Shlah Lekha

I received a warning this week that you should all be made aware of. As of 10 AM Friday morning – when I last checked - the Department of State of the United States of America would like you all to know that it “urges U.S. citizens to carefully weigh the necessity of their travel to Israel.”

“American citizens are cautioned that a greater danger may exist in the vicinity of restaurants, businesses, and other places associated with U.S. interests and/or located near U.S. official buildings, such as the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv and the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem.” (For those of you who walk up Agron Street to attend services at Moreshet Yisrael, the Consulate General is that compound you pass just down the block.)

“The State Department urges American citizens to remain vigilant while traveling, especially within the commercial and downtown areas of West Jerusalem.”

“American citizens should stay away from demonstrations and generally avoid crowded public places, such as restaurants and cafes, shopping and market areas and malls.”

“U.S. government personnel and family members are expressly prohibited from using Route 443 between Modi'in and Jerusalem for personal travel.”

Just think, I drive up from Modi’in every Friday afternoon on Route 443 in order to be in a synagogue in downtown Jerusalem, right up the block from the US Consulate. I seem to be doing everything wrong.

What am I missing? What do the security experts of the United States Department of State see that I do not?

Well, you could change the name of the country in the State Department’s Advisory to the United States, and with minor adjustments, it would probably ring equally true. In fact, the advisory doesn’t sound very unlike the security briefing I received at freshman orientation at Columbia University, or the advice I received from a policeman when I visited Washington DC as a teenager. But the State Department hasn’t issued warnings about those places.

So, let’s rephrase our question, what did Shammua, Shaphat, Igal, Palti, Gaddiel, Gaddi, Ammiel, Setur, Nahbi, and Geuel see that Joshua and Caleb did not? Why did the ten spies issue a travel warning advising against entering the Land of Israel? Why did Joshua and Caleb want to go, despite what the State Department refers to as “this and prior warnings”? Why does the State Department think it’s any safer for you to be in post nine-eleven America than in Israel? Why did the ten spies and the rest of the Israelites – like the State Department - prefer to live with the dangers of the desert, rather than cross into the Promised Land?

In the case of the State Department, the knee-jerk reaction might be to say that the US State Department is a traditional nest of antisemites. Even if that common perception of the State Department be true, it doesn’t explain the analogous conduct of the ten spies. So rather than try to understand the State Department, why don’t we try to figure out what was going on in the minds of the ten spies. Maybe if we can understand the ten spies, we may have a better understanding of the State Department and of the people who may choose to heed its advisory on travel to Israel.

The first thing we have to establish is that the ten spies were not cowards or criminals, nor were they traitors or heretics. The spies are described as “leaders of the Israelites.” They were chieftains handpicked by Moses. These were men respected by all. They were men who were above reproach, and who could be relied upon to tell the truth. So what happened?

Well, they told the truth.

“We came to the land to which you sent us; it flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. However, the people who dwell in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified and very large; moreover, we saw the descendants of Anak there. The Amalekites dwell in the land of the Negeb; the Hittites, the Jebusites, and the Amorites dwell in the hill country; and the Canaanites dwell by the sea, and along the Jordan.” And they concluded: “We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we.”

In modern parlance, that translates something like this:
“Terrorist attacks within Israel have declined in both frequency and associated casualties. However, the potential for further violence remains high. Resentment against efforts to promote peace, and ongoing Israeli military operations in the Occupied Territories could incite further violence in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Israeli security services report that they are investigating between 40 and 60 planned terrorist attacks at any given time. The February 25 suicide bombing of a Tel Aviv nightclub is a reminder of the precarious security environment, even when a cease-fire has been declared.” The conclusion here: “The Department of State urges U.S. citizens to carefully weigh the necessity of their travel to Israel in light of the risks.”

Anything not true there?

