Month: September 2012

Ha-azinu: The Tohu Within

Before Moses dies, he teaches the Israelites a long song.  The words are recorded in this week’s Torah portion: Ha-azinu (“Use your Ears”).

The two main messages in the song are that God is all-powerful, and that God wreaks vengeance on the Israelites when they worship other gods.  This is not news; the God-character portrayed in the Torah has no concept of modern educational methods.

Yet within the song are some gems of inspiration.  One of them employs the relatively rare word tohu.

[God] found it/him in a land of wilderness

And in the tohu of a howling desolation;

[God] surrounded it/him and gave it/him understanding,

[God] protected it/him like the pupil of [God’s] eye. (Deuteronomy/Devarim 32:10)

tohu (תֹהוּ) = chaos, nothingness, formlessness, unreality.

Hebrew prefixes and suffixes indicating the third person singular can be translated as either “it” or “him”.  So what or who did God find in the wilderness of chaotic, howling desolation?

One third-century commentary says God found, or encountered, Abraham there.1  But the book of Genesis/Bereishit states that God called to Abraham when he was living in Charan and told him to go to Canaan.2   Charan was a civilized town, not a howling wilderness.

Most commentaries take their cue from the preceding line of the song, Because God’s portion is [God’s] people, Jacob …  (Deuteronomy 32:9) and assume that “it” is the people named after their ancestor “Jacob” or “Israel”.  (The Torah often refers to a people, an ethnic or political group, in the singular.)

Yet in the book of Exodus/Shemot, God does not find Israel in the wilderness.  God notices the Israelite slaves in Egypt when God hears their cries of distress.  Then God leads them out of Egyptian civilization and into the wilderness.

Modern scholars who take the verse about tohu literally explain these discrepancies by attributing the poem in Deuteronomy and the stories in Genesis and Exodus to different myths explaining the origin of the Israelite people.

But why get stuck on a literal reading? The Torah often uses metaphor and analogy, especially in its poetry. I think the word tohu  in this verse points toward a more profound meaning.

This is only the second occurrence of the word tohu in the Torah.  The first use of tohu is in the sentence just before God says “Let there be light”:

And the earth was tohu and vohu, and darkness over the face of the deep, and the wind/spirit of God hovering over the face of the deep.  (Genesis/Bereishit 1:2)

vohu (בֹהוּ) = a poetic extension of tohu, translated as “unformed”, “void”, “empty”.   (The word vohu appears only three times in the Hebrew bible, always paired with tohu; here, in Isaiah 34:11, and in Jeremiah 4:24.)

I think the meaning that best fits all 19 appearances of the tohu in the Hebrew Bible is “unreal” or “unreality”.

Translating tohu as “unreality” in this week’s Torah portion is awkward if you take our verse literally.  But if “wilderness”, tohu, and “howling desolation” all describe a psychological state, tohu as “unreality” makes sense.  When you feel desperate and desolate, as if there is no hope and you are utterly alone, you experience an inner howling, and your mind no longer anchors itself in familiar habits and beliefs.  You wander in a mental wilderness, and your former world-view seems unreal.

What if someone in a mental state of unreality and howling desolation encounters God?  What if God then encircles them, gives them understanding, and protects them until they pull themselves together and reorganize their lives to fit their new outlook?  During this process, God protects the person’s soul as if it were the pupil of an eye, which can perceive reality and apply insights only if it is both uncovered and unharmed.

Atheists today might object that God itself is unreal, so believing that God is finding and protecting you is an indulgence in unreality.  I don’t blame them.  I am an atheist myself, if you define God as either the anthropomorphic jealous king who lives in the sky, or as the omni-being of medieval theologians.  But many people, including me, use the word “God” for something else, something we have no better word for in English.  Something that defies a clear definition, a mystery that we experience or intuit.

Connecting with this holy mystery is a real experience, one in which the phrases “God finds you” and “you find God” mean the same thing.  I have found that if it happens when my life is falling apart, the connection really does protect me, stabilize me, and give me understanding.

These days, when my emotions begin to overwhelm me, I don’t wait for God to find me.  I take preemptive action by singing prayers, singing until the tightness in my throat relaxes.  Then my mind becomes calmer and clearer, and understanding becomes possible.

So here is my version of the verse from Ha-azinu, with different pronouns.  Maybe this interpretation will ring true for you.

     I found God in a land of wilderness

     And in the unreality of a howling desolation;

     God surrounded me and understanding came;

     God protected me like the pupil of an eye, and I saw.

