1 And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, 2 Speak unto Aaron and say unto him, When thou lightest the lamps, the seven lamps shall give light over against the candlestick. 3 And Aaron did so; he lighted the lamps thereof over against the candlestick, as the Lord commanded Moses. 4 And this work of the candlestick was of beaten gold, unto the shaft thereof, unto the flowers thereof, was beaten work: according unto the pattern which the Lord had shewed Moses, so he made the candlestick.
To judge from the well-known midrash that Rashi brings at the beginning of our parashah, Aaron the Priest was in a very distressful mood at the conclusion of last week’s Torah reading. Day after day, he had witnessed how each of the princes of the other tribes had been given a turn to present gifts and offerings in honour of the dedication of the sanctuary. Now Aaron was upset that the tribe of Levi had not been included among them.
It was in response to Aaron’s distress that God now reassured him:
“By your life! Your role is greater than theirs, because you light and prepare the lamps.”
The commentators have puzzled over the meaning of this passage. Why should Aaron have been so upset? Had the tribe of Levi really been slighted? After all, they had already been the focus of a full eight-day consecration ceremony of their own that we read about in the book of Vayyikra. And during the ceremony of the princes, didn’t the Kohanim and Levi’im have an active and visible role in the offering up of the sacrifices?
Furthermore, even if we allow that Aaron had some cause for feeling affronted, how did the command to light the menorah change anything?
After all, this mitzvah is hardly a new one. The command to prepare the lighting of the menorah has already been issued before, in the book of Shemot (30:8). So Aaron is not being told anything that he did not know previously.
And if the reason for choosing this mitzvah was to enhance his self-esteem or tribal pride, then couldn’t we think of several other commands related to the Kohanim and Levi’im that would have made the point much more clearly? There is, for example, the recitation of the Birkat Kohanim; or the solemn ceremony of Yom Kippur, when the High Priests alone enters the Holy of Holies; or the unique garments that only the Kohen gets to wear; or the special gifts, the t’rumah, ma’aser and sacrificial portions that the people must set aside for the Priests and Levites.
The preparation of the menorah seems very unimpressive by comparison.
I would therefore like to suggest a slightly different explanation of the story.
Let’s try to imagine ourselves in Aaron’s situation. He had just witnessed a very public and pompous ceremonial that had lasted for twelve days, involving the most distinguished leaders of the people, the nesi’im of the tribes., Each had come in turn to the Mishkan and conferred upon it an assortment of valuable gifts, offered their sacrifices, and… disappeared.
The dedication of the Mishkan was a one-time event. It was not turned into an annual celebration, and required no long-term commitment from its participants. With a great deal of fanfare, it briefly shone the spotlight on the leaders of the tribes, and then released them to go about their normal lives. The fact is that, apart from one brief mention of these nesi’im in our parashah—significantly, in connection with the sounding of trumpets in a rather ostentatious parade ceremony—we never hear from those princes again for the duration of the Torah.
I can well imagine that Aaron would have been disturbed by such a sight. He would have wondered: Is this the kind or religion that I and my tribe were chosen to serve? Is the Torah just a matter of showy public rituals for the nobility, that don’t have any long-lasting effects on people’s spirituality? Is this something I really want to be part of?
It was at this point that the Almighty reminded Aaron of one of his special mitzvah—the daily kindling of the menorah.
What is involved in the preparation of a menorah?
On the surface, it seems like such a simple job: You light a match, hold it next to the wick and voilà!
Now, try it with an oil lamp.
If the lamp was used previously, then it has to be cleaned out. I can testify from the accumulated experience of several Hanukkahs that this is not an easy or clean job. And for the Temple you couldn’t just buy your olive oil off the supermarket shelf; it had to be specially grown, preserved, pressed and stored according to halakhic standards or purity. Each cup of oil had to be carefully measured out as it was poured, so that it would burn through the night. The wicks also had to be prepared and positioned individually; and the fire had to be carried from the altar.
Unlike the procession of princely gifts, most of the work required for the preparation of the menorah went unobserved, without huge crowds cheering or congratulating. It was a responsibility that had to be taken care of every day, not only on a special inaugural ceremony.
When the Kohen stood up to light the lamps, to cast its wonderful spiritual aura upon the House of God, it must have seemed to many like an easy job. Most people probably did not give much thought to it, and just came to expect that the Temple should always be lit up all night.
I think that when we understand the matter in this way, we can appreciate how appropriate it was that the Kadosh Barukh-Hu should remind Aaron what are the real values that are represented by the tribe of Levi.
If we translate this idea into the language of the theatre, with which Akiva is so familiar, we could say it as follows: The Levi’im must demonstrate in their own lives and actions that the real path of Torah is not something that happens instantly in centre stage on a glitzy opening night. In reality, it is the accomplishment of innumerable anonymous carpenters, stage-hands, tailors, electricians, cosmeticians and others, who commit themselves to work behind the scenes for the good of the production.
Note carefully that when God does not just say that Aaron is to “light the lamps,” but rather to “light and prepare the lamps.” It is the tedious background preparation that is at the root of the mitzvah.
You have seen enough of the workings of our own congregation to appreciate that this is the way things are done here. Somehow when we show up on Shabbat or Yom Tov we find that Kiddush or se’udah sh’lishit has been prepared, the siddurim are on their shelves, the electric timers have been set—and hopefully the bills will have been paid as well. The elves who did all that work are the true students of Aaron.
You, Akiva, are not just a student, but an actual relative, a great-great-great-great-nephew, a member of the tribe of Levi, ready to take on the tasks that come with your yihus.
I think these ideas are illustrated in the following story which, as far as I know, is a true one:
It happened once that, that on a flight to America, Rabbi Kolitz, the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem found himself seated next to a secular kibbutznik. Since kibbutzniks tend to be very uninhibited about such things, he turned to the rabbi and asked him a question:
“Your Rabbi-ship, I want to ask you about something that has always puzzled me: On the kibbutz we celebrate bar-mitzvahs and weddings too. I’ve also attended bar-mitzvahs and weddings of my religious relatives.
“I’ve noticed that we secular Israelis make a really big deal of the bar-mitzvahs, while our weddings are much more subdued. But among religious Jews it seems to be exactly the opposite: The bar-mitzvah is a quiet occasion, with maybe just some herring and a cup of le-hayyim; while your weddings are absolutely wild—feasting, singing and dancing into the night,
“So, Rabbi, can you explain to me why there should be such a difference?”
Rabbi Kolitz smiled and gave the following answer:
“What, after all, does a Bar-Mitzvah celebrate? It’s when a boy put on t’fillin for the first time. In our communities, the boys will continue wearing t’fillin six days a week for the rest of their lives. So the Bar Mitzvah day is hardly special.
“The wedding, on the other hand, will likely be the only one that this couple will ever have. Therefore it is an occasion for special festivity.
“For the non-observant, however, the matter is exactly reversed. The bar-mitzvah day might be the only day in his life that the boy will ever see that set of t’fillin, and so you make a special occasion of it. But in secular society marriages are so short-lived and frequent that there is no need to treat the first wedding as a big deal.”
Akiva, I trust you are the sort of person who can resist being overwhelmed by this day.
You are bright enough to realize that being a Bar Mitzvah has nothing to do with the spiffy clothes or fancy dinners. With respect to its real significance, it is hard to see how this day is different from all other shabbatot:
You are in shul today, as you were last week and as you will be next week. The prayers that you recited this morning are the same ones that you recited last week or last year–though you no longer have a choice in the matter.
Yesterday, already, you put on t’fillin, and you will do it tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.
True, this week is the first time that you can lead the service as the ba’al t’fillah or read publicly from the Torah—but we expect that you continue doing those things frequently for many years to come, as well as to deliver divrei Torah.
As Rabbi Kolitz tried to show, the Torah is less impressed by things that are rare and special, than it is by those duties that we carry out with constancy and dedication.
This is in fact an important principle of Talmudic law “tadir ve-she’eino tadir, tadir kodem“: When you have two mitzvahs, one of which is performed more frequently than the other, the frequent one takes priority.
In this way we see that what is valued by Judaism are not the exceptional occasions that arrive with a loud fanfare and are not heard about afterwards. On the contrary, we show special esteem for the humble, daily activities.
The simple translation of the Hebrew word “beha’alotekha” is “when you set up [the candles].” However, the same word can also be read as “when you elevate yourself.” Perhaps this is a message that we can all take with us from the parashah, that in faithfully serving others we raise ourselves to higher levels on the ladder of our spiritual betterment. This is a value that is especially associated with our tribe of Levi.
So, Akiva, your mission as an adult has now been defined by your Bar-Mitzvah parashah: “beha’alote’kha“: to raise yourself up to the degree of a true Levi, to help cast the light of Torah upon the world.
Or, to put it in terms that might be more appropriate to a young man who enjoys performing magic tricks: This is your opportunity to “Levi-tate” yourself.
Sermon delivered at Congregation House of Jacob – Mikveh Israel , Calgary, June 13 1998, on the Bar Mitzvah celebration of my son Akiva Moshe Romer Segal
1 And the LORD spake unto Moses in mount Sinai, 2 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye come into the land which I give you, then shall the land keep a sabbath unto the Lord. 3 Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; 4 But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the Lord: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard. 5 That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reap, neither gather the grapes of thy vine undressed: for it is a year of rest unto the land. 6 And the sabbath of the land shall be meat for you; for thee, and for thy servant, and for thy maid, and for thy hired servant, and for thy stranger that sojourneth with thee. 7 And for thy cattle, and for the beast that are in thy land, shall all the increase thereof be meat. 8 And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years. 9 Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubile to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land. 10 And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family. 11 A jubile shall that fiftieth year be unto you: ye shall not sow, neither reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather the grapes in it of thy vine undressed. 12 For it is the jubile; it shall be holy unto you: ye shall eat the increase thereof out of the field. 13 In the year of this jubile ye shall return every man unto his possession.
As so often happens these days, the idea was expressed most succinctly in the words of a TV commercial. At the time, 7-Up soda was using the slogan:
Seven is an odd number
Indeed our sense of time is defined today by the convergence of several important sevens:
Today is, of course, Shabbat, the seventh day of the week and the completion of the creation.
We are also entering the last week of the “’omer” season, the seven-week count-up from the Exodus to the revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai.
Furthermore, today’s Torah portion commands us to refrain from agricultural labour during the seventh year, the shemittah, and to observe the Jubilee at the conclusion of seven sabbatical cycles.
In response to the familiar question posed by the midrash and Rashi at the beginning of our parashah, “Why is Mount Sinai mentioned in connection with the commandment of the sabbatical year?” the K’li Yakar notes several intentional parallels that the Torah draws between the laws of the Yovel and the revelation of the Torah:
Both occasions are preceded by a counting of seven sevens
Both are proclaimed with lengthy blasts of the shofar.
As if during a sabbatical, planting and grazing were forbidden on Mount Sinai from the time of the revelation.
Evidently, it wishes to draw our attention to the thematic connection between the giving of the Torah (which, according to the traditional calculation, occurred on Shabbat), as the fulfillment of a prolonged anticipation, and the Jubilee. These two modes of religious time are entwined in the very essence of Torah.
Our traditional commentators have striven to find a unifying theme underlying the Torah’s manifold instances of imagery based on the number seven.
However, I want to propose a different interpretation, one that discerns at least two different–but complementary–rhythms of spirituality, each of which is essential for our development as Jews and as human beings.
From the counting of the ‘omer we learn that our actions today derive their value in the light of their future consequences, just as the liberation of the Israelites on Passover is significant because it was the prelude to the receiving of the Torah on Shavu’ot. In the same spirit, we are constantly being urged to improve our spiritual states, to pursue justice and kindness and set aside times for study, so that the present moment is always seen a preparation for the next step in our moral development, or for the eventual perfection of an ideal society.
This is an outlook that pervades much of our conduct in daily life. From a young age we instill in our children the consciousness that their second-grade report card will determine whether or not they will be admitted to Harvard. We spend much of our adult years worrying about financial planning for our retirement. As we are dismantling the sukkah we are already in a panic about the Pesah cleaning. Life becomes an unceasing process of readying ourselves for the future.
The Torah teaches us in this way to place matters in perspective. “U’sfartem lakhem” says the Torah: You shall count for yourselves. From your human standpoint, you must overcome your natural tendency to live for the moment and define your present in light of its future consequences.
However the seven that is embodied in shemittah represents a very different dimension of life. Ve-shavetah ha’aretz shabbat la-Shem: “And the land shall observe a rest for the Lord.” The sabbatical year is closely modeled after the weekly Shabbat, about which it is also written: “And the seventh day shall be a Sabbath unto the Lord your God.” On Shabbat, as on the shemittah, we are experiencing the world, as it were, from God’s perspective. We are not striving to improve ourselves or the world. That is why in the Shabbat liturgy we omit the middle section of the ‘Amidah, in which we would normally entreat the All-Merciful for various favours. On Shabbat, we are complete, and the world is as it should be. It is a taste of the perfection that, on other occasions, would be the object of far-off anticipation.
The commentators have pointed out another remarkable similarity that unites the sabbath of days and the sabbath of years: The Torah assures us that the crops that we grow on the sixth year will suffice for three entire years, even as the mannah that fell on Friday was provided in a double measure, to be eaten on Shabbat as well as on Friday.
Upon closer consideration, it strikes us as a strange way of doing things. Would it not have been a more outstanding indication of the day’s special status if the mannah had fallen in abundance Shabbat itself; or, correspondingly, if the seventh year, not the sixth, would be the one to sprout forth its bountiful sustenance!
Evidently this is not what the Torah had in mind. It is precisely because of their lack of any accomplishment, or of any goal outside themselves, that we are able to experience the authentic spirituality of these times of regeneration.
If I may be allowed to hijack yet another Kabbalistic phrase from popular culture, Shabbat and Shemittah are “about nothing” in the most profound sense. These times were introduced in order to offset to the excesses of our future-directed orientation. At defined intervals in our perpetual race to improve our materiality and our spirituality, we are commanded to pause in our tracks, look around, and appreciate the goodness that surrounds us, in our families, our environment, in the Torah, and in ourselves. The holiness and blessings that God bestows upon us are not all set aside to be unwrapped in some far-distant future; they are with us in the present, and it would be ungrateful of us not to appreciate them. The memories of those sabbatical experiences will linger with us through our workaday lives, giving meaning and value to our deeds and relationships.
The guarantee that one year’s crops will be enough to tide us over for three years undoubtedly ranks among the most remarkable Biblical miracles. Nevertheless, I am led to speculate whether the Torah might not have been speaking of a supernatural increase in agricultural output, so much as of a psychological transformation within ourselves . Perhaps what it means to say is that the observance of the Sabbatical year in its true spirit will lead us to revise our priorities, so that we learn to get by without the luxuries that we previously regarded as necessary to our survival. “Who is rich?” it asks in Pirkei Avot. “Those who are satisfied with their lot.” In this way the Sabbatical year bestows upon us inner wealth.
We can readily understand how the sevens of the ‘omer counting, prodding us constantly to surpass ourselves and to make our world a better place, are fundamental to our religious identity. However it is only when they have been balanced and tempered with the divine serenity of the seventh day and the seventh year, that we can gain a complete perspective on the ultimate purpose of life’s struggles, as we strive to fashion a world that is entirely Shabbat.
