I have two texts to share with you that have been on my mind over the past few days.
This past Shabbat I riffed from the pulpit on a thought of Rabbi Shlomo Riskin (Torah Lights, Shemot, p.222-223). Here, he is discussing the keruvim/cherubs that were placed on top of the Ark of the Covenant. Per the Biblical text, “and their faces, one to his brother.”
Rabbi Riskin writes:
The cherubs facing each other was not a result of Israel's doing the will of God; it is rather the definition, a pointing of the way, as to how to best accomplish the will of God. We truly accomplish God's will not when our sights are centered on the Temple walls, no matter how sacred they may be, but rather when our sights are centered on other people, whom we must help, support and uplift….
The symbol of cherubs teaches us that it is not sufficient that…Torah personalities face the Temple. They must face the people. They must feel the angst and hear the cries of their fellow Jews, in order that the Torah which they teach be sensitive and relevant, and truly express a tree of life "whose paths are paths of sweetness and whose every road is peace."(Proverbs 3:17)
Moreover, the Torah scholars must face each other as well! Facing each other means recognizing each other's authority, knowledge and honest motivation to protect the Torah, even when one must respectfully disagree with the other's opinion…R. Yohanan warns that scholars, even those whose steady gaze is never averted from the Holy Temple and the sacred texts, may not be fully doing the will of heaven if they do not look at each other!
Political leaders in Israel are also in the category of the cherubs, charged with protecting the holy ark and the tablets of testimony within it. King Solomon was aware of this challenge. He was almost obsessed with creating a magnificent edifice, a holy temple to God. His gaze was set on the Temple, but in the process he neglected to look with sensitivity upon the masses of Jews. His heavy taxation laid the groundwork for the split between the ten tribes of Israel and the two tribes of Judea even though the revolution did not take effect until his son Rehoboam's reign. His cherubs may have faced the wall of the Temple, but they did not face each other…
Rabbi Riskin’s description made me think of modern definitions of totalitarianism/fascism, particularly the subordination of the people to the state and the promotion of an official ideology. In other words, ignoring the people and looking at the walls of the Temple. In contrast, democracy done right is all about engaging together with other people, not the walls.
It also made me think of Jeremiah 7, in which the prophet chastises those who feel safety because of the Temple, despite their systemic corruption.
Stand at the gate of the House of GOD, and there proclaim this word: Hear the word of GOD, all you of Judah who enter these gates to worship GOD!
Thus said GOD of Hosts, the God of Israel: Mend your ways and your actions, and I will let you dwell in this place.
Don’t put your trust in illusions and say, “The Temple of GOD, the Temple of GOD, the Temple of GOD are these [buildings].”
No, if you really mend your ways and your actions; if you execute justice between one party and another;
if you do not oppress the stranger, the orphan, and the widow; if you do not shed the blood of the innocent in this place; if you do not follow other gods, to your own hurt—
then only will I let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your ancestors for all time.
See, you are relying on illusions that are of no avail.
Will you steal and murder and commit adultery and swear falsely, and sacrifice to Baal, and follow other gods whom you have not experienced,
and then come and stand before Me in this House that bears My name and say, “We are safe”?—[Safe] to do all these abhorrent things!
Generally, this passage is understood to mean that the people are hypocrites. They don’t live up to the values that the Temple represents, but instead they cynically treat it as a protective talisman. God would never destroy God’s own Temple, so the people will be safe from the worst possible consequences for the bad behavior they have no intention of abandoning. Jeremiah is telling them that it’s not true, and the Temple could easily be taken from them, as it was by the Babylonians.
I wonder if we could read it to mean that the people were so dedicated to the Temple as a national or religious symbol, so focused on their religious principles, that they weren’t paying attention to what was actually happening in society.
In that sense, the prophecy is about any religious movement that is so dedicated to its ideals and values that it fails to take into account the human cost of those ideals and values put into practice. They wind up oppressing the disadvantaged, even committing idolatry, out of what they think are the noblest of intentions, because they are studying the holy walls, not looking at each other.