—

  1. Sifrei Devarim 313:1.
  2. Genesis 12:1-5.

Nitzavim: Still Standing

Moses by J.J. Tissot

Moses leads the refugees from Egypt for 40 years and brings them to the Jordan River.  There, he knows, he will die and they will cross over into a new life.  The book of  Deuteronomy/Devarim is his farewell speech to the people, and in this week’s Torah portion, Nitzavim (“taking a stand”) he launches into his conclusion.

Everyone standing there

First Moses lists everyone included in the renewed covenant with God that will take effect when the people cross into the “promised land” of Canaan.

You are the ones who are nitzavim today, all of you, before God, your God—your heads, your tribes(men), your elders, and your officials, every man of Israel; your young children, your women, and your stranger who is in the midst of your camps, from the gatherer of your wood to the drawer of your water—in order to cross into the covenant of God, your God, with its alah that God, your God, is cutting with you today.  (Deuteronomy/Devarim 29:9-11)

nitzavim = taking a stand, stepping up, stationing yourselves, standing firm.

alah = an obligation which puts a curse on anyone who fails to meet it; a penalty clause in a contract.

Moses includes not only all the men of Israel, regardless of rank, but also all the women and all the children.  Moreover, he includes the strangers in their midst: those who are not of the same blood, but who voluntarily chose to join the Israelites when they left Egypt—in other words, the converts.  Moses even includes low-status converts, those who gather wood and draw water for the Israelites.

Journey from one border to another

This is not the same group of Israelites and converts who followed Moses out of Egypt.  Most of the adults in the original group  have died during the 40 years in the wilderness.  Some died when God punished various revolts with plague, fire, earthquake, or snakebite.  Others died of old age during the 38 years that passed between the group’s arrival at the southern border of Canaan in the desert, and their arrival at the more northern border of Canaan at the Jordan River.1

Now the survivors are standing on the river bank, ready to cross.  Most of them were children, or not born yet, when the original group embraced the original covenant with God at Mount Sinai.  So Moses says God is cutting a covenant with this new group.

It is a covenant with a penalty clause, an alah.  If they do not live up to their side of the covenant, following God’s laws and refraining from worshiping any other god, then the long list of curses in last week’s Torah portion would come to pass.  (For example, parents would eat their own children as they are starved by crop failure and besieging enemies.)

When God gave a covenant to the earlier generation at Mount Sinai, they replied, “We will do and we will hear!”  But in this week’s Torah portion, when Moses announces the covenant to the later generation, they say nothing.  No response is recorded in the Torah.

So why does Moses describe this passive group as nitzavim?  Are they really taking a stand in favor of God?  Are they standing firm, as the word nitzavim implies?  Or are they merely standing there waiting for Moses to finish his speech so that they can do the next thing they are required to do? Are they following orders because they want to serve God, or because they have grown up knowing that serving the God of Israel is better than the alternative?

Are they standing firm, or are they merely still standing?

Everyone else

Then Moses expands the group included in the covenant, quoting God:

And I, Myself, am cutting this covenant and this alah not with you alone, but with whoever is here standing with us today before God, our God, and whoever is not here with us today. (Deuteronomy 29:14)

Who are these additional people who are not standing in front of God that day?

According to Rashi2 they are the souls of all future Jews, yet to be born.  Traditional commentary agrees and includes both everyone who ever had or will convert to Judiasm, along with everyone who was or will be born to a Jewish mother.

(Converts enter the covenant with God at the time of their conversion, but people who are born Jewish have no choice; they are simply included.  Different commentators have held different opinions about whether individuals who were born Jewish can opt out of the covenant or not.)

What I wonder is whether traditional Jewish commentary is too narrow in its definition of who is included in “whoever is not here with us today”.  What if the covenant applies to every human being on earth, forever?  That would fit the plain sense of the words.

Is Moses saying that all human beings will become Torah-observant Jews?

No.  I think “whoever is not here with us today” means that all human beings ought to be standing before God.  And that means we should avoid acting as if we were gods.  Only through humility and responsibility can we avoid the curse of (psychologically) devouring our children, the curse of (metaphorically) devouring any other human being, the curse of devouring our own planet.

We should remember that we are small parts of the whole creation.  And we should remember that all human beings are in a covenant together, living on the earth.

  1. At the southern border, most of the people were afraid and refused to cross into Canaan.  (See my post Shelach Lekha: Sticking Point.)  God’s punishment was to make them wait until all but two men from that generation had died before they could attempt a second crossing into Canaan—hence the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness.
  2. 11th-century rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki.