Parshas Vayeishev 5776 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
QUESTION:
Is giving Chanukah gifts an imitation of gentile practices?
ANSWER:
It certainly is! It's the season when the stores are full of good things and everybody is moved to buy. There's a great campaign to save your money for you, everybody has signs on the store, save, save, save, and so as a result you start saving. However this has to be tempered with a little bit of mildness, because the children might feel deprived!
Therefore it wouldn't be out of place to give some presents. But to go around with a long list, a paper a yard long and say I have to do my Chanukah shopping, that's nothing but an imitation of goyim. So if you want to give gifts, you can give gifts for Pesach, for Purim, you want to give gifts for Chanukah too, so we won't criticize that. But to make a big fuss about it, Chanukah giving as an ideal, so you might as well sing carols, and put up a Chanukah tree, because that's what it is.
It is one of the most enigmatic episodes in the Torah, but also one of the most important, because it was the moment that gave the Jewish people its name: Israel, one who “wrestles with God and with men and prevails.”
Jacob, hearing that his brother Esau is coming to meet him with a force of four hundred men, was terrified. He was, says the Torah, “very afraid and distressed.” He made three forms of preparation: appeasement, prayer and war (Rashi to Gen. 32:9). He sent Esau a huge gift of cattle and flocks, hoping thereby to appease him. He prayed to God, “Rescue me, I pray, from the hand of my brother” (32:12). And he made preparation for war, dividing his household into two camps so that one at least would survive.
Yet he remained anxious. Alone at night he wrestled with a stranger until the break of dawn. Who the stranger was is not clear. The text calls him a man. Hosea (12:4) called him an angel. The sages said it was the guardian angel of Esau.[1] Jacob himself seems sure that he has encountered God himself. He calls the place where the struggle took place Peniel, saying, “I have seen God face to face and my life was spared” (32:30).
There are many interpretations. One, however, is particularly fascinating both in terms of style and substance. It comes from Rashi’s grandson, Rabbi Shmuel ben Meir (Rashbam, France, c.1085-1158). Rashbam had a strikingly original approach to biblical commentary.[2] He felt that the sages, intent as they were on reading the text for its halakhic ramifications, often failed to penetrate to what he called omek peshuto shel mikra, the plain sense of the text in its full depth.
Rashbam felt that his grandfather occasionally erred on the side of a midrashic, rather than a “plain” reading of the text. He tells us that he often debated the point with Rashi himself, who admitted that if he had the time he would have written further commentaries to the Torah in the light of new insights into the plain sense that occurred to him “every day”. This is a fascinating insight into the mind of Rashi, the greatest and most famous commentator in the entire history of rabbinic scholarship.
All of this is a prelude to Rashbam’s remarkable reading of the night-time wrestling match. He takes it as an instance of what Robert Alter has called a type-scene,[3] that is, a stylised episode that happens more than once in Tenakh. One obvious example is young-man-meets-future-wife-at-well, a scene enacted with variations three times in the Torah: in the case of Abraham’s servant and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, and Moses and Tsipporah. There are differences between them, but sufficient similarities to make us realise that we are dealing with a convention. Another example, which occurs many times in Tanakh, is birth-of-a-hero-to-a-hitherto-infertile-woman.
Rashbam sees this as the clue to understanding Jacob’s night-time fight. He relates it to other episodes in Tanakh, two in particular: the story of Jonah, and the obscure episode in the life of Moses when, on his way back to Egypt, the text says that “When they were in the place where they spent the night along the way, God confronted Moses and wanted to kill him” (Ex. 4:24). Tzipporah then saved Moses’ life by giving their son a brit (Ex. 4:25-26).[4]
It is the story of Jonah that provides the key to understanding the others. Jonah sought to escape from his mission to go to Nineveh to warn the people that the city was about to be destroyed if they did not repent. Jonah fled in a boat to Tarshish, but God brought a storm that threatened to sink the ship. The prophet was then thrown into the sea and swallowed by a giant fish that later vomited him out alive. Jonah thus realised that flight was impossible.
The same, says Rashbam, applies to Moses who, at the burning bush, repeatedly expressed his reluctance to undertake the task God had set him. Evidently, Moses was still prevaricating even after beginning the journey, which is why God was angry with him.
