Lekh-Lekha & Vayeira: Going with the Voice

The phrase lekh-lekha appears only twice in the Torah. Both times God is telling Abraham to do something radical.

The first time God says lekh-lekha is in his first request of Abraham, at the beginning of this week’s Torah portion (called “Lekh-lekha”):

God said to Abraham: “Lekh-lekha , away from your land, and away from your birthplace, and away from the house of your father, to the land that I will show you.” (Genesis/Bereishit 12:1)

lekh (לֶךְ) = Go!

lekha (לְךָ) = for yourself, to yourself.

lekh-lekha (לְךְ־לְךָ) = Go for yourself! Go to yourself! Go, yourself! Get going!

God’s final request to Abraham, in the Torah portion Vayeira (“And he appeared”), contains the same phrase.

And [God] said: “Please take your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac; and lekh-lekha to the land of the Moriyah, and bring him up there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains, which I will tell to you.” (Genesis 22:2)

God’s first request seems difficult but relatively benign. Yes, Abraham leaves his father and his familiar life. But he takes along his wife Sarah, his nephew Lot, a number of servants or followers, and his wealth in livestock. Although he is venturing into a strange land to find himself, he has the benefit of both resources and companions of his choosing. He also has the reassurance of knowing his brother Nachor has remained in Charan to take care of their elderly father, Terach.

Sacrifice of Isaac, French, 13th century

God’s final request, on the other hand, seems impossibly horrific. Abraham must cut the throat of his son and heir, and burn him up as an offering to God. In dire circumstances, chieftains in the Middle East did sacrifice their own sons to prevent national disaster.¹But at this point in the story of Abraham, his small clan is living peacefully at Beer-sheva, with no threat in sight.

So Abraham knows that although he will prove something to God and himself by sacrificing Isaac, his own people and his neighbors will probably think he is a lunatic. He also knows that his wife Sarah is so attached to Isaac that she will either die of shock or become his bitterest enemy. Nevertheless he leaves early in the morning with his son and three servants, without speaking to Sarah and without telling the servants what kind of offering he is planning.

God’s final request leaves Abraham without aid or comfort from anyone. At this point Abraham only has two family members at home: his wife Sarah, and their son Isaac. (He has already sent away his concubine Hagar and their son Ishmael. His nephew Lot separated from him long ago.) By sacrificing Isaac, Abraham will lose the rest of his family: his wife and his remaining son.

Yet God’s two requests, one benign and one disastrous, are related. Not only do both requests use the unusual term lekh-lekha, but both of them also use a series of phrases that increase Abraham’s emotional stake in obeying. In the first request, God asks Abraham to leave not just his country, but also the culture he grew up with, and even his own birth family. In the final request, God asks Abraham to sacrifice not just his son, but his only child (now that Ishamel is exiled), the son he loves.

Both sentences with the phrase lekh-lekha also leave Abraham’s destination a mystery. The first time, God does not even tell Abraham that he should head for Canaan; he must blindly go to “the land that I will show you”. The second time, God tells Abraham to go to the land of Moriyah (a place name that may be related to the word marah, “something shown”) and promises to point out the right mountain to Abraham when he arrives. Both times, Abraham must start out on his mission trusting God to reveal where it will end.

Furthermore, both of God’s orders come at times when Abraham has a settled life and there is no emergency. When Abraham first hears God say lekh-lekha, he is simply living in Charan with his extended family. (Later commentary invented stories about his dramatic youth there as an idol-smasher, but the Torah itself says nothing.) And when Abraham hears God say lekh-lekha again, he and his people have been living at Beer-sheva for “many years”.

Both times, when nothing in particular is happening, Abraham hears God speak to him out of the blue. Maybe lekh lekha does mean “Get going!”, since both times Abraham responds by rousing himself and taking an action that changes his whole life.

Rashi wrote that lekh-lekha meant “Go for yourself”, i.e. for your own benefit.² He pointed out that God promised Abraham many descendants, a famous name, and blessing in return for leaving Charan and going to God’s undisclosed destination.

But surely Abraham would not benefit from sacrificing Isaac, his son and heir.

The sacrifice is not completed; an angel of God stops Abraham at the last minute, when he is holding his knife over Isaac’s throat. But Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his own son causes lifelong psychological trauma for Isaac. Although Abraham arranges a marriage for his younger son, there is no indication in the Torah that he and Isaac ever see one another again.

Furthermore, after the attempted sacrifice, the next story in the book of Genesis is about the death of Abraham’s wife Sarah.³ Although Abraham eventually remarries, the death of Sarah probably weighs on him.

Lekh-lekha!

How do you know whether the apparently divine voice in your head is summoning you to an adventure, or to a nightmare? How do you know whether it is ethical to follow that call?

Maybe you experience a divine call as an urgent need to change your life, even though you do not know where the need comes from, or where you will end up if you act on it. Suppose you ignore this inner voice, this inner god. Will you feel ashamed for the rest of your life that you did not rise to the challenge?