Ssermon delivered at Congregation House of Jacob – Mikveh Israel , Calgary, May 23 1998.
29 And it came to pass, when Moses came down from mount Sinai with the two tables of testimony in Moses’ hand, when he came down from the mount, that Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while he talked with him. 30 And when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone; and they were afraid to come nigh him. 31 And Moses called unto them; and Aaron and all the rulers of the congregation returned unto him: and Moses talked with them. 32 And afterward all the children of Israel came nigh: and he gave them in commandment all that the Lord had spoken with him in mount Sinai. 33 And till Moses had done speaking with them, he put a vail on his face. 34 But when Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him, he took the vail off, until he came out. And he came out, and spake unto the children of Israel that which he was commanded. 35 And the children of Israel saw the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses’ face shone: and Moses put the vail upon his face again, until he went in to speak with him.
“We’re all in our places
with sunshiny faces…”
What is it that makes a person’s face radiate light, as happened to Moses in today’s reading from Exodus, and to Jesus in the passage from Luke?
Given my own point of departure, I shall be focusing initially on the story of Moses, attempting to gain insight from the teachings of Jewish preachers and interpreters through the ages.
Interestingly, most of the ancient Jewish sages seemed less concerned with explaining the essence of Moses’ illuminations than with another difficulty that arises when we view the narrative in its broader context.
The incident of Moses’ shining countenance occurs, we may recall, as he is descending from Mount Sinai the second time. At this point in the narrative he has successfully interceded with the Almighty, persuading him not to destroy his people in spite of their unspeakable transgression in worshipping the Golden Calf. It is at this point that Moses comes down from the mountain bearing a replacement for the original set of tablets that he smashed in his rage the first time round.
The Jewish teachers were understandably troubled by the discrepancy between the two episodes: Why, when Moses descended from Mount Sinai the first time, was there no equivalent mention of light issuing from his countenance?
Some, like Rabbi Hezekiah ben Manoah in his 13th-century commentary the “Hizzekuni.”, explained that the first revelation, accompanied as it was by lightning, thunder and the actual voice of God, did not require any further confirmation of its supernatural source. The glowing of Moses’ face was needed only for Moses’ second return from the mountain, in order to fend off any potential skeptics who might otherwise accuse Moses of counterfeiting the contents of his message.
A different approach is reflected in the opinion of the second-century teacher Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, Moses had experienced an equivalent “enlightenment” the first time as well. However that was not the chief interest of the Scriptural narrator, whose attention is focused primarily on the people’s reaction to Moses’ appearance.
Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai says: Come and see how severe is the power of transgression! Before the people had set about sinning [i.e., by fashioning the golden calf] what does it say about them? “And the sight of the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire on the top of the mount in the eyes of the children of Israel” (Exodus 24:17). They did not fear, nor did they tremble.
However, after they had stretched out their hands to sin, what does it say about them? “And when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone; and they were afraid to come nigh him” (Exodus 34:30).
It should be noted that, according to Jewish legend, Rabbi Simeon might have been speaking from personal experience. It is related in the Talmud that, because of his outspoken criticism of the Roman occupation Rabbi Simeon was forced into hiding, remaining for twelve years in a cave with his son, occupied in intense religious study. When at length he emerged from his seclusion, the tale continues, Rabbi Simeon had reached such a sublime degree of spirituality that initially he could not tolerate the sight of simple people going about their daily activities. He would direct his gaze at the unfortunates and they would burst into flames. The good Lord was displeased with this unhealthy attitude and “grounded” the Rabbi, ordering him back to the cave for an additional twelve years until he learned how to conduct himself properly in human society.
I wonder whether Rabbi Simeon’s depiction of the Israelites’ responses to Moses’ illumination might not have been influenced by the tensions with which he himself had struggled between his spiritual vocation and his involvement in the company of imperfect mortals.
Indeed, there is a consensus among the commentators that what Moses experienced during his sojourn atop Mount Sinai was a sublime and mysterious experience, so powerful that some of that aura remained with him even after his descent to earthly domains.
Nevertheless, I wish to propose a different interpretation of the incident and its lessons. My point of departure is the Bible’s description of what Moses was doing on Mount Sinai.
There is no denying that Moses does have a close encounter with the divine in that enigmatic passage where he asks to see God’s glory, and is ultimately permitted to witness God’s “back parts” pass before him while he stands in the cleft of the rock. However all that occurred prior to his most recent trip up the mountain.
The message that God transmitted to Moses atop Mount Sinai is not the mystical teaching or metaphysical pronouncement that we should have expected to find on the basis of the interpretations of the classic commentators. Quite the contrary, it begins with an declaration of God’s compassion and its limits, and continues with a reassurance that the covenant of Abraham will remain forever in force, in spite of the people’s failings, and that they will be allowed to inherit their homeland.
However the chief part of God’s message here is a sequence of specific commandments and regulations: To eradicate utterly the idolatry of the Canaanites, to avoid associating with them or acknowledging their gods. The people are urged to observe the Sabbath, the pilgrimage festivals of Passover and the Feast of Weeks; to uphold the sanctity of the firstlings and the first fruits; to honour the sacrificial offerings by not offering them with leaven and by not leaving the leftover meat until morning; not to seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.
In short, what we appear to have before us is a representative sampling of what makes up the bulk of the Torah, and characterizes the normal Jewish expressions of spirituality: A series of commandments that accompany the Jews through all the diverse activities of their lives, providing them with the means and opportunities to sanctify their material and social worlds with the imprint of the divine. Truly, this stands in polar contrast with our stereotypical ideas of mysticism and piety, according to which holiness can be achieved only through the rejection of life in this world.
Indeed, what distinguishes more than anything else Moses’ last ascent of the mountain from his first is the active role that he takes in the process. The first time, God did everything for him, from the hewing of the stones to the etching of the commandments. Moses and the people appear there only as passive onlookers.
And the outcome was disastrous.
The Israelites, rescued so recently form slavery, had never been called upon to take responsibility for their destiny. Without Moses and without any visible guidance from God they fall apart.
Not so the second time around. From the beginning, Moses launches himself into a desperate appeal against God’s decree, standing up on behalf of his flock with an attitude that would be regarded as blasphemous by anyone who is not acquainted with his Biblical precedents, such as Abraham’s attempt to save the citizens of Sodom by challenging God’s justice. After all, the very name “Israel” has its origins in Jacob’s paradigmatic wrestling match with a supernatural being.
Unlike the original set of tablets, the second set were etched on stone tablets that had to be hewn personally by Moses, and it was this fact that made them more precious in the sight of God and the people.
The nineteenth-century Lithuanian scholar Rabbi Meir Simhah of Dvinsk drew upon this idea to explain an ancient Talmudic tradition, according to which “both the tablets and the fragments of the tablets” were housed in the ark that was carried by the Israelites and placed in the sanctuary.
Rabbi Meir Simhah concludes from this tradition that “the first tablets, which were fashioned entirely by God, are “fragmentary”; while the ones that Moses carved are complete.” From this (he concludes) we can learn that no created thing is intrinsically holy. Holiness is derived only through Israel’s observance of the Torah in accordance with the will of the Creator. It does not reside in Heaven, but is the result of the interaction between humans and God.
An ancient Jewish legend relates that after God concluded the writing of the Torah, Moses wiped the pen on his forehead, and it was this ethereal ink stain that continued to radiate as he walked among the people. Perhaps we are justified in learning from this image that it was Moses’ participation in the process of revelation that enhanced its value before God.
This distinction between the first and second versions of the Decalogue is also reflected in a difference related to their content. According to Jewish tradition, the text of the “ten commandments” that appears in the book of Exodus is the one that was etched on the first tablets, whereas the slightly different version found in Deuteronomy was that of the second set. The two versions are almost identical, but the few differences that do exist are instructive.
The most substantial discrepancy between the two versions lies in the differing explanations that they provide for the institution of the sabbath day. The Exodus version ties the sabbath to a theological claim, as an acknowledgment that God is the creator of the universe. However the Deuteronomy version focuses on the human benefits of a weekly day of rest, as a means of preventing the exploitation of one’s workers and household. To do otherwise would be a denial of God’s purpose in the liberation from Egyptian slavery.
I believed that this message is also borne out by the concluding verses that tell of the veil that Moses placed upon his face:
And afterward all the children of Israel came nigh: and he gave them in commandment all that the Lord had spoken with him in mount Sinai.
And when Moses had done speaking with them, he put a veil on his face.
But when Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him, he took the vail off, until he came out. And he came out, and spake unto the children of Israel that which he was commanded.
And the children of Israel saw the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses’ face shone: and Moses put the vail upon his face again, until he went in to speak with him.
If we read these verses very carefully, we will observe that they make reference to three different kinds of occasions. While Moses was teaching the people he left his face uncovered. So too, when he was conversing with the Almighty, he removed the veil from his face. On what occasions did Moses keep his light covered? By default, we are left with those times when he was occupied in private pursuits. These were the times when there was no reason to bask in the divine light, and hence Moses concealed it with a veil.
The renowned fifteen-century scholar-statesman Don Isaac Abravanel summarized the phenomenon as follows:
When Moses became aware of the light that was radiating from his face, he realized it was not fitting to make use of that radiance for trivial, profane activities, such as eating, drinking and sleeping, or during casual conversations with his wife and family, as long as he was not speaking about matters related to the Torah and its precepts.
However, while he was occupied in transmitting the divine influence to the children of Israel in order to instruct them in the Torah and its commandments, he did not place the veil over his face, so that their eyes could behold their teacher.
By extension, it would appear that the veil remained on Moses’ face even while he was engaged in solitary meditation, as long as he was not involved in communication with God or the people. This further reinforces our understanding of the lesson of the story: The Lord did not reveal his words to solitary mystics. Those upon whom the message has been conferred are implored to bring it to the people, to shout it and live it in the marketplace, not to sit in their tents in a state of passive navel-gazing or theorizing.
Luke’s description of Jesus’ transfiguration places him in the company of Moses and Elijah. The association with Moses should require no further explanation in light of what we have said above. However the appearance of Elijah provides an equally striking example of the qualities that we have been describing. Elijah, fleeing from Ahab and Jezebel, was granted a mystical experience of the divine in a cave at Mount Horeb that was virtually identical to that of Moses. So enthusiastic was he about the encounter that he continued to stand at the entrance to the cave, his face covered in his mantle, until the Lord commanded him “Go, return on thy way to the wilderness of Damascus,” dispatching the prophet on a mission. Again we see that Scripture does not value any encounter with the Almighty that does not translate into action and involvement in the world.
Let us return to the question that I posed at the outset of this talk: What is it can make our face radiate light?
I have a very simple answer to that question: Electricity.
For some inexplicable reason, this image was not mentioned by any of our ancient commentators, but it nonetheless seems apt that the spiritual energy that issued through Moses is not to be compared to fire, but to electrical power, which can exist only in the form of a current that flows continuously to and from its source. [Please note that this is meant symbolically. This is not an invitation for you to stick your fingers into the nearest electrical socket.]
Religious inspiration must also be a continual dialogue and struggle between the Creator and his creatures. When that current is interrupted, or even if it fails to return to its source, then the energy has no use, and we find ourselves donning our figurative veils.
It therefore strikes me as particularly fitting to conclude this talk by thanking you for your hospitality in the words of the traditional blessing that is to bestowed through the Hebrew priests:
The Lord bless thee, and keep thee:
May the Lord make his face shine upon you, and be gracious unto you:
May the Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.
Guest sermon delivered at St. Peter’s Church (Anglican), Calgary, February 22 1998.
5 Thus saith the Lord; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord. 6 For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited. 7 Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. 8 For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit..
In typical fashion, the Jewish sages of old paid the closest attention to the wording of the verses in Jeremiah’s message. Based on his understanding of Jeremiah’s simile for the person lacking in faith, the first-century sage Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah derived a lesson that is recorded in the Mishnah (Avot 3:7):
Following is the teaching of Rabbi Eleazar:
To what shall we compare a person whose wisdom exceeds their good deeds? To a tree that has many branches but few roots. Along comes the wind and uproots it, overturning it completely, even as Jeremiah says: “For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, [in] a salt land and not inhabited.”
On the other hand: one whose good deeds exceed their wisdom, to what may we compare such a person? To a tree that has few branches but many roots. Even if all the winds in the world were to come and blow upon it, they would not succeed in budging it from its place, as it says: “For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.”
This passage is fraught with difficulties. For one thing, the proof texts do not seem to fit the argument that they are being brought to support. The prophet is speaking of faith and faithlessness, while Rabbi Eleazar is discussing wisdom and good deeds.
Furthermore, even if we are prepared to allow Rabbi Eleazar a bit of homiletic license, there is something in his message that irritates our sense of logical sequence. For according to the prevailing norms of Western thought, theory must always precede action: First you must understand rationally why you ought or ought not to do something, and only afterwards should you follow through with the consequences of your convictions.
Rabbi Eleazar’s statement seems to defy reason. It sounds like a recipe for ignorance and fanaticism, an encouragement to leap before you look, to come to decisions before you have thought the matter out adequately.
Anyone who is familar with the personality of Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah will recognize that this could not possibly be what he had in mind. Rabbi Eleazar was, after all, an accomplished scholar, proficient in the intricacies of the Bible and ancestral tradition, a man who devoted his life to the most profound and sophisticated analysis of Jewish law and lore–hardly the type that one would expect to speak lightly of scholarship or intellectual rigour.
But I think we all realize that the word “wisdom” encompasses several different qualities, and it would be helpful to examine which of them was intended by Rabbi Eleazar.
In our society wisdom is often equated with intellectual accomplishment, with the amassing of data and with technological skill. Hardly a day goes by when we are not given some reason to gape in amazement at how our scientists have outdone themselves in advancing the frontiers of human knowledge.
These scientific breakthroughs have given us the means to increase crop yields and to cure hitherto invincible diseases. But they have also unleashed the energy to destroy all life on this planet a hundred times over (and you can even choose whether you prefer to be done away with in a single nuclear blast or through a gradual poisoning of the oceans and atmosphere).
This is the same “wisdom” that has linked millions of people together in intricate electronic communications networks, giving equal access to philosophers, teachers, pornographers and hate-mongers. This is the wisdom that, two generations ago in Europe, reached such high levels of industrial efficiency that it could transfer unprecedented numbers of human undesirables to be processed in gas chambres, and efficiently dispose of the bodies in mass crematoria. This is the wisdom of Herr Prof. Doktor Werner von Braun, who was equally comfortable using his rockets to launch American astronauts into space, or deadly explosives into the residential neighbourhoods of London.
But, as the saying goes, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to recognize what happens when we place such immense power in the hands of people whose foliage (to use Rabbi Eleazar’s image) waves gloriously in the air, but are not rooted in any value system.
This, then, seems to be what Rabbi Eleazar had in mind when he insisted on the priority of “good deeds” to wisdom. He was sounding the alarm against those whose intellectual and technological attainments are not guided by a clear moral direction.