It’s all true, and it’s all false. It is not fact but conjecture portrayed as fact. Joshua and Caleb saw exactly what the other spies saw, but they concluded: “Let us by all means go up, and we shall gain possession of it, for we shall surely overcome it.” There is nothing in the State Department’s Travel Advisory that any of us don’t know from watching the evening news or from reading the morning paper, and yet we are here. We are not here in spite of the warnings. We are not here because we don’t believe the warnings or because we ignore the facts. We are here because we choose to draw different conclusions.

The ten spies looked at the Land of Israel, and decided not to take a risk. It wasn’t that they decided to play it safe. They decided that they could stay in the desert, between the Egyptians and the Philistines, and that they could continue to live with the constant threat of Amalekite attack, and be just fine. They lacked the vision necessary to imagine something better than what they had. So they put their lives on hold for forty years, and they died waiting for nothing to happen.

Joshua and Caleb also looked at the Land of Israel, and they saw something that the others did not. They did not think walking around in circles really got you anywhere. Maybe they thought that a life without purpose was not worth living. Maybe they believed that some things are worth the risk, that freedom to wander in the desert is not really freedom, and that liberty is not just about being able to stay where you are – whether in the desert or in Washington. Maybe they just realized that there are dangers wherever you go, so if you want to get on with your life, it you want to have a meaningful existence, then what matters is not where you are but where you should be.

I’m sure those people wandering in the desert never really sensed any feeling of loss. They may have felt bad because Moses yelled at them. They may have felt a little guilty because God rebuked them. But I doubt that they ever really felt that they had been punished. They had never been to the Land of Israel. They had never experienced fulfillment, and they lacked vision, so they had no reason to feel deprived. You could tell them until you were blue in the face that they would live more meaningful lives if only they would cross into the Promised Land, but you would not convince them any more than Joshua and Caleb.

And the same is true for the State Department Travel Advisory. It’s good advice if you don’t mind living without a soul. The fact of the matter is that you probably won’t ever miss it if you’ve never had one, and I don’t think a soul is a requirement for employment by the State Department. It’s sort of like love. If you’ve never felt it, you’ll never miss it, and no explanations can provide sufficient reason to risk anything for it. But if you’ve ever experienced love, or if you can imagine it, then you needn’t be told or convinced. You will risk everything for it without question or regret.

In the end, you just have to decide whether you are satisfied being like those ten fine, upstanding, God-fearing spies, and patiently wait for nothing to happen, until something happens and you die, or whether you are like Joshua and Caleb.

If you are here, then you have made your choice.

And so to the wise authors of the State Department’s Travel Advisory I would like to say just this: We are not here because we are bold and willing to die. We are here because we are afraid not to live.

Avinoam Sharon

© 2005 Avinoam Sharon

B'Ha'alotekha (Numbers 8:1 - 12:16)

Vayehi binso’a ha’aron vayomer moshe, kuma adonai v’yafutsu oyvekha, v’yanusu m’san’ekha mipanekha; uvenuho yomar, shuva adonai rivevot alfei yisrael. “When the Ark was set out, Moses would say: Advance, O Lord! May your enemies be scattered, and may Your foes flee before You! And when it halted, he would say: Return, O Lord, You who are Israel’s myriads of thousands!”

In the Torah, these verses are bracketed. They are set off in the text by a reversed letter “nun” at the beginning and the end. Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi took this to mean that these verses constitute a separate book of the Torah. In a footnote to his book Hellenism in Jewish Palestine, Prof. Saul Lieberman mentions a midrash that attributes these two verses to the prophecy of Eldad and Medad, whom we read about further on in the parasha. Another possible interpretation is that these two verses are separate because they represent an alternative ending to Sefer B’Midbar – the Book of Numbers. Until this point, we have read about the preparations for the journey. These two verses represent the ideal ending of that preparation: a journey in which Israel follows the Torah. The remainder of the Book of Numbers represents the historical reality that begins with Israel’s complaints and rebellion.

These bracketed verses also bracket our Torah service. We say the first when we take out the Torah, and the second when we return it to the ark. Earlier this week, I had the privilege of saying them at a particularly joyful celebration of the Torah -a hakhnasat sefer torah – the dedication of a new Torah scroll to the synagogue in the yishuv where I have lived for the past thirteen years.