So it was with Jacob. According to Rashbam, despite God’s assurances, he was still afraid of encountering Esau. His courage failed him and he was trying to run away. God sent an angel to stop him doing so.
It is a unique interpretation, sobering in its implications. Here were three great men, Jacob, Moses and Jonah, yet all three, according to Rashbam, were afraid. Of what? None was a coward.
They were afraid, essentially, of their mission. Moses kept telling God at the burning bush: Who am I? They won’t believe in me. I am not a man of words. Jonah was reluctant to deliver a message from God to Israel’s enemies. And Jacob had just said to God, “I am unworthy of all the kindness and faith that You have shown me” (Gen. 32:11).
Nor were these the only people in Tanakh who had this kind of fear. So did the prophet Isaiah when he said to God, “I am a man of unclean lips.” So did Jeremiah when he said, “I cannot speak: I am a child.”
This is not physical fear. It is the fear that comes from a feeling of personal inadequacy. “Who am I to lead the Jewish people?” asked Moses. “Who am I to deliver the word of God?” asked the prophets. “Who am I to stand before my brother Esau, knowing that I will continue the covenant and he will not?” asked Jacob. Sometimes the greatest have the least self-confidence, because they know how immense is the responsibility and how small they feel in relation to it. Courage does not mean having no fear. It means having fear but overcoming it. If that is true of physical courage it is no less true of moral and spiritual courage.
Marianne Williamson’s remarks on the subject have become justly famous. She wrote:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”[5]
Shakespeare said it best (in Twelfth Night): “Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.”
I sometimes feel that, consciously or subconsciously, some take flight from Judaism for this very reason. Who are we to be God’s witness to the world, a light to the nations, a role model for others? If even spiritual giants like Jacob, Moses and Jonah sought to flee, how much more so you and me? This fear of unworthiness is one that surely most of us have had at some time or other.
The reason it is wrong is not that it is untrue, but that it is irrelevant. Of course we feel inadequate to a great task before we undertake it. It is having the courage to undertake it that makes us great. Leaders grow by leading. Writers grow by writing. Teachers grow by teaching. It is only by overcoming our sense of inadequacy that we throw ourselves into the task and find ourselves lifted and enlarged by so doing. In the title of a well known book, we must “feel the fear and do it anyway.”
Be not afraid of greatness: that is why God wrestled with Jacob, Moses and Jonah and would not let them escape. We may not be born great, but by being born (or converting to become) a Jew, we have greatness thrust upon us. And as Marianne Williamson rightly said, by liberating ourselves from fear, we help liberate others. That is what we as Jews are meant to do: to have the courage to be different, to challenge the idols of the age, to be true to our faith while seeking to be a blessing to others regardless of their faith.
For we are all children of the man who was given the name of one who wrestles with God and with men and prevails. Ours is not an easy task, but what worthwhile mission ever was? We are as great as the challenges we have the courage to undertake. And if, at times, we feel like running away, we should not feel bad about it. So did the greatest.
To feel fear is fine. To give way to it, is not. For God has faith in us even if, at times, even the best lack faith in themselves.
Why Jacob? That is the question we find ourselves asking repeatedly as we read the narratives of Genesis. Jacob is not what Noah was: righteous, perfect in his generations, one who walked with God. He did not, like Abraham, leave his land, his birthplace and his father’s house in response to a Divine call. He did not, like Isaac, offer himself up as a sacrifice. Nor did he have the burning sense of justice and willingness to intervene that we see in the vignettes of Moses’ early life. Yet we are defined for all time as the descendants of Jacob, the children of Israel. Hence the force of the question: Why Jacob?