It would appear that the destructive potential of morally neutral learnedness is not of recent vintage. Rabbi Eleazar migght have encountered it every day in the well-oiled machine of the Roman occupying forces, even as Jeremiah would have witnessed it in the advanced material cultures of Judea or Babylonia. If there is any meaningful difference between our days and theirs, it probably has more to do with the dimensions of the damage that we can now inflict when our intellectual advances are not subject to moral or spiritual restraints.
In our society we have turned over the education of our children to publicly administered schools rather than leaving it in the hands of the parents, and I believe that this was a welcome and benevolent development. Liberal democracies have also done their best to avoid using the public schools to indoctrinate the young students in the views of a particular established religion; this too is a wise and fair policy.
Unfortunately, many of have allowed our children’s spiritual welfare to fall between the cracks, abandoning the responsibility that traditionally lay with us as parents, to instill in our children the fundaments ethical principles and compassionate qualities that can best be provided by a religious tradition.
As understood by Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah, Jeremiah was aiming his criticism at those who possess a wisdom that is not grounded in the fear of God, but who act out of purely human-centered motives. There are several different factors that can motivate intellectual pursuits: Pride and the pursuit of public adulation are, of course common ones, as are greed and convenience.
And let there be no mistake about it: There can be no objective, scientific basis for ethical theory. From the perspective of pure science there is no difference between a human organism and any other random accumulation of molecules. Anyone who speaks of moral imperatives, whether or not they quote from a scripture or invoke the name of a deity, is speaking religiously.
In previous generation, there was a realistic awareness that the quality of the intellect was significantly shaped by a person’s moral training. Maimonides and other medieval philosophers argued that underlying the restrictions of several areas of Biblical law, such as the dietary regulations, was the premise that unless people learned to control their impulses and appetites, those urges would take control their minds, blurring the truth and twisting it so as to rationalize the pleasure or convenience of the moment.
Modern culture has adopted a more dualistic perspective, believing that the mind can develop autonomously, unaffected by the weaknesses of the body or the social environment. In this approach, I think we are deceiving ourselves. As the ancient Jewish saint, Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa, put it:
If the fear of sin precedes wisdom, then that wisdom will endure. But if the wisdom comes prior to the fear of sin, then that wisdom will be short-lived.”
Perhaps it was for this reason that classical Judaism insisted on maintaining a significant proportion of its tradition in unwritten form, as the “Oral Torah.” In this way, the disciple’s education could never be reduced to the mechanical collection of facts and technical skills that could be derived from books. Rather, the educational process required the student to maintain personal contact with the teacher, living with him and observing his conduct in daily life. In what was admittedly a rather extreme case, the young Babylonian scholar Rav Kahana hid himself under the bed of his master, Rav, in order to observe how the teacher conducted his conjugal life. When Rav became aware of Kahana’s presence and began to rebuke him, the student replied in all sincerity: “But it is Torah, and I must learn it!”
I am sure that any experienced parent will recognize that, when it comes to teaching our children, actions speak louder than any words. I hope that there is nobody here who would subscribe to the philosophy of allowing the young folks to work out their own ethical philosophy before reaching adulthood, without parental interference.
How apt is the prophet’s image of those whose education is stunted by being confined to narrow human interests, without any grounding in spirituality!
For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land not inhabited
A tree with no roots is vulnerable to gusts from any momentary ideological caprice. Such an organism stands solitary in the wilderness, lacking the environmental influences that should be providing it with protection from destructive and anti-social influences. For all its learning and intelligence, such a rootless being, unable to recognize goodness and virtue, will eventually be uprooted and overturned.
Not so the one whose wisdom is directed towards compassion and love of God, whose intellect is firmly implanted in a life of moral activity and responsibility towards the world. Such a person is capable of standing firm against scorching winds of inhumanity, and has the strength of character not to be a blind follower of the frenzied mob.
For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green”
The moral nourishment that surges through those roots must indeed be strong, because there can be some powerful winds trying to dislodge them. Every society generates its own idolatries. In some instances, these winds take the form of totalitarian ideologies that sacrifice the individual to an abstract ideal. In others, it is the myopic interests of a balanced budget or a competitive marketplace; or of unrestrained free speech or technological progress. These idols will grow impatient or derisive when challenged by the still, small voices that insist on crying out for human dignity and compassion.
Jeremiah knew this well when he challenged the leaders of his day. So did Jesus, when he advised his disciples:
Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil
… Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets.
There will never be shortages of false prophets, happy to assure their listeners in the name of God and scripture that all is right with society. But, as the Lord proclaimed to Jeremiah about such prophets:
The prophets prophesy lies in my name: I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, neither spake unto them: they prophesy unto you a false vision and divination, and a thing of nought, and the deceit of their heart.
In the context of Brotherhood-Sisterhood Week, I think that this is an area in which our different traditions can find a common cause. It is a sacred duty of the religious communities to equip our people to distinguish between the authentic divine imperative and the many brands of attractively packaged sound-bytes and buzz words that pass for revelation in our shallow times.
Seen from this perspective, Jeremiah’s words have an uncanny relevance to our contemporary situation. I think that it is now understandable why Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah chose to define the roles of faith and faithlessness in terms of their relationships to knowledge. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our “information age” could give way to a “wisdom age”!
As I noted earlier, Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah was an accomplished scholar in his own right. A later rabbi extolled the breadth of his knowledge, comparing it to a peddler’s bag. When students would come to consult with him on any topic–Including matters of Scripture, exegesis, religious law or homiletic themes–Rabbi Eleazar would invariably have the appropriate answer at his fingertips. And when the questioners would depart from Rabbi Eleazar’s presence, the text reports that they would be “filled with goodness and blessing.”
From my personal perspective as a professional educator, I cannot help but envy that achievement. In my years of teaching, I can attest that I have imparted to my students huge volumes of information, as well as useful analytical and cognitive skills.
But how many of us–whether we are teachers, preachers or parents–can genuinely boast that that information filled our fellows with “goodness and blessing”?
Guest sermon delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd (Anglican), Calgary, February 15 1998
21 And the Lord said unto Moses: Stretch out thy hand toward heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, even darkness which may be felt 22 And Moses stretched forth his hand toward heaven; and there was a thick darkness in all the Land of Egypt three days. 23 They saw not one another, neither rose any from his place for three days; but all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings.
One of the striking features about the Egyptian plagues is that–if we were to examine them individually, and outside of the context of the story of the Exodus–almost all of them could be explained as straightforward natural processes. Several passages in Rabbi Hertz’s commentary make reference to natural and climatic features peculiar to Egypt and to the Nile, beginning with the first of the plagues:
“Between June and August [he writes], the Nile usually turns to a dull red, owing to the presence of vegetable matter. Generally, after this time, the slime of the river breeds a vast number of frogs, and the air is filled with swarms of tormenting insects…”
In keeping with this approach, the miraculous character of the plagues is not to be sought in any objective properties, but in the manner in which they were regarded by their contemporaries. Each plague was preceded by an explicit threat by Moses, and all ten occurred within the space of a single catastrophic year–though I admit that, from my comfortable distance from those events, a year seems like quite a leisurely pace. I had always assumed that they took place in rapid-fire sequence within the two weeks that it takes to read about them in synagogue, or even within the five hours of the De Mille film.
To be sure, the rabbinic imagination has been allowed a free rein in enhancing the plagues with supernatural flourishes. Giant frogs and the like make for entertaining story-telling, but they seem to miss the Torah’s original point, that the Almighty demonstrated a remarkable degree of restraint in not hurling down lightning-bolts or demonic armies, but insisted on employing the same prosaic natural forces that are at work in normal times and seasons.
Perhaps we can find some confirmation of this thesis in the well-known passage in Pirkei Avot that lists various items that God fashioned on the first Friday at twilight. As Maimonides and other Jewish thinkers interpreted that passage, in formulating this list the sages were trying to maintain their confidence in the dependability of natural lawse by arguing that even when those laws seemed to be suspended in order to produce miracles, the miracles had in truth been programmed into the original natural structure at the time of the Creation.
At any rate, the list includes all of the most dazzling instances of Biblical pyrotechnics: the chasm in the earth that opened to swallow up Korach’s congregation; the mouth of Balaam’s ass, the manna, and others. Some even went so far as to include the first pair of pliers, without which it would have been impossible to manufacture the second pair! Nevertheless, conspicuous in their absence are any of the plagues: no bloody river, no frogs (giant or otherwise) or locusts are included in that list. The only item we find there that is related to the plagues is Moses’ staff.
And this seems to be the key to the message: None of the plagues were miraculous in themselves. It was only through their connection to Moses’ mission that their religious significance could be appreciated.
Now the theory that we have been describing works better for some plagues than for others. Frogs, lice, wild animals and locusts are undoubtedly natural phenomena. However I have always had trouble applying the theory to the plague of darkness as it is portrayed in today’s reading: At Moses’ signal, uninterrupted blackness prevails over Egypt for three days, and yet somehow the Children of Israel were unaffected. The Biblical narrative even adds that there was something about this darkness that prevented people from moving from their places, as though they were crushed under a heavy burden.
On the one hand, I am willing to treat with my customary skepticism the midrashic interpretations that this darkness took the form of a solid, lava-like substance (of the sort that reputedly hovers over the Los Angeles area) that solidified around the unfortunate Egyptians and literally prevented them from moving their limbs. Even on this point, not all the commentators are in agreement. The Hebrew phrase “Va-yamesh hoshekh,” that most translations read as “darkness that could be felt” is rendered by several Jewish interpreters simply as “extended darkness.”
On the other hand, I am not quite ready to buy the various naturalistic explanations cited by Rabbi Hertz; such as when he refers to the solar eclipse of March 13 1335 B.C.E.– or when he compares it with another eclipse on January 24 1925, whose shadow ceased abruptly when it got to 96th street in New York (apparently there were some neighbourhoods in New York that even eclipses did not dare enter). Even less am I persuaded that the phenomenon being described was the oppressive air of a Middle Eastern “khamsin.” Other commentators have suggested that the plague might have been a sandstorm. Several British scholars have even proposed that the Egyptians were enveloped in a pea-soup-fog (though for the life of me I cannot imagine what led them to such an interpretation).
None of these explanations has ever seemed completely satisfying to me.
Recently I happened upon a midrashic interpretation that might succeed in–pardon the pun–shedding light on the question, in the form of a rather farfetched parable.
An old chronicle tells of a land far to the east [or at least, east of Manitoba] whose citizens enjoyed a life of ease made possible my a wealth of wondrous inventions. They no longer had to cut wood for kindling, but built houses that warmed themselves automatically. These magical houses could even measure the exact amount of warmth that was required. No oil or wicks were needed to provide light, because illumination could be provided by the touch of a button. People did not need to visit each other’s houses in order to converse, because in this magical land it was possible to speak in one house and have one’s voice miraculously conveyed to other dwellings. Even money was no longer needed, because the citizens of this fantasy-land possessed enchanted charms that knew the precise number of coins that were held in far-off vaults.
So confident were the inhabitants of that land in the power of their magic that they forgot how to chop wood, and they discarded all their oil-lamps and candles. The clinking of coins ceased to be heard.
And then one day all this changed suddenly. A fierce storm encased the land with ice, overpowering the magic. And the people were caught unawares, unable to produce light or heat, unable even to purchase food and clothing, since they had long since stopped carrying money. So unexpected was all this that their lives came to a standstill. They huddled together for warmth waiting for the king’s soldiers to dig them out of the ice.
I wonder if this was not the kind of situation that befell the Egyptians when confronted by the plague of darkness, whether in the guise of an eclipse, a sandstorm, fog or heat-wave, leaving them totally paralyzed.
This difference in their responses reflects a fundamental contrast between pagan religions and the faith of Israel. For the pagan, religion is concerned only with those phenomena that are eternal and unchanging, especially with the recurring cycles of nature, whose forces are personified as deities. For those gods, the domains of human ethics and history are of no real concern. Just as nature is unchanging, the human situation is a permanent one. Each individual departs this life as she or he entered it, no better and no worse, since life is a constant cycle. The Egyptians believed that all aspects of life were like the unfailing course of the Nile that could be depended upon to bring life-giving waters year after year. Faced with any suspension of what was familiar to them, their belief system collapsed and they were totally unable to react. “The Egyptians could not rise from their places for three days.”
Not so for the Children of Israel. Their God is no mere force of nature. The Holy One blessed be he is above all natural laws, and yet takes a profound interest in every aspect of the human situation. Humans are capable of bettering themselves and the world. When confronted with extraordinary circumstances, the Israelites did not see this as a threat to their faith. On the contrary, they welcomed it as a step towards their approaching liberation. “And the children of Israel had light in their dwellings.”
This contrast between the Israelite response and that of the Egyptians marked an important stage in their spiritual maturity. As a Torah community, they could recognize that there is more to reality than what is evident on the surface. The spiritually sensitive personality is receptive to unexpected situations, recognizing them as manifestations of God’s infinite powers and as doorways to an encounter with the divine. What stupified the pagans as an incomprehensible failure of everything that they had come to rely on, was welcomed by the faithful as the hand of God, or–to use the terminology of the Kabbalah–as an infinity of hidden holy sparks waiting to be released.
It would be splendid if we could state with conviction that the spiritual openness of the ancient Hebrews remains part of our religious personality as Jews. Too often we find that the role of Judaism in our lives is precisely the opposite, to provide a kind of comfortable old easy-chair that protects us from the complexities of the outside world. This is particularly noticable in the world of Orthodoxy, where our commitment to tradition–rather than furnishing us with the resources to respond creatively to new challenges, or to discern the sublimity of God’s creation– often numbs us to to anything that does not fit into our customary categories. Sad to say, our institutional leadership has been slow in recognizing the radical challenges posed by the monumental historical developments of recent history, such as the Holocaust and the achievement of Jewish statehood. Many of our leaders and scholars continue to define their attitudes and policies according to categories formulated in ancient or medieval times, as if nothing has changed.
Even in our own beloved shul, how many of us can honestly say that our participation in services and classes has helped to enhance our spiritual receptiveness or sensitivity? How do we react when someone has the chutzpah to introduce (Lord forbid!) a new melody into the davening? While I would be the last person to speak lightly of historical traditions, nevertheless it sometimes seems that we are missing the point of it all.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, instead of slipping into the same spiritual rut as the Egyptians of old, we could learn to emulate the perceptiveness and enlightenment demonstrated by our ancestors.
In the words of the blessing that we recited earlier this morning: “May the Almighty cause a new light to enlighten Zion, so that we may all soon partake of its radiance.”