It was a wonderful celebration in which the whole community participated – observant and non-observant, religious and secular. All walked together behind the Torah in a unity symbolic of the ideal ending of Sefer B’Midbar, with all of Israel walking behind the Ark. There was an uplifting feeling of togetherness; a sense that all Jews could come together around the uniting force of the Torah, whether as the living voice of God, the divinely inspired attempt to express the experience of holiness, or as the exalted human foundation of our heritage. Here was a manifest acknowledgment that the Torah is fundamental to the ethos of every person who thinks of himself as a Jew.

The celebration concluded with a festive meal, and of course, with speeches. One speech, by an ultra-Orthodox maggid – a Hassidic preacher - marred the sense of unity. The maggid - apparently overcome with awe, and swept away by religious fervour – decided to tell a story that expressed what he saw as the spirit of absolute dedication to Torah values that characterizes the Torah-true Judaism of the haredi – ultra-Orthodox – world, and that marks the difference between the world of Torah and hiloni – secular – Israeli society.

I am not a maggid, and lacking the artistry of a great storyteller, I will not attempt to reconstruct this marvellous story in all its minutely contrived details. I will, instead, limit my account to the bare facts of this example of the manifestation of God’s glory on earth.

According to the story, a religious young man was stationed in a bunker in the Sinai desert during the Yom Kippur War. Water in the bunker was running out, and due to the unrelenting artillery bombardment, it was impossible to leave the bunker to replenish supplies. But, being a truly observant Jew, the young man would not eat before performing netilat yadayim – the ritual washing of hands before eating bread. After an entire day of fasting, his commanding officer – a secular Israeli - asked why he would not eat, and the young man replied that he could not eat unless he washed his hands, as required by halakha. This was repeated on the next day, and then again on the next. After three days of fasting, the secular officer, unbelieving but exasperated, finally gave in to this tzaddik’s devotion to God’s law, and permitted the young man to leave the bunker to get water, admonishing him that he was doing so at his own risk. The young man left the bunker, with only his commitment to mitzvot to protect him. When he was a short distance away, the bunker suffered a direct hit, and all of his non-observant comrades were killed. Only he – through his unwavering dedication to even the minutest details of Torah – was saved.

The many rabbis in the room nodded in approval. The less observant members of the audience squirmed in their seats. How could any person raised with the ideals of Western humanism accept such a worldview? What kind of religion would demand such utterly irrational conduct? What kind of God would act so horribly toward his children?

The potentially unfathomable chasm between the religious and secular worldviews could not be more obvious than at that moment of religious delight in God’s wondrous devotion to his loyal believers, and secular revulsion at that glee at God’s callous abandonment of all reason and compassion.

But the true horror of the event can only be appreciated fully if you are acquainted with the rules of netilat yadayim. First of all, a person need not wash to eat fruit, or vegetables, or meat, or anything that one eats with a fork or a spoon. In fact, there is nothing in a standard box of Israeli Army field rations that requires netilat yadayim. Indeed, the Shulkhan Arukh – the standard code of Jewish law – says that a person who performs the ritual of netilat yadayim for such food is gas ruah – haughty.

But our maggid’s story is not just about a haughty soldier, or about the niceties of halakha, but about its underlying spirit.

The Shulkhan Arukh also says: “One who is in the desert, or in a place of danger, and who has no water, is not obligated to perform netilat yadayim.” And as if that were not enough, the Magen Avraham – a standard commentary to the Shulkhan Arukh – explains that the reason for the exemption from netilat yadayim in the desert is that a person in the desert is like a soldier at war, who is exempt from having to seek water for netilat yadayim because it would put him at risk.

So, our maggid’s tzaddik was exempt from netilat yadayim for every imaginable reason. The halakha entirely agrees with the common sense of the secular humanist.

