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.

We had a week at Chautauqua listening to lectures on immigration, and on Shabbat we looked at all the times the Torah tells us to be nice to “strangers” or aliens.

I came away wondering if the Thanksgiving tale is one of the reasons so many Americans are afraid of immigrants. I didn’t grow up in the United States, but I heard that the Pilgrim Fathers would have starved if the Indians hadn’t invited them to their feast. The Indians welcomed immigrants, and look what happened: a week of lectures at Chautauqua–a few miles from the Seneca Nation–without a single Native American voice. The Pilgrim Fathers learned their own lesson: immigrants will destroy you with liquor, with arms, with disease, betray you with their treaties and confine your shattered remnant to remote reservations. No wonder the descendants of the Pilgrims are wary of immigrants.

We’ve all heard that hospitality is highly valued in the Middle East and other parts of the world, so why would the Torah have to instruct people to be nice to immigrants or strangers or aliens? The Jews were strangers in Egypt; the host people didn’t make out so well. The Jews were immigrants in the land of Israel; the indigenous locals didn’t make out so well, either. Since the Jews might have learned to resist immigration as forcefully as some Americans of today, the Torah’s instruction is: Even though you have good reason to be wary of other peoples, you must still treat them well.

Did you read about the copper snake, or were you taking a nap during the Torah reading yesterday?

The Israelites were grumbling, and God sent fiery snakes to bite them. Ouch. Then God told Moses to set up a copper snake on a pole; they could look up at it and be cured.

Fast forward a few hundred years, and Hezekiah destroyed the snake because people had been burning incense to it.

When a symbol of your heritage–something your people have cherished and honored for generation after generation–becomes an object of idolatrous worship, the time has come to destroy it.

You can read all about this and form your own opinion. Look at Numbers 21:5-10 and 2 Kings 18:4. Of course, translations differ, and there are some nice bits of wordplay you can find in the Hebrew, but the point is the same. If you look at the Talmud (Berachot 10b), you’ll see that the Rabbis approved of Hezekiah’s action.

Up with the Rabbis, down with the Confederate flag!

If you watch the new Exodus movie, you’ll probably cringe when Moses tells Pharaoh, “This has nothing to do with you and I.” What about me?

Ignorant scriptwriters. Don’t they know the difference between “with I” and “with me”?

But when you read through and think about the story of Moses, you can see that he’s concerned about his speaking ability.

God reassures him that Aaron will do the talking.

Some think that Moses’ Egyptian becomes rusty while he’s herding sheep for Jethro in Midian. Some think that Moses is concerned about his Hebrew; since he grew up in the palace, how will he talk to the Hebrews? In that case, maybe Aaron steps in to speak Hebrew for him. Then there’s the story about Moses as a baby and the coals that damaged his lips, leaving him with a speech impediment.

Whichever of these possibilities you favor, I at least learned a lesson. For someone like me, a slip of grammar turns a mighty warrior into a contemptible bumpkin, for I am a man of words, not swords. I may not able to hoist a shield or race a chariot, but I know when to say I and me.

Perhaps, though, I should examine my own prejudice and acknowledge that truth can appear in rusty Egyptian, halting Hebrew, and even in broken English.

… to be denied entrance to the Promised Land.

Yeah, I know, he hit the rock.

So what?

When he remembers the incident, he tells the people it’s because of them that he doesn’t get to go into the land. It’s their fault he didn’t follow instructions? C’mon. He must have got crabby in his old age, and somehow he won’t take responsibility for his own faults. Old people are like that. As I grow older, I find that my problems are caused by other people, not me. This must be what they mean by growing older and wiser: shifting blame is a very clever trick.

Back to Mo.

When God tells him he’s not going into the land, God says (Num. 20:12) “Lo he’emantem bi / לֹא־הֶאֱמַנְתֶּם בִּי.” What does this mean? Ahhh, the never-ending question.

One option: you (Moses and Aaron) did not believe in me. That’s why you hit the rock–you didn’t believe me when I told you to just talk to it.

The word for “believe” is in the causative form. It’s always in the causative form, so it could be intransitive (you believed) or transitive (you made someone believe). So we come to option two: you (Moses and Aaron) did not bring about belief in me. That’s to say, you guys had one principal job: to get the Hebrews to believe in God. That’s why you had all those tricks you could do with your stick. When the people cried, “Give us a show, Mo,” you could pick up your stick and show them a trick, like parting the sea. This wasn’t for entertainment: your job was to get them to understand that all the miracles come from God who chose them.