1 And Jacob dwelt in the land wherein his father was a stranger, in the land of Canaan. 2 These are the generations of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was feeding the flock with his brethren; and the lad was with the sons of Bilhah, and with the sons of Zilpah, his father’s wives: and Joseph brought unto his father their evil report. 3 Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age: and he made him a coat of many colours. 4 And when his brethren saw that their father loved him more than all his brethren, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably unto him. 5 And Joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it his brethren: and they hated him yet the more. 6 And he said unto them, Hear, I pray you, this dream which I have dreamed: 7 For, behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and, lo, my sheaf arose, and also stood upright; and, behold, your sheaves stood round about, and made obeisance to my sheaf. 8 And his brethren said to him, Shalt thou indeed reign over us? or shalt thou indeed have dominion over us? And they hated him yet the more for his dreams, and for his words. 9 And he dreamed yet another dream, and told it his brethren, and said, Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me. 10 And he told it to his father, and to his brethren: and his father rebuked him, and said unto him, What is this dream that thou hast dreamed? Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to thee to the earth? 11 And his brethren envied him; but his father observed the saying. 12 And his brethren went to feed their father’s flock in Shechem. 13 And Israel said unto Joseph, Do not thy brethren feed the flock in Shechem? come, and I will send thee unto them. And he said to him, Here am I. 14 And he said to him, Go, I pray thee, see whether it be well with thy brethren, and well with the flocks; and bring me word again. So he sent him out of the vale of Hebron, and he came to Shechem. 15 And a certain man found him, and, behold, he was wandering in the field: and the man asked him, saying, What seekest thou? 16 And he said, I seek my brethren: tell me, I pray thee, where they feed their flocks. 17 And the man said, They are departed hence; for I heard them say, Let us go to Dothan. And Joseph went after his brethren, and found them in Dothan. 18 And when they saw him afar off, even before he came near unto them, they conspired against him to slay him. 19 And they said one to another, Behold, this dreamer cometh….
My wife’s grandmother (of blessed memory) used to tell a story about an elderly Jewish lady in Eastern Europe who would sit attentively in her seat in the women’s gallery of the synagogue, following the weekly reading carefully in the Yiddish commentary, the Tzena Urena. As the reader progressed through the opening words of this week’s section, her countenance became increasingly filled with consternation, until she could hold it back no longer, and blurted out audibly:
“Joseph, don’t do it again! Didn’t you learn your lesson from last year?!”
Indeed, as we review the events that are related in this week’s reading, it is hard to suppress a similar reaction. At times we direct our frustration at Joseph. At times, it might be towards other players in the drama: Jacob, Judah, Reuben or the other brothers. How can they continue to act so stupidly year after year?
And those of you who can see matters from a broader perspective may find another address for the complaints–the Almighty himself: Ribbono shel-olam, you say—Master of the Universe!—How could you stand by and allow the situation to degenerate so tragically without calling a stop before matters got out of hand?
Actually, this last question is the easiest one to answer, since God’s role in the story seems to be the most understandable of all the players. After all, he had a clear agenda. Back in Genesis 15 he had informed Abraham that his descendants would end up enslaved in a foreign land, which is precisely what is accomplished by the conclusion of the book of Genesis. The story of Joseph and his brothers is designed to bring about that situation.
Now this question of perspective makes all the difference in the world in how we evaluate the actions and decisions of the protagonists in our Torah reading.
Seen in their own context, we have before us a sequence of mistakes and weaknesses (and only occasional glimmers of virtue).
Jacob, for example, violates every rule of good parenting in the preference that he displays towards Joseph. Joseph in turn acts like an obnoxious brat when he flaunts his ambitions and his favoured status before his siblings. Even so, none of this can justify the murderous intentions of the brothers, or the vacillations of Reuben and Judah in not nipping the whole story in the bud.
Each of the figures can be taken to task for their misdeeds. This is the case, at least, if we choose to ignore the historical and theological context in which they are unfolding.
Imagine, if you will, that Jacob were here before us to answer to our criticisms. He could reply in all innocence: “I’ve done nothing wrong! If I had not provoked the jealousy of Joseph’s brothers, then he never would have been sold to Egypt, and the family would never have joined him there! The Holy One’s pledge to Abraham would never have been fulfilled. No Egypt; no Passover, no Sinai… So why blame me?”
Now that the tone has been set, we can imagine Joseph’s brothers, and Joseph himself, stepping out from the dark corner where they have been hitherto trying to maintain invisibility, and offering the same excuse. And truly it is a very powerful argument.
Except that the Torah itself does not buy it.
The complex tale of Joseph’s encounter with his siblings as viceroy of Egypt has been interpreted in a variety of ways. Some commentators view it as an act of vengeance, others as a test of the brothers’ regret or repentance; or perhaps as a combination of different motives.
What all the explanations have in common is the assumption that the brothers had done something terribly wrong. Even when Joseph consoles them with the assurance that some good has resulted from their actions, it is clear to both him and them that he is not absolving them of their guilt. “As for you,” he tells them (Genesis 50:20), “you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good.” There is no attempt here to deny the evil of their intentions.
Our sages too were not squeamish about taking our forefathers to task when they deserve it. When Joseph showed special affection for Benjamin by giving him more gifts than the others, the Talmud complains:
Is it conceivable that Joseph should make the same mistake as Jacob had made?! It was on account of two selas weight of wool that Jacob had added for Joseph’s coat that his brothers became jealous of him, culminating in their going down to Egypt. And now he is behaving the same way towards Benjamin!
Yes, neither the Torah nor our sages are ready to gloss over their misdeeds, in spite of their usefulness for God’s plan.
We can learn from this that, as humans beings, it is not our job to second-guess the Creator, or to help him with his historical projects. Our job is to do what is right, as we evaluate the circumstances from our limited perspective. As the Talmud puts it: “A judge can only act on what is before his eyes.”
Otherwise, the Assyrians, Babylonians and Romans could have pleaded that they were merely carrying out God’s orders in punishing Israel for our iniquities. The prophets and sages saw it otherwise: Although God may have manipulated events in order to inflict deserved chastisement, the nations who conquered and oppressed Israel did not do so for that reason, but out of their own selfish motives; and they are held accountable for their deeds.
As for God’s great historical plans, he has many ways to accomplish them without asking or forcing us to do wrong.
This too is something that can be learned from our reading.
Let’s go back to that little old lady with her Tzena Urena. What if we decided to humour her? Imagine that we could go back in time. What could we do then to keep Jacob’s family out of trouble?
Now as a member of the generation who learned its post-Einsteinian physics from Superman comics, I know two irrefutable facts about time-travel:
It is done by spinning of moving faster than the speed of light.
No matter what super powers you have been blessed with (and I am not at liberty to divulge this), you can never change history.
Indulge me nonetheless. We have beamed ourselves over to ancient Israel, and we want to keep Joseph out of trouble. What is the simplest way to achieve that objective?
It’s really very simple.
Remember what happened when Jacob sent Joseph on his ill-fated mission to check up on his brothers: He got lost (He was probably too wrapped up in his daydreams). If matters had been allowed to take their natural course, he never would have made it to his rendezvous. He would have gone home, perhaps been scolded by his father, and would have missed the Ishmaelite caravan. He would not have reached Egypt, and who knows if we ever would have got to celebrate Passover?
All that stood between Joseph and our historical destiny was a casual stranger who happened along, and was able to give him some directions about how to find his brothers. If we had been able to divert that stranger, or otherwise remove him from the story, then history would have taken a crucially different course.
Who was this stranger?
Ibn Ezra remarks that it was nobody important, just an accidental passer-by; and apparently the detail has no special significance. That doesn’t strike me as a very satisfying explanation. For one thing, who ever heard of anybody giving proper directions in Israel? More importantly, we usually do not expect the Torah to waste its precious words on such insignificant details. Presumably there were other trivialities that could have been included, about where Joseph stopped for lunch, or what route he took. Why single out for mention this particular incident?
Rashbam accepts the same premise as Ibn Ezra, but derives a moral lesson from the inclusion of the story: It was to demonstrate how determined Joseph was to fulfill his father’s mission even under adverse conditions.
Most other commentators understood the episode differently. The midrash (quoted by Rashi) states that the mysterious stranger was an angel, a figure who was dispatched specifically by God to make sure that Joseph did arrive at his rendezvous with destiny.
Ramban notes that the story teaches us that all of Joseph’s diligence would have been as naught if the Almighty had not decreed that that nameless guide should appear opportunely to direct him to his brothers. Otherwise, says Ramban, there would be no justification for including the incident in the Torah.
Even so, this seems a roundabout way of doing things. Rather than allowing Joseph to go astray, and then sending an angel to aim him back on his proper course, why didn’t God just keep him from getting lost in the first place?!
I think this is precisely the point of the incident: That is not the way God directs events. He does not prevent people from going astray or making their mistakes. This is true, whether we are speaking of misreading a road map, or trying to murder your brother. God does not interfere with your decisions. He will not make you smarter or more virtuous than you are. That is entirely your own business, and you have to take the responsibility for your actions.
As to fulfilling historical destiny, that is God’s business. There are many ways that this can be accomplished without impinging on our free will. He can produce mysterious strangers, or send famines, or employ some more exotic mechanism to get Jacob’s family into Egypt. But as Ramban said so eloquently, all the human effort that we might invest in such endeavours are not going to make a difference. Joseph’s brothers have no grounds for pleading that they were helping God work out his plan for Jewish history.
This theme was summarized in the Midrash (Genesis Rabbah 85:1) by Rabbi Samuel bar Nahmani, citing the words of the prophet Jeremiah:
“For I know the thoughts that I think towards you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil” (Jeremiah 29:11): The tribes were busy with the selling of Joseph. Jacob was busy with his sackcloth and mourning. Judah was busy looking for a woman. While the Holy One was creating the light of the Messiah!
The 15th-century Spanish commentator Rabbi Isaac Arama presents a remarkable interpretation of that midrash:
In the Joseph story, we find all the protagonists playing their own parts, carrying out their personal objectives, without affecting God’s overall design. Quite the contrary, the freedom of choice of none of the participants is interfered with in any way… The chain of events in which the jealousy of Joseph’s brothers played a prominent part, ultimately proved to have become the instrument for carrying out God’s design. However God could have found many other means to achieve the same end. Therefore the brothers cannot claim exoneration by saying that what they had done helped God to achieve his aim. The Bible is full of similar lessons.
We live in a world in which the petty deeds of individuals seem to count very little against mighty political and historical forces. How many false political gods have been founded on the premise that “the end justifies the means,” that immoral acts can find their justification in the furthering of exalted destinies! How often do we get sent the message that the global economy would be fine if it weren’t for all those troublesomepeople who keep getting in its way?
As Rabbi Arama perceived so clearly, the Torah teaches otherwise. Even the furthering of God’s own plans can never be a justification for unethical deeds.
Seen in this light, maybe our little old lady is not being completely out of line in her expectation that Jacob’s family–to which we all belong– will learn its lessons in time for the next time we read this story.
Sermon delivered at Congregation House of Jacob – Mikveh Israel, Calgary, December 20 1997.
Several months ago, a correspondent of mine on the Internet–I believe that he was a Protestant minister in a southern American state–unwittingly committed the grave mistake of referring to me as a “theologian,” in what he assumed would be taken as a compliment. To his surprise, I protested quite vigorously that I could not make a claim to that particular title, neither by qualification nor by inclination. My university students learn quickly of my tendency to skip over any textbook chapters that get too theoretical or abstract in their analysis of religious ideas; and guest lecturers frequently have to confront my suggestions that the sectarian schism that they just analyzed so eruditely was more probably just a pretext for a congregant’s indignation over being slighted by a church leader.
I now find that the theme of this Institute is compelling me to venture into that uncomfortable realm of theology. Be warned that I plan to do so as little of it as I can get away with. I am, as a rule, more interested in practical questions, and especially in the interactions between individuals and religious communities. Mostly, I wish to share with you some texts and thoughts from the Jewish tradition, in the hope that they might be of some assistance in confronting the problems posed by diversity, both within a single religion and between different religious communities.
Let me begin by burdening you with a question that puzzled me for a long time:
In the course of my teaching to classes of mixed religious composition, and in my limited exposure to interfaith dialogue, I have frequent occasion to hear my community, the people of Israel, referred to as “the Chosen People” –or, even more ambitiously, as “God‘s chosen people.”
The expression has never failed to elicit from me feelings of intense discomfort; and I believe that such an attitude would be shared by most Jews of my acquaintance. To be sure, the reaction is rooted in part in its apparently jingoistic implications– whether it is because we ourselves are uneasy with such attitudes, because we are embarrassed to utter them before others. However, on serious personal and scholarly reflection, I felt certain that the issue was a more fundamental one.
As I tried to account for my reaction, I realized that I have probably never heard the expression issuing from the mouth or pen of a Jew, but invariably from Christians.
Then I set to musing: How would one actually express this idea in Hebrew, the “official” tongue of our religious discourse? I have learned from long and consistent experience that any expression that cannot be traced to a Hebrew original is definitely not an authentic Jewish concept. The answer that I came up with after comparing notes with some knowledgeable Jews of my acquaintance–especially my wife–was no less remarkable: As far as I am aware, there does not exist any traditional Hebrew idiom that approximates the English expression “chosen people.” Some writers invoke the words of Exodus 19:5 `am segullah: “a treasured people”; but though close, this is not quite the same. And though modern Hebrew has occasionally come up with some awkward phraseology in order to render the term, it is evident to most listeners that such stammered equivalences are ad hoc creations, intended to translate concepts that originated in non-Jewish thought-patterns.
I might note in passing that the same could be said about several other common English terms that have become crucial to theological discourse about Jewish values, including (to cite two examples that spring to mind) “the promised land,” and even “Judaism.” But these might be topics for another lecture.
We must make it clear that the consciousness of having been chosen by God is a fundamental part of the Jewish religious self-definition. And yet it remains true that this perception is not formulated by means of any combination of adjective and noun analogous to the English combination “chosen people.”
“Hmm,” I sense some of you thinking: “If, as this pedantic old professor seems to be conceding, the idea of the `Chosen People” is a valid one, only it happens to be expressed in different ways, then the whole business is starting to sound more and more like an instance of linguistic hairsplitting of the sort that is commonly associated with those infamous Talmudists and Jesuits.”
Nevertheless I insist that there is importance to these semantical quirks. Allow me to illustrate by citing some passages from that faithful and unappreciated mirror of Jewish piety, our traditional prayer book.
Firstly, let us look at a blessing that is recited every morning as an introduction to the reading of the “Shema`,” the selection of verses from the Torah (especially Deuteronomy 6:4-8) that proclaim the sovereignty of God and our commitment to his Torah. The blessing relates to the act of the recitation as a fulfilment of the religious obligation of Torah study.
You have loved us with abounding love, O Lord our God, you have shown us great and overflowing tenderness. For the sake of our ancestors who trusted in you, and whom you instructed in the precepts of life–in the same manner, be gracious unto us and instruct us… Put it into our hearts to understand, to become wise, to hear, to learn, to teach, to observe, to do, to uphold–all the words of the study of Torah, lovingly… For you are the performer of wonders, and you have chosen us out of all nations and tongues, and brought us close to your great name in truth… Blessed are you, Lord, who chooses his people Israel in love.
Similarly, when Jews participate in the formal reading of the Torah in the synagogue, they acknowledge the religious dimension of that act with blessing:
Blessed are you, O Lord, King of the universe, who has chosen us out of all the nations to bestow upon us his Torah.
Or, to take another example, from the “Kiddush,” the “sanctification” ceremony in which the sabbath is inaugurated over a cup of wine:
“For you have chosen us and sanctified us out of all the nations, and have given us the sabbath as an inheritance in love and favour. Blessed are you, O Lord, who hallows the Sabbath.”
