The Shmuz on the Parsha
R’ Ben Tzion Shafier
I Never Do Anything Wrong
Parshas Nasoh
“Speak to the Bnai Yisrael and say to them: any man whose wife shall go astray and commit treachery against him. . . ” — Bamidbar 5:12
The Parsha of Sotah
The Torah describes the details of a sotah. If a woman acts in a manner that causes her husband to suspect her of infidelity, he should warn her not to go into seclusion with that other man. If she violates this warning, then the husband is to take her to the Kohain. The Kohain will give her the “bitter waters” to drink. If she was unfaithful, she will instantly die. If she was not unfaithful, she will be redeemed and blessed.
When the Torah lays out the details, it uses an unusual expression: כי תשטה “If a man will ‘tistheh’ his wife.” The word “tishteh” comes from the root “shoteh,” which means insanity. It’s as if to say, “If a man will accuse his wife of insanity.”
Rashi is troubled by the use of this expression. He explains, based on the Gemara, adulterers do not sin until a wave of insanity enters them. The Siftei Chachmim explains this to mean, “until their yetzer harah teaches them it is permitted.”
It seems clear from the Siftei Chachaim that the modus operandi of the yetzer harah is to convince the potential sinners that the act tempting them is permitted. Only when it succeeds, and they are convinced, will they then transgress.
This statement — people only sin when they are convinced that it is permitted — seems difficult to understand. If we are dealing with a pious, proper Jewish woman who got into a bad situation, she knows that the act that she wants to commit is forbidden. How can the yetzer harah teach her that it is permitted? On the other hand, the Torah may be speaking about the opposite extreme — a woman who has gone off the path and just doesn’t care. Why does she need the yetzer harah to tell her it is permitted? She doesn’t care.
So on both sides of the spectrum, the yetzer harah either should not be able to convince the person that it is permitted, or it shouldn’t need to convince them.
I never do anything wrong
The answer to this question is based on understanding one of the most consistent quirks of human nature: “I never do anything wrong.” Whether dealing with sophisticated adults or schoolchildren, whether Supreme Court justices or convicted felons, the human seems never to do anything wrong. Wardens will tell you that their jails are filled with self-proclaimed innocent men. Criminals aren’t wrong. Thieves aren’t wrong. Murderers aren’t wrong. You won’t find a gangster proclaiming, “Yes, it is evil to murder and pillage, but what can I do? I am weak and give into my desires.” Instead, you will hear an entire belief system explaining that his approach to life is actually better for society and the world.
The question is why? Why can’t man just admit: it is wrong to steal, but I want to do it anyway?
The inner workings of the human
The reason for this has to do with the inner working of the human. HASHEM created man out of two distinct parts. One is comprised all of the drives and passions found in the animal kingdom; it is simply base instincts and desires. The other part of man is pure intellect: holy, good and giving. That part of me wishes to be generous and noble and only aspires for that which is good.
Because this part of me is made up of pure intellect and wisdom, it would never allow me to sin. It sees the results too clearly. It understands that all of HASHEM’s commandments are for my good and that every sin damages me. Because of this crystal clear insight, the human would not have the free will to sin. In theory, he could be tempted to sin, but he would never actually come to the act. It would be akin to sticking his hand in a fire. In theory he could do it, but it would never happen. It’s a dumb thing to do. So if HASHEM created man with just these two parts, man would not have free will in a practical sense.
To allow man to be tempted so that he can choose his course and be rewarded for his proper choices, HASHEM put another component in man: imagination. Imagination is the creative ability to form a mental picture and feel it as vividly as if it were real. Armed with an imagination, man can create fanciful worlds at his will and actually believe them. If man wishes to turn to evil, he can create rationales to make these ways sound noble and proper — and fool himself at least. If he wishes, he can do what is right, or if he wishes, he can turn to wickedness. Even his brilliant intellect won’t prevent him. He is capable of creating entire worldviews that explain how the behavior he desires is righteous, correct, and appropriate. Now man has free will.
The answer to the Rashi is on two levels. First off, we see the power of rationalizing. Even a fully mature, pious woman who grew up in the best of homes can be convinced, on some level, that illicit relations are permitted. The yetzer harah will use her imagination and create clever and creative ways to explain that black is white, in is out, and arayos is permitted. As ridiculous as it sounds, that is the power given to the yetzer harah.
The second idea is that even the woman who seems to be off the derech and wouldn’t need an excuse really does. No human can ever do something that is wrong. Because of the greatness of her soul and the truth that she knows deep down inside, she understands that for a married woman to go to another man is forbidden. The only way that she can perpetrate this act is if she has a rational way of explaining how in fact it is permitted. The human is incapable of doing something wrong. The only way he can do something wrong is by making it right.
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For more on this topic please listen to Shmuz #19 I Never Do Anything Wrong
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At 176 verses, Naso is the longest of the parshiyot. Yet one of its most moving passages, and the one that has had the greatest impact over the course of history, is very short indeed and is known by almost every Jew, namely the priestly blessings:
The Lord said to Moses, “Tell Aaron and his sons, ‘Thus shall you bless the Israelites. Say to them:
May Lord bless you and protect you;
May the Lord make His face shine on you and be gracious to you;
May the Lord turn His face toward you and give you peace.’
Let them set My name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.” (Num. 6:23-27)
This is among the oldest of all prayer texts. It was used by the priests in the Temple. It is said today by the cohanim in the reader’s repetition of the Amidah, in Israel every day, in most of the Diaspora only on festivals. It is used by parents as they bless their children on Friday night. It is often said to the bride and groom under the chuppah. It is the simplest and most beautiful of all blessings.
It also appears in the oldest of all biblical texts that have physically survived to today. In 1979 the archeologist Gabriel Barkay was examining ancient burial caves at Ketef Hinnom, outside the walls of Jerusalem in the area now occupied by the Menachem Begin Heritage Center. A thirteen-year-old boy who was assisting Barkay discovered that beneath the floor of one of the caves was a hidden chamber. There the group discovered almost one thousand ancient artefacts including two tiny silver scrolls no more than an inch long.
They were so fragile that it took three years to work out a way of unrolling them without causing them to disintegrate. Eventually the scrolls turned out to be kemayot, amulets, containing, among other texts, the priestly blessings. Scientifically dated to the sixth century BCE, the age of Jeremiah and the last days of the First Temple, they are four centuries older than the most ancient of biblical texts known hitherto, the Dead Sea Scrolls. Today the amulets can be seen in the Israel Museum, testimony to the ancient connection of Jews to the land and the continuity of Jewish faith itself.
What gives them their power is their simplicity and beauty. They have a strong rhythmic structure. The lines contain three, five, and seven words respectively. In each, the second word is “the Lord”. In all three verses the first part refers to an activity on the part of God – “bless”, “make His face shine”, and “turn His face toward”. The second part describes the effect of the blessing on us, giving us protection, grace and peace.
They also travel inward, as it were. The first verse “May Lord bless you and protect you,” refers, as the commentators note, to material blessings: sustenance, physical health and so on. The second, “May the Lord make His face shine on you and be gracious to you,” refers to moral blessing. Chen, grace, is what we show to other people and they to us. It is interpersonal. Here we are asking God to give some of His grace to us and others so that we can live together without the strife and envy that can so easily poison relationships.
The third is the most inward of all. There is a lovely story about a crowd of people who have gathered on a hill by the sea to watch a great ship pass by. A young child is waving vigorously. One of the men in the crowd asks him why. He says, “I am waving so the captain of the ship can see me and wave back.” “But,” said the man, “the ship is far away, and there is a crowd of us here. What makes you think that the captain can see you?” “Because,” said the boy, “the captain of the ship is my father. He will be looking for me among the crowd.”
That is roughly what we mean when we say, “May the Lord turn His face toward you.” There are seven billion people now living on this earth. What makes us any of us more than a face in the crowd, a wave in the ocean, a grain of sand on the sea shore? The fact that we are God’s children. He is our parent. He turns His face toward us. He cares.
The God of Abraham is not a mere force of nature or even all the forces of nature combined. A tsunami does not pause to ask who its victims will be. There is nothing personal about an earthquake or a tornado. The word Elokim means something like “the force of forces, cause of causes, the totality of all scientifically discoverable laws.” It refers to those aspects of God that are impersonal. It also refers to God in His attribute of justice, since justice is essentially impersonal.
But the name we call Hashem – the name used in the priestly blessings, and in almost all the priestly texts – is God as He relates to us as persons, individuals, each with our unique configuration of hopes and fears, gifts and possibilities. Hashem is the aspect of God that allows us to use the word “You”. He is the God who speaks to us and who listens when we speak to Him. How this happens, we do not know, but that it happens is central to Jewish faith.
That we call God Hashem is the transcendental confirmation of our significance in the scheme of things. We matter as individuals because God cares for us as a parent for a child. That, incidentally, is one reason why the priestly blessings are all in the singular, to emphasise that God blesses us not only collectively but also individually. One life, said the sages, is like a universe.
Hence the meaning of the last of the priestly blessings. The knowledge that God turns His face toward us – that we are not just an indiscernible face in a crowd, but that God relates to us in our uniqueness and singularity – is the most profound and ultimate source of peace. Competition, strife, lawlessness and violence come from the psychological need to prove that we matter. We do things to prove that I am more powerful, or richer, or more successful than you. I can make you fear. I can bend you to my will. I can turn you into my victim, my subject, my slave. All of these things testify not to faith but to a profound failure of faith.
Faith means that I believe that God cares about me. I am here because He wanted me to be. The soul He gave me is pure. Even though I am like the child on the hill watching the ship pass by, I know that God is looking for me, waving to me as I wave to Him. That is the most profound inner source of peace. We do not need to prove ourselves in order to receive a blessing from God. All we need to know is that His face is turned toward us. When we are at peace with ourselves, we can begin to make peace with the world.
So the blessings become longer and deeper: from the external blessing of material goods to the interpersonal blessing of grace between ourselves and others, to the most inward of them all, the peace of mind that comes when we feel that God sees us, hears us, holds us in His everlasting arms.
One further detail of the priestly blessings is unique, namely the blessing that the sages instituted to be said by the cohanim over the mitzvah: “Blessed are you … who has made us holy with the holiness of Aaron and has commanded us to bless His people Israel with love.”
It is the last word, be-ahavah, that is unusual. It appears in no other blessing over the performance of a command. It seems to make no sense. Ideally we should fulfill all the commands with love. But an absence of love does not invalidate any other command. In any case, the blessing over the performance of as command is a way of showing that we are acting intentionally. There was an argument between the sages as to whether mitzvoth in general require intention (kavanah) or not. But whether they do or not, making a blessing beforehand shows that we do have the intention to fulfill the command. But intention is one thing, emotion is another. Surely what matters is that the cohanim recite the blessing and God will do the rest. What difference does it make whether they do so in love or not?
The commentators wrestle with this question. Some say that the fact that the cohanim are facing the people when they bless means that they are like the cherubim in the Tabernacle, whose faces “were turned to one another” as a sign of love. Others change the word order. They say that the blessing really means, “who has made us holy with the holiness of Aaron and with love has commanded us to bless His people Israel.” “Love” here refers to God’s love for Israel, not that of the cohanim.
However, it seems to me that the explanation is this: the Torah explicitly says that though the cohanim say the words, it is God who sends the blessing. “Let them put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.” Normally when we fulfill a mitzvah, we are doing something.
But when the cohanim bless the people, they are not doing anything in and of themselves. Instead they are acting as channels through which God’s blessing flows into the world and into our lives. Only love does this. Love means that we are focused not on ourselves but on another. Love is selflessness. And only selflessness allows us to be a channel through which flows a force greater than ourselves, the love that as Dante said, “moves the sun and the other stars”, the love that brings new life into the world.
To bless, we must love, and to be blessed is to know that we are loved by the One vaster than the universe who nonetheless turns His face toward us as a parent to a beloved child. To know that is to find true spiritual peace.
How do Torah leaders who don't read secular books get their broad knowledge?
ANSWER:
There is such a thing as sevoroh; you don't need anything outside of sevoroh. The Torah gives us enough information to know all that we have to know. Of course I'm not saying, if you know Chovas Halvavos or you know Tur, you're going to know how to repair a refrigerator; I'm not saying that. You have to learn each umnus (trade) by itself, but in general the chochmas hanefesh, the chochmas hachaim, how to behave properly, how to live successfully, all comes from the Torah.
Just this word one alone: Kol yomei godalti bein hachachomim, all my life I grew up among wise men, v'lo matzosi laguf tov m'shtika, I found nothing better for the health than keeping quiet. Hear that?
Here is something that is better than vitamins, than jogging, anything else: keep quiet. You'll live longer if you keep your mouth closed, try it out and you'll see. No question about it. That's chochmas hachaim.
Can I tell you how much trouble is caused by talking? Here's a man walking in the street on Ave J, and a gentile bum is loafing in the corner and he said something about this Jew, and the Jew turned around and said something. Oooh..he made a mistake! He made a mistake? He was sorry he said it. Keep on walking, the goy will get killed eventually, a car will kill him, don't worry about it, he'll get his. Don't answer back! If you don't answer back you'll live longer, it's always the rule, don't answer back.
You want to be happy with your wife? Don't answer back!! A fool answers back, a word for a word, a conflagration,, a fire arises, and then trouble comes. Don't answer back and that's all. If your boss insults you, keep quiet, that's your job, just keep quiet. Lo matzosi laguf tov m'shtika, and how many pieces of advice are there? There are thousands of pieces of advice like that.
When people look at your face, they like you right away; you open your mouth, then they stop liking you. You want people to like you? You're going to a wedding with your new mechutonim? Walk in and just smile, don't say a word. Don't say a word!! You keep on walking around talking to them, right away each one knows you're a nothing.
Good Shabbos To All
This is transcribed from questions that were posed to Harav Miller by the audience at the Thursday night lectures. To listen to the audio of this Q & A please dial: 201-676-3210
What is meant by derech eretz kodmah l'Torah, that derech eretz is before the Torah?