So why did the maggid tell this nonsensical fairytale that puts the Torah to ridicule? And why didn’t any of the rabbis in the room protest? I imagine it was because they weren’t thinking in terms of halakha l’ma’aseh – of the day-to-day application of halakha to life. For them, the story wasn’t about Jewish law, or about morality, or God. It was about how “we” are better than “them.” It was about “otherness” and rejection of the secular world. The imaginary religious zealot is God’s warrior standing up to the valueless secular Israeli soldier. Common sense and human compassion never had a chance. Humanism was never in the running. In the worldview of that maggid and the nodding rabbis there is no conversation between modernity and tradition, no dialectic between Western philosophy and Jewish theology, and no attempt to reconcile Humanism and Halakha. There is the world of Torah and there is Chaos. That was the point of the story.

The secularist, confronted by the story of the soldier, cringes in horror at what is presented to him as the beauty of Torah. It is something that is beyond his comprehension. It is foreign to his conception of what it means to be a Jew, and what it means to be a person.

When I sat at that seudat mitzvah – that celebratory meal in honour of the Torah – I understood why I am a Conservative Jew. I am a Conservative Jew because I believe that when modernity and tradition communicate they enrich the language of Judaism, that philosophy and theology complete one another, and that Humanism is the earthly spirit of Halakha, and that Halakha is the divine expression of Humanism.

It is that constant interaction, that never-ending struggle that allows Judaism to infuse every part of life. Secularism rejects those parts of life that are religious, while an ever more radicalized Orthodoxy forbids those elements of human experience that are secular. Each in its own way admits of a frailty of its worldview, and is poorer for it. Each embraces a concept of Judaism that is too weak or too rigid to face a challenge from the other side.

But Judaism is stronger than that. It can add depth and historical perspective to secular modernity, and it can use the challenges of modernity to expand its horizons into the future. To accept less is to minimize the Torah and limit God. To accept less is to be like that maggid who chose to ignore the fact that the crowd that danced before the newly dedicated Torah – the crowd that he addressed - embraced Jews of every type.


The maggid lives in a surreal universe composed entirely of the two out-of-context lines of Eldad and Medad’s vision of perfection. The secular world is the story that begins with the rebellion against God. But Sefer B’Midbar comprises both stories, and it is the ongoing dialectic between the two that completes the Torah.

If we wish to dedicate ourselves to building a Jewish society, then the truly miraculous story we have to try to understand, and the wonderful tale that we have to tell is that of so many very different Jews holding hands to dance around the Torah.

Avinoam Sharon

© 2005 Avinoam Sharon

Shavuot

The art of homiletics – of writing sermons – begins with reading the Bible. For me, the process generally consists of reading the parasha and haftarah, various commentaries, the midrash, and other related texts, until something bothers me. Then I ask myself what it is that caught my attention - what bothered me, and why. Sometimes, it might be a linguistic anomaly, a particularly poetic turn of phrase, an interesting metaphor or parallel, or an ambiguity. Sometimes, what bothers me may be a perceived injustice, an exalted ideal, or a situation that causes me to empathize.

The next step is to try to communicate that sensation of surprise, anger, doubt, empathy or confusion, of insight or understanding. I have to turn it into a message that can be shared with others. In a real sense, homiletics is often about letting other people share my thoughts and feelings.

For example, as I read the Book of Ruth, the use of the word go’el caught my attention. In the Bible, the word seems to refer to a kinsman or close relative. It may have caught my attention because it is the term used in regard to Jeremiah in the haftarah of B’Har, which I discussed three weeks ago. Perhaps that is what made me sensitive to it when I saw it again in last Shabbat’s Torah reading, parashat Naso. It was probably a comment by the midrash on that verse in Naso that made me stop at the word go’el in the Book of Ruth.

In Naso we read: “If the man has no kinsman to whom restitution can be made, the amount repaid shall go to the Lord.” At first glance, that seems quite straightforward. If you are required to make restitution to a person you have wronged, and payment cannot be made to the person wronged or his heirs, then the state inherits. But our Sages were bothered by that. What does the Bible mean by saying, “has no kinsman”?

