it is.
Some people sing so well, even their silences sing. We believe God believes in us, and God believes we believe in Him.
God believes and has faith in me that my faith in Him will ultimately triumph. He tells me that I am so powerful that I can, with my faith, outlive and outlast the ancient gods of the underworld, the Titans and Elillim of Ur and Varanasi.
I tell Him that He is the Jewish God, King of the whole world, God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He nods His head at me, asks for blessings, and smiles upon the face of the abyss.
Now, if you were to ask any one of the gods why it considers itself the only representative face of the divine, entitled to reign supreme, each god will have another excellent reason. This one ought to reign supreme because it is God of Truth, and that one because it is God of Justice. This one because it is God of Creation, and that one because it is God of Light. This one because it is God of Beauty, and that one because it is God of Healing. This one because it is God of Knowledge, and that one because it is God of Time and Space. This one because it is God of War and Peace, and that one because it is God of Abundance. This one because it is God of Life and Death, and that one because it is God the Father. This one is God the Mother and that one is God the Newborn Child. This one is God of Love and that one is God of Music, and so on, seventy gods with perfect reasons for becoming Supreme God. Ask Allah why he should be God and he will tell you, ‘Because I am Greatest - Allahu Akbar!’
And if you ask God why He deserves to be God and reign supreme, He will look amazedly at you. ‘Me? I should reign Supreme? Why? This is not about Me and My Supremacy. It was never about Me. I love Jews, and that’s what this is about, what this has been about since before Creation. It was the Jews who arose in the Thought before Me, and that’s why I created the world, so that I could love them and care for them and nurture them and make them great and keep them with me as my lovers and children forever and eternity. Do I care that these gods, godlings and godlets caper around fighting for the crown? Do I need a crown? Am I focused on winning or on a triumph of any sort? Of course not! All I think about is My Jews, they are all I have ever wanted. My Jews, I love My Jews, Gevalt!’
CHAPTER 11. – ZOT HABRACHA
Just Who Is Moses?
‘This is the blessing with which Moses, man of God, blessed the Children of Israel before his death.’ (Deut. 33:1)
Here the Torah refers to Moses as ISH HaELOHIM - man of God, but the word ISH may also be translated as ‘husband’, which this is precisely how the Zohar reads the verse:
Moses is referred to as the husband of God, and so does as he wishes in his own house. As we read, ‘Every vow and every binding oath that a woman takes upon herself etc., her husband may confirm it[37].’ We see this law - that a husband may confirm his wife’s vow - in action as we read, ‘When the ark traveled Moses said, ‘Rise up LORD.’[38]”
On the other hand, if he prefers, a husband may annul his wife’s vow, as it is written ‘Or her husband may annul it.[39]’ We see this law - that a husband may annul his wife’s oath – in action as we read, ‘When it [the ark] came to rest, he [Moses] said, ‘Sit down LORD.’[40]”
Obviously Moses was exercising his authority as master of the home, and no one could prevent him from doing so - like any man ordering his wife around and forcing her to do what he wants.’ (Vol. I 236b)
The Izbicy says, the reason Moses is referred to as husband of God while blessing the Jewish People, is to demonstrate the power in these blessings. If Moses has the authority to confirm or annul God’s vows, he most certainly has the authority to make vows of his own. The blessings Moses bestows on us before his death, therefore, have the power of a husband’s oaths which even God does not have the authority to rescind.
But it is not merely to highlight his dominance and authority that here Moses is called man of God. There is an unspoken message, which we can only understand when we realize Moses’ most significant characteristic as a leader and Law-giver. Because Moses is such a ubiquitous fixture in the Torah and Judaism, we often forget to examine how he came to occupy a place of such tremendous importance. We encounter him as a shepherd in Midian, tending his father-in-law’s flock in the desert. From the way the narrative is laid out, it is clear that Moses has no expectation of being summoned by his brethren in Egypt to come and save them. Moses knows who and what he is; he’s a shepherd without pretension to any higher calling.