ANSWER:
Somebody told me that he couldn't find that statement; it's a Midrash Rabah in Vayikra. And it states, derech eretz, the way to live properly comes before the Torah. What does that mean? We're not going to wait until you learn how to live properly before you keep the Torah; it'll take too long. What it means is, in history it came first, because Bereishis came before Shmos. The Torah was given in Shmos but in Bereishis we learn derech eretz. You know what derech eretz is?
Derech Eretz is, "Sarah sho'maas", Sarah was listening, that's derech eretz. When Avrohom was talking, Sarah didn't stick her head out and say, "I know all about it!! You said it already to the guests that came yesterday." Sarah is listening, that's derech eretz.
When Avrohom saw wayfarers traveling on a hot day, he ran out in a terrible heat and he begged them to taste of his hospitality. That's derech eretz.
Derech Eretz is, when a strange man came with camels, an able bodied man came with camels, and said to Rivka, "Give me a drink," and she said "What do you think I am? Go yourself to the well." No. She said, "Yes my lord, shi'sei adoni, my master drink," that's derech eretz. And when she added, "Let me give water also to your camels," that's derech eretz.
When Yosef Hatzadik was a prisoner and he was down in the dumps because he was in prison for nothing, and he saw two of his fellow prisoners were glum, he didn't say, "What's it my business, I have my own worries." No, he said ma'duah pi'neichem roim, why do you look bad today? He interested himself in their welfare. That's derech eretz.
All these things and thousands like them are written in Bereishis to teach this is the way to prepare for Torah, good character.
When Yaakov Avinu said that he almost gave his life to take care of Lavan's flocks, by day and by night, in the heat and in the cold, he didn't forsake his charge, he was a loyal watchman...That's derech eretz.
When Yaakov Avinu went back to look for pachim ktanim, little things that were left over on the other side of the river, because he was a treasurer for Hakadosh Baruch Hu, he didn't waste. Don't waste! You can't waste things, it all belongs to Hashem, nothing is ours. That's derech eretz.
When Noach got drunk and he was lying on his bed naked, and his two older sons decided to cover him up. They took the blanket and they walked backwards not to see their father. That's derech eretz.
The whole Bereishis is derech eretz, and it's put there before kabolas ha'Torah to tell you, that's how to prepare for the Torah. That's whats meant by derech eretz kodmah l'Torah.
Good Shabbos and Gut Yom Tov To All
A Q&A from the archives
Question # 279
QUESTION:
How can you make your work incidental (despite working eight hours a day) and your learning should be the main part of your life?
ANSWER:
If a person really means business, he's going to utilize the spare time that's available, and it's remarkable how much time is available. Most people don't work on Sundays; but they don't work on Shabbos either. Now Shabbos is a glorious opportunity and it shouldn't be wasted. In winter time there's a long Friday night; in summer time there's a long Shabbos afternoon. Now people who climb into their pajamas Shabbos after the Seuda and they climb out just for Mincha, are people who are committing suicide; they're ruining their lives.
Motzoai Shabbos is an opportunity, don't just run around visiting relatives; forget about relatives. You have one relative you have to visit, that's yourself. It's not selfish, because life is only for the purpose of making something out of yourself. So you have Friday night, all day Shabbos; remember Shabbos morning before davening should be utilized. Shabbos afternoon, Motzoai Shabbos. If you don't work on Sundays, be a kollel man on Sundays. "Oh!" your wife will say, "at least one day a week you have to be home!" Answer is, say, "My dear, I am not in the Yeshiva now, Yeshiva people are going full speed ahead every day of the week, I have one day and that one day I should waste?" So Sunday morning say good bye to your family, take along lunch and you spend the day someplace else, don't go home until nighttime.
Now, when Hakadosh Baruch Hu sees, hamekabeil uhluv ol Torah, if a man takes upon himself the yoke of the Torah, he means business. You mean business? So Hakadosh Baruch Hu says, this man deserves more time, so they take off of him ol malchus v'ol derech eretz, and things start happening. You'll be amazed what will happen, some more opportunity will be presented to you to learn more and more.
But when a man looks for things to do on Sunday, Motzoai Shabbos he's busy? Sunday he's busy, he has no time? So Hakadosh Baruch Hu says, in your spare time you're making yourself busy? Shabbos after davening you run to this kiddush, this bar mitzvah, that bar mitzvah, this aufroof, whenever you have a chance you go and sit till two o'clock eating and stuffing yourself and wasting time? If that's the case, I'll see that you're kept busy all your life without any opportunity to achieve for yourself.
So the first step is, to make use of the time that you do have, you have plenty of time that's available. Shabbos and Yom Tov, if you use them right, Hakadosh Baruch Hu will reward you and give you some more time.
This is transcribed from questions that were posed to Harav Miller by the audience at the Thursday night lectures.
To listen to the audio of this Q & A please dial: 201-676-3210
Bamidbar is usually read on the Shabbat before Shavuot. So the sages connected the two. Shavuot is the time of the giving of the Torah. Bamibar means, “In the desert.” What then is the connection between the desert and the Torah, the wilderness and God’s word?
The sages gave several interpretations. According to the Mekhilta the Torah was given publicly, openly and in a place no one owns because had it been given in the land of Israel, Jews would have said to the nations of the world, “You have no share in it.” Instead, whoever wants to come and accept it, let them come and accept it.
Another explanation: Had the Torah been given in Israel the nations of the world would have had an excuse for not accepting it. This follows the rabbinic tradition that before God gave the Torah to the Israelites he offered it to all the other nations and each found a reason to decline.
Yet another: Just as the wilderness is free – it costs nothing to enter – so the Torah is free. It is God’s gift to us.
But there is another, more spiritual reason. The desert is a place of silence. There is nothing visually to distract you, and there is no ambient noise to muffle sound. To be sure, when the Israelites received the Torah, there was thunder and lightening and the sound of a shofar. The earth felt as if it were shaking at its foundations. But in a later age, when the prophet Elijah stood at the same mountain after his confrontation with the prophets of Baal, he encountered God not in the whirlwind or the fire or the earthquake but in the kol demamah dakah, the still, small voice, literally “the sound of a slender silence.”4 I define this as the sound you can only hear if you are listening. In the silence of the midbar, the desert, you can hear the Medaber, the Speaker, and the medubar, that which is spoken. To hear the voice of God you need a listening silence in the soul.
Many years ago British television produced a documentary series, The Long Search, on the world’s great religions.5 When it came to Judaism, the presenter Ronald Eyre seemed surprised by its blooming, buzzing confusion, especially the loud, argumentative voices in the Bet Midrash, the house of study. Remarking on this to Elie Wiesel, he asked, “Is there such a thing as a silence in Judaism?" Wiesel replied: “Judaism is full of silences … but we don’t talk about them.”
Judaism is a very verbal culture, a religion of holy words. Through words, God created the universe: “And God said, Let there be … and there was.” According to the Targum, it is our ability to speak that makes us human. It translates the phrase, “and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7) as “and man became a speaking soul.” Words create. Words communicate. Our relationships are shaped, for good or bad, by language. Much of Judaism is about the power of words to make or break worlds.
So silence in Tanakh often has a negative connotation. “Aaron was silent,” says the Torah, after the death of his two sons Nadav and Avihu (Lev. 10:3). “The dead do not praise you,” says Psalm 115, “nor do those who go down to the silence [of the grave].” When Job’s friends came to comfort him after the loss of his children and other afflictions, “Then they sat down with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, yet no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his pain was very great.” (Job 2:13).
But not all silence is sad. Psalms tells us that “to You, silence is praise” (Ps. 65:2). If we are truly in awe at the greatness of God, the vastness of the universe and the almost infinite extent of time, our deepest emotions will indeed lie too deep for words. We will experience silent communion.
The sages valued silence. They called it “a fence to wisdom.”6 If words are worth a coin, silence is worth two.7 R. Shimon ben Gamliel said, “All my days I have grown up among the wise, and I have found nothing better than silence.”8
The service of the priests in the Temple was accompanied by silence. The Levites sang in the courtyard, but the priests – unlike their counterparts in other ancient religions -- neither sang nor spoke while offering the sacrifices. One scholar9 has accordingly spoken of “the silence of the sanctuary.” The Zohar (2a) speaks of silence as the medium in which both the Sanctuary above and the Sanctuary below are made.
There were Jews who cultivated silence as a spiritual discipline. Bratslav Hassidim meditate in the fields. There are Jews who practise taanit dibbur, a “fast of words.” Our most profound prayer, the private saying of the Amidah, is called tefillah be-lachash, the “silent prayer.” It is based on the precedent of Hannah, praying for a child. “She spoke in her heart. Her lips moved but her voice was not heard” (1 Sam. 1:13).
God hears our silent cry. In the agonising tale of how Sarah told Abraham to send Hagar and her son away, the Torah tells us that when their water ran out and the young Ishmael was at the point of dying, Hagar cried, yet God heard “the voice of the child” (Gen. 21:16-17). Earlier when the angels came to visit Abraham and told him that Sarah would have a child, Sarah laughed inwardly, that is, silently, yet she was heard by God (Gen. 18:12-13). God hears our thoughts even when they are not expressed in speech.
The silence that counts, in Judaism, is thus a listening silence – and listening is the supreme religious art. Listening means making space for others to speak and be heard. As I point out in my commentary to the Siddur, there is no English word that remotely equals the Hebrew verb sh-m-a in its wide range of senses: to listen, to hear, to pay attention, to understand, to internalise and to respond in deed.
This was one of the key elements in the Sinai covenant, when the Israelites, having already said twice, “All that God says, we will do,” then said, “All that God says, we will do and we will hear [ve-nishma]” (Ex. 24:7). It is the nishma – listening, hearing, heeding, responding – that is the key religious act..
Thus Judaism is not only a religion of doing-and-speaking; it is also a religion of listening. Faith is the ability to hear the music beneath the noise. There is the silent music of the spheres, about which Psalm 19 speaks:
The heavens declare the glory of God
The skies proclaim the work of His hands.
Day to day they pour forth speech,
Night to night they communicate knowledge.
There is no speech, there are no words,
Their voice is not heard.
Yet their music carries throughout the earth.
There is the voice of history that was heard by the prophets. And there is the commanding voice of Sinai, that continues to speak to us across the abyss of time. I sometimes think that people in the modern age have found the concept of “Torah from heaven” problematic, not because of some new archaeological discovery but because we have lost the habit of listening to the sound of transcendence, a voice beyond the merely human.
It is fascinating that despite his often fractured relationship with Judaism, Sigmund Freud created in psychoanalysis a deeply Jewish form of healing. He himself called it the “speaking cure”, but it is in fact a listening cure. Almost all effective forms of psychotherapy involve deep listening.
Is there enough listening in the Jewish world today? Do we, in marriage, really listen to our spouses? Do we as parents truly listen to our children? Do we, as leaders, hear the unspoken fears of those we seek to lead? Do we internalise the sense of hurt of the people who feel excluded from the community? Can we really claim to be listening to the voice of God if we fail to listen to the voices of our fellow humans?
In his poem, ‘In memory of W B Yeats,’ W H Auden wrote:
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start.
From time to time we need to step back from the noise and hubbub of the social world and create in our hearts the stillness of the desert where, within the silence, we can hear the kol demamah dakah, the still, small voice of God, telling us we are loved, we are heard, we are embraced by God’s everlasting arms, we are not alone.
R’ Ben Tzion Shafier
The Power of a Tzibbur
Parshas Bechokosai
“If you go in my ways and follow my statutes…Five of you will chase a hundred, and a hundred of you will chase ten thousand, and they will fall from your sword.” Vayikra 26:8
The Torah is very explicit that if the Jewish nation follows the ways of HASHEM, we will enjoy peace, prosperity, and success in all of our endeavors. We will plant and harvest abundant crops, our borders will be secure, - life will be good. Included in this is a guarantee that in battle with our enemies we will be astonishingly successful; small numbers of our weakest soldiers will chase down and annihilate far larger groups of the enemy.
When describing this phenomenon, the Torah is very specific: five of you will chase a hundred, and a hundred of you will chase ten thousand. Rashi is troubled by the proportions. If five will chase a hundred, then the ratio is 1:20. By that proportion, a hundred should chase 2,000. Yet the Torah tells us that 100 will chase 10,000, a ratio that is five times greater than what it should be. Why would the group of a hundred be five times more effective than the group of five?
Rashi explains: “There is no comparison between a few keeping the Torah to a multitude keeping the Torah.”
Why should larger numbers make a difference?
It is clear from this Rashi that the only distinction between the two groups is in numbers. Rashi isn’t saying that the group of a hundred had more kavanah when they did the mitzvah. Nor is he telling us that they were greater people, or that they were engaged in a holier act. The only difference is that there are more of them involved. The question is: why should a larger group be exponentially more effective simply because of its size?
If Rashi were telling us that from a psychological standpoint there is strength in numbers and the group gives chizuk to each other so that they will fight better — it would make sense. Or if because they were a large assembly of people, they were strengthening each other in the purity of their intentions and were more l’shmo, we could understand why they would be more successful. However, that isn’t the difference. It is simply the fact that there are more of them. Why should the same people, on the same madgregah, doing the same mitzvah, be so many more times successful simply because they are a larger group?
The answer to this question lies in understanding the systems that HASHEM created and gave over to man.
A change in the world order
On August 6, 1945, the Japanese city of Hiroshima was obliterated. Never before in the course of history had man unleashed so much power and destruction in one act. For many, it took a long time to comprehend. How was it possible to destroy an entire city? Man had been using explosives for thousands of years, but nothing of this magnitude. There were five hundred pound bombs that could destroy buildings, one thousand pound bombs that could level an apartment complex, but how did they wipe out a city? Miles and miles of rubble and destruction — everything leveled. “How large can the bomb possibly be? How many explosives can you possibly pack into one plane?”