In a similar vein, the festival prayers proclaim as follows:
You have chosen us out of all the nations. You have loved us and taken pleasure in us, and exalted us above all tongues, and sanctified us in your commandments, and brought us close, O our King, to your worship. And you have called us by your great and holy name, and you have given us in love appointed times for rejoicing, festivals and seasons for gladness…
Examples could easily be multiplied. What they all have in common is the unstated assumption that there is no thing called the “chosen people,” but that “choosing” is invariably perceived as a verb, a dynamic activity that is inextricably identified with Israel’s devoted observance of the precepts of the Torah.
This dynamic does not come across in that deathly static expression “chosen people,” suggesting as it does that Israel has been tagged with some kind of halo, badge or colouring that defines its status. Surely such an approach is the polar opposite of the view that was voiced so ably in the blessings that we heard a moment ago, in which chosenness is a process that permits the people of Israel to bring sanctity into their lives and into the world.
I am reminded of a passage that is fortunately not found in the “Wizard of Oz” story, when the wizard reassures Dorothy’s little-known companion, the God-Seeking Heathen. As you will undoubtedly not recall, when the Heathen approaches the Wizard to make good on his pledge to make him chosen, the wise old Wizard responds as follows:
In my country there are many people who call themselves chosen, and they’re no different from you or me. The only thing special about them is that they have a sign……a circumcision
Now I would be the last one to belittle the sacred covenantal sign of circumcision that has been maintained with such devotion over the millennia of Jewish history. Nevertheless, it is clear that chosenness is a more complicated matter than that the bearing of a sign in one’s flesh. At the very least, it would appear to have something to do with assaults on the assorted witches, flying monkeys and other agents of evil.
We may better illustrate the point by adapting an analogy that is beloved of the Biblical authors. Let me put the matter bluntly:
To assert that a nation is “chosen” has as much content as to say that a person is “married.”
True, in the latter instance the factual declaration has the value of informing us that the couple has participated in a recognized legal ceremony, that they might be wearing rings on their fingers, and that their acts of unfaithfulness now fall into the category of adultery. However none of this really gets to the dynamic of what a marriage really is, as a relationship that imprints itself upon every moment in the couple’s lives, something that must continually be worked at.
So self-evident is this perception to traditional Jews that we tend to gag on the very inertia of the expression “chosen people” –even as I frequently get taken aback by those starry-eyed folk (usually single, of course) who are unable to distinguish between a wedding and a marriage. In either case the people who speak in such ways are missing the point.
Indeed, there is no “chosen people.” Rather, there are people whom God has sanctified by commanding them to rest on the sabbath, to rejoice in the festivals, to study the Torah and to accept the overriding yoke of God’s supremacy over all other allegiances.
Now the more one examines it, the marriage analogy reveals itself to be increasingly useful and instructive. The prophets and sages of Israel have invoked it mostly in order to characterize divine-human relationships, whether through the eroticism of the Song of Songs or the marital breakdown of Hosea. However, to a lesser extent it might also provide us with a serviceable framework for understanding relationships within and among different religious communities.
For example, I hope that there would be general agreement with the premise that members of one family should not normally be interfering in the marital affairs of the neighbours across the road. Any pair of spouses is likely to face sufficient challenges in the day-to-day maintenance of their own marriage–keeping their houses in order in the literal, figurative or allegorical sense–without diverting their strained spiritual resources to meddling in other people’s business.
This is not to deny that we might have some general interest in encouraging other couples to enter into the state of marriage and supporting those who have done so–and I hope that this is more than a mere case of misery longing for company. We might even be justified in shying away from individuals whose relationships strike us as illegal, irresponsible or unhealthy.
Returning to the religious context, Jewish law has defined a “generic” standard of human morality that legitimizes those who maintain it as individuals and as societies. I am referring of course to the so-called “Seven Commandments of the Children of Noah.”
Though several variations on this list were discussed in rabbinic sources, the one that became normative is as follows:
Idolatry
Blasphemy
Murder
Sexual crimes, especially incest and adultery
Robbery
Consuming a limb from a living creature
The establishment of a judicial system
The rabbis of the first century claimed to base this fundamental list of obligations on careful exegesis of certain verses at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, though I am confident that anyone who is not familiar with the intricacies of the relevant talmudic passages would be at a loss to recreate most of their interpretations, or be persuaded by them. For a historian such as myself this artificiality always raises suspicions that, as is frequently the case in classical Jewish discourse, the ideas (at least, some of them) did not originate in the interpretation of the Biblical text, but had their own conceptual logic.
This supposition appears more plausible when we take into account that at around the same time that the Talmudic Jewish sages were arguing over their list of generic obligations, a different Jewish faction was also grappling with the promulgation of their own set of minimum standards for persons who would seek salvation without becoming full-fledged members of the Jewish people. They came up with a briefer, but somewhat similar series of things to abstain from, including:
Things polluted by contact with idols
Fornication
Consuming anything that has been strangled, and blood (Acts 15:20)
Admittedly, the characteristic interpretation given to the Noachide commandments by most modern Jewish thinkers, that they furnish the basis for a policy of religious tolerance, is not consistently supported by the ancient sources, which were composed under the cruel yoke of pagan Rome, and took it for granted that few if any human beings actually lived up to those standards. In their more vindictive moments, the ancient preachers would point out that in the final judgment, the neglect of the seven commandments would be held up as decisive evidence against those heathen oppressors of Israel.
Nevertheless, when it comes down to practical application, it appears that ancient Judaism was sincere in its profession that it is possible to be a perfectly decent human being without having to participate in the unique Jewish covenant of the 613 commandments.
This understanding seems to be the only one that can account for the normative response that is to be given to aspiring proselytes, as found in the Talmud:
If at the present time people desire to become proselytes, they are addressed as follows: What reason have you for desiring to become a proselyte? Do you not know that Israel at the present time is oppressed, despised, harassed, and overcome by afflictions? …And they are informed about the penalties that attach to the commandments. They are told: Be aware that as long as you had not reached this state you were able to eat forbidden fat without incurring the penalty of “cutting off.” If you profaned the Sabbath you would not incur the penalty of stoning. However now if you were to eat forbidden fat you would be subject to the penalty of cutting off, and if you were to violate the Sabbath you would be punished by stoning…
For all the pride that they undoubtedly took in their special covenantal relationship with God, I think it is fair to say the Jewish sages who devised this procedure could not have believed that it was imperative to draw others in to it. If they were convinced that salvation could be acquired only through the full observance of the Israelite commandments, then it makes no sense that they would be so discouraging in their attitudes towards the individuals who came seeking spiritual fulfilment in the Torah. Clearly those seekers would not be abandoned to share the fate of the unredeemed wicked.
All of this begs the question: If the universal standard defined by the seven Noahide precepts is adequate, then what need is there for specific covenant?
The Biblical sources are astonishingly un-helpful on this question. Like many other institutions in Judaism, the covenant is often treated as an absolute or given, whose existence has priority over its rationale. We are informed, for example, that Abraham was chosen to be the progenitor of the covenant people by virtue of his trust in the Almighty. But we are not told why God deemed it necessary in the first place that there should be a “covenant people.” Much of the biblical narrative presupposes that the history of Israel in itself constitutes the unfolding of a divinely guided plan, but there is no clear statement about what this plan is or how it will culminate, and why it must take the particular course that it does. Our sages often suppose plausibly that it has something to do with spreading God’s word to the world and serving as a moral example to humanity–a perception that became a favourite justification for the prolonged Jewish exile. But none of these explanations is binding.
An answer to this question that is striking in its simplicity is suggested by our marriage metaphor (that hopefully has not yet been utterly worked to death). Would any of us consider such a formulation as: “I want to be married, but only in a general way. It does not have to be to a specific partner”?
It is of course a simple truth that, in spite of all the attempts of those wretched theologians to universalize our experiences, the experiences have existence only in their particulars. As Maimonides (Guide of the Perplexed 3:509) put it when discussing the arbitrary-looking character of some of the sacrificial regulations in the Torah:
…When you ask why a lamb should be prescribed and not a ram, the same question would have to be asked if a ram had been prescribed instead of a lamb. But one particular species had necessarily to be chosen…
Every relationship between individuals is thus a unique instance of the general potential for relationship, defined by the personalities involved as well as by their specific circumstances and experiences. This applies as much to covenant as it does to a marriage.
A favourite theme in ancient Jewish legend (e.g., Shabbat 88b) is that the ministering angels resented the fact that God chose to bestow the most precious of his gifts, the Torah, upon the unworthy race of mortal humans. Called upon by the Lord to refute their arguments, Moses is said to have instructed the angels in selected passages from the Torah:
It is written in the Torah “I am the Lord your God who has brought you out of the Land of Egypt from the house of slavery”–Were you perhaps enslaved in Egypt and then delivered, that you are in need of the Torah? It is written there: “You shall have no other gods before me”–Are there idolaters amongst you? It is written there: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vein”–Do you have occasion for oaths? It is written there: “Thou shalt not commit murder” “Thou shalt not commit adultery” “Thou shalt not steal”–are you angels subject to any of those vices?…
If I may allow myself a pinch of homiletical license, I think that we might expound the legend such that the angels, who are metaphysical beings without physical bodies or emotions (with the apparent exception of jealousy…), represent a “general” or “generic” relationship with the Almighty. I have no doubt that their experience of closeness to God is sublime beyond my imagination. However the point of the story is that the covenant embodied in the Torah is not for them, but for finite and distinctive human beings.
The bottom line is that the Egyptian slavery and liberation are unique to the experience of Israel, as are other historical events whose commemoration and reenactment form a central part of the covenantal commandments. The celebrations of the Israeli agricultural seasons speak to the experiences of Israel in a way that can make no real sense to peoples who have grown up in different climates and environments.
To insist on restricting the Divine-human relationship to elements that are generic to all human experience, reflecting our common origins as children of Noah, might be possible in some realms. However if religion were allowed to deal only with such generalities, I fear that it would leave us with a stark, lifeless sort of affair with very little appeal to anyone other than a handful of theologians. By defining the covenant in terms of the particular situation of a historical community, the good Lord was acknowledging some fundamental facts of the human situation. People can then express the values and aspirations of their faith in terms that have existential meaning for them.
For to have done otherwise would have been as absurd a the notion of being “married in general.”
This same accommodation to the realities of human nature is in evidence when we consider the opposite possibility, namely, of treating covenants as unique relationships that vary with each and every individual. Again, the possibility might be theoretically conceivable, but my gut feeling is that that kind of model utterly contradicts a human nature that is built upon family and social interactions. At any rate, this kind of solitary mystical navel-gazing is clearly not an option that is acceptable to the Biblical value system, which is committed to the creation of a just and compassionate society.
The fact that the Biblical covenant was established with a particular community, sharing a common ancestry and history, thus comes across as a perfectly natural phenomenon. In a country that is terrified by the prospects of regionalism and fragmentation, we might derive some consolation from the recognition that humans have a natural predilection for identifying with social units of a limited size, and that when I locate myself spiritually within one particular community this does not imply a rejection of the validity of other communities, any more than my devotion to my own family demands that I despise all other families. Au contraire: Surely it is only through the love of spouse, family and community that we can hope to arrive at the ability to feel love for humanity “as a whole.”
There remain a number of important questions that might benefit from examination in light of the Covenant model. Whether for reasons of limited competence, or of diplomatic discretion, I shall confine myself to little more than mentioning them.
While the Covenant model that we have been describing provides a basis for pluralism and tolerance, I think it should be clear that not everything is acceptable. Although nobody would be happier than I to distance ourselves from those medieval days when any deviation from my particular version of truth constituted grounds for inquisitions, excommunication or extermination, we must nevertheless not lose our ability to recognize the limits of such toleration, and raise our arms and voices against evils. As a non-Christian, I am not subject to the prohibition of “judge not,” or even of turning the other cheek. At any rate, I would hope that as religious people we can distance ourselves from a social norm in which “judgmental” is has become a morally debilitating term of opprobrium.
I do not have any clear guidelines to offer you on where to draw the line between tolerance and the upholding of moral or religious principles. I am certain that it would make a useful topic for several additional Summer Institutes.
In my abstract unpacking of the Covenant idea, I have been quite vague about where and how I envisaged the application of these ideas. Most of what I have said could easily be referring to the question of ecumenical cooperation among your respective denominations. Anyone who has been reading recent newspaper reports about the increasing fragmentation and intolerance among Jewish movements will certainly be astounded at the chutzpah involved in inviting a Jew to instruct you in the intricacies of interdenominational harmony!
Nevertheless, I have studiously refrained from dealing with the implications vis à vis Christian-Jewish relations. I am of course not blind to the disastrous consequences that have emerged from the competing claims of the two communities to inclusion in the same covenant. The conflict has previously been characterized as a form of sibling or oedipal rivalry , and by adding an adulterous ingredient to the stew I have not solved or lessened the problem. Once again, I have no facile solution to this situation.
At least, allow me to delineate some parameters for understanding the issues.
The honest recognition of this fact must precede any attempt at candid discussion between the two sides. To put it crudely, each side believes that the other is severely mistaken about central points in their respective belief systems. I have seen individuals whom I love I admire greatly devoting themselves to the quest for a mutually acceptable statement of creed. Not only is this an futile task, but the very attempt violates the premises of dialogue. Do not hold your breath for religious Jews to recognize the validity of Christian claims to an authentic covenant.
I should add that the futility of attempts at harmonization extends to several areas that are not always appreciated by all concerned. To take a simple instance, every springtime I am approached by a number of Christian friends who proudly inform me they are planning to hold a traditional Jewish Passover feast, a seder. Sometimes they ask me to participate in an active or passive capacity, and they usually try solicit my help in finding kosher lamb-meat. The expectation is that as a Jew, I will be gratified by their attempts to return to Christianity’s Jewish roots.
Please be advised, that the affect of such activities on committed Jews is precisely the opposite. They are more likely to be irritated, or downright offended, by this usurpation of a cherished Jewish tradition and perversion of its significance. From a Jewish perspective such well-intentioned deeds merely exacerbate the historical tensions of two communities laying claim to the same historical covenant. You have every right to do so, but don’t expect us to be thrilled about it.
In the religious arenas we must accept the premise that is so sacred and beneficial to our political and social life, that it is possible to respect, and even love, those with whom we disagree. As a parent of teen-agers, I can’t recall the last time anyone in my family agreed with me, and yet that does not lessen our affection for one another.
In light of what we have just said, I pray that there is no need to reiterate the self-evident corollary, that out-and-out missionizing aimed at the other religion is totally unacceptable, implying as it does a delegitimization of the other faith. For Christians after the Holocaust to insist on the need for the conversion of Jews, or to support such a mission, is nothing short of a historical obscenity.
Even when we seem to be drawing from the same wellsprings of conceptual vocabulary, this is likely to be illusory. Several years ago I coined a bon mot about Jews and Christians being divided by their common Bible. Trust me that it is so, that even when we think that we are using the same words or quoting the same scriptural verses, odds are that they have a completely different meaning to Jews and to Christians. While there might be some long-term value in sorting out those differences, I do not think that now is the ideal time to be doing so.
For those of you who are still trying to fit all this into my marriage metaphor, I should make it clear that we have now ventured into some sensitive and controversial territory. I confess that I am promoting a “guy” type of approach to which many, especially psychotherapists and members of the female persuasion, would object and insist that all differences ought to be talked out rather than allowing them to linger and fester.