Suppose you do heed the call. Will you become a revered leader and the founder of a new way of life, like Abraham? Or will you become a crazy person ready to sacrifice his own child—like Abraham?

Listen carefully.

—

For example, in 2 Kings 3:27, when the king of Moab is losing to the invading armies of Israel, Judah, and Edom, he sacrifices his son and heir as a burnt offering, and the invaders retreat.
Rashi is the acronym of 11th-century rabbi Shlomoh Yitzchaki.
The story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac is Genesis 22:1-19. Then there is a brief genealogical interlude, Genesis 22:20-24. The story of Sarah’s funeral begins with Genesis 23:1.

Bereishit & Noach: All Flesh

Light and dark, good and evil, heaven and earth, spirit and matter—the narratives as well as the religious laws in the Torah often speak in terms of opposites. In this universe of contrasting pairs, humans are a unique combination of the heavenly and the earthly. This concept of humankind begins in the second chapter of Genesis:

Creation of Adam, Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493

And God formed the human out of dirt from the ground, and blew into its nostrils the soul of life, and the human became a living being. (Genesis/Bereishit 2:7)

Humans are a combination of dirt and God’s breath—a vivid way of saying we are a combination of body and soul (in the English idiom), or basar (flesh) and ruach (spirit) in the biblical Hebrew idiom.

basar (בָּשָׂר) = flesh; muscle; all the soft tissue of a human or other animal, the part that can decay, be eaten, or be burned up; all mortal creatures

ruach (רוּחַ) = wind; spirit; temperament; divine movement or impulse

The word ruach appears right at the beginning of the Torah, at the beginning of the first creation story:

… and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the ruach of God was hovering over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:2)

The word basar first appears when God divides the primordial human into two sides, and refashions them into two independent creatures:

Then God cast the human into a supernal sleep, and took one of its side, and closed the basar. And God built the side that It took from the human into a woman, and It brought her to the human. And the human said: This time, it is bone from my bone, and basar from my basar; this one will be called woman, because this one was taken from man. (Genesis 2:21-23)

Eleven generations and about a thousand years later, God observes that the human combination of flesh and spirit has led to a lot of bad thoughts and actions.

And God saw that the evil of the human on the earth was abundant, and all the shapings of its inventions were only evil, every day. (Genesis 6:5)

How were they evil? The next Torah portion, Noach (a resting place, serenity; as a proper name, “Noah”) gives us only a hint.

God looked at the earth, and hey! it had become spoiled, because all basar had spoiled its ways upon the earth. So God said to Noach: “An end of all basar is coming, because they have filled the earth with outrage; so here I am, about to spoil the earth.” (Genesis 6:12-6:13)

When God warns Noah about the flood, God predicts the end of all basar. But when God proceeds to flood the earth, the Torah describes the end of the ruach of humans and the other land animals.

Everything that had the soul of the ruach of life from God’s nostrils, out of all that was on dry land, died. …and God wiped them away from the earth, and kept safe only Noach and those with him in the ark. (Genesis 7:22-23)

Apparently the evil does not lie exclusively in either the basar (flesh, which is the “dirt” or inanimate matter that God brought to life) or the ruach (which means either wind or spirit: God’s movement inside us). The evil may be in a spoiled relationship between flesh and spirit.

Medieval Jewish commentators said the problem was sexual immorality (one of their favorite topics). The 19th-century rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch explained that a righteous person refrains from sexual immorality by subordinating the physical, sensual drives of the flesh to the divine will of God’s spirit. If, on the other hand, the spirit is subordinate to the flesh, then a person’s thoughts and actions will tend toward immorality, and be “spoiled”.

Jews have little or no monastic tradition, and even medieval rabbis carefully distinguished between morally desirable sex and immoral sex. Today some of us might draw the line in a different place, but we still draw a line, and expect a decent human being to have enough self-control to refrain from immoral sexual acts.

And sex is not the only area in life where humans experience a conflict between the flesh and the spirit. For example, sometimes we crave food or drugs that we know will have bad results for ourselves and other humans who depend upon us; if our flesh is not subordinate to our spirit, we act on our cravings. Sometimes we have trouble giving up a material comfort our “flesh” is attached to, for the sake of a higher good.

It’s easy to condemn other people for not trying hard enough, when their spirit loses the struggle with an undesirable desire of the flesh. But when I look deeper, I see people who find dieting manageable condemning those who try to diet without success; people who already have sexual self-control condemning those who succumb to temptation; people who can afford to buy hybrid electric cars condemning those who drive old gas-guzzlers.

In the Torah, God condemns and wipes out the whole human race except for Noah and his immediate family, and throws in millions of animals for good measure. After the flood subsides, Noah sacrifices the excess animals that God included in the ark at the last minute, in Chapter 7. By building an altar and completely burning up their flesh, Noah demonstrates that he values God more than animals, spirit more than flesh.