The reason that it was so difficult to comprehend was because the force was derived from a completely different set of principles and didn’t work with the old rules. HASHEM had allowed man to harness the power of the atom — an energy source more than a million times more powerful than conventional weapons. It was a whole new reality, and the old frame of reference had little bearing.
So too, in the spiritual world, HASHEM has created certain forces that are powerful and magnify the efforts of man a thousand fold or more. When a sofer takes parchment and ink, writes the parshios with the right intentions, and inserts them into properly prepared batim, an object has been created. That object is far greater than any of its parts.
A pair of tefillin is one of the holiest objects in creation. The parshios themselves had a certain level of kedsuha; the batim themselves prepared l’shmo have some holiness to them. But when all of the parts are brought together, it creates a new entity that is exponentially more holy and potent than the sum of its parts. A kosher pair of tefillin has been created. The object itself is now kodesh, and when man wears them, he harnesses powerful forces that affect both this world and the upper worlds in ways that are difficult to imagine.
So too, when Jews gather together to perform a holy act, it is no longer ten or twenty individuals; it is a new entity – a tzibbur. That tzibbur is far more powerful than the sum of all of its members. It is now in a new category and taps an energy source that is infinitely more powerful than any of the individual members can muster. The impact and effect that it brings about is far greater and it can now accomplish far more than any of its members acting alone.
The power of a tzibbur
This seems to be the answer to this Rashi. Much like a kosher pair of tefillin or a complete sefer Torah, a hundred Jews acting in unison reach a new plateau of effectiveness, multiple times that of the individuals involved. They have tapped the force of the tzibbur. A hundred will chase ten thousand.
This concept has great relevance to us in helping us be more successful. The Gemarah (Tannis 8a) tells us that while all prayer works, for it to be heard, it must be said with an outpouring of emotion. Only when tefillah comes from a deep devotion and is expressed with sincere, powerful intention will it move mountains… unless it is said b’tzibbur. Then, with or without this deep level of Kavanah, it will accomplish its intended purpose.
It is clear from the Gemarah that the same prayer, the same intention, and the same person will find much greater results from his davening because has joined a minyan. He may not have changed, but his circumstances have. He is now in a assemblage that has joined together, and its efficacy far outweighs that of all the individuals combined. By sharing in the merit of that group, his prayer will have a far greater effect. He has put the power of a tzibbur to work.
R’ Ben Tzion Shafier
Everybody is doing it
Parshas BeHar
“You shall sound a broken blast on the shofar, in the seventh month, on the tenth of the month; on the Day of Atonement you shall sound the Shofar throughout your land.” — VaYikrah 25:9
The mitzvah to blow the shofar on yovel
When we are on our own land, we are commanded to keep every seventh year as the shmittah year, and at the completion of seven shmittos, to add an additional shmittah year — the yovel. During this year, all land lays fallow. Homesteads return to their original owners, and all Jewish slaves are freed.
On Yom Kippur, at the start of the yovel year, we have a specific commandment to publicly blow the shofar.
Why we blow the shofar on yovel
The Sefer HaChinuch explains that the Torah commands us to blow the shofar on yovel because freeing a slave is a very difficult mitzvah, and the slave-owners need chizuk. A master who has had a slave for many years may well have become dependent upon him and find it hard to part with him. By sounding the shofar, we are publicly proclaiming that it is yovel, and all Jews will be freeing their slaves. The master will then recognize that throughout the Land of Israel, everyone is freeing his slaves, and so it will be easier for him to free his own slave.
Why is it easier because others are doing it?
This statement becomes difficult to understand. Why does it become easier for a slave owner to free his slave because others are doing the same? The slave owner is a businessman, not a teenager. We are dealing with a mature person, faced with a difficult test. What difference does it make to him whether this is a popular mitzvah or not? The mitzvah is difficult because he is being asked to give up something that he has become attached to and is dependent upon. Since that’s what makes the mitzvah difficult, what difference does it make to him whether there are many other people doing the same or if he is the only person on the planet doing it?
Understanding human nature
The answer to this question is based on understanding human nature. Psychologists from Freud to Skinner to Maslow have been debating the inner nature of the person for decades. With ever-changing views and understandings, that which one generation accepts as gospel, the next rejects as tomfoolery. Here we get insight into the nature of man from the One Who truly knows – from his Maker.
That understanding is that we humans are highly social. We are affected by our environment. Our perspective on the world is affected by what those around us do. Peer pressure isn’t something that only impacts the world of the teenager. It affects everyone. “My crowd,” “my chevra,” and “my society” affect the way I view things. Ultimately, they help shape my value system.
The Torah is teaching us that even a mature adult faced with a difficult trial will be greatly influenced by what others are doing. If something is done by everyone, it will be much easier for him. It won’t lessen his financial loss, and it won’t ease the burden of replacing a loyal servant, but it will help him gather the fortitude to make the proper decision since everyone is doing it.
Creating our own society
This concept has very real application in our lives. We live in times when society at large has lost its moral compass. Particularly in the United States, once a bastion of family values and morality, we now watch daily as new innovations in decadence and promiscuity pour forth. We can’t open a newspaper without being exposed to a new depth of moral decay. Ideas, concepts, and images that wouldn’t have been accepted in the most base of publications a generation ago are now commonplace in the most respected ones.
We may be tempted to assume that this doesn’t affect us. After all, we are different. We don’t buy into the culture of the times. And while we may feel self-assured and secure in our position, the reality is that we are human, so it can’t help but affect us. The question is: what can we do about it?
The whole world agrees
The Gemara often uses an expression: “kulei alma lo pligi” – “the whole world agrees.” To the Torah sages, their world was the whole world. If you had an opinion about an issue of Halacha, you were in the world. If not, you weren’t. This is illustrative of a perspective. While they were certainly aware of people outside of their sphere, they created their own world.
This may sound myopic and cloistered, but it is based on a fundamental understanding of the human. To remain pure in an impure world, we need to create our own world.
To some extent, we have done just that. We now have our own music, our own novels, and our own magazines. We have, to a degree, created our own culture. But this comes with a cost. There is no question that The New York Times has better writers than do the Yated and the Hamodia. The world of Jewish music is quite limited in its scope and development. There is much out there in the world at large that has great value, but it doesn’t come without baggage. In our times, the baggage far outweighs the advantages.
To some, this may sound like “Ghetto Judaism” – limiting, closed off, isolated from the world. And in truth, it is. But it’s not out of being small-minded. It stems from recognizing the extent of the problem and the nature of the human. The unfortunate reality is that we can’t just take the good and ignore the bad. If we wish to live as a holy nation in these times, we need create an oasis of purity. We need to create our own world.
I argued in Covenant and Conversation Kedoshim that Judaism is more than an ethnicity. It is a call to holiness. In one sense, however, there is an important ethnic dimension to Judaism.
It is best captured in the 1980s joke about an advertising campaign in New York. Throughout the city there were giant posters with the slogan, “You have a friend in the Chase Manhattan Bank.” Underneath one, an Israeli had scribbled the words, “But in Bank Leumi you have mishpochah.” Jews are, and are conscious of being, a single extended family.
This is particularly evident in this week’s parsha. Repeatedly we read of social legislation couched in the language of family:
When you buy or sell to your neighbour, let no one wrong his brother. (Lev. 25:14)
If your brother becomes impoverished and sells some of his property, his near redeemer is to come to you and redeem what his brother sold. (25:25)
If your brother is impoverished and indebted to you, you must support him; he must live with you like a foreign resident. Do not take interest or profit from him, but fear your God and let your brother live with you. (25:35-36)
If your brother becomes impoverished and is sold to you, do not work him like a slave. (25: 39)
“Your brother” in these verses is not meant literally. At times it means “your relative”, but mostly it means “your fellow Jew”. This is a distinctive way of thinking about society and our obligations to others. Jews are not just citizens of the same nation or adherents of the same faith. We are members of the same extended family. We are – biologically or electively – children of Abraham and Sarah. For the most part, we share the same history. On the festivals we relive the same memories. We were forged in the same crucible of suffering. We are more than friends. We are mishpochah, family.
The concept of family is absolutely fundamental to Judaism. Consider the book of Genesis, the Torah’s starting-point. It is not primarily about theology, doctrine, dogma. It is not a polemic against idolatry. It is about families: husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters.
At key moments in the Torah, God himself defines his relationship with the Israelites in terms of family. He tells Moses to say to Pharaoh in his name: “My child, my firstborn, Israel” (Ex. 4:22). When Moses wants to explain to the Israelites why they have a duty to be holy he says, “You are children of the Lord your God” (Deut. 14:1). If God is our parent, then we are all brothers and sisters. We are related by bonds that go to the very heart of who we are.
The prophets continued the metaphor. There is a lovely passage in Hosea in which the prophet describes God as a parent teaching a young child how to take its first faltering steps: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son … It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms … To them I was like one who lifts a little child to the cheek, and I bent down to feed them.” (Hosea 11:1-4).
The same image is continued in rabbinic Judaism. In one of the most famous phrases of prayer, Rabbi Akiva used the words Avinu Malkenu, “Our Father, our King”. That is a precise and deliberate expression. God is indeed our sovereign, our lawgiver and our judge, but before He is any of these things He is our parent and we are His children. That is why we believe divine compassion will always override strict justice.
This concept of Jews as an extended family is powerfully expressed in Maimonides’ Laws of Charity:
The entire Jewish people and all those who attach themselves to them are like brothers, as [Deuteronomy 14:1] states: "You are children of the Lord your God." And if a brother will not show mercy to a brother, who will show mercy to them? To whom do the poor of Israel lift up their eyes? To the gentiles who hate them and pursue them? Their eyes are turned to their brethren alone.[1]
This sense of kinship, fraternity and the family bond, is at the heart of the idea of Kol Yisrael arevin zeh bazeh, “All Jews are responsible for one another.” Or as Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai put it, “When one Jew is injured, all Jews feel the pain.”[2]
Why is Judaism built on this model of the family? Partly to tell us that God did not choose an elite of the righteous or a sect of the likeminded. He chose a family – Abraham and Sarah’s descendants -- extended through time. The family is the most powerful vehicle of continuity, and the kinds of changes Jews were expected to make to the world could not be achieved in a single generation. Hence the importance of the family as a place of education (“You shall teach these things repeatedly to your children …”) and of handing the story on, especially on Pesach through the Seder service.
Another reason is that family feeling is the most primal and powerful moral bond. The scientist J. B. S. Haldane famously said, when asked whether he would jump into a river and risk his life to save his drowning brother, “No, but I would do so to save two brothers or eight cousins.” The point he was making was that we share 50 per cent of our genes with our siblings, and an eighth with our cousins. Taking a risk to save them is a way of ensuring that our genes are passed on to the next generation. This principle, known as “kin selection”, is the most basic form of human altruism. It is where the moral sense is born.
That is a key insight, not only of biology but also of political theory. Edmund Burke famously said that “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.”[3] Likewise Alexis de Tocqueville said, “As long as family feeling was kept alive, the opponent of oppression was never alone.”[4]
Strong families are essential to free societies. Where families are strong, a sense of altruism exists that can be extended outward, from family to friends to neighbours to community and from there to the nation as a whole.
It was the sense of family that kept Jews linked in a web of mutual obligation despite the fact that they were scattered across the world. Does it still exist? Sometimes the divisions in the Jewish world go so deep, and the insults hurled by one group against another are so brutal that one could almost be persuaded that it does not. In the 1950s Martin Buber expressed the belief that the Jewish people in the traditional sense no longer existed. Knesset Yisrael, the covenantal people as a single entity before God, was no more. The divisions between Jews, religious and secular, orthodox and non-orthodox, Zionist and non-Zionist, had, he thought, fragmented the people beyond hope of repair.
Yet that conclusion is premature for precisely the reason that makes family so elemental a bond. Argue with your friend and tomorrow he may no longer be your friend, but argue with your brother and tomorrow he is still your brother. The book of Genesis is full of sibling rivalries but they do not all end the same way. The story of Cain and Abel ends with Abel dead. The story of Isaac and Ishmael ends with their standing together at Abraham’s grave. The story of Esau and Jacob reaches a climax when, after a long separation, they meet, embrace and go their separate ways. The story of Joseph and his brothers begins with animosity but ends with forgiveness and reconciliation. Even the most dysfunctional families can eventually come together.
The Jewish people remains a family, often divided, always argumentative, but bound in a common bond of fate nonetheless. As our parsha reminds us, that person who has fallen is our brother or sister, and ours must be the hand that helps them rise again. SHABBAT SHALOM
I was walking in the street and I almost got hit by a car, (or almost drowned), what should I do to thank Hakadosh Baruch Hu properly?
ANSWER:
Ish ki'matnas ya'do, each person according to his ability. One thing you're able to do, however, and that's for a very long time when you say modim anachnu Loch, don't just bow down for nothing, it's a pity, it's a waste of a glorious opportunity. Bowing down is a very important act, and not to utilize it is a rachomnus. It states when you come to bring the bikurim, vi'hish'tachaviso; bowing down is a purpose in itself, it's avodas Hashem to bow down. You have to think that you're doing it for a purpose, it's hakoras tov, modim...we're thanking You. And so, when a person barely escaped getting hit by a car, as long as he can, he should continue every time he bows down and he thinks about what could have happened, I thank You Hashem.
Now, that's not to be considered as lifnim mi'shuras hadin - it's for big tzadikim. After all, you can't play around with words, and the words modim anachnu Loch mean that. What are you thanking for?
And therefore, you should prepare yourself beforehand, hold your keys in your hand, hold a pencil in your hand, whatever it is, so that when you come to modim you should remember, modim anachnu Loch.
You went to the doctor and you were worried, and the doctor said, "I'm sorry to tell you there's nothing wrong with you." You walk out, don't forget that, Hashem says al tish'kocheini, don't forget Me, Hashem says, it's a pity. Therefore our reaction should be: we'll remember You Hashem.