It was during those many days that the king of Egypt died, and the Children of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. God heard their groaning and He remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. God saw the Children of Israel - and God knew. And Moses was a shepherd… (Ex. 2:25-3:1)
It is as a shepherd that Moses goes to Egypt and takes charge of the Israelites. The story of the Exodus, his confrontation with Pharaoh, the great Plagues upon Egypt and the Splitting of the Red Sea are narrated at great length in the following chapters of the Book of Exodus, until at the end of Chapter Nineteen we find Moses delivering the Israelites to God at the foot of Mount Sinai, where we first discovered him grazing his father-in-law’s sheep. At that original encounter by the burning bush, God had told Moses, ‘I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.’ (Ibid. 3:12) After a journey of some five weeks, Moses brought us to Sinai as we read:
On the first day of the third month after the Israelites left Egypt - on that very day - they came to the Desert of Sinai. After they set out from Rephidim, they entered the Desert of Sinai, and Israel camped there in the desert in front of the mountain. Then Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain and said, ‘This is what you are to say to the descendants of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel.’ (Ibid 19:1-3)
Moses knew himself as a shepherd and nothing more. Now that the Israelites, whom he had been commanded by God to deliver from Egypt, were safely in front of God’s mountain, Moses went back to his tent convinced his job was finished. Because he was a humble man, it never once occurred to Moses that God might have any other task in mind for him. His expectation was to be allowed to go back to tending sheep.
Looking at that last verse we notice it says, ‘Then Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain,’ but if Moses had already gone up to God, why was there any need to call him?
The Rebbe Reb Bunim of Pshischa explains the flow of the narrative thus: We are told that Israel camped there in the desert in front of the mountain. The verse uses the singular form, telling us that there was unity among the whole nation. It also tells us that there was little in the way of hierarchy, especially since Moses no longer saw himself as the leader; Israel was suddenly completely egalitarian, no one stood out above anyone else.
Suddenly, Moses went up to God. Not up the mountain, just ‘up’ in some generic sense of upness. He was suddenly elevated, for now he was to take on a new role, that of Law-giver, teacher and prophet, so the second half of the verse tells us that God only called to Moses from the mountain after Moses had been elevated. It was precisely thus that Moses the shepherd had been called to deliver the Israelites from Egypt, immediately after the text told us that ‘their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. God heard their groaning and He remembered His covenant…[41]’
Moses is a national treasure, a man so humble that he can be the palimpsest for any number of texts, or different versions of the same text. He is always completely available to God, to be scraped off and written on afresh. But more than that, Moses is also a Jewish cultural artifact, and he is just as available to the Jewish people as he is to God. When we arrived at despair in Egypt, we suddenly produced a redeemer, a Jew who was not stuck in exile with us – Moses. When we arrived at Mount Sinai, we suddenly produced a teacher, a man who was not stuck in the ignorance of the unlettered, but a prince of Egypt, educated and well-travelled – Moses.
Moses contains within him the souls of all Israel[42] because he is a product of all those souls. Another way of stating this is that we, all of us, produced Moses. He doesn’t just represent us, he is us. As was discussed previously, Moses is the Chokhma – Wisdom inside every Jew (see Radical Chukath, Radical Masey). Another way of stating it is that all Moses’ wisdom was given him as an expression of us. In this light, we can understand why the Torah says that Moses has dominion over God. Because Moses is about to be reabsorbed into the Jewish People, we need to own and acknowledge our power over God. We need to stop thinking of ourselves as powerless in the hands of God, for not only are we not powerless over our own lives, we are not powerless over God either!
As was discussed in last week’s Sidra (Radical Haazinu), we tell God who to be - it’s the least He expects of us. Every day in a thousand and one ways, we remind Him that He is the Jewish God. Whether by the language in which we address Him, the forms in which we worship Him, or in the ways we live our lives as individuals and in community, we are telling God and reminding Him what it means to be a Jew, and by extension, what it is incumbent upon Him to be and do as the Jewish God.
Unfortunately, in the last two thousand years we have come to think of ourselves as victims, and so have projected our victimhood onto God, as well.