As I said, we read the word go’el as “kinsman.” That seems to be what it means in context. But looking back to the case of Jeremiah, we must conclude that “kinsman” is only a connotation. It is a significance of the word that we derive by association. Jeremiah is asked to buy the field of his cousin Hanamel because Jeremiah is the go’el. If the word simply meant kinsman, then it would apply equally to Jeremiah and to Hanamel. But Hanamel is not a go’el. The primary meaning of the word is “redeemer.” Jeremiah acts as Hanamel’s redeemer – go’el -because he is his kinsman. That is the way the term is employed in parashat B’Har – which refers to a kinsman as ahikha, your “brother” - and that is how the term go’el is used in referring to Boaz in the Book of Ruth. Boaz says to Ruth: “But while it is true I am a redeemer (go’el), there is another redeemer (go’el) closer than I. Stay for the night. Then in the morning, if he will act as a redeemer, good! Let him redeem. But if he does not want to act as redeemer for you, I will do so myself.”

And so let’s return to the midrash on that verse in Naso: “If the man has no go’el to whom restitution can be made.” The midrash asks: “Is there anyone in Israel who has no go’el? The idea is morally unacceptable. How can a person be so isolated, and how can a society be so alienated that a person might be entirely alone? The Sages decided to use this to teach a moral lesson about “otherness” and about acceptance. The answer the Sages give is that the only Jew who could possibly lack a go’el would have to be a childless convert to Judaism. For such a person, God Himself is the go’el.

I could not help but come to a sudden stop at Boaz’s words to Ruth. The Sages lead us to believe that the only situation that they could imagine in which a person might have no redeemer is that of a childless convert. The Sages could not have been unaware of the fact that the only example of a childless convert in the Bible is Ruth, and Ruth has not one but two redeemers.

For our Sages, the idea that a person might be entirely alone in society is a moral impossibility. That is their challenge to us.

Another interesting thing I noticed in regard to the use of term go’el in Naso is the context. The usage in Naso would seem very exceptional. In B’Har, the go’el is a person who purchases back a kinsman’s property or redeems him from slavery. Jeremiah acts as go’el in purchasing his cousin’s field. Boaz plays a similar role as go’el, when he offers to purchase the field that belonged to Naomi’s husband. It is the field that is the immediate object of the transaction between Boaz and the other, unnamed, redeemer, not Ruth.

But in Naso, the redeemer does not act on behalf of his kinsman. He doesn’t purchase his field, or free him from slavery or – as in the case of a go’el hadam (redeemer of blood) – take vengeance upon a killer. The go’el in Naso is called upon to accept restitution on behalf of a deceased kinsman. The go’el would appear to be merely an heir. If so, why refer to him as a go’el, a redeemer? Not surprisingly, then, our inclination is to translate the term merely as “kinsman.”

But the role of the go’el in Naso comes within the context of a special kind of wrongdoing. The context is: “When a man or a woman commits any wrong toward a fellow man, thus breaking faith with the Lord…”

What do we mean by a wrong toward a fellow man that constitutes breaking faith with the Lord? What might the Torah be trying to teach by tying together the idea of a wrong against a person that is viewed as a wrong against God, and the idea of there being no redeemer, no one to redress the wrong or restore one’s honour?

I imagine it was my legal training that made me think of a concept of perfect and imperfect laws – lex perfecta and lex imperfecta. Perfect laws are those that prohibit some form of conduct and provide some punishment or form of redress. If you steal, you go to jail. If you park in a no-parking zone, you pay a fine. Imperfect laws state a prohibition but do not prescribe a remedy. Perhaps that is what the Torah is talking about when it refers to wrongs against people that are sins, and for which no payment can be made for lack of a redeemer.

Maybe the Torah is not talking about people who die and have no one to collect their debts, but about wrongs that society does not redress - the wrongs you can’t take to court. Could those be the wrongs for which there is no redeemer?

There are wrongs against people that are not viewed as crimes or civil wrongs by human law. Perhaps the Torah is saying that even when society provides no redeemer – no redress – God still acts as redeemer. There is, nevertheless, a higher justice.