And God smelled the soothing fragrance, and God said to [God’s] heart: I will not again denigrate the ground on account of the human , for the tendencies of the human heart are bad from its youth; so I will not again strike down everything that lives, as I have done. (Genesis, 8:21)

Thus God decides to continue the experiment, continue with these strange combinations of physical flesh and divine spirit that we call adam, humankind. God pulls back from condemnation because of the mere scent of a better relationship between flesh and spirit.

If God can do it in the Torah, maybe we can do it here on earth. We humans all have bad tendencies, because we are all hybrid creatures of flesh and spirit. My most troublesome bad tendency may be different from yours. But I pray that I will notice what is good in you, and in myself ; that I will refrain from the impulse to condemn; and that I will become a humane human.

Vezot Habrakhah: Face to Face

And no other prophet arose in Israel like Moses, whom God knew face to face; for all the signs and the miracles that God sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all who served him, and to all his land; and for all the strong power and all the great awe that Moses carried out before the eyes of all Israel. (Deuteronomy/Devarim 34:10-12)

That’s the ending of this week’s Torah portion, Vezot Habrachah (And this is the blessing); of the book of Deuteronomy/Devarim; and of the Torah proper (the first five books of the Jewish canon).

In one sense, this passage is a eulogy for Moses, who died at age 120 “by the mouth of God” after liberating the people from Egypt and shepherding them for forty years until they were ready to cross the Jordan River into “the promised land” of Canaan.

But the passage also tells us something about God.

panim = face; indicator of mood; identity

panim el panim = face to face, directly, without an intermediary

The first place that the Torah uses the expression “face to face”, is at the end of the mysterious account of Jacob wrestling all night with an unnamed “man” who blesses him with a new name (Israel) at dawn.

Jacob called the place there Penieil (Face of a god), ‘Because I saw Elohim face to face, and my life was saved.’ (Genesis/Bereishit 32:31)

eil = God, a god

elohim = God, gods

The next place we see the phrase “face to face” is after the golden calf incident, when Moses pitches his tent some distance from the camp. Whenever Moses returns to the tent, now called the Tent of Meeting, everyone can see the pillar of cloud descend and stand at the tent opening. Then, the Torah says,

God spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his neighbor. (Exodus/Shemot 33:11)

This verse uses the personal, four-letter name of God, so there is no ambiguity about whether the speaker is a god or the God. Moses is able to hear God’s speech “face to face”, as clearly as one man can hear his neighbor speak. Moses is able to hear God directly at the burning bush, and according to the Torah, this straightforward communication occurs repeatedly for the rest of Moses’ life. The ability to hear God is not unique to Moses; the Torah reports that many of the characters in Genesis, as well as all true prophets, also hear God speak. But Moses hears God’s voice much more often than anyone else, and only Moses can count on initiating a conversation with God.

Yet despite their close relationship, when Moses asks to see God’s kavod (glory, heaviness), God tells Moses:

You will not be able to see my face, because no human can see Me and live. (Exodus/Shemot 33:20)

Then what about Jacob, who said he saw God’s face and lived? I think Jacob neither saw nor wrestled with God’s real identity, but only with a few aspects of God, which he called elohim. He was grateful to live through the experience of beholding even one divine aspect, or angel, or god.

“Seeing” God’s face is different from having a face-to-face conversation with God. Like English, Biblical Hebrew often uses the verb for “see” to mean “understand”. If one’s “face” is one’s identity, then nobody can know God that intimately and live.

Two humans in an intimate relationship often watch one another’s faces for clues about what the other person is thinking and feeling inside. Yet anyone who has had a loving partner for decades knows that we can still get it wrong. The expressions on a well-known face indicate a fleeting mood, but the observer can only guess at the thoughts behind the face. Experience over time makes the guesses somewhat more accurate. Yet the innermost person is still inaccessible, unknowable.

In fact, we cannot even fully know ourselves, or even predict what choices we will make in every circumstance. Watching our own faces in a mirror is not much help. The face itself is an intermediary between the soul and the observer; a person’s inner identity is still hidden.

Does the conclusion of the book of Deuteronomy tell us that Moses finally saw God’s true “face” at the moment of his death? Not really. The Hebrew says that God knows Moses face to face, not that Moses knows God that way.

Since God knows Moses’ true “face”, his inner self, God knows that Moses has the potential to carry out all the signs and the miracles, and to demonstrate all the strong power that creates all the great awe, and moves the religion forward.

Whatever our notions about God are, if we are wise we know we can never see God’s “face”, as long as we live. But maybe it’s more important that God can see us.

Ki Teitzei: Work Like an Animal

You shall not plow with an ox and a donkey together. (Deuteronomy/Devarim 22:10)

You shall not muzzle an ox while it is threshing. (Deuteronomy/Devarim 25:4)

These two lines from this week’s Torah portion, Ki Teitzei (“When you go forth”), are often cited as examples of biblical injunctions to minimize the suffering of animals. If two animals of unequal strength are yoked together, the weaker animal is likely to stumble or strain itself to exhaustion. If an ox is muzzled while it is trampling grain to thresh it, the ox is tormented by the sight of food it cannot eat.