Hashem Elokei li'olam o'deka, I'll remember You forever! Like Dovid said when he got well from his illness, l'maan yi'zarmecho kovod, I'll sing about Your glory - l'olam odeka.
Therefore, that's the first thing to do and the easiest thing to do. If you're able to do more than that, then certainly, ish k'matnas ya'do.
Good Shabbos To All
Thisl is transcribed from questions that were posed to Harav Miller by the audience at the Thursday night lectures.
To listen to the audio of this Q & A please dial: 201-676-3210
“And you shall count for yourselves from the day after the rest day, from the day when you bring the Omer of the waving — seven weeks, they shall be complete.” — Vayikra 23:15
Sefer HaChinuch: The Torah commands us to count the Omer so we can relive the Exodus from Mitzrayim. Just as the Jews back then anxiously anticipated the great day when they were to receive the Torah, so too we count the days till Shavuos, the Yom Tov that commemorates the giving of the Torah. To the Jews then, accepting the Torah on Har Sinai was even greater than their redemption from slavery. So we count each day to bring ourselves to that sense of great enthusiasm, as if to say, “When will that day come?”
With these words the Sefer HaChinuch defines the mitzvah of Sefiras HaOmer. The difficulty with this is the statement that “to the Jews then, receiving of the Torah was even greater than being freed from slavery.” It seems hard to imagine that anything would be greater to a slave than being freed. This concept is even more perplexing when we envision what it was like to be a slave in Mitzrayim.
A life of suffering and bloodshed
The life of a Jew in Mitzrayim was one of misery and suffering. They had no rights. They had no life. They couldn’t own property, choose their own destiny, or protect their own children. They didn’t even have the right to their own time. A Mitzri could at any moment demand a Jew’s utter and complete compliance to do his bidding. If a Jew walked in the streets, it was every Mitzri’s right to whisk him away, without question and without recourse, and force him into slave labor for whatever he saw fit.
Waking in the early morning to the crack of the Mitzri’s whip, the Jews were pushed to the limit of human endurance till late at night when they fell asleep in the fields. Without rest, without breaks, the Jews lugged heavy loads and lifted huge rocks. Sweat, tears, and bloodshed were their lot. In the heat of the sweltering sun and in the cold of the desert night, at the risk of life and limb, the Jew was oppressed with a demon-like fury. A beast of burden is treated wisely to ensure its well-being, but not the Jew. He was pushed beyond all limits. Finally, when Pharaoh was asked to let the Jewish people go, he increased their load, taking it from the impossible to the unimaginable.
How could anything in the world be more desirable to the Jews than freedom? How could it be that anything, even something as great as receiving the Torah, could mean more to them than being redeemed from slavery?
What the Jews experienced by living through the makkos
The answer to this question lies in understanding the great level of clarity that the Jews reached by living through the makkos and the splitting of the sea.
For ten months, each Jew saw with ever-increasing clarity that HASHEM created, maintains, and orchestrates this world. With absolute certainty, they experienced HASHEM’s presence in their lives. This understanding brought to them to recognize certain core cognitions.
Every human has inborn understandings. Often times they are masked and subdued. Whether by environment or by desire, the human spends much of his life running from the truths that he deeply knows. When the Jews in Mitzrayim experienced HASHEM’s power and goodness, they understood the purpose of Creation. They knew that we are creations, put on this planet for a reason. We were given a great opportunity to grow, to accomplish, to mold ourselves into who we will be for eternity. We have a few short, precious years here, and then forever we will enjoy that which we have accomplished. Because they so clearly experienced HASHEM, their view of existence was changed. They “got it.”
Because of this, the currency with which they measured all good changed. They recognized that the greatest good ever bestowed upon man is the ability to change, to mold himself into something different so that he will merit to cling to HASHEM. They recognized that everything that we humans value as important pales in comparison to the opportunity to grow close to HASHEM. Because they understood this point so vividly, to them the greatest good possible was the receiving of the Torah — G-d’s word, the ultimate spiritual experience.
And so, while they anxiously anticipated the redemption from slavery as a great good that would free them from physical oppression, they valued the reason they were being freed even more. They were to receive the Torah.
Davening is me talking to HASHEM; learning is HASHEM talking to me
This concept has great relevance in our lives, as we have the ability to tap into this instinctive knowledge of the importance of learning. When a person gets caught up in the temporal nature of this world, the currency with which he rates things changes. The value system now becomes honor, power, career, or creature comforts. That is what he views as good, and that is what he desires. The more a person involves himself in these, the more important they become, and the less precious the Torah becomes. Our natural appreciation of Torah becomes clouded over by other desires and an ever-changing value system.
However, the more a person focuses on his purpose in the world, the more he values the Torah. He recognizes it as the formula for human perfection. He now sees the Torah as the ultimate gift given to man because it is both the guide and the fuel to propel his growth. With this changed perspective, the very value system with which he measures things changes, and now his appreciation, love, and desire to learn increase until finally he becomes aligned with that which HASHEM created him for — perfection and closeness to HASHEM .
The parsha of Emor contains a chapter dedicated to the festivals of the Jewish year. There are five such passages in the Torah. Two, both in the book of Exodus (Ex. 23:14-17; 34:18, 22-23), are very brief. They refer only to the three pilgrimage festivals, Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot. They do not specify their dates, merely their rough position in the agricultural year. Nor do they mention the specific commands related to the festivals.
This leaves three other festival accounts, the one in our parsha, a second one in Numbers 28-29, and the third in Deuteronomy 16. What is striking is how different they are. This is not, as critics maintain, because the Torah is a composite document but rather because it comes at its subject-matter from multiple perspectives – a characteristic of the Torah mindset as a whole.
The long section on the festivals in Numbers is wholly dedicated to the special additional sacrifices [the musaf] brought on holy days including Shabbat and Rosh Chodesh. A memory of this is preserved in the Musaf prayers for these days. These are holy times from the perspective of the Tabernacle, the Temple, and later the synagogue.
The account in Deuteronomy is about society. Moses at the end of his life told the next generation where they had come from, where they were going to, and the kind of society they were to construct. It was to be the opposite of Egypt. It would strive for justice, freedom and human dignity.
One of Deuteronomy’s most important themes is its insistence that worship be centralised “in the place that God will choose,” which turned out to be Jerusalem. The unity of God was to be mirrored in the unity of the nation, something that could not be achieved if every tribe had its own temple, sanctuary or shrine. That is why, when it comes to the festivals, Deuteronomy speaks only of Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot, and not Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, because only on those three was there a duty of Aliyah le-regel, pilgrimage to the Temple.
Equally significant is Deuteronomy’s focus – not found elsewhere – on social inclusion: “you, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, the Levites within your gates, and the stranger, the orphan and the widow living among you.” Deuteronomy is less about individual spirituality than about the kind of society that honours the presence of God by honouring our fellow humans, especially those at the margins of society. The idea that we can serve God while being indifferent to, or dismissive of, our fellow human beings is utterly alien to the vision of Deuteronomy.
Which leaves Emor, the account in this week’s parsha. It too is distinctive. Unlike the Exodus and Deuteronomy passages it includes Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It also tells us about the specific mitzvoth of the festivals, most notably Sukkot: it is the only place where the Torah mentions the arba minim, the “four kinds,” and the command to live in a sukkah.
It has, though, various structural oddities. The most striking one is the fact that it includes Shabbat in the list of the festivals. This would not be strange in itself. After all, Shabbat is one of the holy days. What is strange is the way it speaks about Shabbat:
The Lord said to Moses, “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: The appointed times [moadei] of the Lord, which you are to proclaim [tikre’u] as sacred assemblies [mikra’ei kodesh]. These are my appointed festivals [mo’adai]. Six days shall you work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of sabbaths, a day of sacred assembly [mikra kodesh]. You are not to do any work; wherever you live, it is a sabbath to the Lord.”
There is then a paragraph break, after which the whole passage seems to begin again:
These are the Lord’s appointed times [mo’adei] festivals, the sacred assemblies [mikra’ei kodesh] you are to proclaim [tikre’u] at their appointed times [be-mo’adam].
This structure, with its two beginnings, puzzled the commentators. Even more was the fact that the Torah here seems to be calling Shabbat a mo’ed, an appointed time, and a mikra kodesh, a sacred assembly, which it does nowhere else. As Rashi puts it: “What has Shabbat to do with the festivals?” The festivals are annual occurrences, Shabbat is a weekly one. The festivals depend on the calendar fixed by the Bet Din. That is the meaning of the phrase, “the sacred assemblies you are to proclaim at their appointed times.” Shabbat, however, does not depend on any act by the Bet Din and is independent of both the solar and lunar calendar. Its holiness comes directly from God and from the dawn of creation. Bringing the two together under a single heading seems to make no sense. Shabbat is one thing, moadim and mikra’ei kodesh are something else. So what connects the two?
Rashi tells us it is to emphasize the holiness of the festivals. “Whoever desecrates the festivals is as if he had desecrated the Sabbath, and whoever observes the festivals as if if he had observed the Sabbath.” The point Rashi is making is that we can imagine someone saying that he respects the Sabbath because it is God-given, but the festivals are of an altogether lesser sanctity, first because we are permitted certain kinds of work, such as cooking and carrying, and second because they depend on a human act of fixing the calendar. The inclusion of Shabbat among the festivals is to negate this kind of reasoning.
Ramban offers a very different explanation. Shabbat is stated before the festivals just as it is stated before Moses’ instructions to the people to begin work on the construction of the Sanctuary, to tell us that just as the command to build the Sanctuary does not override Shabbat, so the command to celebrate the festivals does not override Shabbat. So, although we may cook and carry on festivals we may not do so if a festival falls on Shabbat.
By far the most radical explanation was given by the Vilna Gaon. According to him, the words “‘Six days shall you work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of sabbaths,” do not apply to the days of the week but to the days of the year. There are seven holy days specified in our parsha: the first and seventh day of Pesach, one day of Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, the first day of Sukkot and Shmini Atseret. On six of them we are allowed to do some work, such as cooking and carrying, but on the seventh, Yom Kippur, we are not, because it is a “Sabbath of Sabbaths” (see verse 32). The Torah uses two different expressions for the prohibition of work on festivals in general and on the “seventh day.” On the festivals what is forbidden is melekhet avodah (“burdensome or servile work”), whereas on the seventh day what is forbidden is melakhah, “any work” even if not burdensome. So Yom Kippur is to the year what Shabbat is to the week.
The Vilna Gaon’s reading allows us to see something else: that holy time is patterned on what I have called (in the Introduction to the Siddur) fractals: the same pattern at different levels of magnitude. So the structure of the week – six days of work followed by a seventh that is holy – is mirrored in the structure of the year – six days of lesser holiness plus a seventh, Yom Kippur, of supreme holiness. As we will see in two chapters’ time (Lev. 25), the same pattern appears on an even larger scale: six ordinary years followed by the year of Shemittah, “release.”
Wherever the Torah wishes to emphasize the dimension of holiness (the word kodesh appears no less than twelve times in Lev. 23), it makes systematic use of the number and concept of seven. So there are not only seven holy days in the annual calendar. There are also seven paragraphs in the chapter. The word “seven” or “seventh” occurs repeatedly (eighteen times) as does the word for the seventh day, Shabbat in one or other of its forms (fifteen times). The word “harvest” appears seven times.
However, it seems to me that Leviticus 23 is telling another story as well – a deeply spiritual one. Recall our argument (made by Judah Halevi and Ibn Ezra) that almost the entire forty chapters between Exodus 24 and Leviticus 25 are a digression, brought about because Moses argued that the people needed God to be close. They wanted to encounter Him not only at the top of the mountain but also in the midst of the camp; not only as a terrifying power overturning empires and dividing the sea but also as a constant presence in their lives. That was why God gave the Israelites the Sanctuary (Exodus 25-40) and its service (i.e. the book of Leviticus as a whole).
That is why the list of the festivals in Leviticus emphasizes not the social dimension we find in Deuteronomy, or the sacrificial dimension we find in Numbers, but rather the spiritual dimension of encounter, closeness, the meeting of the human and the divine. This explains why we find in this chapter, more than in any other, two key words. One is mo’ed, the other is mikra kodesh, and both are deeper than they seem.
The word mo’ed does not just mean “appointed time.” We find the same word in the phrase ohel mo’ed meaning “tent of meeting.” If the ohel mo’ed was the place where man and God met, then the mo’adim in our chapter are the times when we and God meet. This idea is given beautiful expression in the last line of the mystical song we sing on Shabbat, Yedid nefesh, “Hurry, beloved, for the appointed time [mo’ed] has come.” Mo’ed here means a tryst – an appointment made between lovers to meet at a certain time and place.
As for the phrase mikra kodesh, it comes from the same root as the word that gives the entire book its name: Vayikra, meaning “to be summoned in love.” A mikra kodesh is not just a holy day. It is a meeting to which we have been called in affection by One who holds us close.
Much of the book of Vayikra is about the holiness of place, the Sanctuary. Some of it is about the holiness of people, the Cohanim, the priests, and Israel as a whole, as “a kingdom of priests.” In chapter 23, the Torah turns to the holiness of time and the times of holiness.
We are spiritual beings but we are also physical beings. We cannot be spiritual, close to God, all the time. That is why there is secular time as well as holy time. But one day in seven, we stop working and enter the presence of the God of creation. On certain days of the year, the festivals, we celebrate the God of history. The holiness of Shabbat is determined by God alone because He alone created the universe. The holiness of the festivals is partially determined by us (i.e. by the fixing of the calendar), because history is a partnership between us and God. But in two respects they are the same. They are both times of meeting (mo’ed), and they are both times when we feel ourselves called, summoned, invited as God’s guests (mikra kodesh).
