Sermonette
28 August 2015
Temple Ner Ami, Camarillo, CA
(1650 words, ca. 12 and a half minutes)
So
the child says to the rabbi, "Rabbi, why did the Holy One set the minyan at ten?" And the rabbi
replies, "That is simple, my child. A minyan
of ten guarantees that for every issue of importance to the congregation —
and {shuddering to recall} many, many issues of no importance whatever! — there
should be at least a dozen opinions."
Okay,
a lot of Jews, it is said, like to argue, and I grew up in Chicago: among another
group of people who definitely like to argue.
And
not argue just with each other, at least not among Jews.
One
image of Israel's relationship with God is a loving betrothal, as in the final
prayer when putting on tefillin, or in a mystic reading of the Song of Songs — or
with greeting the Sabbath bride as we did with L'Cha Dodi. But marriages,
especially after the first six hundred years or so, can get stormy, and another
image of the Jewish relationship with God is the wrestling match: Jacob
wrestles with the angel and is renamed "Israel": "He who
struggles with God." Abraham dickers with God over the destruction of
Sodom, and Job in the poem of Job is
far from patient with God. In the long poem in the center of the book of Job, Job is ticked and accuses God of injustice. Ultimately vehemently,
Job presents his indictment to a silent God — or silent to the climax of the
poem — and the Book of Job as a whole suggests that without such an argument
there may be no true encounter with God.
Which
brings me to the Torah reading for this Shabbat, Ki Teitzei — a substantial hunk of Deuteronomy — where
most of us nowadays would have some questions — and one or two places where we should have objections. And it
brings me, as someone ignorant of Hebrew, to what I can recite and talk about. Baruch ata Adonai natein haTorah: The often-repeated
and expanded upon, "Blessed are You, Eternal, who gives the Torah."
We
bless God for giving us Torah, the Teaching:
God's teachings, commandments,
injunctions, laws.
And
I got thinking about that blessing for Torah.
I
don't think I'd bless the California State Assembly for giving us the
California Revised Statutes, and I know I cursed them (quietly) for allowing
photo-enforced traffic lights with two-second yellows. Still, even when being
welcomed to Ventura County with $600 in fines and fees for my first moving
violation since I was 18 — even then, I don't think I would have found anything
in California law as, let's say, problematic
as the "Rules for waging holy war" in Deuteronomy. Most of those
rules are in last week's reading, but Ki Teitzei
starts out with the rules for a victorious Israelite soldier seizing from
"among the captives a beautiful woman" and appropriating her —
seizing her — for a wife.
Also,
well … for 35 years I lived in a college town around the corner from a
consolidated high school and occasionally fantasized dire punishments for teens
who are "stubborn and rebellious" (and noisy) and for any over-age
kid who's "a glutton and," way more so, "a drunkard." Still,
having them stoned to death as Deuteronomy commands (21.21) seems excessive —
and "a little bordering upon cruelty."
When
we bless God for "Torah and mitzvot," what should we be blessing God for?
First
off we should be thankful for the arguments within our Scriptures and beyond
where it's a question of whether swords should be beaten into plowshares, as
Isaiah says, and we "learn war no more," or the other way around. The
prophet Joel tells us to "Hammer your plowshares into swords and your pruning hooks
into spears" and rather than ceasing to learn war anymore, to "Train
even your weaklings to be warriors" (3.10).
Also
there are — always — historical contexts and the need to be not so open-minded
that our brains fall out, but humble not just before God but also with our
ancestors, and honor their progress in compassion.
For
a famous example, Christians criticize the Law of "an eye for an
eye." Well, back in the day of Hammurabi and Moses, that law served to limit violence. Somebody knocks out the
eye of a guy in the ancient world (or our world), and he'd want to kill the offender. And American
Christians might keep in mind that if the US had stuck to "an eye for an
eye," we would have paused after killing four or five thousand Afghans in
revenge for 9/11 — and see what, if anything could be done against al-Qaeda by
law. "An eye for an eye" can be idealistic even today.
More
specific to today's reading, Ki Teitzei commands, "You shall not give up to his master a slave who has
escaped […]; he shall dwell with you [… and]; you shall not oppress him"
(23.15). The Code of Hammurabi, nearly four thousand years ago "decreed
death as the penalty for sheltering a fugitive slave" (RSV 244 n.); and the laws of the
American colonies and the United States required returning fugitive slaves
until 1864.