The Talmud (in Bava Metzia 90b) explains that both prohibitions also apply more generally. Two different kinds of animals must not be made to work together at any task, whether they are yoked or not, even if they are merely driven by a shout. Similarly, an ox must not be restrained even by a shout from eating as much grain as it wants while it works.

Ki Teitzei is also the Torah portion that insists an employer may not delay paying an employee’s wages.

You shall not oppress a poor or destitute hired laborer, from among your brothers or from among your stranger who is in your land, within your gates. Each day you shall give him his hire and the sun shall not set on him, because he is poor and it is supporting his life … (Deuteronomy/Devarim 24:14-15)

Thus the general principle of acting with consideration toward the animals who work for you also applies to the human beings who work for you. We should be considerate toward human laborers by paying them promptly.

I believe we should also treat them at least as well as our laboring animals.

That means we should not ask two people with different strengths to do the same job, any more than we should ask an ox and a donkey to do the same job. And we should not make people slave away without any breaks to refresh their spirits, any more than we should make an ox trample grain without taking any grain for its own refreshment.

And, following the Talmud, we should not shout at anyone who works for us: employees, students, or family members. Nor should we insult them.

In an even larger sense, the laboring animal and the human master are two parts of a person’s psyche. Sometimes I browbeat myself into finishing a project even when my body is sore or my brain is tired. This is cruelty to my animal aspect.

After studying this week’s Torah portion, I have three new rules for myself. I shall not expect to do the same job as someone else, or even the same job that I did on another day. I shall not put my nose to the grindstone, but instead snatch what spiritual nourishment I can from every job. And I shall reward myself at regular intervals for my own hard work.

These are not easy rules for a conscientious perfectionist to follow. But I need my inner ox. I must not muzzle it!

Eikev: With Heart and Throat

What does God want from us? Moses asks and answers that question, as old as human history, in this week’s Torah portion, Eikev (“following on the heels of”). And the answer still means something, even for those of us who define God as a state of being rather than as the omnipotent ruler of the universe.

And now, Israel, what does God, your god, request from you? Nothing but to be in awe of God, your god; to walk in all God’s paths; and to love God; and to serve God, your god, with all your levav and all your nefesh; to observe the commands and decrees of God that I am commanding you today for your own good. (Deuteronomy/Devarim 10:12-13)

levav = heart; seat of thoughts and feelings and understanding; inner self, consciousness

nefesh = throat; appetite; the soul that animates the body; life force

Long-time readers of this blog are already acquainted with the Hebrew words levav and nefesh. Both words refer to parts of human anatomy that are metaphors for aspects of being human. But why does God require service with all our “heart” AND all our “throat”—both in last week’s Torah portion (check out Deuteronomy 6:5), and again this week?

In modern terms, we might translate the phrase as “with all your mind and all your body”. So the two verses translated above mean we must direct all our conscious feelings toward both awe and love of God, and make all our conscious decisions so they follow God’s paths. Furthermore, our conscious feelings and decisions must become so habitual that our bodies instinctively react that way. And it takes both our minds and our bodies to keep on observing (paying attention to, guarding) the rules Moses laid out for going God’s way.

If you define God as the omnipotent ruler of the universe, obviously doing all this is “for your own good”. We get more rewards and fewer punishments when we go along with human authorities, so it seems reasonable that the same would be true for going along with a divine authority. When we provide what the boss wants from us, we get more of what we want from the boss.

Do you define God as the omnipotent ruler of the universe? That definition is certainly implied in the book of Deuteronomy. And the Talmud, commenting on the passage above, claims that God rules everything except our own feelings. “Everything is in the hands of Heaven, except the awe/fear of Heaven.” (Talmud, Berakhot 33b)

Jewish liturgy applies this definition of God in its repeated use of the phrase “melech ha-olam”, literally “king of the world/universe/eternity”, in formal blessings and prayers. And many people today, in several different religions, view God as the omnipotent ruler of the universe.

I do not. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a family of athiests, but the only rulers I know of are human decision-makers. I don’t even view “nature” as the ruler of the universe, since “nature” doesn’t make decisions; it just is.

Yet the two verses I translate above still speak to me, even though in my own “heart” I use the slippery word “God” to name a mystery that my rational mind can describe as a state of being, and my intuitive mind identifies as the source and goal of my yearning.

I encourage and cultivate my yearning for “God” in ways that Jews have cultivated their awe and love of “God” ever since the fall of the second temple, almost 2,000 years ago: through Torah study, through prayer, and through noticing the wonders of this world (from the bug crawling on a leaf to my husband smiling at me). All three practices lead to feeling awe, love, and gratitude for … what? Why not call it “God”, in English or Hebrew?

