Drashot

Rosh Hashanah is here once again, inviting us to review and renew our lives. Judaism is a religion of moral purpose, not one of individual salvation. It is the community and our relationships, with God and with each other, that matter the most. How we live here and now will determine our future, in this world and, if you believe in it, in the world-to-come. Rosh Hashanah is our annual opportunity to begin again, to be different, to grow and to change for the better. Why then do we read the Akeida, the story of Abraham almost sacrificing his son at God’s command? Perhaps one reason is to remind us that living a moral life, doing good and caring for others, is hard. It demands sacrifice. Not like the sacrifice God demanded of Abraham, but a sacrifice nonetheless, of not putting our needs first. Living a Jewish life, or any moral life, is not easy, but it is deeply satisfying. Caring for our needs above all is a lonely way to live. Being in relationship, with our family, with friends, with our community, and with God is the way to a life of meaning and purpose. Shannah tovah u’metukah… may you have a good and sweet New Year.

In one week we will stand together at the beginning of Rosh Hashanah and the start of another year. We welcome the Jewish new year with serious introspection, not with revelry. On Rosh Hashanah we recommit to being the best people we can. In the Jewish view of human development we are works in progress; on a path of growth and change. This week’s Torah portion begins with the words, “You stand this day, all of you, before your God —your tribal heads, your elders, and your officials, every householder in Israel. your children, your wives, even the stranger within your camp, from woodchopper to waterdrawer—to enter into the covenant of your God.” (Deuteronomy 29:9-11) All of us stood together, before God, at Sinai. Not just those present on that day. All of us, to this present day. Our Torah portion asks us, what do we stand for, what are our values and commitments? Rosh Hashanah is an opportunity to reflect on who we are and what we care about and then to put those commitments into action. In one week we will all stand together in the synagogue. As you prepare for that day, think about what you stand for when you stand with your community.

At the most fundamental level, Jewish religion is not interested in the world to come, but in the world we inhabit now. The fundamental moral question of Jewish religion is how do we create a society that reflects God’s will for humanity? How we interact with each other each day is the concern of Judaism; morality is meaningless if we do not practice it in our lives. 

This week’s Torah portion, Ki Teitze, takes the command of last week, “Justice, justice shall you pursue,” (Deuteronomy 16:20) and shows us how we pursue justice each day. It may seem like a jumble of unrelated laws covering lost property (which must be returned to the owner or held in trust for them), the treatment of women taken prisoner in war (the Hebrew captor must marry them or set them free), wives that are not loved by their husbands (cannot be mistreated and must be divorced and financially compensated), respect for parents, or the obligation to build a guard rail around a roof, shoo a mother bird away from the nest before taking her eggs for food, or leaving some of the harvest for the needy and having honest weights and measures. What all these different laws have in common is legal prohibition against maximizing one’s own interest in favor of treating the more vulnerable members of society fairly. The moral principle underlying this vision is, “Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and that your God יהוה redeemed you from there;” (Deuteronomy 24:18). Commenting on this verse, Ramban (14th C. Spain) wrote, “Scripture mentioned the slave for this reason, namely, that you do not pervert the justice due him.” In other words, how we treat the weakest and most vulnerable among us is the measure of society’s morality. This is one reason that throughout history, autocrats and dictators have identified Jews as their enemy. Authoritarians justify the rule of the strong through force. The Jewish people stand on the side of the weak and the vulnerable.

Israel is currently riven by great political division. The current government is trying to reform the judicial system and change the power relationship between the judiciary and the legislative/executive branch of the government. This has triggered massive protests, bringing 500,000 protesters into the streets for seven consecutive months. While conflict has exacerbated some of the basic divisions in Israeli society and both sides seem unable to compromise; ironically, many Israelis feel that some judicial reform is justified. It isn’t the issue, but rather how it is being carried out that has triggered the political conflict, with the government trying to unilaterally pass these reforms and the opposition questioning their motives. 