We can’t always be spiritual. God has given us a material world with which to engage. But on the seventh day of the week, and (originally) seven days in the year, God gives us dedicated time in which we feel the closeness of the Shekhinah and are bathed in the radiance of God’s love.—Shabbat Shalom
The other day I was having a conversation with a Jewish intellectual and the question came up, as it often does, as to the nature of Jewish identity. What are we? What makes us Jewish? This has been one of the persisting debates about Jewish life ever since the nineteenth century. Until then, people by and large knew who and what Jews were. They were the heirs of an ancient nation who, in the Sinai desert long ago, made a covenant with God and, with greater or lesser success, tried to live by it ever since. They were God’s people.
Needless to say, this upset others. The Greeks thought they were the superior race. They called non-Greeks “barbarians,” a word intended to resemble the sound made by sheep. The Romans likewise thought themselves better than others, Christians and Muslims both held, in their different ways, that they, not the Jews, were the true chosen of God. The result was many centuries of persecution. So when Jews were given the chance to become citizens of the newly secular nation states of Europe, they seized it with open arms. In many cases they abandoned their faith and religious practice. But they were still regarded as Jews.
What, though, did this mean? It could not mean that they were a people dedicated to God, since many of them no longer believed in God or acted as if they did. So it came to mean a race. Benjamin Disraeli, converted to Christianity by his father as a young child, thought of his identity in those terms. He once wrote, “All is race -- there is no other truth,”[1] and said about himself, in response to a taunt by the Irish politician Daniel O’Connell, “Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”
The trouble was that hostility to Jews did not cease despite all that Europe claimed by way of enlightenment, reason, the pursuit of science and emancipation. It could now, though, no longer be defined by religion, since neither Jews nor Europeans used that as the basis of identity. So Jews became hated for their race, and in the 1870s a new word was coined to express this: antisemitism. This was dangerous. So long as Jews were defined by religion, Christians could work to convert them. You can change your religion. But you cannot change your race. Anti-Semites could only work, therefore, for the expulsion or extermination of the Jews.
Ever since the Holocaust it has become taboo to use the word “race” in polite society in the West. Yet secular Jewish identity persists, and there seems no other way of referring to it. So a new term has come to be used instead: ethnicity, which means roughly what “race” meant in the nineteenth century. The Wikipedia definition of ethnicity is “a category of people who identify with each other based on common ancestral, social, cultural, or national experiences.”
The trouble is that ethnicity is where we came from, not where we are going to. It involves culture and cuisine, a set of memories meaningful to parents but ever less so to their children. In any case, there is no one Jewish ethnicity: there are ethnicities in the plural. That is what makes Sefardi Jews different from their Ashkenazi cousins, and Sefardi Jews from North Africa and the Middle East different from those whose families originally came from Spain and Portugal.
Besides which, what is often thought of as Jewish ethnicity is often not even Jewish in origin. It is a lingering trace of what Jews absorbed from a local non-Jewish culture: Polish dress, Russian music, North African food, and the German-Jewish dialect known as Yiddish along with its Spanish-Jewish counterpart, Ladino. Ethnicity is often a set of borrowings thought of as Jewish because their origins have been forgotten.
Judaism is not an ethnicity and Jews are not an ethnic group. Go to the Western Wall in Jerusalem and you will see Jews of every colour and culture under the sun, the Beta Israel from Ethiopia, the Bene Israel from India, Bukharan Jews from central Asia, Iraqi, Berber, Egyptian, Kurdish and Libyan Jews, the Temanim from Yemen, alongside American Jews from Russia, South African Jews from Lithuania, and British Jews from German-speaking Poland. Their food, music, dress, customs and conventions are all different. Jewishness is not an ethnicity but a bricolage of multiple ethnicities.
Besides which, ethnicity does not last. If Jews are merely an ethnic group, they will experience the fate of all such groups, which is that they disappear over time. Like the grandchildren of Irish, Polish, German and Norwegian immigrants to America, they merge into the melting pot. Ethnicity lasts for three generations, for as long as children can remember immigrant grandparents and their distinctive ways. Then it begins to fade, for there is no reason for it not to. If Jews had been no more than an ethnicity, they would have died out long ago, along with the Canaanites, Perizzites and Jebusites, known only to students of antiquity and having left no mark on the civilisation of the West.
So when, in 2000, a British Jewish research institute proposed that Jews in Britain be defined as an ethnic group and not a religious community, it took a non-Jewish journalist, Andrew Marr, to state the obvious: 'All this is shallow water,' he wrote, 'and the further in you wade, the shallower it gets.' He continued:
The Jews have always had stories for the rest of us. They have had their Bible, one of the great imaginative works of the human spirit. They have been victim of the worst modernity can do, a mirror for Western madness. Above all they have had the story of their cultural and genetic survival from the Roman Empire to the 2000s, weaving and thriving amid uncomprehending, hostile European tribes.
This story, their post-Bible, their epic of bodies, not words, involved an intense competitive hardening of generations which threw up, in the end, a blaze of individual geniuses in Europe and America. Outside painting, Morris dancing and rap music, it's hard to think of many areas of Western endeavour where Jews haven't been disproportionately successful. For non-Jews, who don't believe in a people being chosen by God, the lesson is that generations of people living on their wits and hard work, outside the more comfortable mainstream certainties, will seed Einsteins and Wittgensteins, Trotskys and Seiffs. Culture matters . . . The Jews really have been different; they have enriched the world and challenged it.[2]
Marr himself is neither Jewish nor a religious believer, but his insight points us in the direction of this week’s parsha, which contains one of the most important sentences in Judaism: “Speak to the whole assembly of Israel and say to them: Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.” Jews were and remain the people summoned to holiness.
What does this mean? Rashi reads it in context. The previous chapter was about forbidden sexual relationships. So is the next chapter. So he understands it as meaning, be careful not to put yourself in the way of temptation to forbidden sex. Ramban reads it more broadly. The Torah forbids certain activities and permits others. When it says “Be holy” it means, according to Ramban, practice self-restraint even in the domain of the permitted. Don’t be a glutton, even if what you are eating is kosher. Don’t be an alcoholic even if what you are drinking is kosher wine. Don’t be, in his famous phrase, a naval bireshut ha-Torah, “a scoundrel with Torah license.”
These are localised interpretations. They are what the verse means in its immediate context. But it clearly means something larger as well, and the chapter itself tells us what this is. To be holy is to love your neighbour and to love the stranger. It means not stealing, lying, or deceiving others. It means not standing idly by when someone else’s life is in danger. It means not cursing the deaf or putting a stumbling block before the blind, that is, insulting or taking advantage of others even when they are completely unaware of it – because God is not unaware of it.
It means not planting your field with different kinds of seed, not crossbreeding your livestock or wearing clothes made of a forbidden mixture of wool and linen–or as we would put it nowadays, respecting the integrity of the environment. It means not conforming with whatever happens to be the idolatry of the time – and every age has its idols. It means being honest in business, doing justice, treating your employees well, and sharing your blessings (in those days, parts of the harvest) with others.
It means not hating people, not bearing a grudge or taking revenge. If someone has done you wrong, don’t hate them. Remonstrate with them. Let them know what they have done and how it has hurt you, give them a chance to apologise and make amends, and then forgive them.
Above all, “Be holy” means, “Have the courage to be different.” That is the root meaning of kadosh in Hebrew. It means something distinctive and set apart. “Be holy for I the Lord your God am holy” is one of the most counter-intuitive sentences in the whole of religious literature. How can we be like God? He is infinite, we are finite. He is eternal, we are mortal. He is vaster than the universe, we are a mere speck on its surface. Yet, says the Torah, in one respect we can be.
God is in but not of the world. So we are called on to be in but not of the world. We don’t worship nature. We don’t follow fashion. We don’t behave like everyone else just because everyone else does. We don’t conform. We dance to a different music. We don’t live in the present. We remember our people’s past and help build our people’s future. Not by accident does the word kadosh also have the meaning of marriage, kiddushin, because to marry means to be faithful to one another, as God pledges himself to be faithful to us and we to him, even in the hard times.
To be holy means to bear witness to the presence of God in our, and our people’s, lives. Israel – the Jewish people – is the people who in themselves give testimony to One beyond ourselves. To be Jewish means to live in the conscious presence of the God we can’t see but can sense as the force within ourselves urging us to be more courageous, just and generous than ourselves. That’s what Judaism’s rituals are about: reminding us of the presence of the Divine.
Every individual on earth has an ethnicity. But only one people was ever asked collectively to be holy. That, to me, is what it is to be a Jew. SHABBAT SHALOM
Some years ago I was visited by the then American ambassador to the Court of St James, Philip Lader. He told me of a fascinating project he and his wife had initiated in 1981. They had come to realise that many of their contemporaries would find themselves in positions of influence and power in the not-too-distant future. He thought it would be useful and creative if they were to come together for a study retreat every so often to share ideas, listen to experts and form friendships, thinking through collectively the challenges they would face in the coming years. So they created what they called Renaissance Weekends. They still happen.
The most interesting thing he told me was that they discovered that the participants, all exceptionally gifted people, found one thing particularly difficult, namely, admitting that they made mistakes. The Laders understood that this was something important they had to learn. Leaders, above all, should be capable of acknowledging when and how they had erred, and how to put it right. They came up with a brilliant idea. They set aside a session at each Weekend for a talk given by a recognised star in some field, on the subject of “My biggest blooper.” Being English, not American, I had to ask for a translation. I discovered that a blooper is an embarrassing mistake. A gaffe. A faux pas. A bungle. A boo-boo. A fashla. A balagan. Something you shouldn’t have done and are ashamed to admit you did.
This, in essence, is what Yom Kippur is in Judaism. In Tabernacle and Temple times, it was the day when the holiest man in Israel, the High Priest, made atonement, first for his own sins, then for the sins of his “house,” then for the sins of all Israel. From the day the Temple was destroyed, we have had no High Priest nor the rites he performed, but we still have the day, and the ability to confess and pray for forgiveness. It is so much easier to admit your sins, failings and mistakes when other people are doing likewise. If a High Priest, or the other members of our congregation, can admit to sins, so can we.
I have argued elsewhere (in the Introduction to the Koren Yom Kippur Machzor) that the move from the first Yom Kippur to the second was one of the great transitions in Jewish spirituality. The first Yom Kippur was the culmination of Moses’ efforts to secure forgiveness for the people after the sin of the Golden Calf (Ex. 32-34). The process, which began on 17th Tammuz, ended on the 10th of Tishri – the day that later became Yom Kippur. That was the day when Moses descended the mountain with the second set of tablets, the visible sign that God had reaffirmed his covenant with the people. The second Yom Kippur, one year later, initiated the series of rites set out in this week’s parsha (Lev. 16), conducted in the Mishkan by Aaron in his role as High priest.
The differences between the two were immense. Moses acted as a prophet. Aaron functioned as a priest. Moses was following his heart and mind, improvising in response to God’s response to his words. Aaron was following a precisely choreographed ritual, every detail of which was set out in advance. Moses’ encounter was ad hoc, a unique, unrepeatable drama between heaven and earth. Aaron’s was the opposite. The rules he was following never changed throughout the generations, so long as the Temple stood.
Moses’ prayers on behalf of the people were full of audacity, what the sages called chutzpah kelapei shemaya, “audacity toward heaven,” reaching a climax in the astonishing words, “Now, please forgive their sin – but if not, then blot me out of the book You have written.” (Ex. 32: 32). Aaron’s behavior by contrast was marked by obedience, humility, and confession. There were purification rituals, sin offerings and atonements, for his own sins and those of his “house” as well as those of the people.
The move from Yom Kippur 1 to Yom Kippur 2 was a classic instance of what Max Weber called the “routinization of charisma,” that is, taking a unique moment and translating it into ritual, turning a “peak experience” into a regular part of life. Few moments in the Torah rival in intensity the dialogue between Moses and God after the Golden Calf. But the question thereafter was: how could we achieve forgiveness – we who no longer have a Moses, or prophets, or direct access to God? Great moments change history. But what changes us is the unspectacular habit of doing certain acts again and again until they reconfigure the brain and change our habits of the heart. We are shaped by the rituals we repeatedly perform.
Besides which, Moses’ intercession with God did not, in and of itself, induce a penitential mood among the people. Yes, he performed a series of dramatic acts to demonstrate to the people their guilt. But we have no evidence that they internalized it. Aaron’s acts were different. They involved confession, atonement and a search for spiritual purification. They involved a candid acknowledgment of the sins and failures of the people, and they began with the High Priest himself.
The effect of Yom Kippur – extended into the prayers of much of the rest of the year by way of tachanun (supplicatory prayers), vidui (confession), and selichot (prayers for forgiveness) – was to create a culture in which people are not ashamed or embarrassed to say, “I got it wrong, I sinned, I made mistakes.” That is what we do in the litany of wrongs we enumerate on Yom Kippur in two alphabetical lists, one beginning Ashamnu, bagadnu, the other beginning Al cheit shechatanu.
As Philip Lader discovered, the capacity to admit mistakes is anything but widespread. We rationalize. We justify. We deny. We blame others. There have been several powerful books on the subject in recent years, among them Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success (and Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes)[1]; Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margins of Error,[2] and Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me.[3]
Politicians find it hard to admit mistakes. So do doctors: preventable medical error causes more than 400,000 deaths every year in the United States. So do bankers and economists. The financial crash of 2008 was predicted by Warren Buffett as early as 2002. It happened despite the warnings of several experts that the level of mortgage lending and the leveraging of debt was unsustainable. Tavris and Aronson tell a similar story about the police. Once they have identified a suspect, they are reluctant to admit evidence of his or her innocence. And so it goes.
The avoidance strategies are almost endless. People say, It wasn’t a mistake. Or, given the circumstances, it was the best that could have been done. Or it was a small mistake. Or it was unavoidable given what we knew at the time. Or someone else was to blame. We were given the wrong facts. We were faultily advised. So people bluff it out, or engage in denial, or see themselves as victims.