Even Zionism-Triumphant has not rid us of this deeply ingrained victim-consciousness. I write this during the ongoing war in the south. Am I the only one who noticed that the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu waited before ordering the IDF into battle, until the Arabs had refused a ceasefire three or four times? So that Israel could turn to the world and say, ‘See what victims we are? We have no choice but to fight back. Did you take note of how long we waited, absorbing rocket and missile fire to all our major population centers? We waited so that you, the world and the UN, would confirm we are the victims of aggression.’
We have internalized victimhood, and now project it onto God. In the modern Jewish narrative, God created us in order to fix His world – Tikkun Olam, because God enmeshed Himself in brokenness of one sort and another. Beginning with the Tzimtzum – Withdrawal and followed by the Shevirah – Shattering, nothing is right with His world, it needs us to set it right.
It follows that because the whole world is in a mess, we, the Jewish People are also in a mess. God is waiting for us to clear up this mess so that He can be revealed and the Messianic Age can dawn. But because we are a mess, we cannot fulfill our role. It is we who need fixing, and so the world, the Jews and God are all trapped in a cycle of helplessness. The idea that God is waiting for us to fix something that He is incapable of fixing, is not a new one. It can be seen developing in classical Rabbinic literature. We read in the Midrash:
God said to the Ministering Angels, ‘Let us go, you and I, and take a look at what the enemy has done to My house.’ All the Ministering Angels went with God, together with the Prophet Jeremiah who walked in front. God saw the Temple, and said, ‘Most certainly this is it. This used to be My house and home, where the enemy has come and done whatever he wanted to do.’ God began crying and screaming, ‘O, woe is Me, for My house. Where are My children? My priests, where are you? My lovers, where are you? What will I do with you? I warned you but you would not repent.’
God said to Jeremiah, ‘Today I look like someone who had an only son. He prepared a Chupah - wedding canopy for the boy, but the lad died while under the Chupah. Can’t you show some compassion for Me and My boy?’
At that moment Metatron came and fell on his face before God, saying, ‘Master of the Universe, I will cry so that You don’t have to cry.’
‘If you won’t allow Me to cry right now,’ God replied. ‘I will go to a place where you have no permission to enter and I will cry there, as it is written, “But if you will not hear it, my soul shall weep in secret places for her greatness; and my eye shall weep sore, and run down with tears.” (Jer. 13:17)’ (Lament. Rabbah Intro. 24)
The rabbis who authored the Midrash have God framing Himself in victimhood, telling us that He cannot help Himself. His world is shattered; His children are gone, killed and dispersed. Nothing remains for our inconsolable God but a retreat to some inner chamber where He will be allowed to weep undisturbed. This has remained the dominant rabbinic paradigm for 2000 years, and is indisputably accepted in mainstream Judaism to this day. I suspect the rabbis of the Midrash were prophets, too. They foresaw the tragic narrative of our wanderings, our suffering and persecutions. They knew it was going to be literally thousands of years before we collected ourselves again as a People, organizing ourselves, arming ourselves and making choices and decisions about our future. They understood how our personal narratives affected God’s narrative, for we essentially mirror one another.
But Moses, here in this Sidra, is hinting to us that we were never victims, nor were we helpless. How could we be victims, when we are the ones who told Moses who to be? Moses, who has the power to tell God who to be and what to do? And now that Moses is dying, all his authority reverts back to its original owners: us!
I bless you and me to feel our power as Jews. I bless you and me to use our power wisely but fearlessly; to change our attitude, to cease thinking as victims. We are immensely powerful, as powerful as God. And now it is time to tell God who to be again, as God. We are all done crying, as it is written, ‘He will swallow up death forever. Almighty God will wipe away tears from every face and He will remove the disgrace of His people from the whole earth. For God has spoken.’ (Isa. 25:8)
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Completed by the Grace of God
14th day of Av 5774 - Aug. 10th 2014
Safed, Israel
In Memoriam - my father,
R. Zev b. Avraham Worch