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Moshe tells us that not only did the covenant with Hashem include all of those who stood at Sinai, but it extends to all descendants of those who experienced the Revelation at Sinai (29:14). This would indicate that the covenant was binding upon all future generations who were not even there. This poses an obvious logical problem. The Midrash indicates to us that all Jewish souls were present at the time of the beginning of the Torah, even those who had not been placed in physical bodies at that time.
Therefore, all of us were actually there because our souls were in existence back at that time. The covenant was established not with individuals but with the nation of Israel, and just as the nation of Israel is eternal, so, too, the covenantal relationship with the Almighty is eternal. Anybody who is part of the nation of Israel is part of Knesset Yisrael, which means that that individual is automatically included within the covenantal relationship. It is the eternality of the nation of Israel that in turn obligates every future Jewish soul who comes into this world to obey and adhere to the binding relationship with Hashem. At the end of the first Aliyah, Moshe says: “The hidden things belong to Hashem our God, and the revealed things are for us and our descendants forever, to observe all the words of this Torah” (29:28). The Ktav Sofer noted that our Sages relate that there are two possible times for salvation: one which is hidden from us, and one which is revealed. Moshe was prophesying about the long and bitter exile which the Jewish people were destined to endure, the conclusion of which was not revealed to the prophets. This hidden fact is known only to Hashem. However, there is another possible time of salvation and that one is revealed to us and our descendants. The time of that salvation is brought about by the nation of Israel observing all the words of the Torah. This is similar to the rabbinic interpretation of the words of Isaiah when we read recently in a haftorah that Hashem will redeem us; He will hasten it in its time. If we do nothing it will come in its proper time. If we observe Torah as a nation we will therefore enable God to hasten the time of redemption. One time of redemption is in our hands to create while the second time of redemption is in God’s hands alone. Haftorah Nitzavim: This haftorah is the last of the seven haftorahs of consolation spanning Tisha B’Av to Rosh Hashanah. The prophet Isaiah compares the salvation of Israel to the earth that gives forth its plants, the seeds of which disintegrate in the soil and then sprout, renewed and better than they were originally; for the new is generally better than the old. Moreover, from one seed emanates many kernels. So is it with Israel. We have been in exile for thousands of years; we have been persecuted; and many have perished. Yet when redemption arrives, we will multiply to many times their former number and increase in greatness and in glory. Isaiah then compares us to a garden in which various seeds are sown, each one maturing in another season. So will Israel experience many benefits, one following the other.
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his week’s parsha reading truly belongs in the month of Elul, just a few days before we begin these Days of Awe.
Parsha Ki Tavo is a wake-up call, a way to tell us that we must always remember how far we have come. We chose to abandon the rituals and practices of our neighbors, of those around us and those who came before us. We were slaves destined to be free, and we claimed not only that freedom but also a new idea, an idea different and radical. What was that idea? It was monotheism, the idea that there is one God and that God loves us and wants us to WALK IN HIS WAYS. Judaism is about the courage to make a claim for an idea as new and different as monotheism. Judaism tells us that what has always been is not how things must be, or should be. Judaism tells us that HABITS do not dictate our future. And that is true of the world and it is also true of us as individuals. We can always be better. The message of Ki Tavo is that we are not static. Two sentences illustrate this point. One is a curse and the other is not. They appear in the parsha separated by about 43 verses. Here’s the earlier verse, the curse: YOU SHALL GROPE AT NOON AS A BLIND MAN GROPES IN THE DARK. Now I know that’s not as graphic as eating your own children, which is also in this parsha, but this