The answer, it seems to me, is intimated in the beginning of this week’s parsha. Jacob was in the middle of a journey from one danger to another. He had left home because Esau had vowed to kill him when Isaac died. He was about to enter the household of his uncle Laban, which would itself present other dangers. Far from home, alone, he was at a point of maximum vulnerability. The sun set. Night fell. Jacob lay down to sleep, and then saw this majestic vision:
He dreamed and, look, there was a ladder set on the earth, with its top reaching heaven; and, look, angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And, look, the Lord stood beside him and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread forth to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed through you and through your offspring. And look, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Gen. 28:12-17)
Note the fourfold “and look,” in Hebrew ve-hinei, an expression of surprise. Nothing has prepared Jacob for this encounter, a point emphasized in his own words when he says, “the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it.” The very verb used at the beginning of the passage, “He came upon a place,” in Hebrew vayifga ba-makom, also means an unexpected encounter. Later, in rabbinic Hebrew, the word ha-Makom, “the Place,” came to mean “God.” Hence in a poetic way the phrase vayifga ba-makom could be read as, “Jacob happened on, had an unexpected encounter with, God.”
Add to this Jacob’s night-time wrestling match with the angel in next week’s parsha and we have an answer to our question. Jacob is the man who has his deepest spiritual experiences alone, at night, in the face of danger and far from home. He is the man who meets God when he least expects to, when his mind is on other things, when he is in a state of fear and possibly on the brink of despair. Jacob is the man who, in liminal space, in the middle of the journey, discovers that “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!”
Jacob thus became the father of the people who had their closest encounter with God in what Moses was later to describe as “the howling wasteland of a wilderness” (Deut. 32:10). Uniquely, Jews survived a whole series of exiles, and though at first they said, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” they discovered that the Shekhinah, the Divine presence, was still with them. Though they had lost everything else, they had not lost contact with God. They could still discover that “the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!”
Abraham gave Jews the courage to challenge the idols of the age. Isaac gave them the capacity for self-sacrifice. Moses taught them to be passionate fighters for justice. But Jacob gave them the knowledge that precisely when you feel most alone, God is still with you, giving you the courage to hope and the strength to dream.
The man who gave the most profound poetic expression to this was undoubtedly David in the book of Psalms. Time and again he calls to God from the heart of darkness, afflicted, alone, pained, afraid:
Save me, O God,
for the floodwaters are up to my neck.
Deeper and deeper I sink into the mire;
I can’t find a foothold.
I am in deep water,
and the floods overwhelm me. (Ps 69:2-3)
From the depths, O Lord,
I call for your help. (Ps. 130:1)
Sometimes our deepest spiritual experiences come when we least expect them, when we are closest to despair. It is then that the masks we wear are stripped away. We are at our point of maximum vulnerability – and it is when we are most fully open to God that God is most fully open to us. “The Lord is close to the broken-hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Ps.34:18). “My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise”(Ps. 51:17). God “heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wounds” (Ps. 147:3).
Rav Nahman of Bratslav used to say; “A person needs to cry to his Father in heaven with a powerful voice from the depths of his heart. Then God will listen to his voice and turn to his cry. And it may be that from this act itself, all doubts and obstacles that are keeping him back from true service of Hashem will fall from him and be completely nullified.”[1]
We find God not only in holy or familiar places but also in the midst of a journey, alone at night. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for You are with me.” The most profound of all spiritual experiences, the base of all others, is the knowledge that we are not alone. God is holding us by the hand, sheltering us, lifting us when we fall, forgiving us when we fail, healing the wounds in our soul through the power of His love.
My late father of blessed memory was not a learned Jew. He did not have the chance to become one. He came to Britain as a child and a refugee. He had to leave school young, and besides, the possibilities of Jewish education in those days were limited. Merely surviving took up most of the family’s time. But I saw him walk tall as a Jew, unafraid, even defiant at times, because when he prayed or read the Psalms he felt intensely that God was with him. That simple faith gave him immense dignity and strength of mind.
That was his heritage from Jacob, as it is ours. Though we may fall, we fall into the arms of God. Though others may lose faith in us, and though we may even lose faith in ourselves, God never loses faith in us. And though we may feel utterly alone, we are not. God is there, beside us, within us, urging us to stand and move on, for there is a task to do that we have not yet done and that we were created to fulfil. A singer of our time wrote, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
The broken heart lets in the light of God, and becomes the gate of heaven. SHABBAT SHALOM
“The boys grew up. Esau became a skilful hunter, a man of the outdoors; but Jacob was a mild man who stayed at home among the tents. Isaac, who had a taste for wild game, loved Esau, but Rebekah loved Jacob” (Gen. 25:27-28).