It did not have to be this way. In this week’s Torah portion we read, “Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that your God is giving you.” (Deuteronomy 16:20) Many of our Sages commenting on this verse (Rashi, Ibn Ezra and Ramban) although they lived in different times and places agree that the repetition of the word justice means that a society must pursue justice, justly. The ends do not justify the means; the means are the ends. If an idea is right or a cause righteous, our sages believed that you must persuade others to follow you. Perhaps if the current government had heeded this wisdom the current crisis could have been avoided.

Our society is obsessed with success. We celebrate the wealthy, the powerful, and the famous. Our society holds them up as the paragons of virtue and ideals that we should all strive to emulate. Judaism is counter-cultural and views our life’s purpose very differently. God asks human beings to remain committed to growth and change; to become better people; to be good, kind, fair and compassionate. This is what God expects of us and is the Jewish measure of personal success. The other measure, of a society’s success, is how we treat the most vulnerable, “If, however, there is a needy person among you, one of your kin in any of your settlements in the land that your God is giving you, do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kin. Rather, you must open your hand and lend whatever is sufficient to meet the need.” (Deuteronomy 15:7-8) Rashi (11th C Germany) interprets “you must open your hand,” as give a gift to the needy and “lend” as, if the needy person will not accept the gift then give them the loan. Ibn Ezra (12th C Spain) wrote that “needy kin” means that we must put the needs of the poor ahead of those of others. What a profound contrast to our own society. Jewish religion does not see poverty as a personal failing, but as an economic condition that cannot be tolerated and must be ameliorated. That is the sign of a moral and just society. Would that ours would be so.

This Shabbat is the second of the seven Shabbats leading up to Rosh Hahshanah. It follows Tisha b’Av, the saddest day of the Jewish year, when both Temples were destroyed. One way to look at the calendar is to think that our lives exist between these two poles, the despair of Tisha b’Av and the hope of Rosh Hashanah. How do we choose to live our lives? This week’s Torah portion builds on this idea: “When you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in, and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered, beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget your God… and you say to yourselves, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.” Remember that it is your God who gives you the power to get wealth,” (Deuteronomy 8:11-18) There is a deep humility in this teaching. We are not the complete authors of our lives or destinies. Much of what we consider success is due to luck, or chance, or God’s grace. It is good for us to remember that we should approach life with optimism, gratitude and humility. We are not the center of the universe or the hero in our own story. We are part of a much bigger mosaic, the web of life itself. We should always remember it is God who gives us the power to get wealth, and by extension to accomplish anything in life. We should be grateful. That is the best antidote for despair.

Shabbat. That the Jews rested did not bother them; Romans too enjoyed leasure. What shocked the Romans was that the Jews also allowed their servants to rest on Shabbat. This was unheard of to them and seemed a violation of the social hierarchy. 

In this week’s Torah portion we read, “Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of your God יהוה; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave,… Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and your God יהוה freed you from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore your God יהוה has commanded you to observe the sabbath day.” (Deuteronomy 5:12 – 15) 

Our Torah taught that because we were once slaves we had to treat our slaves and servants with the respect worthy of any human being, including Shabbat. In this sense, the Torah teaches that all human beings are equal; none is better than another, and all deserve rest and renewal. In today’s economy where technology continues to erase the boundaries between work and our private lives, and employers expect their employees to be available at all times it is wise to remember these words, that the difference between a free person and a slave is the right to control their own time, to be able to work and to rest. 

Commenting on this verse, Nahmanides (14th C. Spain) wrote, “to observe the Sabbath because of our having been slaves, working all day against our will and never having rest, and he commanded us now to abstain from work and rest in order that we remember the kindnesses of G-d towards us in bringing us forth from slavery to rest.” The Sabbath is a constant reminder that we are imbued with dignity as creations of God and have greater value than our economic utility. Make this Shabbat a real day of rest.