Sorry, folks, but I shall here invoke my personal credentials as a husband of twenty-five years. Sometimes there are issues that are best left alone, at least temporarily. Even when open communication is crucial within my family, it might not be wise to remind my next-door neighbour about those unreturned garden tools from a dozen years ago just when it looked as if we are starting to get along well together…
Here we return to the point that I tried to argue at the start of this talk. Covenanting is an activity, not a state. Work at it, as you would with your marriage, without devoting too much thought to its conceptual underpinnings. And whatever you do, don’t start comparing your “chosenness” with that of the folks down the road, and don’t get yourself obsessed about what goes on in their (metaphoric) kitchen or bedroom. Their family does not require your approval, nor does yours need theirs. All such exercises in comparison or analysis will in the end only serve to draw attention to potential contention.
On the other hand, friendships and neighbourliness tend to flower out of common activities, the (metaphoric) PTA meetings and neighbourhood barbecues (hockey and little league, I am told, do not achieve this purpose). In real terms, I am convinced that participation in a project like the Inter-Faith food bank does more towards advancing interreligious understanding than a dozen dialogue sessions.
After we’ve learn to get along as human beings, we can always invent the theologies to justify it.
Allow me to conclude by quoting a story from the Talmud that illustrates what can happen when people interact on the simple level of human decency.
Said Rav Judah, said Samuel: They asked Rabbi Eliezer: How far does the requirement of honouring one’s father and mother extend? He said to them: Go and see what a certain pagan by the name of Dama Bar Netinah did for his father in Ashkelon. Once the sages of Israel asked him for precious jewels for the priestly breastplate for a price of 600,000. [Rav Kahana taught: for a price of 800,000]. However the keys were lying under his father’s head, and he refused to inconvenience him. The following year, the Holy One gave him his reward, when a red heifer was born into his herd. When the sages of Israel approached him, he said to them: I can tell that if I were to demand all the money in the world you would give it to me. However I want from you only the amount of money that I lost while honouring my father. And Rabbi Hanina said: If such is the reward of a person who performs a precept for which he is not commanded, how much greater is the reward of those who perform the commandments because they are commanded! (Talmud Kiddushin 31a)
The rabbis, not withstanding their uncompromising ideological opposition to idolatry, were full of admiration for a pious deed performed by a the pagan Dama, even where they were unable to sanction the deities by whom he might have felt “chosen” or “covenanted.” I think that with some determination and good will, we can hope to achieve at least as much.
A Talk given on June 23 1997 to the 11th Annual Summer Ecumenical Institute on “Covenants and Covenanting Churches,” sponsored by the Saskatoon Centre for Ecumenism and the churches of Calgary, FCJ Christian Life Centre, Calgary.
When I was first invited to give this talk, its topic was presented to me as “What does Judaism say about Israel” –understood to refer to the State of Israel. I prepared a brilliant lecture on that theme and then, a few weeks ago, was informed that the actual advertised title was “What does Judaism say about the Land of Israel?”
I sensed immediately that this would require an entirely different presentation. On further reflection, I found it of considerable interest that these are in reality such different questions. Why that is the case will therefore be one of the subjects that I will try to explore this evening.
Since I gather that the present talk comes at the tail-end of the “What does Judaism say…” series, I hope that I am not the first speaker who has expressed some discomfort with the use of the term “Judaism” that appears in the title. The “-ism” suffix is normally used to denote a consistent and systematic ideology. The assumption that a religion is defined by its articles of belief comes to us from other traditions, but it has not been the dominant view in Jewish thought over the ages. Although we may have striven for normative life-styles and ritual standards, and have been united by perceptions of a shared past and historical destiny, Jews have rarely set a high priority upon the formulation of definitive doctrine. Classical Hebrew does not even possess a proper word to denote the European term “Judaism”; the modern Hebrew “yahadut” is a recent innovation.
Notwithstanding all those reservations, for purposes of this talk I shall use the word “Judaism” in a general way, to indicate all religious expressions of Jewish tradition.
It is clear to any academic historian that Jews over the generations have tolerated extensive disagreements over central doctrinal issues. Even where a consensus might have existed with respect to fundamental ideas and values, such as the belief in one God or the sanctity of the Torah, the translation of these generalities into their specifics often involved controversies of radical dimensions.
The preceding characterization is undoubtedly applicable to the questions of the Land of Israel–that is, to the Jewish attachment to our homeland, and the practical halakhic or political implications of that premise.
The basic perception that Jews constitute a nation, and that our proper territory coincides (roughly) with the land trodden by our Biblical progenitors, is one that has never [well…hardly ever] been challenged in the Jewish consciousness since the earliest strata of the Bible.
The covenant with Abraham, that forms the basis of our religious peoplehood, includes the promise that the patriarch’s descendants, after their enslavement in a strange land, will return to the land:
On that day God entered a covenant with Abram saying: To your descendants I have given this land from the River of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates…
A substantially different set of borders is commanded to Moses in Numbers 34:1-15, and still other boundaries are mentioned in Deuteronomy (1:7, 11:24); in Joshua and in Ezekiel (47:15-20); and the Jewish commentators have worked diligently trying to identify the various place names, to determine whether the maps can be harmonized, or whether there is a way to explain the discrepancies between them.
Though the right of Israel to these territories is expressed in absolute terms–as a “possession” or an “inheritance”–there are some intriguing reservations placed on this principle.
It is made clear to Abraham that even God will not simply evict the current occupants on the basis of the his children’s claim to the land, but that the Hebrews must wait patiently until the Amorites have become sufficiently depraved to deserve expulsion.
And as the talmudic rabbis commented, the Patriarch’s divinely promised ownership of the land did not prevent him from having to haggle with Ephron over the purchase of a burial plot in Hebron.
What strikes me in reading Talmudic discussions about the geographical boundaries of the Promised Land is how academic they all seem to be. Jews, as you may be aware, prefer to devote their intellectual passion to matters of law. There are expressions that appear in the Talmud when the discussion seems to become too theoretical or historical: such as Mai nafka minnah (What practical difference emerges from this?) or Mai dehava hava! (What happened happened! Why should we be interested in mere historical questions?). And in truth, the matter of historical borders appears to have been understood as such a question. The boundaries may have reflected the actual extent of Jewish sovereignty at some point in the past, or they might be an as-yet-unfulfilled vision that will be realized in the messianic future. Either way, they would have no obvious practical implications for us, and hence are outside the domain of useful talmudic discourse.
The preceding statement is best illustrated by examining the halakhic boundaries of the Land of Israel. According to Jewish law, the determining of borders does indeed have practical halakhic relevance for several areas of Jewish law, especially the agricultural regulations such as tithing, the sabbatical year, etc. that, according to the prevailing rabbinic view, only apply (at least, by Torah authority) within the Land of Israel. For in Judaism, it is the applicability of Torah laws that defines a place’s sanctity, not historical memories or metaphysical auras.
In this context, rabbinic literature does attempt to define the legal borders of the Land of Israel. Specific landmarks are identified, and the topic’s urgency is indicated by the fact that the relevant Talmudic passage was copied in full on the Mosaic floor of a 7th-century synagogue in Beit Shean that was excavated in 1974.
One fact that emerges clearly from all the talmudic references to the halakhic boundaries of Israel is that they bear very little relationship to any of the biblical descriptions. The rabbinic borders are quite modest, limited to the territories that were settled by Jews during the early Second-Temple era. The northern border runs through Acre, and the southern through Ashkelon, while the Shomron is excluded altogether. The Talmud states that the sanctity of the more extensive territory that had been settled after the Egyptian Exodus was canceled out with the first exile. A new situation was created at the time of the restoration of Judea under Ezra and Nehemiah, and it was the people themselves who determined what territories would carry sanctity. Of course, the religious leaders of the time were well aware of the previous promises of wider boundaries that had been guaranteed to Abraham, Moses and Ezekiel–but there is a perception that this was God’s problem, not something that affected their practical affairs. The people of Israel must work with the geographical cards that history had dealt them.
Later, under Roman rule, when the Jewish majority in Israel had to struggle to retain their hold on ancestral lands in the face of political and economic challenges, the local rabbis motivated their flocks to remain by emphasizing the religious value of dwelling in the holy land, and the grave transgressions involved in leaving it, even under economic or political pressure.
Conversely, Diaspora leaders–responding perhaps to a “brain drain” of their best scholars and to the social breakdown left in their wake by young students impulsively deciding to move to Eretz Yisrael–preached that such behaviour violated the divine punishment for which they had been exiled in the first place.
The arguments of both sides would of course be adduced by later generations.
A fundamental ambivalence about the relative roles of God and man in the redemption of Eretz Yisrael can be discerned in the controversies of the medieval rabbis.
Of course, all traditional Jews include in their daily prayers requests for the restoration of the House of David, the ingathering of the exiles and the rebuilding of Jerusalem. However, serious differences arose when it came to the translating those aspirations into practical imperatives. Thus, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, codifiers of Jewish law had to cope with the question of whether the Jews of their time were under the obligation to settle the Holy Land.
Maimonides included no such commandment in his comprehensive enumeration of the 613 precepts of the Torah. As generally understood, he interpreted the various biblical exhortations to that effect as applying only to the time of Joshua’s conquest, implying that since those times the obligation was, at most, of rabbinic authority.
Nahmanides challenged Maimonides on that point, insisting that the settlement of the Land of Israel is an absolute imperative valid in all times. Nahmanides himself went on aliyyah, and counted that commandment among the 613.
Other authorities were more equivocal. Some, like a certain Rabbi Hayyim Cohen cited in the Tosafot, were afraid of the difficult halakhic burden that would weigh upon Jews in the Holy Land. Others, while recognizing the obligation in principle, acknowledged that there might be mitigating circumstances that could legitimately keep people from packing their bags for Jerusalem.
Having sketched out the historical background, let us proceed to examine how religious Judaism in our own times has responded to the challenge of defining the meaning of Eretz Yisrael in connection with the reborn State of Israel.
As most of you are probably aware, 1997 marks the centenary anniversary of the first Zionist Congress, convened by Theodore Herzel in Basle. The famous programme proclaimed at that congress called for “the creation for the Jewish people of a home in Palestine secured by public law.” Whether we see this programme as a response to ancient religious yearnings or to the recent persecutions of European Jewry, it is hard not to acknowledge its legitimacy–if not its feasibility.
Let us see therefore what actual responses were prompted by the Basle declarations.
The following letter was issued by the German Rabbinerverband (Union of Rabbis) even as the ink was drying on the Basle platform. Its signatories, I should note, included leaders from both the Reform and Orthodox camps–a trick that was as rare in those polarized times as it is in our own. Among other things, the letter states:
The efforts of the so-called Zionists to create a Jewish National State in Palestine are antagonistic to the messianic promises of Judaism, as contained in Holy Writ and in later religious sources.
In order to appreciate the vehemence of this response, we must bear in mind some distinctive features of central European Judaism during the nineteenth century. Jewish tradition at that time was being radically reinterpreted so as to permit Jews to respond positively to the new opportunities that were being offered by their countries of residence. The liberal ideology that underlay the modern nation-state granted political equality to all people as individuals, provided that those people were prepared to declare their unswerving loyalty to the state in which they lived. Most of the religious reforms that were being proposed by Jewish leaders at that time can be viewed as attempts to facilitate Jewish participation in European society.
In light of these needs, it should not be all that surprising that the traditional Jewish ideals of peoplehood and messianic redemption were felt to be problematic. How could they claim to be loyal and patriotic citizens of Germany, France or Austria when they continually prayed for the restoration of their national sovereignty on their ancestral soil? Moreover, in a culture that viewed religion in terms of universal theological and moral truths, what justification could be found for the Jewish equation of religion with narrow nationalism?
The response of many European Jews to these challenges involved some radical new understandings of the concepts of messianism. The traditional images of a king from the house of David and of the ingathering to Jerusalem could now be seen as mere metaphors for the ideals of enlightenment and equality that were making themselves felt in modern Western society. Judaism, they argued, is a system of beliefs that transcends parochial restrictions, and German Jews have more in common with their Christian neighbours than with their “coreligionists” in Poland or Morocco. For supposedly modern Jews to proclaim their hope for a literal return to Zion must therefore be viewed as nothing less than a reversion to superstitious medievalism!
While we are used to identifying these attitudes with the Reform movement, this episode serves to remind us that, notwithstanding all the differences that separated them, German Orthodoxy, especially that associated with the school of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, shared many of the fundamental assumptions of their Reform brethren, especially in their enthusiasm for German culture and the problems that posed for the national dimensions of their Judaism.
Eastern Europe was of course a different story. Neither Jew nor Gentile in Russia, Poland or the Ukraine had any doubts that the Jews constituted an ethnic community with its own languages and culture. Here dwelt a solid core of traditionalists who were untroubled by the literal meaning of the daily prayers for the speedy advent of the Messiah, the ingathering of the exiles and the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem.
Here we have reason to expect that the sympathies of the religious leadership would be with the Zionists, and that the Basle platform would be endorsed universally.
And thus wrote the great Hasidic leader, Rabbi Zadok Hacohen of Lublin: A voice was heard from on high, a voice of lamentation… It concerns the sect that has arisen recently under the name of Zionists. They drag iniquity by cords of vanity and lift up their souls to folly… For this my heart grieves exceedingly… The Zionists sow wheat and reap thorns and even though the work of Satan should prosper, the end will be, Heaven forbid, what it will be…
As Rabbi Zadok goes on to explain, he has a number of grave objections to the Zionist cause. Unlike his central European counterparts, he asserts his commitment to the sanctity of the Land of Israel and its eternal bond with the people of Israel. However, it is precisely the sanctity of the land that invalidates Zionism in his eyes.
Exile, from the perspective of Jewish religious tradition, is a punishment for the sins of the Jews, who were deemed by the Almighty to be unworthy of the holy soil. Seen from this perspective, messianic redemption can only be the result of a widespread turning to the life and ideals of Torah, an opportunity for living a full and devout life of sanctity in an environment untainted by profanity. Such a redemption will be accomplished miraculously, by the hand of God.
The reality of Zionism demonstrated clearly that it was the antithesis of those traditional ideas. At no other period in its history was the Jewish community so corrupted by the influences of secularism and modernity. The Zionist leadership consisted primarily of freethinkers who had abandoned the Torah and its precepts in favour of foreign ideologies.
Of course, Rabbi Zadok’s arguments have remained virtually unchanged until today, and they can still be heard even from individuals who currently sit in the Israeli parliament. Ultimately, his principal objections are not to Zionism per se, as much as they are to the Zionists. Whatever the reasons, it is an undeniable historical fact that, from its beginnings, the Jewish nationalist cause came to be dominated by figures who were actively hostile to traditional Judaism and its rabbinic leadership.
Although Rabbi Zadok and his many successors are able to support their position with learned talmudic proof texts and theological arguments about the impropriety of human interference in the divine historical plan, there is no doubt in my historian’s mind that all those arguments must be viewed as secondary to the fundamental power struggle between two rival claimants to communal leadership. Of course, that century-old struggle is still playing itself out in Israel and abroad.