We have no difficulty understanding why Rebekah loved Jacob. She had received an oracle from God in which she was told: “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger” (Gen. 25:23).
Jacob was the younger. Rebekah seems to have inferred, correctly as it turned out, that it would be he who would continue the covenant, who would stay true to Abraham’s heritage, and who would teach it to his children, carrying the story forward into the future.
The real question is why did Isaac love Esau? Could he not see that he was a man of the outdoors, a hunter, not a contemplative or a man of God? Is it conceivable that he loved Esau merely because he had a taste for wild game? Did his appetite rule his mind and heart? Did Isaac not know how Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of soup, and how he subsequently “despised” the birthright itself (Gen. 25:29-34). Was this someone with whom to entrust the spiritual patrimony of Abraham?
Isaac surely knew that his elder son was a man of mercurial temperament who lived in the emotions of the moment. Even if this did not trouble him, the next episode involving Esau clearly did: “When Esau was forty years old, he married Judith daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and also Basemath daughter of Elon the Hittite. They were a source of grief to Isaac and Rebekah” (Gen. 26:34-35). Esau had made himself at home among the Hittites. He had married two of their women. This was not a man to carry forward the Abrahamic covenant which involved a measure of distance from the Hittites and Canaanites and all they represented in terms of religion, culture and morality.
Yet Isaac clearly did love Esau. Not only does the verse with which we began say so. It remained so. Genesis 27, with its morally challenging story of how Jacob dressed up as Esau and took the blessing that had been meant for him, is remarkable for the picture it paints of the genuine deep affection between Isaac and Esau. We sense this at the beginning when Isaac asks Esau: “Prepare me the kind of tasty food I like and bring it to me to eat, so that I may give you my blessing before I die.” This is not Isaac’s physical appetite speaking. It is his wish to be filled with the smell and taste he associates with his elder son, so that he can bless him in a mood of focused love.
It is the end of the story, though, that really conveys the depth of feeling between them. Esau enters with the food he has prepared. Slowly Isaac, and then Esau, realise the nature of the deception that has been practiced against them. Isaac “trembled violently.” Esau “burst out with a loud and bitter cry.” It is hard in English to convey the power of these descriptions. The Torah generally says little about people’s emotions. During the whole of the trial of the binding of Isaac we are given not the slightest indication of what Abraham or Isaac felt in one of the most fraught episodes in Genesis. The text is, as Erich Auerbach said, “fraught with background,” meaning, more is left unsaid than said. The depth of feeling the Torah describes in speaking of Isaac and Esau at that moment is thus rare and almost overwhelming. Father and son share their sense of betrayal, Esau passionately seeking some blessing from his father, and Isaac rousing himself to do so. The bond of love between them is intense. So the question returns with undiminished force: why did Isaac love Esau, despite everything, his wildness, his mutability and his outmarriages?
The sages gave an explanation. They interpreted the phrase “skilful hunter” as meaning that Esau trapped and deceived Isaac. He pretended to be more religious than he was.[1] There is, though, a quite different explanation, closer to the plain sense of the text, and very moving. Isaac loved Esau because Esau was his son, and that is what fathers do. They love their children unconditionally. That does not mean that Isaac could not see the faults in Esau’s character. It does not imply that he thought Esau the right person to continue the covenant. Nor does it mean he was not pained when Esau married Hittite women. The text explicitly says he was. But it does mean that Isaac knew that a father must love his son because he is his son. That is not incompatible with being critical of what he does. But a father does not disown his child, even when he disappoints his expectations. Isaac was teaching us a fundamental lesson in parenthood.
Why Isaac? Because he knew that Abraham had sent his son Ishmael away. He may have known how much that pained Abraham and injured Ishmael. There is a remarkable series of midrashim that suggest that Abraham visited Ishmael even after he sent him away, and others that say it was Isaac who effected the reconciliation.[2] He was determined not to inflict the same fate on Esau.
