A few people asked me to write up my d’var Torah from yesterday (April 1, Shabbat Va’et’chanan), so here it is, to the best of my memory.

I had a talk all written out, but late last night someone said, “I bet the Rabbi would have talked about what happened today.” She was referring to the firebomb attack on Palestinian homes that burned a family and murdered a toddler. So here is something not written down.

All Jewish people are responsible for each other
כל ישראל ערבים זה בזה
Kol Yisra’el arevim zeh bazeh
(BT Shavu’ot 39a)

We often hear this phrase when we’re talking about how Jewish people must help each other. We set up our Jewish institutions, from Free Loan to Meals on Wheels, to make sure no needy Jew is left to fend for himself or herself without the community’s help.

But there’s another side to this phrase. When a Jewish person does something shameful, we are all shamed. When a Jewish person commits a heinous terrorist act, we know that the reputation of our entire system of living—the Torah given by God—is diminished. In today’s sedrah (Va’et’chanan) Moses says of the Torah: כִּ֣י הִ֤וא חָכְמַתְכֶם֙ וּבִ֣ינַתְכֶ֔ם לְעֵינֵ֖י הָעַמִּ֑ים אֲשֶׁ֣ר יִשְׁמְע֗וּן אֵ֚ת כָּל־הַחֻקִּ֣ים הָאֵ֔לֶּה וְאָמְר֗וּ רַ֚ק עַם־חָכָ֣ם וְנָב֔וֹן הַגּ֥וֹי הַגָּד֖וֹל הַזֶּֽה, This is your cleverness and your wisdom—this is the source of your smarts—in the opinion of nations who hear all these rooms and say, “These Jewish people are nothing but clever and wise!” The Torah system wins the admiration of all who see people live by it. Living a life of Torah brings glory to our God, and the opposite brings shame on our God and our people, for we are all intertwined.

You’ve heard of the brilliant Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, right? I know, you’re going to dismiss him as an anti-Semite because of Fagin in Oliver Twist, right? Slow down! Although Shakespeare’s Shylock was a moneylender, the moneylenders in Dickens—and there are several, because debt and debtor’s prison were miseries of Victorian life—the moneylenders in Dickens are never Jewish. In his last novel, Our Mutual Friend, Dickens presents a good Jewish man, Mr. Riah, who works for a conniving and heartless moneylender, Fledgeby. Fledgeby uses Riah as a front man so that people will blame Riah for Fledgeby’s business cruelty. Eventually, Riah leaves Fledgeby, and one day he explains his decision to an old friend:

I reflected … that I was doing dishonour to my ancient faith and race. I reflected—clearly reflected for the first time—that in bending my neck to the yoke I was willing to wear, I bent the unwilling necks of the whole Jewish people. For it is not, in Christian countries, with the Jews as with other peoples. Men say, ‘This is a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks. This is a bad Turk, but there are good Turks.’ Not so with the Jews. Men find the bad among us easily enough—among what peoples are the bad not easily found?—but they take the worst of us as samples of the best; they take the lowest of us as presentations of the highest; and they say “All Jews are alike.” If, doing what I was content to do here, … I had been a Christian, I could have done it, compromising no one but my individual self. But doing it as a Jew, I could not choose but compromise the Jews of all conditions and all countries. It is a little hard upon us, but it is the truth. I would that all our people remembered it! (Book III, ch. 9)

Would that those who commit terrorist acts would remember that they bring condemnation on all their people.

Last Sunday we fasted in mourning for the destruction of the Temple on the Ninth of Av. I know a lot of us probably feel that the Holocaust, still in living memory, deserves more attention. But there’s a key difference between the Holocaust and the destruction of the Temple. In the Holocaust, we were victims. In the Inquisition, the Chmielnitzki massacres, in the other disasters of Jewish history, we were victims. We may wish to blame the Romans for the destruction of the Temple and the end of Jewish autonomy in our land, but remember that they had nothing to gain by destroying a cash cow like the Temple treasury, boosted by cash-bearing tourist visitors from hundreds of miles away and by annual donations from every Jew in the Roman empire and beyond. So long as we paid hefty taxes and didn’t make too much trouble, they’d leave us more or less alone. But did we make trouble—trouble for ourselves that brought about the end of our Temple. We were not simply the victims, but largely the architects of our own tragedy.

Josephus describes the political situation. Three factions of Jews struggled for power. One of them, impatient to bring the battle against the Romans to a head, burned the supplies that would have enabled the Jews to resist the Roman siege. Josephus says:

almost all the corn was burnt, which would have been sufficient for a siege of many years. So they were taken by the means of famine, which it was impossible they should have been, unless they had thus prepared the way for it by this procedure. (V.I.4)

The Talmud has a different story, of penetrating psychological insight (BT Gittin 55b-56a) . One man resented another, denounced people to the Roman authorities, and thus set off the chain of events that led to the destruction of Jerusalem.

It seems beyond belief that a disagreement between two people could lead to such horror, but it reminds us that the smallest evils can have the most terrible consequences.

We sometimes think that our right to the land of Israel is unalienable because God gave us the land. But an unalienable right can be lost: just ask anyone in jail what happened to his or her unalienable right to freedom. In the same way, the Torah warns us repeatedly that our original right to the land given to Abraham and his descendants is conditional. In this week’s reading, for example, we’re warned that if we want to keep the land, we’d better do right and do good (Deut. 6:18).

Two weeks from now Shabbat coincides with Rosh Chodesh, and we have a special Musaf prayer. In the middle blessing of the Musaf Amidah, we remind ourselves why we lost our land: “Because we sinned at you, both we and our ancestors, our city was deserted, our Temple ruined, our treasure laid bare and pride cast aside from the Temple, the hub of our life.”

I hope we can heed the warning from our history and remember: when Jewish people perpetrate evil, they endanger all their coreligionists, bring shame to our way of life and our God, and weaken our hold on the land we love.

Shabbat Shalom.