Okay, so I’m working on two of God’s requests in this week’s Torah portion: feeling awe and feeling love. What about walking in all God’s paths, and serving God with all my levav and all my nefesh, and following all the rules passed on by Moses?

I can’t prove it, but I believe all this studying, praying, and noticing I’m doing does lead to making better decisions (in my levav) and creating better habits (in my nefesh), so I walk more often on the right paths, and better serve the spirit of God within me. I don’t follow exactly the same set of rules Moses gives in the Torah (though I do pay attention to them, and think about them, when I study Torah). But I work on following, as best I can, an informal set of rules for behavior that my own branch of Judaism agrees upon. And I like myself more, so perhaps all these practices are indeed for my own good.

What God wants from me is, apparently, the same as what I want from my orientation toward God.

Am I just being self-centered? I don’t know, but I take comfort in the double name of God that first appears in the book of Deuteronomy. In the verses above I translate the double name as “God, your god”, but the Hebrew actually uses two different words for “God”. The first one is the four-letter name of God, spelled with the Hebrew equivalents of Y-H-V-H and related to the verb “to be”. Jews refer to it as Hashem, “The Name”, and treat it as sacred.

The second word appears sometimes in Deuteronomy as Eloheynu, “our god”, sometimes as Eloheykhem, “your god” (the god of all of you being addressed), and sometimes, including the verses above, as Eloheykha, “your god” (the god of you, one person in particular). The implication is that the God of all be-ing is also a god that we, you, and I have a relationship with.

What does God want from you? Relationship, connection, direction. You can deduce it from the verses quoted above. What do you want from God? Relationship, connection, direction?

Masey: Refuge from Compensation

This week’s Torah portion, Masey (“Journeys”), calls for the new land of Israel to be divided up into territories by tribe, with a special arrangement for Levites, who will not own land. Forty-eight cities must be set aside for the Levites, and six of these will be designated “cities of refuge”.

Speak to the children of Israel, and you shall say to them: When you cross the Jordan to the land of Canaan, you shall select cities for yourselves. They will become cities of refuge for you, and a killer who strikes down a living soul inadvertently shall flee there. The cities shall be for you a refuge from a go-eil, so the killer will not die until he has stood before the community for the legal ruling. (Numbers/Bemidbar 35:10-12)

go-eil (גֺּאֵל) = a compensator; a redeemer or avenger; a person who is responsible for redressing the situation when a man’s life or land is taken

In the Torah, a go-eil is usually a male relative of a male victim. When an Israelite man becomes a slave, a go-eil redeems him, freeing him by paying his owner. When a man dies without heirs, his nearest male relative serves as a go-eil by making the widow pregnant, so her child will inherit the deceased man’s property and his “name” will continue. When a man is killed, a “go-eil of the blood” (go-eil hadam) is responsible for correcting the situation by killing the killer.

Legally, execution by the “go-eil of the blood” is is not revenge, but rather a way to uphold the dignity and importance of the victim. If no male relative is available to serve as the go-eil of the blood, the judges appoint one.

(What if the victim of enslavement or murder is a woman? The Torah does give a few examples of redemption and retribution for female victims, but there is no go-eil in these cases. The Torah reflects the culture of the time and place where it was written down, so it has different laws for men than for women.)

The Torah provides for six cities of refuge where a killer can flee to be safe from an over-eager go-eil until the community where the killing occurred passes sentence on the case. If the verdict is murder, the go-eil may execute the death penalty, even if he has to enter a city of refuge to do it. But what if the verdict is accidental manslaughter?

If in an instant, without enmity, he knocked someone down, or threw down upon him any implement, without premeditated malice … then the community shall rescue the killer from the hand of the go-eil of the blood, and the community shall return him to his city of refuge where he had fled. And he shall stay in it until the death of the high priest … and after the death of the high priest the killer may return to his land-holding. (Numbers 35:22, 25, 28)

Thus a man who accidentally causes another’s death receives a different sentence. He must leave his own land, and live in a city of refuge, where the go-eil is not allowed to harm him. The killer must not leave his city of refuge until the high priest of Israel dies.

Traditional commentary offers three reasons for this restriction. One is that it preserves the killer’s life by protecting him from being attacked by a vengeful go-eil. The Talmud takes the idea of protection further by teaching that the refugee is given a place to live in the city of refuge, and he does not have to pay taxes to the Levites.

A second reason for the restriction is that since taking a life is such an awful deed, even an inadvertent killer should be punished. So he is exiled from his home, his land, his friends and neighbors. This makes a “city of refuge” more like a city of imprisonment (though it is a very nice prison, where he can have a normal life within the city limits).

A third reason is that the Levites who run the city, and are presumably spiritually elevated by their career of serving God, will help the killer to repent and atone for his guilt over any possible negligence.

I would add that it would be hard to process your guilt and horror over causing someone’s death if you stayed in your old job and kept associating with the same people (who would now see you differently). Moving to a new place would give you breathing room. Although the residents of the city of refuge would all know why you were there, you would still get a chance to built a new identity, instead of pretending you were the same old person.