curse is terrifying in its own way. First, it reminds us all of another moment in our history—of when we were in Egypt and Pharaoh refused to LET US GO. And so, God inflicted plagues on the Egyptians. We know about that last plague: the deaths of all the first-borns. What was the one before that? It was the plague of darkness. Our sages tell us that the plagues occurred from the least bad to the worst; if that’s true, then the ninth plague was the second-worst plague, and the only one worse was the deaths of children. So, we have to know that darkness is terrifying. Think about the first human beings, and how they must have felt when the sun went down. Think about how WE feel when we lose power during a storm. We feel frightened and ALONE. But, of course, the darkness here can also be metaphorical. The darkness here is the darkness of SIN, the darkness of willful ignorance, the darkness of a loss of community. In fact, the last part of that very verse ends with “you shall be abused and robbed, with none to give help.” Without that help, we face a kind of vulnerability and each of us becomes the enemy of the other. We have no neighbor. That is, without question, a powerful curse. The second line is almost at the very end of the parsha. And it’s pretty typical that Parshiyot end on a positive, or at least a somewhat positive, note. This line occurs AFTER all the blessings and the curses, so we have to assume that it’s neither a blessing NOR a curse. Here’s the line: “Yet to this day the Lord has not given you a mind to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear.” There’s a negative there that makes this line a little hard to understand, so I’m going to rephrase it, to try to make it a little clearer. What this line is saying is: “ON THIS DAY THE LORD HAS GIVEN YOU A MIND TO UNDERSTAND AND EYES TO SEE AND EARS TO HEAR.” HAYOM HAZEH. This day. A mind and eyes and ears. That’s all we need. On this day—and we can think of this as THAT day in time, the day that the Torah is referring to. But we can also think about this in terms of TODAY, of every day. Every day that we reaffirm our commitment to Judaism, that we reaffirm our commitment to living a righteous life. That is truly the antidote to the curse of blindness. We now have not only EYES to see but also ears to hear and a mind to understand. At the end of Ki Tavo, God is telling the Israelites, God is telling US: you are ready. You are ready to be a people, ready to grow up, break bad habits, and find your own way. God no doubt has hopes for us, hopes for HOW we will find that way; but there is no question that we are now on our own. And that’s the message of Elul. As individuals and as a community, we are not only permitted to re-create ourselves, we are expected to do so. Now, most likely, at this point in our lives, we are probably not going to change the habits that we’ve had for so long. If you are suddenly angry, that tendency is not going to disappear. If you are inclined to be fearful, don’t expect that some prayers and some fasting will eliminate that inclination. But what these days CAN DO for us is to bring light to the darkness. What these days can do for us is to wake us up, to call us to account for ourselves.
Regardless of THOSE changes, we will probably continue to do many of the same things next year that we have done in the year now ending. But, in other ways, we need to be ready to shed aspects of ourselves that have hurt us and others, and be willing to take on new identities that will lift us and lift them. We have to feel ready and able to transform ourselves as dramatically as a group of slaves who made themselves over into Israelites. Our history as Jews is one of choosing to be different, of embracing what appears to be so strange to other people—if you’ve ever tried to explain kashrut to anyone, you know exactly what I mean. We should all use these holidays to rethink who we are, and be ready to change in order to bring more hope, more life, more sanctity into this world, both for Jews and for non-Jews. As Ki Tavo tells us, our capacity for personal transformation is our sacred inheritance and our sacred obligation. Let us resolve to think about the ways that we can honor that inheritance, and fulfill that obligation. AND LET US SAY AMEN. Ki Teitzei is actually one of our favorite parshiyot, why? It is full of mitzvot! More than 12% of the 613 mitzvot command us to obey. But the opening of Ki Teitzei may seem completely irrelevant to our daily existence. That opening reads...