What might those wrongs be? Well, how about cutting in front of someone in a line at the ATM? What do you do if someone cuts in front of you? You may feel wronged or cheated. You may feel insulted. But what can you do? There’s no law against it. You can’t call the police. You are wronged and you have no redeemer. Perhaps the Torah is saying that it is, nevertheless, a sin, and God is your redeemer.

Or how about when a friend tells you how wonderful you are, but you discover that he tells other people that he thinks you’re terrible? Well, maybe what he tells your friends is slander, but the insincere flattery he gives you is what? It makes you feel terrible, deceived, stupid and angry, but what can you do about it?

Or perhaps someone says he supports you one hundred percent, but behind your back tries to get you fired? Or maybe someone talks you into applying for a position he knows you can’t get just to humiliate you? Or maybe someone dismisses you out of hand, and doesn’t let you state your opinion at a meeting. Well, you may feel just as bad as if you’d been publicly embarrassed, but there’s not much you can do about it. The law provides no redeemer.

Perhaps what the Torah is teaching us is that those nasty things that we think we can get away with may not be criminal but they are wrong. They are sins in the eyes of the Torah, and when we commit them we stray from Judaism. They are immoral in the eyes of God, and even if we may think that we can get away with them, we can’t because getting away with them makes us less holy. We become defiled and can no longer rightly claim a place among the tribes of Israel encamped around the Sanctuary.

Of course, as I pointed out at the outset, when I write a sermon, I think about what bothers me in the Torah, and so it isn’t about you, it’s about me. But if something I say about myself makes you feel a little guilty, then maybe it is about you, after all.

Avinoam Sharon


© 2005 Avinoam Sharon

Naso (Numbers 4:21 - 7:89)

There are two kinds of people in this world. There are people like Manoah’s wife, and there are people like the man whom Professor Uriel Simon refers to as “the husband of Manoah’s wife.”

This week's haftarah (Judges 13:2-25) recounts the annunciation of the birth of Samson. An angel appears to a woman whom we know only as “Manoah’s wife.” The angel foretells the birth of a son, and instructs Manoah’s wife that the child is to be a nazirite from birth, and that he shall deliver Israel from the Philistines.

Manoah’s wife has no doubts as to what she has witnessed. She runs to her husband and tells him: “A man of God came to me; he looked like an angel of God, very frightening.”

Now what exactly does an angel of God look like? In art, angels are pretty easy to spot. They wear flowing white robes, they have halos, and most helpful of all, they have wings.

Hollywood took a different direction. With the exception of John Travolta – who had big white wings hidden under his overcoat in the movie Michael - and Emma Thompson – who flies about on our TVs in traditional white-robed regalia in Angels in America – Hollywood’s angels are hard to spot. They may look like a very dapper Claude Rains in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, or a rather unsavory Harry Belafonte as The Angel Levine. In City of Angels they appear remarkably like Nicholas Cage and Dennis Franz.

Biblical angels would seem to be more like the Hollywood variety. Abraham sees three men and offers them water to wash their feet, and a meal. Jacob meets an angel and wrestles with it. No one is sure if the man that Joseph met when he was looking for his brothers was a man or an angel. It would seem that angels are not immediately easy to recognize.

The Zohar explains that angels present themselves dressed as human beings, for otherwise we would not be able to look upon them. And so, not surprisingly, they are not that easy to spot, and are commonly mistaken for ordinary folk.

So, when Manoah’s wife tells her husband that she has just seen a man of God who looked like an angel, he assumes his wife met a prophet, but that she has an overactive imagination. And so, Manoah, seeking further instruction, asks God to send the man back again.

The angel reappears. But this time, Mrs. Manoah decides to play by her husband’s rules, and she tells him that “The man who came to me before has just appeared to me.” She calls him a man, but note that she is completely aware that this is no ordinary man or prophet. She doesn’t say that the man has stopped by again, or that he has come calling. He “has just appeared.”

