Us and Torah

A Midrash reads, “In the beginning” means that “God looked into the Torah and created with world.”  Torah preceded the Creation.  The ancient sages believed that just as any good building must have an architectural plan so too the universe required an outline so that Hi idea would resemble the end product.  The Torah came first!  It was the “blueprint of the universe.”  Does this sound far-fetched?

Think of the thousands of years of human existence and look with amazement at how our lives, the entire world - has been shaped by Torah.  We base our jurisprudential system of justice of Torah.  We learn how to be merciful to the needy through Torah (it is not just giving but how to fairly distribute).  We gauge our relationship to God, our relationship to others, our connection to Israel, even our language is determined by the holy Writ.  The mitzvot run the gamut from the Ten Commandments to burying our dead.  There is not an aspect of civilization that has not been informed by Torah.

And we are its guardians.

“…I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation.  If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations…”.  Written by John Adams in 1809, Adams misses the most critical aspect of our contribution to the world; it was not us that deserve the credit for changing the world’s landscape; it was God’s Torah.

Without Torah we would be as any other people. There would be no Christianity or Islam and the world would probably have remained much more savage.  

We often celebrate ourselves, particularly in this post-Holocaust generation.  Perhaps this is misplaced.   While the victims of the Shoah demand that we remember them (and the world often seems insistent on forgetting its murderous assault) the most gratuitous victory we can claim after Auschwitz is our heritage, the sacred Torah.  This is the real secret power and invincibility of the Jew. As pointed out in the new book Black Earth the real danger perceived by Nazis, nihilists and despots is what makes us unique, Torah.

“All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains.  What is the secret of his immortality?” asked Mark Twain.

The secret is lying out in the open for everyone to see. It is not our charitable gifts; it is where we learn what tzedakah means.  It is not our insistence of evenhandedness or whether we are active Democrats or Republicans; it is the source that sustains our belief in the primacy of mishpat, righteous justice.  It is not that we have excelled in professions but our insistence on lifelong learning, which comes directly from Torah.

Left to our own discernments we would likely choose the path that hurts us the least or benefits us the most.  Torah lengthens our reach beyond self-interest.  That is the real secret to our immortality.

Celebrate the lifeline of the ages, the blueprint of the universe, the reason why we are still here after millennia, and the reason why the Jew will still be informing the world two thousand years from today. Torah.

Hate Hate

“The Bible tells is to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people,” wrote G.K. Chesterton.

It is part of the human condition that we are expected to differentiate between that which is toxic and that which is merely distasteful.  They are often confused.  For example, one witness to World War II noted, “We ought to have declared war on Germany the moment Mr. Hitler’s police stole Einstein’s violin.”  Compare that with the historical fact that after the Nazis annexed Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland before declaring war on France and England the United States did nothing until Pearl Harbor was attacked.  And, as you know, Jews were being gassed and thrown into ovens daily.  It is distasteful to take away a violin.  It is toxic to commit atrocities and destroy life.

We must know the difference between them.

In hindsight it is easy to know what was benign and what was evil.  We all recognize that the mass murders, rapes, and brutalizations of the Tutsis in 1994 Rwanda were evil.  But there were early warning signs that tensions between the tribes were escalating.  We chose to ignore them as insignificant. 

The same with Pol Pot’s murderous rampage in the 1970’s where one and one half million people were murdered.  It all started with ideology, only a philosophic idea.  Pinochet, Amin, Mugabe, Milosevic, Hitler and Stalin all proceeded with their annihilation of innocent people, unchecked because we thought them wrongheaded but not so toxic as to require intervention.

We do an ineffective job of discriminating between the toxic and distasteful.

There is a Russian story about an Armenian grandmother on her deathbed.  Her children gathered to hear her final words.

“Take care of the Jews,” she wheezed.

“Mom, we are Armenians.  Why take care of the Jews?”

“First they come for the Jews and then they come for the Armenians.” 

That is why we must be ever vigilant.  It is foolish to protect our home while our neighbor is being attacked thinking, “at least I am safe.” 

In our world there are no separations.  Like a virus, corruption and evil spread and they can be easily ignored by saying to ourselves, “They are meaningless.  This will pass.”  Maybe it will.  Maybe it won’t.  Can we afford to take the chance?

As Jews we are charged with a unique task.   Besides bringing to the world the notion of there being a singular force in the world, G-d, we have also been given the noble task to teaching that all human life is sacred.  We are vested with the imprimatur of being cast in the “image of G-d” with full knowledge that all of humanity is related.  That makes us responsible for one another.  What remains is for us to be responsive to one another to act and not simply empathize.

It is no easy task to determine whether we are facing a time when hateful words and evil acts are coming with greater frequency and acceptance and therefore we must push forward to become involved …  or whether to step aside and wait for this to pass. 

I am concerned.  Daily, I watch for news of more bomb threats against Jewish institutions and more anti-Israel pronouncements.  I am appalled at the attacks on Mosques and Muslims.  I grow concerned with each passing day with what I see as mounting world xenophobia.   As you will remember, this is one of the listed sins on Yom Kippur.  We are putting up walls, real and imagined, at a world that we increasingly see as hostile, dangerous and against us. 

We are called as a people to decry evil and fight against it.  This is the basis of ethical monotheism.  We are also commanded to be compassionate to the stranger as once “you were strangers in Egypt.”

Along with motivated clergy and laity in our community I am working to forge an alliance against hate.  It is called Justice for All. Watch for it on the news, or better, ask to become involved.

On the Kansas City Shootings

 Every good person will feel his or her heart break today.  As a lone human brazenly shot at a Jewish Community Center and a Jewish assisted living facility in Kansas we weep.  We weep for the victims and their families.

Such hatred must have no place in this world.  It needs to be scourged from the minds of all.  And it starts with us.  

If we are not moved by such evil to find the places where it will likely dwell and root it out we are culpable.  

The cry of Abel still resonates in the ears of humanity as his blood seeped into the earth.  For as it is stated in the Bible, the Hebrew word for "blood" there is in the plural form leading us to understand that when one person is murdered, untold generations will never live.  Indeed, society fails when its individual components perpetuate hatred and acts of cruelty.   We weep for the victims and we weep for us.

It is not enough to feel bad for the victims of violence we must speak out against it.  Every person is called upon to dismantle bigotry, fight hatred, and make a determined stand against acts of utter evil as now with these violent shootings in Kansas City.  Enough.

Especially cruel is the timing as we the Jewish community gets ready to observe the Festival of Freedom from slavery where families gather to recall a time when God intervened to redeem the Israelites from unmentionable hatred.  Perhaps that was our lesson too.  It may be that tale is about how we are supposed to be one another’s guardians.

May our passion for fighting evil be stronger than their passion for being inhuman.