Then why does the exile in a city of refuge end when the high priest of all Israel dies?

Whatever reasons they give, traditional commentators agree that the high priest was a beloved figure whom everyone looked up to. So his death was a national tragedy, touching everyone’s heart and moving everyone to see life differently.

Rambam (12-century commentator Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides) wrote that when the high priest dies, a go-eil of the blood loses his taste for vengeance, so it becomes safe for his relative’s killer to leave the city of refuge.

Other commentary views the death of the high priest as the final cleansing of the inadvertent killer’s soul, so he becomes sufficiently pure of heart to go back to his former life with the right attitude.

I’ve seen similar psychological transformations in my own congregation, P’nai Or of Portland, when our beloved founding rabbi, Aryeh Hirschfield of blessed memory, passed away unexpectedly. So many of us felt overwhelmed by grief, we could have fallen apart as a community. Instead, the shock and grief opened our hearts, so that many of us rose above petty personal issues and took on new challenges to keep the congregation going. We had even more lay leadership for services, more learning, more support for each other. And we are still going strong.

Although it is a psychological truth that the death of a beloved leader can transform people, we must not postpone our own transformations until our personal high priests die. We need to begin changing our lives at once, just as an unintentional killer was required to flee to a city of refuge at once. And we need to open our hearts so that any tragedy or insight might offer transformation.

Few of us are haunted by the knowledge that we accidentally killed a human being. But many of us are haunted by other things we did in the past. Our society rarely provides us with clearly defined refuges from our internal “go-eil of the blood”: our recurrent guilt, self-accusation, or emotional memories. We need to find our own cities of refuge, even if they are part-time or internal.

May each of us find a place of refuge from the past deeds that haunt us. May each of us be able to use that refuge to look more honestly at our past and accept it with compassion toward ourselves. And then may each of us be blessed with a big shift in perspective, opening up a new phase in our lives.

Matot: From Genocide to Gentleness

The Israelites perpetrate genocide in this week’s Torah portion, Matot (Tribes).

God spoke to Moses, saying: Take vengeance, the vengeance of the children of Israel, against the Midianites; afterward, you will be gathered to your people. (Numbers/Bemidbar 31:1-2)

For this last military action before Moses dies, he sends out a detachment of 12,000 men, a thousand men from each non-Levite tribe. With them he sends his grand-nephew, the new priest Pinchas, who skewered the Israelite man and the Midianite woman in the act of fornicating to worship the god of Peor. (See my last two blogs, Pinchas: Aromatherapy, and Balak: Wide Open.)

To further emphasize that the coming battle is a religious one, rather than an ordinary battle for conquest or defense, Moses sends Pinchas with signal trumpets and (unspecified) holy objects.

The Israelite detachment succeeds without losing a single man. They kill all the Midianite men, and bring back the women, children, livestock, and other booty as spoils of war.

The Women of Midian Led Captive by the Hebrews, by James Tissot, ca. 1900

And Moses became angry with the military orders given by the officers of the thousands and the officers of the hundreds, the ones coming from the armed battle. And Moses said to them: You let the females live! Hey, they were here leading Israel in the matter of Bilam, to choose unfaithfulness to God in the affair of Peor; and the pestilence happened to the community of God! So now kill every male among the small children, and every woman who has known a man by lying down with a male, kill her! But all the small children among the women who have not known lying down with a male, keep alive for yourselves. (Numbers 31:14-18)

Whoa! Are Moses’ orders as awful as they sound? It depends on the level of interpretation. Jewish Torah commentary is often divided into four classifications: peshat, “spreading out” the literal interpretation; remez, the application of “hints” in the text to related situations; derash, the “investigation” of how mythical elements in the text apply to human psychology and ethics; and sod, the “hidden” level that finds mystical symbolism in the words.

Peshat

On the literal, peshat level, Moses carries out God’s request for “vengeance” by treating the action against the Midianites in Moab as different from all previous military actions. This is a religious war against a people who seduced the men of Israel into worshiping a false god. That’s why the priest Pinchas leads the army, bringing holy objects with him. The Israelites kill all the Midianite men in combat, without losing one of their own men, because God is on their side.

But then they follow standard wartime procedure by returning with all the women and children as part of their booty. Moses declares that since the Midianite women were the ones who seduced the Israelite men into worshiping the god of Peor, through both sex and animal sacrifices, they are guilty and must then be killed. It is not clear which Midianite women seduced Israelite men, so Moses orders all the non-virgins killed.

As for the young boys, they must be killed to prevent them from growing up and avenging their fathers. But the young girls are considered safe, because (according to traditional commentary) they will be converted by their Israelite husbands.