From everything that has been said so far you might get the impression that all the major movements of religious Judaism were inimical to the Jewish national movement for one reason or the other. While this was generally the case until the actual establishment of the Jewish state, there were some significant exceptions to the pattern.
Indeed there were a number of rabbis who were calling for the establishment of Jewish settlements in Eretz Israel well before Herzel. These includes such figures as Zvi Hirsch Kallischer, Joseph Mohilever and Judah Alkalai. Although all these figures invoked the religious vocabulary of messianism and sacred soil, maintaining that there is nothing in Jewish belief that rules out the possibility a human initiative, it is important to note that their chief motivations were identical to those of Herzel and the secular Zionists, based on a realistic assessment of the bleak situation of European Jewry, especially under the viciously antisemitic policies of the Russian Czars, and a pragmatic understanding of the political options available. This basic approach found expression in the founding manifesto of the Mizrachi religious Zionist movement in the wake of the fifth Zionist Congress in Basle in 1902:
In the lands of the Diaspora the soul of our people–our holy Torah–can no longer be preserved in its full strength, nor can the commandments, which comprise the entire spiritual life of the people, because the times are besieging us with difficult demands…
The Mizrachi perceived Zionism primarily as an antidote to assimilation and persecution, hoping that the national revival would also generate a spiritual renaissance when Jews were given the opportunity to live whole and undiluted religious lives on their ancestral land. They barely mention the eschatological dimensions (though there were of course formidable exceptions to this pattern, such as Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook), and the Mizrachi continued to make common cause with the mainstream secular and socialist streams of the Zionist movement.
American Reform Judaism also included a small but influential pro-Zionist faction whose importance increased as the movement’s original German constituency became outnumbered by Jews of Eastern European extraction. As early as 1937, the Columbus Platform affirmed their commitment to Jewish peoplehood. While confirming that Jews must be patriotic citizens of the lands where they reside, the Platform also stated:
In the rehabilitation of Palestine, the land hallowed by memories and hopes, we behold the promise of renewed life for many of our brethren. We affirm the obligation of all Jewry to aid in its upbuilding as a Jewish homeland by endeavoring to make it not only a haven of refuge for the oppressed but also a center of Jewish cultural and spiritual life.
And those of you who are familiar with present-day Jerusalem–Have you ever wondered how it happened that the Israeli government ever consented to turn over one of the capital’s juiciest pieces of real estate, next to the King David Hotel, to the Hebrew Union College, the seminary of a movement that is all but outlawed in Israel? The rumour in wide circulation–which I personally find completely plausible–has it that this privilege was granted in return for vital assistance that had been given to the Zionists prior to the War of Independence by the institute’s president, the distinguished biblical archeologist Nelson Glueck whose extensive excavations in Transjordan had been accompanied by valuable intelligence gathering.
If Zionism proved problematic to the Reform movement as well as to the Orthodox traditionalists in both Eastern and Western Europe, it should be noted that there was one branch of religious Judaism for whom the commitment to Jewish peoplehood led to an unswerving support for Zionism. I am referring to the “Positive Historical” school founded by Zacharias Frankel which evolved into the Conservative Movement in America. This movement had its origins in 1846 at the Breslau Conference of the Reform movement, from which Frankel walked out in anger because he felt that the Reformers were turning Judaism into a theological abstraction without due appreciation of the centrality of Jewish peoplehood and historical continuity (as demonstrated in their belittling the place of the Hebrew language in the liturgy). Support (often unrequited) for the Zionist enterprise and for Israel have remained a feature of Conservative Judaism throughout its history.
The issue of defining Israel’s proper borders was of limited importance as a religious question during the earlier period of Zionist activity. While there was a general recognition that Jews had rights over both sides of the Jordan, and some real expectation that they might obtain it all as long as it was all included in the British mandate, the force of historical circumstances forced most Zionists to lower their sights and be glad to get any part of Palestine–or, according to some factions, even a substitute like Uganda or Madagascar. The Revisionist opposition to the acceptance of the UN. partition plan was a matter of political ideology, and not primarily a religious issue.
As for the other movements, many of the early controversies were rendered moot by history. The tragic plight of the displaced remnants of the Holocaust made the establishment of the Jewish national home into a matter of urgency, and once the State of Israel had become a fact, there no longer seemed to be much point to the heated debates of previous decades. To be sure, there were still extreme factions in both the Reform and Orthodox camps whose ideological opposition to Zionism persisted even after statehood, but most of the world’s Jews became committed to the survival of the fragile state and its population of refugees. Indicative of this consensus was the widespread adoption of Israeli Independence Day as a religious holiday with a status similar to Hanukkah or Purim.
Although messianic allusions, and their implications as regards the extent of Israel’s territory, were part of the rhetoric of both secular and religious Zionists, they did not occupy a prominent place in either, since with the rise of Hitler there were enough immediate concerns to occupy the Zionists and to justify their original minimalist programme of providing a place of refuge for persecuted Jews. The miraculous proportions of the Jewish victory in the War of Independence were not lost on its contemporaries; nor were the conceptual links to the gruesome catastrophes that were expected to precede the redemption–the “War of Gog and Magog” or the “birth pangs of the Messiah”–according to the traditional Jewish eschatological scenario. Nevertheless, I think it is accurate to say that when religious Jews recited the Hallel on the first Yom Ha’atzma’ut it was for most of them as a song of thanksgiving, and not out of a belief that the Messiah had arrived or was at the door.
A watershed in the evolution of religious attitudes towards Israel occurred in 1967. By this time an entire generation of religious Israelis had been quietly educated according to a religious ideology that focused disproportionately on territorial and messianic components of Jewish tradition. The unification of Jerusalem and the expansion of Israel’s borders suddenly lent new relevance to those themes, and there was a surprising receptivity to those ideas among a public that no longer felt satisfied by the various secularist ideologies that had provided motivation to their parents and grandparents. Viewed as the unstoppable unfolding of a preordained historical process, the expansion of Israel’s borders became a central priority in the agenda of Israeli religious Zionism. This idea also proved attractive to some non-religious nationalists who could not justify their territorial claims on political or military grounds.
This momentous transformation of religious Zionism into a messianic movement can be felt on a number of planes. In particular, it has involved a delegitimization of the secular Zionist agenda to which the classic Mizrachi movement had adhered. In the Israeli religious schools, religious devotion is equated with patriotism of a sort that can pit the believer against the elected government; since democracy itself is seen as a questionable institution from the perspective of traditional Judaism. Pragmatic and moral considerations tend to be ignored in favour of ritualistic points of halakhah and dogma. History is rewritten or reinterpreted in such a way that the traditional spiritual links to the holy land as expressed in medieval times through prayer or pilgrimage, are presented as the authentic Zionism. The commitment to religiously defined territorial boundaries is expressed as an absolute obligation, not as a component that must be weighed against other moral and pragmatic factors.
In significant ways, I believe that this type of religious nationalism has more in common with the earlier religious anti-Zionists than with the mainstream Jewish Zionist movement, religious or otherwise. Like Rabbi Zadok Hacohen, it rejects any attempt at Jewish sovereignty that is not part of the messianic scheme. Like those myopic rabbis of earlier generations, it prefers to cite biblical or talmudic concepts rather than confronting the complexities of ethical decisions, politics or historical needs. The decisive difference is, of course, whether or not one believes that we are living in messianic times.
An instructive illustration of these phenomena may be seen in the varying attitudes towards the two calendar celebrations related to events in Israeli history, Israeli Independence day and Jerusalem Liberation Day. As I noted above, Yom Ha’Atzma’ut was adopted as a religious celebration in recognition of its momentous importance in Jewish history, particularly as a haven for the remnants of the Holocaust. The festival’s validity was in no way seen as dependent on eschatological considerations. By contrast, when Yom Yerushalayim came to be celebrated after the Six Day War it was clear that it was no mere commemoration of a military victory, but rather it was tied specifically to a particular piece of sacred territory.
Now the whole concept of “holy places” that derive their sanctity from historical associations is an unusual phenomenon in Jewish tradition. The Bible did not even bother to preserve the locations of many of its most important events, let alone establish days to celebrate conquests or liberations.
Thus, the creation of a modern holiday built around Jerusalem should be recognized as an uncommon occurrence in Judaism, though it is fully consistent with a religious mentality that attaches tremendous importance to soil and territory. What strikes me as even more intriguing is the fact that in Israeli national-religious circles, Jerusalem Day has rapidly eclipsed Independence Day in importance. Whereas a generation ago it was standard for religious Zionists to observe Yom Ha’Atzma’ut with the recitation of a full Hallel (in spite of the equivocations of the official rabbinate), the current norm is to recite full Hallel with blessings only on Jerusalem Day, while relegating Yom Ha’Atzma’ut to the dubious status of half-Hallel without blessings. In addition to distancing themselves thereby from the mainstream Zionist tradition, I would venture to suggest that this trend also reveals their preference for the Land of Israel over the people of Israel in their scale of values.
Although people and land are both cherished values in Judaism, I believe that it is the question the relative importance of the two that will define the agendas of the religious Zionists camps for the foreseeable future.
But of course, in the context of Jewish history “foreseeable future” is something of an oxymoron.
Talk presented to the Jewish Federation of Edmonton, May 22, 1997.
4 And they journeyed from mount Hor by the way of the Red sea, to compass the land of Edom: and the soul of the people was much discouraged because of the way. 5 And the people spake against God, and against Moses, Wherefore have ye brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? for [there is] no bread, neither [is there any] water; and our soul loatheth this light bread. 6 And the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died. 7 Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord, and against thee; pray unto the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us. And Moses prayed for the people. 8 And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. 9 And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.
The passage that we read this morning from the Book of Numbers is one that has caused no end of difficulty for the Jewish commentators who have studied it.
Having arrived at this stage in the Biblical narrative we find it difficult to imagine that the people have still not learned to appreciate the grace and generosity that God has bestowed upon them. At the very least, they ought to have realized that their whinings tend to provoke reactions that can be injurious to their health.
And then there is the strange instrument of chastisement: —serpents. Is there some symbolic appropriateness in the pairing of that punishment with this crime?
And what are we to do with that utterly heathen-sounding prescription for their affliction: gazing at a graven image? Historians have justifiably pointed out the parallels between Moses’ bronze serpent and the “caduceus,” the mythological symbol of the Greek god Asclepius that still decorates hospitals and ambulances. This seems terribly out of place in the Bible.
I would like to share with you some insights from the Jewish exegetical tradition that might furnish solutions to the above puzzles, while suggesting some lessons for our own situation.
Let me begin with the issue of the Israelites’ murmuring:
Is what is described in this passage just another occurrence of the tedious grumbling that has typified the people’s behaviour since the Exodus? A fourteenth-century Spanish Jewish exegete, Rabbi Bahya ben Asher was bothered by the same difficulty with which we have been struggling. In fact, his dilemma was rendered even more acute by the fact that he read the story of the Israelites’ sojourn in the wilderness in the light of the numerous legendary embelishments that had come to surround the story in Jewish tradition.
Seen this way, it was supremely unfair of them to dismiss their rations as “miserable fare.” Quite the contrary, what they were eating was mannah, the same wondrous food that the Psalmist designated “the bread of the angels” (Psalms 78:25). The rabbis lovingly embellished the mannah’s miraculous qualities, including its reputed ability—ike some primordial tofu— to take on the flavour of any food that a person might crave.
[I know of a cartoonist who used this idea as the basis for a pictorial representation of the “Sinai Supermarket,” whose shelves were stocked to the brim with an ample selection of mannah-flakes, manna soup, manna rolls, mannah Stroganoff, diet mannah and… Well, you get the picture.]
The water that they were issued in the desert was also from a supernatural source. The ancient rabbis spoke of a marvellous spring that accompanied the people in their wanderings, by virtue of the righteousness of the prophetess Miriam.
And if these legends should strike you as fantastic, then you should at least be aware that a certain first-century Pharisee from Tarsus was also familiar with the image of how the Hebrews “all ate the same supernatural food and all drank from the same supernatural drink…that accompanied their travels” (1 Corinthians 9:3-4)—using these legends as the basis for his own christological homily.
Seen in the light of all this splendid benificence, says Rabbi Bahya, how can we make any sense of the people’s emphatic dissatisfaction with their diet?
He proposes that their distress stemmed from more profound reasons. It was precisely the unnaturalness of their lives that was bothering them. For when they looked around at the other nations of the world, they discerned no correlation between economics and spirituality; food and drink are distributed with no connection to the recipient’s moral quality.
Not so the people of Israel. Throughout their desert excursion, their sustenance was directly in the hands of the Creator. They had to have faith that their wants would be provided for from one day to the next, for mannah could not be hoarded or stockpiled. Even their water supply was subject to religious regulation: Talmudic legend related, for example, that the above-mentioned spring had been temporarily disconnected following the demise of its patroness, Miriam.
Living their entire lives under that kind of scrutiny made the Israelites exceedingly uncomfortable.
Nor was the problem due to disappear with their entry into the Promised Land. As Moses would later make quite clear to them (Deuteronomy 11:10) “The land that you are entering to inherit is not like the land of Egypt from which you have come, where after sowing seed you irrigated it by foot like a vegetable garden. But the land which you are crossing to occupy is a land of mountains and valleys watered by the rain of heaven. It is a land which the Lord your God tends and on which his eye rests from year’s end to year’s end.”
The upshot of this is that for Jews living on their ancestral soil, economic prosperity would invariably be linked to their nation’s religious behaviour. This is a theme that is hammered home throughout the Bible. And the situation has not changed signficantly since those days. I think that there is a large measure of truth to that ancient perception that there is something in the very physical ecology of the Land of Israel that promotes a religious consciousness.
As Rabbi Bahya was well aware, the point of this whole story was that the Israelites’ complaints were ultimately unacceptable to God, who saw the rejection of “specialness” as a violation of the covenantal mission for which they had been chosen.
As a dutiful Jew, I must accept that verdict, though as I have pondered the episode over the years I have never completely succeeded in stamping out that little voice from within that emerges from time to time and whispers (with intonations that sound uncannily like Tevyeh the dairyman in “Fiddler on the Roof”): O Lord, it is an honour to be the “chosen people,” but why can’t you choose somebody else for a change?! Why indeed cannot the rest of humanity enjoy the honour and pleasure of seeing the direct correlation between their own behaviour and the state of their physical environment?
Well my wish has finally been granted! The entire world is now in the same metaphoric lifeboat that was once the distinctive lot of the Jewish nation. The rapid shrinking of our world, and the huge leaps in our industrial and technological abilities, have brought humanity to a state where we can see the fruits of our actions immediately reflected in the climate, economy and social health.
While it was previously possible for people to dwell in comfort in lands blessed by the Lord with boundless richness, while we despoiled resources and natives on far-away shores, we have now discovered that unchecked greed has come back to our very backyards and kitchens in the form of unbreathable air, poisoned water and deadly radiation.
This is no less true in the social realm: It might have been possible once upon a time to pass our lives in sanitary, safe suburbs, with only the vaguest awareness that somewhere across the tracks there exist pockets of privation, in which dwell individuals and families who have been disadvantaged by bad upbringing, unexpected illnesses and financial downturns. There may have been a time when that other world need not impinge on our own, but that time is long gone. Their suffering penetrates our protected world in the guise of crime, disease, drugs and unwalkable streets strewn with the homeless.