“Ki tetzei lamilcham al oiyecha, unesana Hashem Elokecha beyadecha veshavisa sivyo.” “When you take the field against your enemies, and the Lord your God delivers them into your power, and you take some of them captive. . . “ And the rest of the Aliyah goes on to describe the rules for taking a beautiful woman captive and whether you can marry her and how long you have to wait if you DO want to marry her. Now I don’t think anyone here is worried about taking women captive in wartime. So, we may be inclined to dismiss this passage as part of another era, as something that is no longer—and happily no longer—relevant to our lives. Or—as I think Mary Belgard suggested a couple of years ago, this passage is truly ICKY. Ironically, some argue that this passage shows that Judaism, in our long-ago past, was concerned with treating women with respect. But many of us might think that that’s stretching it. So, we are left thinking that the passage is either embarrassing OR irrelevant. BUT let me try to convince you that there might be another alternative. To do so, I want to take a little poetic license with one of the Hebrew words in the opening of the passage—the word is VESHAVISA. The root of that word is SH’V’H—to take captive, and that gives the pasuk—the verse—its literal sense. But—and here’s the poetic license—doesn’t that root also look like something else? That something else is SH’U’V—to RETURN. Another possible translation might be to “take back.” So, let’s think about that in the context of the month of Elul. We are getting ever closer to the High Holy Days, and we know that those days are a period of time when we look inward, when we ask ourselves what we could have done differently, whom we have hurt, and how we can be better people in the year ahead. What keeps us from being the best people that we can be? I think we all know the answer to that question. It is the YETZER HARA—the evil voice inside of each of us that is always tempting us to go astray, to take the path of least resistance, to cheat on our goals. That yetzer hara is constantly trying to take the US captive, to hold us in its spell. But if we think about this passage in Ki Tetzei, we might imagine a kind of war between good and evil in each one of us. Who will win that war? Can we “recapture” our goodness, can we wrest that righteousness from the dark forces of self-destruction that lie within each one of us? The forces of evil are clever and powerful. They can hold us “CAPTIVE,” SHIVYO. They can even appear, superficially, to be beautiful. Otherwise, why would we be tempted? But we can’t be fooled by surface appearances. Beauty fades, and sin is never as satisfying as we imagine that it will be. So, let’s think about this concept as we approach the holidays. Let’s use Shabbat as a time for heightened awareness and as preparation for the awesome days to come. Let’s remember that beauty--THE SURFACE—fades over time. But INTEGRITY—what lies BELOW the surface—cannot be muted by time or place. You can enhance your coming Shabbat by attending this Friday evening and being part of the shul community, as well as on Shabbat morning. There are so many troubling parts of the Torah, and we struggle to interpret them.
The laws about owning slaves, for example, are hard to grapple with, even if they were probably pretty progressive for their time. In addition, many of the Torah’s preaching about women might give us pause (to say the least). And should we really stone the disobedient child? Do we genuinely believe that idolaters should not be allowed to live? I have no doubt that we could provide many more such examples. These concepts and principles force us to interpret the Torah through a modern lens. And rabbis over the centuries have struggled to do that as well. And, God willing, centuries of future Jews will face the same intellectual and spiritual challenge. But this week’s Parsha has a very modern feel to it. Much of Shoftim is devoted to JUSTICE. Justice Justice shall you pursue The very repetition of the word makes clear how important a concept it is. And Shoftim gives us clear guidelines not only for how kings should be appointed over a people but also about limitations on the king’s behavior. These are VERY radical ideas. It wasn’t that long ago that many scholars and politicians defended what has been called the DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS. That idea meant that the King was the direct descendent of God, and that God had actually APPOINTED the king. What would that mean? Well, it would mean that to question a king is literally to question GOD. It would also mean that the king had absolute authority over his people—in other words, there were no limits to what a king could do. And, finally, the idea of the divine right of kings meant that the successor to the throne was based on one’s ancestry. Any idiot son could (and DID!) lay claim to the throne. And that was not at all unusual. It was only in the 1600s and 1700s that real opposition to this idea became forceful. Think about THAT—only three or four hundred years ago radical thinkers challenged the idea that God appoints kings. But the Torah has something to say about that LONG before the 1600s. In Parshat Shoftim, there are definite limits on a king’s power. First, one’s king has to be a “kinsman,” not a foreigner. A king, we are told, should not keep too many horses or have too many wives. In other words, kings should not be distracted by wealth or romance. As the Torah tells us, “He shall not have many wives, lest his heart go astray; nor shall he amass silver and gold to excess.” Even our own rulers (think about Shlomo) didn’t always follow those principles. And perhaps the most radical idea of all is that Shoftim tells us that the king should always keep a copy of the Torah by his side. “Let it remain with him and let him read it all his life.” What a powerful idea—this passage is instructing the king on how to rule. This passage is telling the king (and all of us) that rule cannot be arbitrary, that rule must be based on teaching, on scripture, on the Torah. So that we know that there is always something higher than the king. The Torah and God limit what the king can and cannot do; and that’s a very radical idea, not only for the time when it was written but even for today. |
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