We have an almost infinite capacity for interpreting the facts to vindicate ourselves. As the sages said in the context of the laws of purity, “No one can see his own blemishes, his own impurities.”[4] We are our own best advocates in the court of self-esteem. Rare is the individual with the courage to say, as the High Priest did, or as King David did after the prophet Nathan confronted him with his guilt in relation to Uriah and Batsheva, chatati, “I have sinned.”[5]
Judaism helps us admit our mistakes in three ways. First is the knowledge that God forgives. He does not ask us never to sin. He knew in advance that His gift of freedom would sometimes be misused. All he asks of us is that we acknowledge our mistakes, learn from them, confess and resolve not to do them again.
Second is Judaism’s clear separation between the sinner and the sin. We can condemn an act without losing faith in the agent.
Third is the aura Yom Kippur spreads over the rest of the year. It helps create a culture of honesty in which we are not ashamed to acknowledge the wrongs we have done. And despite the fact that, technically, Yom Kippur is focused on sins between us and God, a simple reading of the confessions in Ashamnu and Al Chet shows us that, actually, most of the sins we confess are about our dealings with other people.
What Philip Lader discovered about his high-flying contemporaries, Judaism internalized long ago. Seeing the best admit that they too make mistakes is deeply empowering for the rest of us. The first Jew to admit he made a mistake was Judah, who had wrongly accused Tamar of sexual misconduct, and then, realizing he had been wrong, said, “She is more righteous than I” (Gen. 38: 26).
It is surely more than mere coincidence that the name Judah comes from the same root as Vidui, “confession.” In other words, the very fact that we are called Jews – Yehudim – means that we are the people who have the courage to admit our wrongs.
Honest self-criticism is one of the unmistakable marks of spiritual greatness.
The Missing Fifth – An Extract from Rabbi Sacks’ Haggada
Many commentators, among them the Vilna Gaon, have drawn attention to the influence of the number four in connection with the Haggadah. There are four fours:
The four questions
The four sons
The four cups of wine
The four expressions of redemption: ‘I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians and free you from their slavery. I will deliver you with a demonstration of My power and with great acts of judgment. I will take you to Me as a nation.’ (Ex.6: 6-7).
It may be, though, that just as an X-ray can reveal an earlier painting beneath the surface of a later one, so beneath the surface of the Haggadah there is another pattern to be discerned. That is what I want to suggest in this chapter.
The first thing to note is that there is, in fact, another ‘four’ on the seder night, namely the four biblical verses whose exposition forms an important part of the Haggadah:
‘An Aramean tried to destroy my father . . .’
‘And the Egyptians ill-treated us and afflicted us . . .’
‘And we cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers . . .’
‘And the Lord brought us out of Egypt . . .’ (Deut. 26:5-8)
There are, then, not four fours, but five.
In early editions of the Talmud tractate Pesachim (118a) there is a passage that perplexed the medieval commentators. It reads: ‘Rabbi Tarfon says: over the fifth cup we recite the great Hallel.’ The medieval commentators were puzzled by this because elsewhere the rabbinic literature speaks about four cups, not five. The Mishnah, for example, states that a poor person must be supplied with enough money to be able to buy four cups of wine. In both the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds the discussion revolves around the assumption that there are four cups on seder night. How then are we to understand the statement of Rabbi Tarfon that there is a fifth cup?
Among the commentators three views emerged. The first was that of Rashi and the Tosafists. According to them, there are only four cups on the seder night, and it is forbidden to drink a fifth. The statement of Rabbi Tarfon must therefore be a misprint, and the texts of the Talmud should be amended accordingly.
The second was that of Maimonides. He holds that there is a fifth cup, but unlike the other four, it is optional rather than obligatory. The Mishnah which teaches that a poor person must be given enough money to buy four cupfuls of wine means that we must ensure that he has the opportunity to fulfil his obligation. It does not extend to the fifth cup which is permitted but not compulsory. Rabbi Tarfon’s statement is to be understood to mean that those who wish to drink a fifth cup should do so during the recitation of the great Hallel.
The third view, that of Ravad of Posquières, a contemporary of Maimonides, is that one should drink a fifth cup. There is a difference in Jewish law between an obligation, hovah, and a religiously significant good deed, mitzvah. The first four cups are obligatory. The fifth is a mitzvah, meaning, not obligatory but still praiseworthy and not merely, as Maimondes taught, optional.
Thus there was a controversy over the fifth cup. Rashi said that we should not drink it; Maimonides that we may; Ravad that we should. What does one do, faced with this kind of disagreement? Jewish law tries wherever possible to propose a solution that pays respect to all views, especially when they are held by great halakhic authorities. The solution in the present case was simple. A fifth cup is poured (out of respect for Ravad and Maimonides) but not drunk (out of respect for Rashi).
When a disagreement occurs in the Talmud which is not resolved, the sages often used the word Teyku, ‘Let it stand’. We believe that such disagreements will be resolved in the time to come when Elijah arrives to announce the coming of the Messiah. One of his roles will be to rule on unresolved halakhic controversies. An allusion to this is to be found in the word Teyku itself, which was read as an abbreviation of Tishbi Yetaretz Kushyot Ve’ibbayot, ‘The Tishbite, Elijah, will answer questions and difficulties.’ This therefore is the history behind ‘the cup of Elijah’ – the cup we fill after the meal but do not drink. It represents the ‘fifth cup’ mentioned in the Talmud.
According to the Jerusalem Talmud, the reason we have four cups of wine is because of the four expressions of redemption in God’s promise to Moses. How then could Rabbi Tarfon suggest that there are not four cups but five? The fascinating fact is that if we look at the biblical passage there are not four expressions of redemption but five. The passage continues: ‘And I will bring you to the land I swore with uplifted hand to give to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. I will give it to you as a possession. I am the Lord.’ (Exodus 6: 8)
There is a further missing fifth. As mentioned above, during the course of reciting the Haggadah we expound four biblical verses, beginning with, ‘An Aramean tried to destroy my father.’ In biblical times, this was the declaration made by someone bringing first-fruits to Jerusalem. However, if we turn to the source we discover that there is a fifth verse to this passage: ‘He brought us to this place [the land of Israel] and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey’ (Deuteronomy. 26: 9). We do not recite or expound this verse at the seder table. But this strange since the Mishnah states explicitly, ‘And one must expound the passage beginning, “An Aramean tried to destroy my father” until one has completed the whole passage.’ In fact we do not complete the whole passage, despite the Mishnah’s instruction.
So there are three ‘missing fifths’ – the fifth cup, the fifth expression of redemption, and the fifth verse. It is also clear why. All three refer to God not merely bringing the Jewish people out of Egypt but also bringing them into the land of Israel. The Haggadah as we now have it and as it evolved in rabbinic times is, in Maimonides words, ‘the Haggadah as practised in the time of exile,’ meaning, during the period of the Dispersion. The missing fifth represented the missing element in redemption. How could Jews celebrate arriving in the land of Israel when they were in exile? How could they drink the last cup of redemption when they had said at the beginning of the seder, ‘This year slaves, next year free; this year here, next year in the land of Israel’?
The fifth cup – poured but not drunk – was like the cup broken at Jewish weddings. It was a symbol of incompletion. It meant that as long as Jews were dispersed throughout the world, facing persecution and danger, they could not yet celebrate to the full. One great sage of the twentieth century, the late Rabbi Menahem Kasher, argued that now that there is a State of Israel, many exiles have been ingathered and Jews have recovered their sovereignty and land, the fifth cup should be re-instated. That remains for the halakhic authorities to decide.
What, though, of the four questions and the four sons? There was a fifth question. The Mishnah states that a child should ask: ‘On all other nights we eat meat that is cooked, boiled or roasted; but this night only roasted meat.’ This text can still be found in the early manuscripts of the Haggadah discovered in the Cairo genizah. It refers to the time when the Temple stood and the food eaten at the seder night included the paschal offering, which was roasted. After the Temple was destroyed and the practice of eating a paschal lamb was discontinued, this question was dropped and another (about reclining) substituted.
Was there a fifth child? The late Lubavitcher Rebbe suggested that there is a fifth child on Pesach. The four children of the Haggadah are all present, sitting round the table. The fifth child is the one who is not there, the child lost through outmarriage and assimilation. Rabbinic tradition tells us that in Egypt, many Jews assimilated and did not want to leave. The Torah uses a phrase to describe the Israelites’ departure from Egypt, Vachamushim alu bnei Yisrael miMitzrayim (Exodus 13: 18). This is normally translated as ‘The Israelites went up out of Egypt armed for battle.’ However Rashi, citing earlier authorities, suggests that hamush may not mean ‘armed.’ Instead it may be related to the word hamesh, ‘five’. The sentence could therefore be translated as, ‘Only a fifth of the Israelites left Egypt.’
The rest, he explains, perished in the plague of darkness. The plague itself was less an affliction of the Egyptians than a way of covering the shame of the Israelites, that so many of their number did not want to leave. The loss of Jews through assimilation has been an ongoing tragedy of Jewish history. How do we allude to it on seder night? By silence: the fifth child – the one who is not there.
So the beneath the surface of the Haggadah we find, not four fours, but five fives. In each case there is a missing fifth – a cup, an expression of deliverance, a verse, a question and a child. Each points to something incomplete in our present situation. In the half-century since the Holocaust the Jewish people has emerged from darkness to light. The State of Israel has come into being. The Hebrew language has been reborn. Jews have been brought to safety from the countries where they faced persecution. In the liberal democracies of the West Jews have gained freedom, and even prominence and affluence.
But Israel is not yet at peace. In the Diaspora assimilation continues apace. Many Jews are estranged from their people and their faith. Something is missing from our celebration – the fifth cup, the fifth deliverance, the fifth verse, the fifth question and the fifth child. That is a measure of what is still to be achieved. We have not yet reached our destination. The missing fifths remind us of work still to be done, a journey not yet complete. CHAG SAMEACH
Our parsha begins with childbirth and, in the case of a male child, “On the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised” (Lev. 12:3). This became known not just as milah, “circumcision”, but something altogether more theological, brit milah, “the covenant of circumcision”. That is because even before Sinai, almost at the dawn of Jewish history, circumcision became the sign of God’s covenant with Abraham (Gen. 17:1-14).
Why circumcision? Why was this from the outset not just a mitzvah, one command among others, but the very sign of our covenant with God and His with us? And why on the eighth day? Last week’s parsha was called Shemini, “the eighth [day]” (Lev. 9:1) because it dealt with the inauguration of the Mishkan, the Sanctuary, which also took place on the eighth day. Is there a connection between these two quite different events?
The place to begin is a strange midrash recording an encounter between the Roman governor Tyranus Rufus 1 and Rabbi Akiva. Rufus began the conversation by asking, “Whose works are better, those of God or of man?” Surprisingly, the Rabbi replied, “Those of man.” Rufus responded, “But look at the heavens and the earth. Can a human being make anything like that?” Rabbi Akiva replied that the comparison was unfair. “Creating heaven and earth is clearly beyond human capacity. Give me an example drawn from matters that are within human scope.” Rufus then said, “Why do you practise circumcision?” To this, Rabbi Akiva replied, “I knew you would ask that question. That is why I said in advance that the works of man are better than those of God.”
The rabbi then set before the governor ears of corn and cakes. The unprocessed corn is the work of God. The cake is the work of man. Is it not more pleasant to eat cake than raw ears of corn? Rufus then said, “If God really wants us to practise circumcision, why did He not arrange for babies to be born circumcised?” Rabbi Akiva replied, “God gave the commands to Israel to refine our character.”2 This is a very odd conversation, but, as we will see, a deeply significant one. To understand it, we have to go back to the beginning of time.
The Torah tells us that for six days God created the universe and on the seventh he rested, declaring it holy. His last creation, on the sixth day, was humanity: the first man and the first woman. According to the sages, Adam and Eve sinned by eating the forbidden fruit already on that day and were sentenced to exile from the Garden of Eden. However, God delayed the execution of sentence for a day to allow them to spend Shabbat in the garden. As the day came to a close, the humans were about to be sent out into the world in the darkness of night. God took pity on them and showed them how to make light. That is why we light a special candle at Havdalah, not just to mark the end of Shabbat but also to show that we begin the workday week with the light God taught us to make.
The Havdalah candle therefore represents the light of the eighth day – which marks the beginning of human creativity. Just as God began the first day of creation with the words, “Let there be light”, so at the start of the eighth day He showed humans how they too could make light. Human creativity is thus conceived in Judaism as parallel to Divine creativity,3 and its symbol is the eighth day.
That is why the Mishkan was inaugurated on the eighth day. As Nechama Leibowitz and others have noted, there is an unmistakable parallelism between the language the Torah uses to describe God’s creation of the universe and the Israelites’ creation of the Sanctuary. The Mishkan was a microcosm – a cosmos in miniature. Thus Genesis begins and Exodus ends with stories of creation, the first by God, the second by the Israelites. The eighth day is when we celebrate the human contribution to creation.
That is also why circumcision takes place on the eighth day. All life, we believe, comes from God. Every human being bears His image and likeness. We see each child as God’s gift: “Children are the provision of the Lord; the fruit of the womb, His reward” (Ps, 127:3). Yet it takes a human act – circumcision – to signal that a male Jewish child has entered the covenant. That is why it takes place on the eighth day, to emphasise that the act that symbolises entry into the covenant is a human one – just as it was when the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai said, “All that the Lord has said, we will do and obey” (Ex. 24:7).
Mutuality and reciprocity mark the special nature of the specific covenant God made, first with Abraham, then with Moses and the Israelites. It is this that differentiates it from the universal covenant God made with Noah and through him with all humanity. That covenant, set out in Genesis 9, involved no human response. Its content was the seven Noahide commands. Its sign was the rainbow. But God asked nothing of Noah, not even his consent. Judaism embodies a unique duality of the universal and the particular. We are all in covenant with God by the mere fact of our humanity. We are bound, all of us, by the basic laws of morality. This is part of what it means to be human.
But to be Jewish is also to be part of a particular covenant of reciprocity with God. God calls. We respond. God begins the work and calls on us to complete it. That is what the act of circumcision represents. God did not cause male children to be born circumcised, said Rabbi Akiva, because He deliberately left this act, this sign of the covenant, to us.