Rabbi Larry Kushner once said that Jews hold the Torah to be sacred because it is open to infinite interpretation. The Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) is not sacred because it is the word of God, fixed and unchanging, as fundamentalists declare, it is sacred because as we change our understanding of it changes. This is true for the final book of the Torah, Devarim, or Deuteronomy in English, which we begin reading this Shabbat. Rather than a continuation of the Torah it is a recapitulation of the events and laws described in the previous four books of the Torah. But it is more than that; it is a reinterpretation of many of those events and laws. Commenting on the first verse of our Torah portion, Nahmanides (14th C. Spain) wrote, “that he [Moses] would repeat them [the commandments] in order to clarify them further and to give additional instruction about them.” Moses did this because the Israelites who were about to enter the land of Israel were a new generation. They were not the Hebrew slaves who left Egypt, but a new generation raised in freedom and life in the wilderness. Their understanding was different, so Moses had to reinterpret God’s word for their conditions. So it has continued for the Jewish people throughout history: as our historical conditions change our understanding and interpretation of God’s word change. The Torah remains constant, but our understanding is always developing.  This is the tension of Jewish religious thought. 

Israel is embroiled in one of the biggest conflicts in its history, the proposed reform of the Israeli Supreme Court and judicial system. Those proposing the reforms argue that it is a necessary correction to give the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) the power it deserves and limit the court’s ability to cancel legislation. Those opposing the reform argue that it is not a corrective but an attempt to neuter the only effective check on the Israeli parliament, enabling it to pass any law it wishes thus pushing Israel closer to an authoritarian regime rather than a democratic one. Wherever one may stand on this issue, this is a moment that reminds us that what happens in the State of Israel matters and we must be engaged with it, at least at certain moments. In this week’s Torah portion the tribes of Reuven and Gad do not want to enter the Land of Israel. They wish to remain on the East side of Jordan River, land which they view as ideal for herding cattle, their primary occupation. Moses gives them permission to do so under the following conditions, “if you go to battle as shock-troops, at the instance of God, and every shock-fighter among you crosses the Jordan, at the instance of God, until [God] has personally dispossessed the enemies, and the land has been subdued,” In other words, these two tribes receive permission to live outside of the Holy Land as long as they commit to fighting with their fellow Israelites to conquer the Land of Israel. This story from our Torah reminds us that all Jews have a stake in what happens in Israel, whether we live there or not. As it says in the Talmud (Shavuot 39a), “The entire Jewish people are responsible for one another.” 

I imagine a bumper sticker I have never seen that reads, “God is not a bigot.” It comes to me every time a person, religious or not, declares another as less-than-human for who they are: whether they are queer or non-gender conforming, or their skin color is different, or they are women who demand equal treatment to men, a different  religion, or ethnicity. Our Torah teachers us that all human beings are created בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹהִ֖ים (b’tzelem elohim) “in God’s image.” (Genesis 1:27), i.e. everyone is a reflection of God. This idea, that God created everyone and accepts everyone and that it is our limited perception that distorts this reality is reinforced in this week’s Torah portion where we read about the daughters of Zelophehad. “The names of the daughters were Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah.” (Numbers 27:1) The Torah continues, “They stood before Moses, Eleazar the priest, the chieftains, and the whole assembly, at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting, and they said, Our father died in the wilderness. He was not one of the faction, Korah’s faction, which banded together against God, but died for his own sin; and he has left no sons. Let not our father’s name be lost to his clan just because he had no son! Give us a holding among our father’s kinsmen!” (Numbers 27:3-4) In other words, their father died without having any sons and, as women, his daughters are not entitled to inherit his land holdings in the Land of Israel, so it will pass out of the family. Women in ancient Israel, like in many cultures, had no legal right of inheritance. It is important to note that these women are bringing their plea to an all male assembly of leaders. Moses does not know what to do, so he brings their request to God. God’s answer is unequivocal, “The plea of Zelophehad’s daughters is just: you should give them a hereditary holding among their father’s kinsmen; transfer their father’s share to them. Further, speak to the Israelite people as follows: ‘If a householder dies without leaving a son, you shall transfer his property to his daughter.” (Numbers 27:7-8) God understands what many of us do not, that all human beings are of equal value. If we all lived our lives guided by that spiritual and moral insight, imagine what a paradise our world might be.