In Deut. 3:25, Moses brings up the question of entering the land, and God slaps him down. Why does Moses bring up the question? One commentator (I heard from someone well learned) suggests why. After the spies/scouts came back, the people lost confidence that God would help them fight–their belief wavered. Years later, before Moses’ death, he sends the people to attack Sihon and Og, and they don’t hesitate. So Moses could think that they’ve recovered their belief, that this proves he’s done his job successfully, and that he’s got a chance at entering the land. No dice, but nice try.

One more option. Imagine you change the last vowel of “he’emantem” so it reads “he’emantAm.” This would mean you (Moses) did not get them to believe. To change TEM to TAM, all you need to do is connect the dots in the E vowel. (If you can read Hebrew, you know what I mean, and if you can’t, I’m sorry.) The Torah is written without vowels, but we have no ancient authority to support this change, so it’s just something to think about.

Moses’ job was to get the people to connect the dots between the miracles they had seen and the reality behind those miracles: a loving God who chose to bring this people from slavery to freedom. If Moses failed, it’s at least party because the people just weren’t faith material, so he might as well blame them for not taking to heart the lesson he taught.

Well, if you want to talk about this week’s sedrah, here’s a thought. Not the second paragraph of the Shema. Not the injunction to eat and be satisfied. Something completely different.

Earlier this week I attended the North America Interfaith Network annual conference. May I mention in passing that religion continues to evolve new forms, such as the Aetherius Society (how can you choose between the authoritative-sounding Wikipedia article and the organization’s own website?) and the Urantia Book (okay, I’m going for Wikipedia), both based on new revelations transmitted to human vessels. Scoffers, hold back, for the process is much the same as the revelations for many hoary religions, including the revelation to Moses that we Jews treat with respect.

Speaking of Moses, here’s something he says in the sedrah of Ekev: “Remember the whole journey on which your ruling God has led you” (Deut. 8:2). You may be hoping for a picture at this point, so please close your eyes for a moment and imagine an expanse of sand as far as you can see. Great, you can open them now.

One day on the NAIN conference, we had a tour of the Underground Railroad. Our guide explained that Detroit was the last stop for an estimated 50,000 passengers. On that route. Detroit was called Midnight, the last stop before Canada, the Dawn of hope and freedom.

Detroit’s name comes from the old French name for the Straits of Lake Erie, the narrow strip of navigable water between Lakes Huron and Erie, and I was struck by the thought that the Torah’s name for Egypt, Mitzrayim, also refers to straits–both the narrow strip of arable land next to the fertile Nile and the bitter constraints and oppression that the Hebrews suffered as slaves.

I mentioned I was working on the poems used to call honorees on Simchat Torah. The poems assume that the honorees are male and the Torah female. I was tempted to offer versions with switched genders but finally decided there’s little point changing the Hebrew poems. Here’s the note I’m putting in the book to explain why, and I invite your comments, in case you actually read this.

The Chatan Torah oversees the final reading from the entire Torah, and the Chatan Bereshit oversees the beginning of the next year’s cycle (for congregations with an annual cycle). As you can see from the poems used (in whole or on part) to call them up, these honors are a big deal. Some will say the honors go to leaders in the congregation, role models in virtue and scholarship, dedicated to Jewish practice and to Jewish ideals and to their congregation. Others will say the honors go to anyone willing to sponsor a fancy Kiddush.

Some communities want to share the honor of Chatan Torah and Bereshit, Bridegrooms of the Last and First Torah Readings, equally among men and women. Torah is part of every healthy Jewish life and relationship, so Jewish singles and couples are all in a sense “wedded” to the Torah.

However, some will point out that these honors are about faking a marriage to Torah, and the Torah is feminine—the Hebrew word Torah is of the feminine gender, the Torah is feminine in traditionally male-dominated religious fantasy and certainly in these poems. (That’s not why she has those cute velvety dresses and the fancy silver deely-boppers to wear; in olden times, guys used to wear skirts, like the High Priest on Yom Kippur with bells and pomegranates a-jangling.) But Torah is often a she, and many people will understand if some shuls hesitate to celebrate a relationship between two females or a threesome. Please stop sniggering.

That’s why we didn’t provide versions of these poems for calling up a lady or a couple. If you think we’re marrying off a girl-scroll, you’ll insist on calling up a guy. Otherwise, this could be a good time to ignore the gender of the pronouns in these poems and use them for whoever gets the honor, a guy, a gal, a couple, a family, or whatever you please.