There's a fun Midrashic story about God offering the Torah to the leading powers of the world, who in turn reject it, before finally asking the Jews who accept it.1
The first nation to reject the Torah are the children of Esau/Esav (representing for the rabbis the Roman Empire). They ask God what is in the Torah and God responds, "Thou shalt not murder." They reject it because, as Jacob promised Esau, "By your sword you shall live.2
The Israelites don't ask what is in the Torah - they say "We will do and we will hear3," meaning, we accept with no preconditions and only later will find out what we agreed to.4
Rabbi Chaim ibn Attar (Ohr Hachayim, 18th century Morocco), wonders about Esau’s rejection. Maybe God should have forced them to accept the Torah so they would stop killing.5 (Imagine rejecting gun control regulation not because you think the regulations will be onerous and ineffective but because having unregulated guns is part of the local identity. Actually, you don’t need to imagine.) He answers that they weren’t telling God that it would be impossible for them to restrain themselves from bloodshed, like it was a temptation they couldn’t control. If that were true, they could have accepted the Torah and tried to work on themselves over time. It’s not like the Israelites were always completely in compliance with everything in the Torah.
Rather, the children of Esau told God that their society was defined by its violence - that the violence was a critical part of their identity and value system.
This is a teaching to reflect on as Israel, a country with near-universal conscription into an army that occupies an outside role in the national culture and society, wages war. It is one thing to be surrounded by bloodshed. It is another to be defined by it.
It also reminded me of the following post, which I wrote this past summer.
In a Torah Scroll, this week’s portion, Parashat Beha’alotcha, contains a unique feature. One passage, two verses long (Num 10:35-36), is surrounded by two upside-down letters. The letters, nun’s in Hebrew, resemble parentheses that literally partition this passage from the rest of the text.
The first verse in the passage is:
וַיְהִי בִּנְסֹעַ הָאָרֹן וַיֹּאמֶר מֹשֶׁה קוּמָה יְהֹוָה וְיָפֻצוּ אֹיְבֶיךָ וְיָנֻסוּ מְשַׂנְאֶיךָ מִפָּנֶיךָ׃
And it happened, as the Ark journeyed on, that Moses would say, “Rise O Lord, let your enemies scatter, and Your foes flee before You.”
This was Moses’ prayer as the Ark of the Covenant set forth to lead the Israelites on a leg of their journey through the wilderness.
The second verse is:
וּבְנֻחֹה יֹאמַר שׁוּבָה יְהֹוָה רִבְבוֹת אַלְפֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל׃
and when it came to rest, he would say: “Come back O Lord, to Israel’s teeming myriads” (translation Robert Alter)
This was Moses’ prayer as the Ark moved back to the center of the Israelites’ encampment when they reached their next destination.
In our liturgy, we recite the first of these two verses to accompany the Torah scroll on its journey from the Ark at the front of the sanctuary to the bimah, the raised platform in the center from where it is read to the congregation, and then the second is recited as the Torah is restored to the Ark.
The sages of the Midrash ascribed great significance to these upside-down letters/parentheses; one opinion explains that they indicate how this passage actually constitutes a book of the Torah in its own right!
In accordance with whose teaching is that which R. Samuel b. Nachmeini spoke in the name of R. Jochanan "She hath hewn out her seven pillars (Pr. 9, 1), i.e., these are the seven books of which the Torah is composed [and not five as we count]"? This is in accordance with the opinion of Rabbi [Judah the Prince, who says that the above two passages form a book in and of themselves].
Rabbi Yehuda Leib Ginsburg, an influential 20th-century rabbi and communal leader, explains that these two verses are cordoned off because they are about war - the first calls on God to scatter the Israelites’ enemies from before the Israelites as they traveled, and the second refers to the Ark settling back among the “teeming myriads of Israel” - a military reference.
Rabbi Ginsburg explains that although military action is often justified and sometimes even necessary, a war footing should be seen as an exception, a book in its own right, partitioned off and set aside from normal day-to-day national life. The Israelites sometimes would have to march forth into battle, but war and war-making would not define their regular day-to-day existence.
This interpretation may seem especially counter-cultural today. America spends over 750 billion dollars a year on its military, more than the next ten countries combined, and accounts for 40% of global arms exports. Simply put, the military is inextricable from the American economy and, in a major way, defines America’s presence in the world.
The impact on day-to-day life may be reflected in a society with more guns than people, that suffers mass shootings on a daily basis, and where the specter of violence feels perpetually just beneath the surface. More and more, our politics are belligerent and violent. Instead of reaching out to forge and nurture connections between people, we seem to feel the need to defend ourselves from them. We are more and more at war with ourselves.
Rabbi Ginsburg might tell us that in 21st-century America, those Hebrew nuns, the parentheses around the verses of war, have been erased. War and war-making are not just something we sometimes do. Instead, they have become who we are; they are our framing for the world around us.
The challenge of the two nuns is in imagining what it would look like to reestablish those boundaries, in our lives and in our society.
It’s a wild thought experiment. Instead of being the Chosen People, the Israelites were actually God’s last resort!
Yes, this is also the rabbis' commentary on the often-brutal Roman occupation under which they lived.
נַעֲשֶׂה וְנִשְׁמָע/Ex. 24:7
Another thought experiment: if God had started specifying laws to the Israelites, which would have caused them to reject the Torah?
The Midrash also says that the Israelites’ own acceptance of the Torah was somewhat coercive, at least in part. The idea was that God was trying to mold them into something better than what they currently were.
I love the Midrash. I'd forgotten the last resort part and I don't think I ever knew the accepting it before knowing what was in it.
Maybe I could extend the Midrash to say that ever since then, we Jews have studied and become expert in the law to make sure we always read the fine print!