Now we begin to understand the full depth of the conversation between Rabbi Akiva and the Roman governor Tineius Rufus. For the Romans, the Greeks and the ancient world generally, the gods were to be found in nature: the sun, the sea, the sky, the earth and its seasons, the fields and their fertility. In Judaism, God is beyond nature, and his covenant with us takes us beyond nature also. So for us, not everything natural is good. War is natural. Conflict is natural. The violent competition to be the alpha male is natural. Jews – and others inspired by the God of Abraham – believe, as Kathryn Hepburn said to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, that “Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”
The Romans found circumcision strange because it was unnatural. Why not celebrate the human body as God made it? God, said Rabbi Akiva to the Roman governor, values culture, not just nature, the work of humans not just the work of God. It was this cluster of ideas – that God left creation unfinished so that we could become partners in its completion; that by responding to God’s commands we become refined; that God delights in our creativity and helped us along the way by teaching the first humans how to make light – that made Judaism unique in its faith in God’s faith in humankind. All of this is implicit in the idea of the eighth day as the day on which God sent humans out into the world to become His partners in the work of creation.
Why is this symbolised in the act of circumcision? Because if Darwin was right, then the most primal of all human instincts is to seek to pass on one’s genes to the next generation. That is the strongest force of nature within us. Circumcision symbolises the idea that there is something higher than nature. Passing on our genes to the next generation should not simply be a blind instinct, a Darwinian drive. The Abrahamic covenant was based on sexual fidelity, the sanctity of marriage, and the consecration of the love that brings new life into the world.4 It is a rejection of the ethic of the alpha male.
God created physical nature: the nature charted by science. But He asks us to be co-creators, with Him, of human nature. As R. Abraham Mordecai Alter of Ger said. “When God said, ‘Let us make man in our image’, to whom was He speaking? To man himself. God said to man, Let us – you and I – make man together.”5 The symbol of that co-creation is the eighth day, the day He helps us begin to create a world of light and love.
If a person is always apprehensive, he's afraid (Yiras Hashem) like was described before: when out in the street he should feel like he was arrested by a Roman sergeant. Wouldn't that be a contradiction to enjoying life? Wouldn't that detract from the happiness of life?
ANSWER:
The happiness of life is never appreciated when people live in monotony. When you enjoy life without thinking, you don't have the happiness of life. It's only when you have a criteria, you're aware of what happened to others but it didn't happen to you, that's when a man begins learning to suck the honey out of life. There are people who never broke a bone in their bodies all their lives; it never occurred to them to be full of joy because of that. Full of joy because I didn't break a bone in my body? But when it happens challila, it's such a discomfort, you can't even lie in bed; it's excruciating. It's such a difficult experience, it has repercussions on all other functions of the body.
And this man all his life, he passed his days in utter peace; now he doesn't appreciate that. If he utilizes his head and he studies what happened to others, that man certainly is going to enjoy life. That's a prescription to be happy in life, to see what happens to other people.
Now, if that's the case, when a man learns Yiras Hashem he's not apprehensive, he's really not afraid of things that might happen to him, he's afraid of Hashem. This man, besides gaining the appreciation of the fact that what happened to others didn't happen to him, in addition he's gaining the satisfaction of the perfection of Yiras Hashem.
Nobody is going to have less happiness in life because of the fear of Hashem. On the contrary, he becomes more and more aware that Hakadosh Baruch Hu is protecting him; he's more and more sensitive to the things that others don't enjoy. Therefore Yiras Hashem actually gives happiness to people in addition to giving them longer lives.
Good Shabbos To All
This email is transcribed from questions that were posed to Harav Miller by the audience at the Thursday night lectures.
To listen to the audio of this Q & A please dial: 201-676-3210
The world gives the impression as if it operates by itself. Although a nonbiased individual should be able to discern the Grand Puppeteer behind the stage, it seems that most people are simply oblivious to the Creator. A fascinating explanation of a mitzvah in this week's parsha offered by the Sefer HaChinuch, illustrates to just what degree Hashem's presence in this world is hidden.
The Torah commands us, "A permanent fire shall be lit upon the mizbeiach, it shall not be extinguished" (Vayikra 6:6). The Chinuch writes that it is well known that even awesome miracles performed by Hashem are somewhat concealed. They appear as if they are simply an element of nature. Prior to the splitting of the sea, arguably the most astounding miracle in all of history, "Hashem moved the sea with a strong east wind all night" thereby giving the impression that the whole incident was the result of a natural disaster. The force of a powerful tornado caused the waters to split thereby allowing the Jews to pass through the parted waters. In a similar vein, despite the fact that a fire descended from Heaven onto the mizbeiach, we are commanded to light our own fire upon it to veil the otherwise overt miracle. Indeed, even when Hashem's reveals Himself, He makes sure to hide behind the veil of nature.
When the Navi exhorts us, "Walk with tzenius with Hashem" (Michah 6:8), he is not merely instructing those who look for publicity to conceal their good deeds. He is informing us that when one conceals his actions he is actually following in Hashem's ways, since He also hides what He does.
Rav Wolbe writes (Alei Shur vol. II p. 594) that many people define tzenius very superficially. The virtue of tzenius being discussed here refers not to an external dress code; rather, it refers to one's internal spiritual composition. The pasuk states, "Tzenius goes together with wisdom" (Proverbs 11:2). Rabbeinu Yonah explains that tzenius is a virtue which is attributed to the wise, "for they hear and listen and they do not desire to reveal what lies in their hearts." They do not feel compelled to reveal everything they have seen and heard. This quality allows them to live a life of penimiyus, since they have created for themselves a world that is not dependent on the opinions and desires of others. They are able to focus on their spiritual state without being affected by outside influences.
It takes one to know one. Only a person who lives with tzenius and conceals his actions has the ability to discern Hashem's concealed hand conducting the world. Had Mordechai and Esther not written the Megillah in a manner which highlights the various milestones that occurred over a twelve year period, most people would have perceived these occurrences as happenstance. Vashti happened to disobey Achashveirosh, Esther happened to be chosen as queen and Mordechai happened to overhear the plot of Bigson and Seresh. It takes a wise man to connect the dots in a way that produces a "picture" of Hashem's involvement.
We live in the internet generation where anything and everything is public. Anything anybody says, publishes or captures on camera is recorded and posted for the world to perceive. People have a hard time keeping anything inside themselves. Creating a relationship with Hashem means one is cognizant of His presence in his life - something inaccessible to a person who perceives the world superficially. Imbibing wine on Purim allows one to discover who he really is. Dig a little under the surface of your skin. Not only will you begin creating a world of penimiyus, but you will also succeed in scraping the veneer off this world thereby revealing the Creator in all His glory!
A Freilichen Purim! Reprinted from Bais Hamussar Newsletter
by Rabbi Michalowicz
Purim is celebrated this year on Wednesday evening March 23th and Thursday March 24th.
1 – Fast of Esther:
1. The fast is on Wednesday, March 4th.
2. The fast begins at 5:48 A.M. and ends at 8:25 P.M. Those who find fasting very difficult may eat at 8:10
P.M.
3. All adult males and females over Bar/Bat Mitzvah are obligated to fast.
4. Pregnant and Nursing women are exempt from fasting.
5. A person who is ill [even if it is not serious] is not permitted to fast.
6. One should not fast even if one only has a severe headache.
7. Children under bar/bat Mitzvah do not need to fast even for a few hours. Nevertheless, they should not be
given treats.
8. You may take medications prescribed by a doctor. One, who has difficulty swallowing pills without water, may
drink the amount of water required to swallow them.
9. One may rinse the mouth only if bad taste causes discomfort. Only a small amount of liquid should be used
while leaning forwards in order to minimize the chance of it being swallowed.
10. One is permitted to eat before the fast, provided that one explicitly states before going to sleep that he/she
plans to wake up early to eat before the fast begins.
11. Bathing is permitted even with hot water.
12. It is permitted to listen to music.
13. The special “Aneinu” prayer is said during the Mincha Amida by those who are fasting.
14. “Avinu Malkeinu” is said during Shacharis, but not during Mincha.
2 - The Half Shekel:
1. On the Fast of Esther [usually around Mincha time], there is a custom to give three coins to charity. Each coin
should be the denomination of ½ the standard currency in that country [e.g. ½ a dollar].
2. If one does not have the correct coins, he should purchase them [optimally for approximately $15] from the
charity box, and then put them back into the charity box.
3. All adult males are obliged in this Mitzvah. The custom is that a father gives on behalf of his sons, whatever
their ages.
4. The custom is that women are not obliged to give.
5. The money collected should be given to the poor.
6. If one forgot to give it on Erev Purim, he should give the money on Purim morning before the Megilah reading.
7. One may not use his “Ma’aser [charity] money” to fulfill this Mitzvah.
3 – Prayers on Purim:
1. We recite the “Al Hanisim” prayer during all 3 Amidas and for Birchas Hamazon. If one forgets to say it, he
need not repeat the Amida or Birchas Hamazon.
2. ‘Tachanun” and “Lamenatzeach” are omitted during Shacharis.
3. The Torah is read during Shacharis – before the Megilah reading.
4. One should not pray while dressed in a costume. One must dress respectfully during davening.
5. If a person is intoxicated to the extent that he would not be able to speak respectfully to an important official,
he may not pray. If he is only slightly intoxicated, to the extent that he would be able to speak respectfully to an
important official, it is nonetheless not correct to pray. However, the custom is to be lenient and allow prayer in
this state, although ideally he should wait until he is sober.
4- Work on Purim:
1. All forms of work are permitted on the evening of Purim.
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2. The custom is to prohibit going to work on the day of Purim. The Rabbis of the Talmud tell us that
whoever works on Purim will not see any blessing from it.
3. Work is permitted in the following situations:
• If not working will cause financial loss
• Work that is necessary for a Mitzvah
• Work that is required for Purim
4. One may ask a non-Jew to do all forms of work for the Jew.
5. Laundering is prohibited unless the clothes are necessary for Purim.
6. It is permitted to shave or take a haircut if it is done in order to look presentable on Purim itself.
7. It is forbidden to cut one’s nails.
8. The custom is to wear Shabbos clothes on Purim. One should keep his Shabbos clothes on through
the evening of Purim while hearing the Megilah.
5 – Reading /Hearing the Megilah:
1. Men and women over bar/bat Mitzvah are obligated to hear the Megilah twice – one time at night and one time
in the morning.
2. Children who are mature enough to listen attentively to the Megilah reading should do so. Preferably, such
children should be brought to hear the public reading. However, they must be properly supervised during
the reading and should understand that they have not been brought to Shul simply for the fun of banging at
Haman. Young children who are likely to cause a disturbance and prevent others from hearing the
Megilah should not brought to Shul for Megilah reading.
3. The earliest time to read the Megilah is after nightfall –8:25 P.M. The earliest correct time to read the
Megilah in the morning is after sunrise – 7:13 A.M. The Megilah can be read all day long until sunset.
4. Before reading or listening to the Megilah one should have in mind that they are fulfilling the Mitzvah of reading
or hearing the Megilah. Additionally, the reader should have in mind to include all the listeners who wish to
fulfill their obligation.
5. Three blessings are made by the reader before reading the Megilah in the evening and in the morning:
• “Al Mikra Megilah”
• “She’asa Nisim”
• “Shehechiyanu”
6. One should stand when saying or hearing the blessings.
7. When listening to the blessings, you should have in mind that you are fulfilling your obligation. When hearing
the “Shehechiyanu” blessing in the day, one should have in mind to include all the special Mitzvos of Purim.
The reader should have in mind that he is reciting the blessings on behalf of the entire congregation.
8. If a person arrives to Shul in the middle of the blessings:
• If there is sufficient time, he should quickly say the blessings himself, taking care that they are
completed before the reading begins.
• If there is insufficient time to say all the blessings, he should say as many of the blessings that he can.
• If there is not enough time to recite any of the blessings, he should preferably attend another reading
where the blessings will be heard.
• If this is very inconvenient, he may listen to the Megilah without hearing the blessings.
9. A special blessing is made after the evening Megilah reading in the presence of a Minyan. “Shoshanas
Yaakov” is sung after the Megilah reading.
10. The listeners may sit during the reading of the Megilah. The reader should stand when reading to a minyan,
but may lean if necessary.
11. One must hear very word of the Megilah. If a person missed even one word he has not fulfilled his
obligation. Therefore, it is mandatory to arrive on time for Megilah reading.
12. If a person did not hear some words, he should immediately say the words himself. However, this creates a
problem since the reader continues to read the Megilah while the person is saying the missed words, thereby
causing him to miss further words. Therefore, he must say the missed words and continue reading until he
overtakes the reader, at which point he may resume listening.
13. It is forbidden for both the reader and listener to speak from the beginning of the first blessing until the end of
the after blessing. Parents must be aware of this when bringing young children to the reading.
14. There are four verses of the Megilah which are read out loud before the reader. They are the following:
3
• Chapter 2, verse 5
• Chapter 8, verse 15
• Chapter 8, verse 16.
• Chapter 10, verse 3
15. In addition, it is customary for the congregation to say the names of the ten suns of Haman out loud.
16. It is a time honored tradition to bang / make noise every time the name of Haman is mentioned in the Megilah.
Nevertheless, excessive noise and tumult should be discouraged since this often prevents people
from hearing clearly.
17. In order to enhance the Mitzvah and make greater publicity of the miracle, both men and women should make
every effort to attend a public reading in Shul. Even if one can organize a minyan at home, it is better to join
the congregation.
18. If it is impossible for a person to attend Shul, he must hear the Megilah read at home from a Kosher Megilah.
6 – “Matanos Le’Evyonim” – Gifts to the Poor:
1. One must give one gift each to at least two poor people. The gift may be either money or food. The Mitzvah
should be performed on Purim during the daytime. It is preferable to do it after the Megilah reading without
delay.
2. One may give money to a charity collector before Purim if the charity collector will distribute the money to the
poor people only on the day of Purim for the purpose of fulfilling this Mitzvah.