Yes, the world around us reacts quickly and immediately to our abuses, to our unrestrained avarice and insensitivity.
And how can we respond to this situation?
Let us return to the Book of Numbers, and to the bizarre symbol of the bronze serpent.
Now, the serpent has some well-known associations in the Bible. Several of the the Jewish commentators have tried to explain its appearance here by invoking the tale of the Garden of Eden.
To appreciate the significance of this symbol, we need to recognise that the traditional Jewish reading of the “Garden of Eden” story differs from the classical Christian version. While the serpentine tempter has often been identified in both faiths as Satan, Jews have never understood Satan to be a being outside of God’s command, or a rebel against divine authority. In his role as a sort of cosmic prosecuting attorney, Satan is entrusted with the jobs of testing, entrapping and testifyng against us before the heavenly court. It’s a dirty job—and he sometimes strikes us as performing it with excessive zeal—but it must be done to maintain order in the world.
The ancient rabbis equated both the primordial serpent and Satan himself with a force known as the “yetzer ha-ra.” This Hebrew expression is often translated as “the evil urge,” but this translation is dangerously misleading. According to the Jewish understanding, the good Lord implanted into every human being this yetzer ha-ra, a drive that combines features of ambition, greed and sexual desire.
An extraordinary myth found in the Talmud relates how the Jewish sages, shortly after the Babylonian Captivity, were determined to put an end to this formidable threat. Encouraged by their recent success at eradicating the “urge” to worship idols (an urge that had been such a constant stumbling-block to earlier generations, but which no longer held any appreciable attraction to the Jews of their time),—hese sages now felt (understandably) that they were “on a roll.” So they decided to seize the opportunity to capture and destroy the “yetzer ha-ra” itself. And they were successful. They caught the beast and bound it in chains, eagerly awaiting the moment when they would remove it from the world for all time.
But soon strange reports started arriving: Nobody was showing up at work anymore. No one wanted to marry or raise families. The chickens were not laying eggs!
Now these sages came to the realisation that they had misunderstood the nature of this “evil urge.” For the drives represented in that faculty are essential for the proper functioning of humanity as God planned us to live our lives. The urge is not “evil” in any absolute sense, but only when it is allowed to trespass beyond its legitimate domain. Sexuality is a wonderful gift when invested in a loving marriage and family, but can be perverted into a force for hatred and abuse. And ambition can be an admirable quality when it is channelled towards spiritual creativity and service of humanity, but is a fiery scourge when it is twisted into unrestricted covetousness. It was this failure to set limits to the “yetzer ha-ra” that was represented by the serpent in the Garden of Eden. This made the serpent a suitable instrument of divine punishment—but also of healing.
The conclusion from all this is that our role as humans is not to eliminate the “serpent,” the yetzer ha-ra, but to keep it under control and direct it to a productive course. Jews believe that this is best done by following the values and way of life set down in the Torah. Christians try to achieve it through their faith in Jesus.
Following from the ideas that I have just sketched, allow me to propose my own way of understanding the symbolism of the brazen serpent.
The Mishnah, that eminent compendium of Jewish oral traditions, has explicitly rejected any simplistic magical interpretation of the story: “Does a serpent really hold the power over death or life?” it asks rhetorically. “Rather, as Israel lifted their eyes and gazed upward, they would submit their hearts to their Father in Heaven—and this would bring about their cure.”—
Perhaps, the meditation on the serpent image was intended to teach them something about their roles as a special, holy people. Living under the direct scrutiny of the Almighty does not require that they relinquish the normal, healthy human drives which he has given them. God, as a loving parent, wants nothing more than the happiness of his creatures. Let the serpent remind you of this basic truth, that holiness will be achieved through perfecting your humanity, not by denying it or seeking to transcend it.
I believe that this modest insight might help us find direction in our current dilemmas on the social and global planes. Sometimes we are led to believe that there is something in our very humanity that puts us at odds with God’s plans, and that in order to live in harmony with nature and with the world community we are being called upon to reverse out human natures. The image of the bronze serpent can serve us as a reminder that those basic drives to improve our lot and to provide material comfort for our families are not in themselves evil. However they possess a formidable potential to be turned to evil if they are permitted to exceed their legitimate spheres of activity, when they are emptied of compassion and social or environmental responsiblity.
Somewhere between these extremes we must learn to respect those limits.
And speaking of limits—let me respect my own limits, and those of your patience, by concluding right here. Thank you so much for listening to me.
Guest sermon delivered at St. Cyprian Anglican Church, Calgary, March 9 1997.
1 And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I [am] the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect. 2 And I will make my covenant between me and thee, and will multiply thee exceedingly. 3 And Abram fell on his face: and God talked with him, saying, 4 As for me, behold, my covenant [is] with thee, and thou shalt be a father of many nations. 5 Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee. 6 And I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee. 7 And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee. 8 And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God. 9 And God said unto Abraham, Thou shalt keep my covenant therefore, thou, and thy seed after thee in their generations. 10 This [is] my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised. 11 And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you. 12 And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any stranger, which [is] not of thy seed. 13 He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised: and my covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant. 14 And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant. 15 And God said unto Abraham, As for Sarai thy wife, thou shalt not call her name Sarai, but Sarah [shall] her name [be]. 16 And I will bless her, and give thee a son also of her: yea, I will bless her, and she shall be [a mother] of nations; kings of people shall be of her. 17 Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall [a child] be born unto him that is an hundred years old? and shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear? 18 And Abraham said unto God, O that Ishmael might live before thee! 19 And God said, Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son indeed; and thou shalt call his name Isaac: and I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, [and] with his seed after him. 20 And as for Ishmael, I have heard thee: Behold, I have blessed him, and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly; twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation. 21 But my covenant will I establish with Isaac, which Sarah shall bear unto thee at this set time in the next year. 22 And he left off talking with him, and God went up from Abraham.
The perception of being the children of Abraham is one that is central to the Jewish religious consciousness. Three times each day, the traditional liturgy begins with a passage that underscores our relationship with “Our God and the God of our fathers.” Though the other Patriarchs are mentioned briefly in the prayer, the blessing culminates in words full of meaning: “Sovereign who helps, saves and protects—Blessed are you Lord God, the Shield of Abraham.” Converts to Judaism are officially classified as “children of our father Abraham,” in fulfilment of the divine pledge that he would become “the father of nations.”
Nowhere in traditional Judaism is there an equivalent role assigned to Isaac, Jacob, or even Moses. It was through Abraham that the identity of Israel as a religious community was defined.
Generations of Jewish teachers have striven to identify that special quality of Abraham that made him worthy of initiating a special covenant with God. I wish to share with you here some of the insights that they have brought to bear on this question, along some of my own dubious contributions to it.
The Jewish mystical tradition sees the personalities of the Bible as embodiments of divine qualities and attributes. It is significant that the quality assigned to Abraham was hesedagapé. Indeed, among the many examples that can be adduced from Abraham’s conduct, we might mention his urgently challenging God for the lives of the people of Sodom; his readiness to forego his territorial rights in the face of a dispute with Lot’s shepherds; and his welcoming in of three strangers on a hot day, as he was convalescing from a painful circumcision.
From the fact that God chose Abraham for such a central task, we might be justified, at the very least, in surmising that selfless hesed is to be a decisive part of the religious personality that is to be associated with the legacy of Abraham.
This very theme was expressed by an ancient Rabbi as an interpretation of Moses’ summary of the covenantal history in Deuteronomy 7:
The Lord did not set his love upon you nor choose you because ye were more in number.. But because the Lord loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he swore unto your fathers, hath the Lord brought you out with a mighty hand…
Know therefore that the Lord thy God, He is God; the faithful God who keepeth the covenant and mercy with them that love him”
Rabbi Hiyya encapsulated the lessons of this passage in a comment that, we hope, goes beyond mere wishful thinking
Israel possess three good qualities: They are shamefaced, they are compassionate and they perform acts of kindness (ḥesed).
But of course Abraham alone could not have produced a legacy for future generations. In this task he had a capable partner, Sarah. If I may again refer to the insights of the Jewish mystics, Sarah was viewed by them as a representative of the divine presence in the world, the Shekhinah, a concept closely akin to the Christian idea of the Holy Spirit.
For it is a crucial feature of Jewish piety that the spirit does not remove itself from the marketplace, nor should humans be striving to liberate themselves from involvement in the material world. On the contrary, our role is to bring the Divine down to the world so that the world will become imbued with the divine spirit. Traditional Jews see the performance of the commandments, the mitzvot, as the vehicle for imprinting the world with God’s will. It was this facet of God’s “worldliness,” his direct involvement in the human condition that is represented in the personality of the Matriarch Sarah, whose solid realism frequently reins in the excesses of her husband’s uncritical generosity.
It seems to me that these two personality types were meant to work in a careful balance. It is only through the combination of their qualities that the divine will could be transmitted to future generations of humanity. Furthermore, this is a mission that they could achieve only as parents. Although Jewish tradition has portrayed Abraham and Sarah as prototypical evangelists of God’s message—a theme that reflected the Jewish missionary role in pagan antiquity, and was evoked by a typically midrashic reading of the reference in Genesis 12:5 to “the souls that they had gotten in Haran”— there is nevertheless an overwhelming consciousness that no matter how many souls and disciples Abraham and Sarah might have amassed through their preaching and example, their covenantal mission could only be accomplished through the special relationship that exists within a biological family. The promise of offspring was the pivotal element in God’s promise to them, and its delayed fulfilment was a source of profound sorrow to the aging couple.
It is therefore so fascinating to see how each of them responds to the announcement that after decades of childlessness, they are about to have the child for whom they have waited with such prolonged anguish.
On the surface, it seems that the reaction is similar: They laugh.
“Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said in his heart ‘Shall a child be born unto him that is a hundred years old? And shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear?'” (Gen. 17:17).
Sarah reacts similarly in the next chapter (Gen 18:12), when the mysterious visitor informs her of her imminent motherhood. “And Sarah laughed within herself, saying ‘After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?'”
The divine response to Sarah’s laughter is different than it was to her husband’s. God makes a point of calling it to Abraham’s attention, and stubbornly rejects Sarah’s attempt to deny her laughter.
[I should add parenthetically a delightful observation made here by the Talmudic rabbis. If you carefully compare what Sarah actually said to God, with what God reported her to Abraham as saying, you will notice a small discrepancy. Sarah was incredulous at the announcement because she was old “and my lord [i.e., Abraham] being old also” —However when God paraphrases this to Abraham, he leaves out the part about Abraham’s being old! —so as to avoid any possibility of Abraham’s taking offence at what might have been a sensitive issue in their household!
The sages derive from this a valuable lesson: In the interests of maintaining harmonious relations between a husband and wife, even God did not hesitate to bend the truth a little…]
The classical Jewish commentators were understandably troubled by this apparent double standard, in which God seems to flare up impatiently at Sarah’s momentary loss of control —when Abraham’s ostensibly identical reaction earlier was passed over in silence. Most of them tried to resolve the inconsistency by proposing subtle conceptual differences in the motives and the quality of the laughter in the respective cases: Abraham’s laughter was an expression of trusting joy, while Sarah’s was giving vent to her doubts and skepticism in the face of a divine assurance.—This distinction was incorporated into the “Targum,” the ancient Aramaic translation of the Torah.
With all due respect to those great sages of the past, I would like to propose a somewhat different reading of the story. Somehow, I do not see God’s exchange with Sarah as an angry or confrontational one. Quite the contrary—The Almighty is trying to point out to her the importance of her utterly human response to the news. Sarah herself fears that it was inappropriate and disrespectful for her to laugh, as it were, in the face of God. It was a detail that she would be likely to omit from her memoirs. Unlike Abraham, who laughed out loud for all to see, Sarah laughed “within herself,” embarrassed to give public expression to her feelings.
To paraphrase a later Jewish teacher: “Wheresoever this story shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her” —God seems determined to remind all concerned that the laughter was integral to his plan, and to the covenantal mission. The memory of the laughter is so inseparable from the story of Sarah’s pregnancy that God has already commanded Abraham that the child shall be named in honour of that very laughter “Yitzhak”: meaning “He shall laugh”!
I would be the last to ignore the many weighty ideals and spiritual values that are involved in the divine covenant—maybe we could discuss this on some other occasion. At the present moment, however, it strikes me as supremely important that the laughter of Abraham and Sarah should be appreciated in all its profound importance, for somehow it plays a decisive role in that grand design. The first fruit of that covenant was named “Isaac” for laughter, and there is an implication that people who are incapable of a spontaneous chuckle, even in the presence of the Almighty, are not considered worthy of participating in the covenant.
A longstanding Jewish tradition sees the career of Abraham as a sequence of trials, commencing with his call to leave his homeland for an unidentified destination, and culminating in the command to sacrifice his son. Perhaps we are justified in seeing the present episode as a trial of a different sort: Had Abraham and Sarah not reacted to God’s promise with irrepressible laughter, then they would have failed the test! They would have been declared unworthy bearers of God’s covenant.
Think of it: Neither the loving compassion of Abraham, nor Sarah’s representation of God’s presence in our world, could be achieved by people who did not know how to laugh. I am sure that we are all familiar with some of those dour ideologists—and fanatics—who can sincerely declare “I love humanity, it’s just people I can’t stand” and who are ready to sacrifice people for an exalted principle! Evidently, these are not the kind of people that God had in mind. The Rabbis, as usual, have expressed this succinctly: “The Torah was not given to the Ministering angels.”
Maybe this explains why it was so important for God’s plan that the covenant be transmitted from parents to children. For all the pleasure that I derive from my students, it is clear there is something so fundamental to the sheer joy of parenthood, the experience of a baby’s giggles, that leads me to suspect that all other forms of laughter and humour derive from this root experience. Until one has experienced it—and been deflated by it—one is not fully human. In this respect, I find a telling difference between the traditional Jewish attitudes and our contemporary Western ones,—that the Hebrew abstract noun derived from the word for “womb” (rehem) means “compassion”; whereas its etymological counterpart in European languages is “hysteria.”
Sarah laughed at the prospect that at the age of ninety she would be enjoying the pleasures of motherhood. There is some satisfaction in noting that her good humour was in fact inherited by her son. When Isaac grew up and followed his parents’ example in trying to present his wife Rebecca as his sister (Gen. 26), what gave them away was that he was spotted “sporting [employing the same Hebrew word that is translated in our passage is “laughing”] with Rebecca.”
I don’t know exactly what it was that they were doing, but since it was enough to prove that they were not siblings, then I would guess that they weren’t just playing Scrabble®. Evidently, they were were involved in a public display of affection; or in other words: (if you’ll pardon the expression) making out! and having a good time of it. What a delightful statement this makes about the natural quality and good humour of their married life!
And doesn’t this also teach us something about Isaac’s and Rebecca’s suitability to be the continuers of the covenant?
If you found that what I have said is laughable, than I will consider that the highest of compliments.
Guest sermon delivered at St. Laurence Anglican Church, Calgary, February 23 1997.