Remez

So on the literal, peshat level, Moses has a rationale for the genocide. But when I look on the remez level for what the text hints at, I notice the assumption that Israelite men have no willpower to resist seduction. All the blame lies on the Midianite women, rather than on the men who succumb to their invitations. And since the Midianite women seduce the Israelite men openly, it is a fair assumption that the Midianite men are complicit. That’s why God orders vengeance against all the Midianites in Moab.

If the Israelite men were held responsible for their own sex acts, the story would be different. The vengeance or punishment would be left up to God, who has already afflicted both Israelites and Midianites with a pestilence. And Moses would exhort the men of Israel to leave Moab behind them, rejecting any future seductions from Midianite women. No war or genocide would be necessary; the Israelites do not intend to conquer Moab, and their men must learn to resist seduction by worshipers of foreign gods.

So in my remez interpretation, the story of genocide becomes a tragic illustration of what happens when women get all the blame for seducing men into bad behavior.

Derash

Moving toward the derash level, modern commentators have noted that Moses himself was married to a Midianite. Moses’ wife Tzipporah has nothing to do with the seduction in Moab; he married her decades earlier, she belonged to a group of Midianites living far away on the Sinai peninsula, and her father was the Midianite priest Jethro (Yitro), who mentored Moses and worshiped the same god.

Nevertheless, Moses might feel self-conscious about his Midianite wife, and therefore insist on being especially severe with the Midianite women in Moab in order to prove his complete aversion to them and their alien religion.

Going deeper into a derash investigation, I find the basic human conflict between what Freud called the id and the superego. The id side of a human being wants to indulge in any pleasure that comes along, and avoid the pain of saying no, setting boundaries, refusing to go along with other people. This is the side that is seduced by Midianites into worshiping the wrong god. The superego side of a human being wants to do the right thing, earn self-respect and inner peace, and go for the long-term reward of a good reputation. This is the side that must utterly reject the Midianites. And this utter rejection is expressed metaphorically by the extermination of all the Midianites in Moab—except for the young girls.

Sod

What do the young, virgin girls stand for? Moving into the sod level of interpretation, I think they represent our more innocent impulses toward pleasure and sociability. Human beings should not be total killjoys. Instead, we should let our love of physical and social pleasures enrich our moral activities and bring a gentle joy into our lives. Young girls are often romanticized as gentle, happy creatures.

Rebirth of Torah Sparks and Torah Monologues

This is my new site for my blogs on the Torah portion of the week, “Torah Sparks”, and my website for my Torah Monologues and creative midrash workshops.

I’ve been working on this new site for more than a month now, while outside sprouts slowly push out of their seeds or bulbs and up through the dirt, until finally they reach the open air and the sun turns them green.

And my dear and computer-savvy husband, Will, transferred “www.mtorah.com” to this new site just before Passover (Pesach in Hebrew). How delightfully appropriate! Not only is Passover a spring holiday, but it celebrates the liberation of the Israelites from their old life of slavery in Egypt, and how they (and everyone else who decided to join them as they left Egypt) began to learn a new way of life on the other side of the Reed Sea. In their new life, they were all to become priests and priestesses, a holy nation. And that takes a lot of learning and a lot of practice.

I’ll address what “holy” means in my next regular blog, on the Torah portion named Kedoshim (Holiness).

I hope this new site will make it easier for you to find sparks of inspiration, and easier for me to continue the “holy” work I’ve taken on.

Toledot: Opposing Twins

(This was my first “Torah Sparks” blog post, published on November 17, 2009. I made a few small additions before reposting it in 2020.)

Birth of Esau and Jacob, by Francois Maitre, ca. 1480

And [Rebecca’s] days for giving birth filled, and hey! Twins were in her womb! And the first one emerged red all over, like a robe of fur; and they called his name Eisav. After that, his brother emerged, and his hand was holding onto the akeiv of Eisav, so he called his name Ya-akov. (Genesis/Bereishit 25:24-26)

Eisav (עֵשָׂו) = (“Esau” in English.) Doer? (Probably from the verb asah, עָשַׂה = did, made. Aso, עֲשׂוֹ = to do.)

akeiv (עָקֵב) = heel. (From the verb akav, עָקַב = grasp by the heel, cheat.)

Ya-akov (יַעֲקֺב) = (“Jacob” in English.) He grasps by the heel.

Isaac and Rebecca name the first one Eisav, and he grows up to be a hunter and a man of action. They name the second one Ya-akov because he was born holding onto his twin brother’s heel . Clearly this heel-holding is important. But what does it mean?

The traditional Jewish interpretation is that Jacob is trying to pull Esau back, because even in the womb Jacob knows that he, not Esau, should receive the inheritance and the blessing that belong to the firstborn. Since he fails to switch places with Esau at birth, the adult Jacob resorts to trickery to get the rights of the firstborn.

But what if Jacob is hanging onto Esau because he cannot bear to be separated from his twin? Esau has always been with him, since they were conceived. Rebecca noticed the agitation in her belly as the brothers struggled, or wrestled, or perhaps danced inside her. Then suddenly Esau was gone. How could Jacob stand the sudden loss?