3. Each person should be given at least the amount of food that is eaten at a regular meal or the amount of
money required to buy this. [approximately $25 per poor person]
4. It is recommended to give more than this minimum amount of money and amount of poor people. It is better
to spend more on this Mitzvah than on the other Mitzvos of Purim.
5. A check may be given if it can be easily exchanged for cash.
6. “Ma’aser [charity] Money” may be used for any of these donations, except for the minimum two gifts [valued at
$50.]
7. Women and children over bar/bat Mitzvah are also obligated in this Mitzvah. Although a married woman may
rely on her husband to give on her behalf, nevertheless it is preferable for her to perform the Mitzvah
personally. The same applies for the children. A practical solution would be to do the following: The husband
could give some money to a poor person or charity collector stating that it is on behalf of his wife. The poor
person / charity collector should have in mind to acquire the money on behalf of the woman, and she should
know that the procedure is being used for her. The same applies for the adult children.
8. Children aged six or seven should be trained to perform this Mitzvah. The above methods can be used as well
for them.
7 – “Mishloach Manos” – Sending Food:
1. On the day of Purim, one must send two items of food to at least on person. It is praiseworthy to send to many
people, but see 6:4 above.
2. Preferably, one should send food that is ready to be eaten immediately
3. The two food items must be different. However, it is not necessary for the items to require two different
blessings. Drinks are also suitable. One may send two different food items or two different drinks, or one food
and one drink.
4. The food should be a respectable quantity according to the standards of the sender and recipient. Therefore,
one should send a nicer package to a wealthy person than to a poor person, and a wealthy person should
send a nicer package than a poor person.
5. One should send at least one nice package to one person and any additional packages may be ‘token’
packages. This is better than sending a large number of small ‘token’ packages.
6. One is not permitted to use his “Ma’aser [charity] money” for this Mitzvah. If a person wishes to send several
packages to poor people he may use his “Ma’aser money” for all but the first package.
7. Women and children over Bar/Bat Mitzvah are obligated in this Mitzvah.
8. According to some opinions, a package may be sent on behalf of the entire family. That package should have
two food items for every family member sending the package. According to another opinion, only a husband
4
and wife can send together, but children should send on their own. If children prepare their own packages from
food in their parents’ home, they should be allowed to acquire the food before sending it.
9. Children aged six or seven should be trained to perform the Mitzvah.
10. It is praiseworthy to send packages to Jews who know little about Torah. This will arouse their interest
in Jewish practices and increase love and friendship between Jews. In a similar vein, this is an ideal
opportunity to repair broken relationships by sending packages to people with whom one has ill
feeling.
11. One may not send a package to a mourner. If another family member is not in mourning, the package may be
addressed to the family.
12. A mourner is obligated to send one package, but the package should not be too elaborate.
13. If a person receives a package, it is praiseworthy to reciprocate and send one in return, but it is not an
obligation.
14. According to the prevalent custom, one may give the package personally. According to some opinions, it is
preferable to send the package via a third person. One may use a child as a messenger, but must confirm that
the package was delivered. A reliable delivery service may be used.
15. Anonymous packages should be avoided. The recipient should know who has sent them the package.
8 – “Seudas Purim” – Feasting & Rejoicing:
1. The main Mitzvah is to have a festive meal on the day of Purim. In addition, one should have a nicer meal than
usual on the evening of Purim.
2. The table should be set nicely for the evening meal. Some have a custom to light candles.
3. There is a custom to eat seeds and pod foods such as rice, peas, and beans. It is not necessary to eat bread
at this meal.
4. It is customary to eat “Hamantashen” with a filling made of poppy-seed.
5. The prevalent custom is to eat bread and beef at the daytime meal.
6. Some women have a custom to drink a little wine in honor of the day. It is not necessary for children to drink
wine.
7. One should set a spiritual tone for this meal by doing the following:
• Spend a little time studying Torah before the meal. There is a special Mitzvah to begin studying the
laws of Pesach on Purim.
• Have in mind that eating the meal is a Mitzvah.
• Relate the Purim miracles and sing praise to Hashem during the meal.
8. It is a Mitzvah for men to drink wine. According to some opinions there is an obligation to become dunk until he
can no longer distinguish between ‘Cursed be Haman’ and ‘Blessed be Mordechai.’ According to other
opinions, one is only requite to drink more than the usual, but not to the point of getting drunk. One should
then go to sleep and thereby be unable to distinguish between ‘Cursed be Haman’ and ‘Blessed be
Mordechai.’
9. The Sages certainly did not want people to make a fool of themselves and behave with frivolity and
disgrace. The intention is to come closer to Hashem, using joy to reach great heights of love and
praise for Hashem. A person who knows that intoxication will prevent him from making blessings or
praying properly, or will lead him to light-headedness, should follow the second opinion. Everything
that one does should be purely for the sake of Heaven.
10. It is preferable to fulfill this Mitzvah by drinking wine only. A person who wishes may have other alcoholic
drinks after some wine.
11. The main obligation is to drink during the festive meal. If a person wishes to fulfill the Mitzvah by sleeping, he
should drink a little wine during the meal and go to sleep after Birchas Hamazon. Sufficient time should be left
to sleep before nightfall.
12. One should refrain from drinking too much if alcoholic drinks are harmful to him.
13. It is customary to wear costumes and masks on Purim.
14. One should refrain from dressing in costumes of the opposite gender. The same applies for children.
15. If a person insulted someone while intoxicated, he is required to ask for forgiveness.
16. Although it is customary to have Purim ‘shtik’ [plays, skits, songs, etc.] – it is forbidden to insult or embarrass
people even in jest.
PURIM
When Adar comes in we are told to increase our joy. Why is that?
ANSWER:Because it's a season that requires a certain frame of mind. Purim requires joy, Pesach requires joy. In order, however, to be prepared, you must start at the beginning of Adar. You can't be glum and sad, and suddenly when Purim comes, you jump up and down and you celebrate. No! You're doing it with a heavy heart.
When Adar comes in you begin looking for ways and means of generating happiness, and you look at the world. The world is full of happiness. The sunshine causes happiness. The fact that you're able to see. One of the greatest pleasures in the world is the ability to see. It's fun to see. You have two movie cameras taking pictures constantly wherever you look, color pictures. Isn't it fun to see? Oh, close your eyes, a dark sad world. Open your eyes. Oh!! Moving pictures! And they function in synchronization, together. And the pictures are recorded in your mind. You know the pictures that you are taking right now will never be forgotten? I could prove to you that the pictures are recorded forever in your mind. Forty years later somebody will say, “You remember sitting in Rabbi Miller's shul years ago? He was talking about the wonders of creation.”
“Oh yes I remember now,” and the pictures suddenly flashes out from the filing cabinets of your mind and you see everything once more.
Where was the picture for forty years? It was there, because the pictures you are taking are never erased from your mind. You might forget, because it goes back in the depths of the cabinets, but the pictures are there. Someday you might take them out and see them again, and reminisce about your youth. You remember even the voices; that's because you have a sound recording in your head.
So you start in the beginning of Adar, piling up Simcha. It's fun to see, (Rabbi Miller takes a big breath) it's fun to breathe. Rabosai, let's all practice the Simcha of filling our lungs with this wonderful air in this little place here. (And everyone takes a deep breath) AHH, that's joy. It's fun to be alive! Baruch Hashem, it's fun to live. It's fun as the heart causes the blood to course through your vessels; it's fun. Everything in life is fun. How silly people are! You know when they realize life is fun? When they are on the verge of dying. Oh, oh, oh, it's all over. Now is the time, enjoy life right now.
It's fun everywhere. When you sit down tomorrow morning at breakfast, it's fun to use those teeth to chew food, teeth are fun. False teeth are also fun. Life is fun, life is happiness, and we thank Hakdosh Baruch Hu for it.
This email is transcribed from questions that were posed to Harav Miller by the audience at the Thursday night lectures.
To listen to the audio of this Q & A please dial: 201-676-3210
Sitting is the new smoking. So goes the new health mantra. Spend too much time at a desk or in front of a screen and you are at risk of significant danger to your health. The World Health Organisation has identified physical inactivity as the fourth greatest health hazard today, ahead of obesity. In the words of Dr James Levine, one of the world’s leading experts on the subject and the man credited with coining the mantra, says, “We are sitting ourselves to death.”
The reason is that we were not made to sit still. Our bodies were made for movement, standing, walking and running. If we fail to give the body regular exercise, it can easily malfunction and put us at risk of serious illness. The question is: does the same apply to the soul, the spirit, the mind?
It is fascinating to look at the sequence of verbs in the very first verse of the book of Psalms: “Happy is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly, or stand in the way of sinners, or sit in the seat of the scornful” (Ps. 1:1). That is a picture of the bad life, lived in pursuit of the wrong values. Note how the bad man begins by walking, then stands, then sits. A bad life immobilises. That is the point of the famous verses in Hallel:
Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands. They have mouths, but do not speak, eyes but do not see, ears but do not hear, noses but do not smell. They have hands but cannot feel, feet but cannot walk, nor can they make a sound with their throats. Those who make them will be like them; so will all who trust in them. (Ps. 115:4-8)
If you live for lifeless things – as in the bumper sticker, “He who dies with the most toys, wins” – you will become lifeless.
Except in the House of the Lord, Jews do not sit. Jewish life began with two momentous journeys, Abraham from Mesopotamia, Moses and the Israelites from Egypt. “Walk on ahead of Me and be blameless” said God to Abraham (Gen. 17:1). At the age of ninety-nine, having just been circumcised, Abraham saw three strangers passing by and “ran to meet them.” On the verse, “Jacob dwelled [vayeshev, the verb that also means “to sit”] in the land where his father had stayed” Rashi, citing the sages, commented: “Jacob sought to live in tranquility, but immediately there broke in on him the troubles of Joseph.” The righteous do not sit still. They do not have a quiet life.
Rarely is the point made with more subtlety than at the end of this week’s parsha and the book of Exodus as a whole. The Tabernacle had been made and assembled. The closing verses tell us about the relationship between it and the “cloud of glory” that filled the Tent of Meeting. The Tabernacle was made to be portable.1 It could be dismantled and its parts carried as the Israelites travelled on the next stage of their journey. When the time came for them to move on, the cloud moved from the Tent of Meeting to a position outside the camp, signalling the direction the Israelites were to take. This is how the Torah describes it:
When the cloud lifted from above the tabernacle, the Israelites went onward in all their journeys, but if the cloud did not lift, they did not set out until the day it lifted. So the cloud of the Lord was over the tabernacle by day, and fire was in the cloud by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel in all their journeys. (Ex.40: 36-38)
There is a significant difference between the two occurrences of the phrase “in all their journeys”. In the first, the words are meant literally. When the cloud lifted, the Israelites knew they were about to begin a new stage of their journey. However in the second instance, they cannot be meant literally. The cloud was not “over the Tabernacle” in all their journeys. To the contrary, it was there only when they stopped journeying and instead pitched camp. During the journeys the cloud went on ahead.
Rashi notes this and makes the following comment:
A place where they encamped is also called massa, “a journey” . . . because from the place of encampment they always set out again on a new journey, therefore they are all called “journeys”.
The point is linguistic, but the message is remarkable. In a few brief words, Rashi has summarised an existential truth about Jewish identity. To be a Jew is to travel. Judaism is a journey, not a destination. Even a place of rest, an encampment, is still called a journey. The patriarchs lived, not in houses but in tents.2 The first time we are told that a patriarch built a house, proves the point:
Jacob traveled to Sukkot. There he built himself a house and made shelters [sukkot] for his livestock. That is why he called the place Sukkot. Gen. 33:17).
The verse is astonishing. Jacob has just become the first member of the covenantal family to build a house, yet he does not call the place “House” (as in Bet-El or Bet-lechem). He calls it “cattle-sheds.” It is as if Jacob, consciously or unconsciously, already knew that to live the life of the covenant means to be ready to move on, to travel, to journey, to grow.
One might have thought that all this applied only to the time before the Israelites crossed the Jordan and entered the Promised Land. Yet the Torah tells us otherwise:
The land shall not be sold in perpetuity because the land is Mine: you are strangers and temporary residents as far as I am concerned. (Lev. 25:23)
If we live as if the land is permanently ours, our stay there will be temporary. If we live as if it is only temporarily so, we will live there permanently. In this world of time and change, growth and decay, only God and His word are permanent. One of the most poignant lines in the book of Psalms – a verse cherished by the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas – says, “I am a stranger on earth. Do not hide your commands from me” (Ps. 119:19). To be a Jew is to stay light on your feet, ready to begin the next stage of the journey, literally or metaphorically. An Englishman’s home is his castle, they used to say. But a Jew’s home is a tent, a tabernacle, a sukkah. We know that life on earth is a temporary dwelling. That is why we value each moment and its newness.
Recently a distinguished British Jew, (Lord) George Weidenfeld, died at the age of 96. He was a successful publisher, a friend and confidant of European leaders, an inveterate fighter for peace and a passionate Zionist. In 1949-50, he was political adviser and Chief of Cabinet to Chaim Weizmann, first President of Israel. One of his last acts was to help rescue 20,000 Christian refugees fleeing from ISIS in Syria. He was alert and active, even hyperactive, to the very end of a long and distinguished life.
In an interview with The Times on his ninety-second birthday he was asked the following question: “Most people in their nineties slow down. You seem to be speeding up. Why is that?” He replied, “When you get to ninety-two, you begin to see the door about to close. I have so much to do before the door closes that the older I get, the harder I have to work.” That is a good formula for staying young.
Like our bodies, our souls were not made for sitting still. We were made for moving, walking, traveling, learning, searching, striving, growing, knowing that it is not for us to complete the work but neither may we stand aside from it. In Judaism, as the book of Exodus reminds us in its closing words, even an encampment is called a journey. In matters spiritual, not just physical, sitting is the new smoking.
Important Numbers