It also made me think of this For Heaven’s Sake podcast episode in which Donniel Hartman and
discuss the ultra-orthodox “haredi” population in Israel. The conversation tries to strike a balance between the haredi community's insistence on limited participation in modern Israeli society to protect tradition as it understands it with the requirements of participation in national life and military service. The conversation tries hard to really see haredim for who they are and what they are about.And the Haredim, in their way, replicated the Zionist achievement. We built a state, they built a whole destroyed world. And they did it at tremendous sacrifice. And I saw this growing up. I grew up in a Haredi neighborhood in Brooklyn, in Borough Park. I saw it emerging from, really from the void. And the sacrifice that they showed, raising enormous families in two rooms, three rooms, and assuming voluntary poverty, which nobody in the Jewish people does anymore.
We used to, you know the kibbutzim, the settlers in the early years, they all took on a certain voluntary poverty. The Haredim are our last repository of voluntary austerity for the sake of a higher goal. And so when we confront them, as we must, we also need to tell them we understand what you’ve sacrificed. We understand that the enormous obstacles you were up against in achieving your historic reconstruction, and we will do whatever we can as a society to try to protect that.
This passage from an essay by Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, referenced several times last week in an email group that I participate in, is haunting. The context is the Book of 1 Samuel, Chapter 15. King Saul is ordered by the prophet to wage a war of total eradication against the Amalekites, to fulfill the biblical directive. Saul is largely successful but spares Agag, the King of Amalek, whom he holds as a prisoner, and several of the livestock, which were intended to be thanksgiving offerings. In response to this deviation, God orders Samuel to strip Saul of his crown. Rav Lichtenstein writes:
After the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, I published an open letter to the Prime Minister. Among other things, this letter dealt with the use of force and the motivation behind it. I asked: Why was it that King Shaul was punished for not killing Agag, King of Amalek? Was it simply for not having killed the last remaining Amalekite? I suggested that he was punished not just for sparing Agag, but because the fact that he refused to kill Agag placed in a totally different light his killing of all the other Amalekites beforehand.
Shaul had been commanded to take a whole people and kill them—and this is, morally, a frightful thing. The only justification lies in it being a response to an unequivocal divine command. Therefore, if Shaul had been motivated in his actions purely by fear of God, by obedience to the tzav, then he should have followed the command to the letter. God didn’t say, “Kill Amalek but spare Agag.” Now, if he didn’t kill Agag but killed everybody else, what does that indicate? It indicates that what motivated him in killing the others was not the tzav (command) of God, but rather some baser impulse, some instinctive violence. And the proof is that he killed everyone, but spared his peer, his royal comrade. If that is the case, then Shaul was not punished for sparing Agag: rather, he had to be punished because of the Amalekites he did kill! Why? Because he killed them not purely due to a divine command (which is the only thing that can overcome the moral consideration), but rather out of military, diplomatic or political considerations.
(The idea of a divine imperative to kill, overruling moral considerations, is scary. Hamas claims this as well! The counter-claim is that God would never order something so monstrous, and if you come to the conclusion that God desires genocide, that itself is the proof that you’re off the rails. This is at the root of much discussion about the Binding of Isaac, and Rav Lichtenstein is taking a very Kierkegaardian position.1)
In any case, Rav Lichtenstein’s point is on the critical nature of intentionality, even when doing things at the border of morality - or maybe especially then. The sense of being in extraordinary, spiritually dangerous circumstances is supposed to be sobering and pervasive, the difference between a difficult act of divine obedience and the worst sins.
It is especially poignant, without comment, in light of an article this week in the Forward:
Why triumphant Israeli images from Gaza are castigated abroad – The Forward.
The Hebrew edition of Haaretz published a photo spread Tuesday of images that two 37-year-old reservists, Nadav and Elam, took showing what they ate while serving in Gaza. The men said that they had “mixed feelings” about using the Palestinian residents’ kitchen supplies, but explained that they found that having homemade food instead of relying on IDF rations raised morale. They spend much of the interview detailing the dishes they made, and their popularity among the troops — with other battalions having come to join their meals and build camaraderie.
It has long been common practice for IDF soldiers to use Palestinians’ homes as bases during military actions, sometimes with the residents still present. But when the article caught the attention of the English-language internet, the soldiers’ meals were not seen in the same wholesome light Nadav and Elam used to describe their cooking.
Maybe the cherubs teach us that we also need to look directly at our enemies, even - especially - while at war with them.
Rav Lichtenstein himself backtracks a bit later in the essay when he says “The moment one speaks of a kind of clash between the demands of yirat Shamayim (reverence of Heaven) and the demands of morality—even given the qualifications which I mentioned—there is some kind of problem.”
I gave another devar Torah in my shul this Shabbos, and I cited this article. I'll post and link it soon.