More generally, we have to use our
imaginations and think about what evolving Torah meant to our ancestors.
A nice Jewish boy, if secular,
Steven Pinker, wrote in 2011 a long and fascinating and controversial book
called The Better Angels of Our Nature:
Why Violence Has Declined. "What? — Violence declined?!?", you will say — which is why Pinker needed to
write a big book. "Don't we live
in peculiarly violent times of existential threat!?"
Well, no, not really. There are existential threats to the human
species from asteroids and comets and thermonuclear war. And the last period of
global warming back in the Middle Ages was great for the Vikings but horrible
for people living in hot, dry places like, well, like around here, and our
current round of global warming will produce, in many places, like around here,
very tough times.
Still, nothing going on nowadays
compares with the bloodbaths of the two world wars of the 20th
century, and my students in a course called just "Massacres" came up
with the scary statistic that those two world wars and some 80 million dead
were barely a blip on the graph in the increase in human population. World War
II was an existential threat to Jews and Roma and did (thank God) destroy the
Third Reich; but the 20th-century World Wars were a spasmodic
exception to a general trend of improvement.
"Genocide" is a modern
word, but large-scale massacres are ancient, and we find it hard to believe
that Violence Has Declined because we
can barely imagine how violent a world our ancestors lived in during the
anarchy that preceded civilization and the violence and oppression under early
kings and empires.
Scribes in really ancient, ancient Mesopotamia
wrote of kingship coming down from heaven as a gift from the gods. Well, yeah;
having a king meant that now all you had to fear in the lethal violence
category was the king and his thugs from the capital and not the local free-lance
thugs. Early civilization was less violent and brutal than what preceded it,
but that still leaves a lot of room for violence and brutality. Our ancestors
got a taste of civilized life in Egypt, and my ancient history book says the
Hebrews weren't treated much differently from Pharaoh's other subjects — and
our ancestors in Egypt thought they were treated like slaves. And when our later
ancestors demanded a king, the Prophet Samuel described in gory detail how even
an Israelite king will tax them and draft them "and you shall be his
slaves" (1 Samuel 8.10-18). Oppressive kings were better than constant
clan warfare and small-group violence, but they were bad and could be very bad.
So, Blessed be the Eternal, who gave the yoke of the law to restrain and guide
individuals and (on balance, eventually) curb violence and oppression.
And blessed be the Eternal for Torah
not just as Law but as Teaching and a Way of life: for giving us a creation
myth where God looks upon all the work of of Creation on the 6th Day
and finds in "very good" (Genesis 1.31) — a phrase a great teacher of comparative religion says "gives a lilt
to the whole attitude toward nature" and life in Torah, and makes Torah
the ground of "This beautiful tree, the tree of life." <http://billmoyers.com/content/wisdom-faith-christianity-judaism/>
And, indeed, the weirder rules in
Deuteronomy in the reading for today repeat the kind of Rule of Separations in the
Book of Leviticus — and these also make sense.
Torah teaches that in the beginning
God brought order out of chaos; and the rules to keep fabrics all of one
material and farm fields of one crop, the rigid rules on sex and gender and age
status — these are bad ideas today but long served as walls against chaos.
We need "New Rules!" about
now, and Reform Judaism helps provide them, but the impulse behind the old
rules was necessary. Back when humans were beginning to get the world organized
in our minds and cultures, we needed strong categories for animals and crops
and fabrics, even for men's clothing and women's clothing; we needed at least
regulation of the violence of frequent wars and constant slavery — and rules to
keep in check royal egomaniacs.
And many of the rules really are good
ideas: expanding our circles of empathy, sympathy, of feeling and concern. In the
Torah reading for today, in the midst of a bunch of rigid regulations on
punishments and inheritance and "Levirate" marriage. In the midst of
lawyerly details comes the rule, "You shall not muzzle an ox when it
treads out the grain" (25.4). Even an ox deserves reward for his labor, a
standard of justice and compassion that we have not met today.
Blessed is the Eternal, who's given
the Torah to Israel.
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