The birth process separates the twins, and also separates them into two halves of one person, dividing the traits of a human being between them. Esau is a physical man, hairy like an animal, focused on eating, taking wives, and killing. Jacob is an intellectual, a smooth-skinned smooth-talker, focused on cooking up the future and getting words of blessing.

That’s why neither Jacob nor Esau can be whole until he takes on some of his brother’s characteristics. In next week’s Torah portion, Vayeitzei, Jacob becomes interested in taking a wife and acquires physical strength when he sees Rachel and rolls the big stone off the well (Genesis 29:10). And in the following portion, Vayishlach, Esau learns to think well enough to become a leader of a tribe (Genesis 32:7). But neither twin can be at peace until they finally meet again in old age, and kiss and weep together (Genesis 33:4).

Va-eira: Shortness of Ruach

(This blog was first posted on January 10, 2010.)

And Moses spoke thus to the children of Israel, but they did not listen to Moses, from kotzer of ruach and from avodah kashah. (Exodus/Shemot 6:9)

Moses asks Pharaoh to give the Israelite slaves a leave of absence to spend three days in the wilderness worshiping their god. Pharaoh responds by accusing the Israelites of laziness and giving them extra work: they must collect their own straw to mix with clay, and still make the same quota of bricks. The slaves complain to Moses, who then complains to God that now the people are even worse off than before. This week’s Torah portion,Va-eira (“And I appeared”), opens with God reaffirming the divine plan to rescue the children of Israel from Egypt.

Moses passes on this communication to the Israelite slaves, but they do not listen to him. Why not? The brief explanation ending the sentence in Exodus 6:9, “from kotzer of ruach and from avodah kashah“, can be translated in many ways. Below are some possibilities; pick one from each list to make your own translation.

kotzer = shortness. being stunted. despondency. impatience.

ruach = wind. spirit. breath. motivation.

avodah = labor. service. ritual. worship.

kashah = difficult. heavy. stubborn. severe.

Some translators choose a physical interpretation, writing that the Israelites did not listen to Moses out of shortness of breath and hard bondage (Robert Alter, following Rashi). How can you listen to someone promising an unimaginable future when you’re working so hard that you’re panting? Ramban says physical exhaustion made the people impatient and sapped them of the strength to hope.

Other translators take a psychological approach, writing that the Israelites did not listen to Moses because of a constriction of the spirit (the Zohar) and because of the heathen service which weighed heavily upon them (the Targumim, according to Elie Munk). Their suffering was so continuous that they were reduced to animals who could only think about their daily physical needs; they did not have enough human spirit to imagine anything else. Lacking imagination and believing themselves powerless, they paid homage to the Egyptian gods of their slave-masters. This idol worship also prevented them from listening to any communication from their own god.

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, in The Particulars of Rapture, wrote: “To hear is to open oneself up to vulnerability, change, contingency.” Pharoah the hard-hearted cannot consider even the idea of change, so he refuses to hear out Moses. Pharoah afflicts his Israelite slaves with the same deafness, by making their lives so hard that they cannot stop and listen to any revolutionary ideas. Thus Egypt, which in Hebrew is called Mitzrayim, “Narrow Places”, is the place of constriction for both master and slave. It is the place where people are stunted, cut short—“kotzer”—from the freedom of thought that make us human.

In Kabbalistic terms, the children of Israel are stunted in the ruach level of soul. Like animals, they exist from day to day with only the nefesh, the level of soul that animates the body. They have neither time nor energy to access their ruach and neshamah levels of soul. (The neshamah is the soul level where one can hear one’s calling and receive inspiration. The ruach is the level where one is seized by the drive and motivation to seek that calling, to do something new.)

In the story of creation at the beginning of Genesis, the ruach—wind or spirit—of God hovers over the face of the waters. Throughout the Torah, certain humans are seized by the irresistible power of the ruach of God, which turns them into prophets or madmen, or perhaps both. A human being’s own ruach may not be as enormous as God’s ruach, but it is still a motivating force that can be ignored only by rigorous denial.

Pharaoh is the king of denial. He does not listen to the word of God because his ruach is stunted; he refuses to believe that change is unavoidable. The children of Israel do not listen to the word of God because their ruach is imprisoned by continuous suffering; they refuse to believe that change can happen to them.

I’ve been in that constricted place, too. I’ve cried over more than one unbearable situation in my life, unable to believe that I could do anything about it or that it would ever change. But each situation did change. Sometimes I heard a different inner voice, and I found a way out. Other times the change happened without an action on my part, by the grace of God, and all I had to do was to respond, to gird my loins and go with it.

But what about when you’re still trapped in the suffering? How do you find the voice you haven’t been hearing? Does it take a temporary break—a deep breath, a real Shabbat, three days in the wilderness—to hear the voice of freedom? Or do you need someone, or something, to lead you out of your Egypt whether you’re ready or not?