Manoah, however, is a little slow on the uptake. He turns to this man that the text repeatedly refers to explicitly as an angel, and offers to make a barbeque. The angel tells Manoah that if he wants to burn food, he should offer it as a sacrifice. If we haven’t figured it out yet, the text now tells us straight out: “Manoah did not know that he was an angel of the Lord.”

Manoah goes ahead and prepares a sacrifice. Flames leap up from the altar. Manoah is still clueless. Then the angel ascends heavenward in the flames of the altar. At which point, Manoah finally realizes that he has seen an angel, and he assumes he is going to die because of what he has seen.

Fortunately, Mrs. Manoah, who has known what was happening since the beginning, calms him down, and explains that if God planned on killing them by showing them an angel, he wouldn’t have had the angel tell them they were going to have a son, and instruct them on child rearing.

As I said, there are two kinds of people. Some people look at the world and see people; some see angels. Some look at the world and see dirt and suffering and misery. Some look at the world and see beauty and wonder and hope. One is not more “realistic” than the other. There are different ways of perceiving reality. But not all are equally rewarding.

The passage I referred to in the Zohar doesn’t just describe how to look at angels. It uses that image to tell us how to read the Torah, and how to perceive reality. It says that because the Torah conveys the word of God, we cannot apprehend it directly. Rather, what we take to be the Torah is but the vessel in which God’s message appears. The Zohar warns us that only fools look at the clothing and seek no further. The Torah is not about the stories it tells. We could write equally good, if not better stories ourselves. The Torah is about the message conveyed by the stories.

There is a body under the clothing, and a soul in the body, and – according to the Zohar - even the soul has a soul. Israel is the body, and the Torah is the soul of Israel. When we read the Torah, we must seek the soul of the Torah.

The world around us is no different. We can look at Israel and see land. We can look at it and see a country. We can look at that country and see a nation. We can look at that nation and see in it the realization of a dream. We can look at that dream and see the expression of hope and faith. We can look at that hope and that faith and see them as the fulfillment of God’s promise. We can look at God’s promise and find the Torah.

How we look at the world – how we look at the Torah – is a matter of choice. Each of us must choose whether to look at the world through the eyes of Manoah’s wife, or through the eyes of her husband.

Avinoam Sharon

© 2005 Avinoam Sharon

B'Midbar (Numbers 1:1-4:20)

Many years ago, I learned a new word from William Safire’s column “On Language,” in the New York Times. The word was synecdoche.

A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part of something represents the whole. If I recall correctly, Mr. Safire gave the example of “heads” of cattle.

I thought of that column when I read this week's haftarah (Hosea 2:1-22).

The haftarah is taken from the book of Hosea. Like other prophets, Hosea finds symbolic meaning in things that would not necessarily strike us as portentous.

Samuel, for example, looked at his torn robe and told Saul: “The Lord hath rent the kingdom of Israel from thee this day.” We would not read such ominous meaning into a ripped hem. Isaiah saw the future of Israel in a twig – a shoot out of the stock of Jesse. We might see the possibility of fruit, but not the future of a nation. Jeremiah saw punishment in broken pottery that could not be made whole again. Ezekiel spoke of sour grapes, of bones, and of the cedars of Lebanon. Amos saw the future of Israel in a basket of summer fruit.

Hosea saw himself.

If you just read the haftarah – the second chapter of Hosea - in isolation, it seems like any other prophecy. Hosea sees Israel as a woman gone astray, a harlot. But despite her sins, her husband - God - takes her back. Similar prophecies can be found elsewhere. The prophet sees symbolic meaning in some common occurrence, or expresses his prophetic view in a parable or metaphor.

What makes Hosea unique is that when Hosea speaks about God and Israel, he is talking about himself and his own wife. When he speaks about Israel gone astray, he is referring to his spouse. When he speaks of despair, he is referring to himself. Hosea lives out his prophetic view of Israel in his own home, and he looks at his home as a microcosm of the nation.

Hosea marries a woman named Gomer. She deceives him, abandons him, and is unfaithful to him. But despite the hurt and the betrayal, Hosea brings his wife home. He remains loyal. For Hosea, his own home is a synecdoche for the House of Israel. Hosea knows how God feels about Israel, because he knows how he feels about his own wife.

Hosea provides a useful model for preaching. When I have to figure out what to say to you, when I have to come up with something that will interest you, all I have to do is figure out what bothers me. After all, the very fact that we are all here together means we have some common interests. If I’m cold, you’re probably cold too, and so we’re probably all thinking pretty much the same thing, and I can safely go ahead and make a comment about the need to lower the air conditioning or raise the heat and be fairly certain that most of you will agree.

So, if I look into myself, then at some basic level, I should be able to tap into hopes, feelings and desires that are common to all of us by the very fact that we are all here. And I should be able to come up with a sermon.

Our ability to do that is what makes it possible to empathize with one another. It is what makes it possible for us to maintain a society. The fact that we share certain basic needs, hopes, desires and dreams makes it possible for us to live together on the basis of an underlying agreement as to some fundamental beliefs that we hold in common.

But Hosea takes a leap beyond the mere conclusion that if it bothers me, it probably bothers you. Hosea assumes that if it bothers him, it bothers God. That is quite an assumption and quite a leap.

Hosea seems to take the idea that we are created in God’s image quite seriously. If we are all miniature projections of the Divine image, then what concerns us, concerns God, and what we can do, God can do.

If Hosea is bothered by the infidelity of Gomer, God must be saddened by the falseness of Israel. But if Hosea can remain loyal, if Hosea can forgive, if Hosea’s love is strong enough to overcome his anger and his grief, then certainly God remains loyal to His people and can forgive our mistakes and our betrayals.

Hosea’s source of prophecy is himself.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his book The Prophets, argues that all prophets are like that. He says that “[t]he prophet is a person, not a microphone.” When a prophet hears the word of God, he does not hear words that he then transcribes like a stenographer. God’s message reverberates in the prophet, and he tries to express that sensation. In Heschel’s words: “He speaks from the perspective of God as perceived from the perspective of his own situation.”

That is particularly true of Hosea. He knows what God feels because he has lived through it himself and has learned from his own experience.

Hosea is a prophet unlike our image and imagination of prophets. God’s voice does not echo in his ears. He feels sorrow, and he tries to understand what it is that makes him sad. Once he discovers that, Hosea knows what makes God sad.

And so, Hosea presents a challenge.

If we understand Hosea, we not only understand prophecy, we learn how to become sensitive ourselves to the prophetic message.

Hosea’s prophecy – Hosea’s voice – calls to us even now. It asks us not only to return to God, it tells us precisely how to know what God, what society, what our friends and what our neighbors feel and what they need from us.

Hosea tells us to pause to think about how we feel. But he asks us not to stop there. Knowing our own feelings, our own pain and sorrow and happiness and pleasure is not enough. Self-awareness is not the goal. It isn’t enough just to know ourselves. That is only the beginning.

The process of getting to know ourselves is the occurrence from which we learn to understand and accept everyone else.

Hosea’s prophecy is not a response to revelation. Hosea does not know God. Hosea knows himself, and through the process of knowing himself, Hosea identifies with God.

Knowing ourselves, our own feelings and our own reactions, can provide us with the means through which we can empathize with God, and through that shared consciousness we become God’s partners in creation.

This idea of partnership is given poetic expression in a deceptively simple yet profound verse in the haftarah:

“Vehaya bayom hahu, ne’um Adonai, tikre’i ‘ishi, velo tikre’i li ‘od ba’ali”

“And in that day, says the Lord, you will call me ‘ishi - my man – and no longer will you call me ba’ali - my master.”

It is in this context, as partners in a marriage, that we bind ourselves to God each morning with the closing words of the haftarah:

I will betroth you forever;
I will betroth you in righteousness and justice,
and with steadfast love and mercy;
I will betroth you in faithfulness,
and you shall know the Lord.

Avinoam Sharon

© 2005 Avinoam Sharon