Likewise he knew to the very depths of his being the psychological cost on both his father and himself of the trial of the binding. At the beginning of the chapter of Jacob, Esau and the blessing the Torah tells us that Isaac was blind. There is a midrash that suggests that it was tears shed by the angels as they watched Abraham bind his son and lift the knife that fell into Isaac’s eyes, causing him to go blind in his old age.[3] The trial was surely necessary, otherwise God would not have commanded it. But it left wounds, psychological scars, and it left Isaac determined not to have to sacrifice Esau, his own child. In some way, then, Isaac’s unconditional love of Esau was a tikkun for the rupture in the father-son relationship brought about by the binding.
Thus, though Esau’s path was not that of the covenant, Isaac’s gift of paternal love helped prepare the way for the next generation, in which all of Jacob’s children remained within the fold.
There is a fascinating argument between two mishnaic sages that has a bearing on this. There is a verse in Deuteronomy (14:1) that says, about the Jewish people, “You are children of the Lord your God.” Rabbi Judah held that this applied only when Jews behaved in a way worthy of the children of God. Rabbi Meir said that it was unconditional: Whether Jews behave like God’s children or they do not, they are still called the children of God.[4]
Rabbi Meir, who believed in unconditional love, acted in accordance with his view. His own teacher, Elisha ben Abuya, eventually lost his faith and became a heretic, yet Rabbi Meir continued to study with him and respect him, maintaining that at the very last moment of his life he had repented and returned to God.[5]
To take seriously the idea, central to Judaism, of Avinu Malkeinu, that our King is first and foremost our parent, is to invest our relationship with God with the most profound emotions. God wrestles with us, as does a parent with a child. We wrestle with him as a child does with his or her parents. The relationship is sometimes tense, conflictual, even painful, yet what gives it its depth is the knowledge that it is unbreakable. Whatever happens, a parent is still a parent, and a child is still a child. The bond may be deeply damaged but it is never broken beyond repair.
Perhaps that is what Isaac was signalling to all generations by his continuing love for Esau, so unlike him, so different in character and destiny, yet never rejected by him – just as the midrash says that Abraham never rejected Ishmael and found ways of communicating his love.
Unconditional love is not uncritical but it is unbreakable. That is how we should love our children – for it is how God loves us.
Dvar Torah - By Michael Zaroovabeli
(This weeks Dvar Torah is dedicated to Rivkah Bat Chana who has had health problems recently, please pray for her to have a full refuah shelaima and feel better. If you would like to dedicate a Dvar Torah, please Email me!!)
This weeks Torah reading starts off with eulogizing the life of Sarah, she passed away at the age of 127 years old (Bereishit 23:1). Avraham had the task of burying Sarah, he knew the ideal place where she was to be buried, the Cave of Machpeale. Already Adam and Chava were buried there and Avraham wanted to purchase this burial plot of land so that Sarah and later on he, could be buried there, in fact also Yitzchak and Rivka along with Yaakov and Leah would also be buried there (Eruvin 53a).
Despite Avraham had already been told the whole of the land of Israel would be his (Bereishit 15:7), he still purchased the plot of land, he bought it off a man named, Ephron the Hittie. In fact, prior to purchasing the land, Ephron had been promising and boasting that he will give the plot for free as a generous gift, however his greedy character prevailed and almost sarcastically said to Avraham in front of many people, you can have the entire plot of land for ‘400 silver shekels! (Bereishit 23:15)’ which many of the sages say was an enormous sum of money, however Avraham knew he had to buy the plot for whatever sum of money was required. Just as we learned last week, how the righteous 'say little and do a lot,' we see from this the opposite is true, that 'the wicked say so much and do a little,' just like Ephron boasted how much he will give to Avaraham and how he would give it as a gift, it turned out he charged what was a huge some of money for the plot at the time (Bava Metzia 87a).
Much of the rest of the Parshah is dedicated to relating the task of Eliezer (Avraham’s faithful servant) in finding Yitzchak a wife. The first ever accounted so called ‘Shidduch’ was being set up in Biblical history. After Avraham made Eliezer swear to find the girl from Avraham’s family (Bereishit 24:3). Eliezer traveled to Aram Naharaim and prayed for a sign to find the right girl at a water spring, who would be the potential wife for Yitzchak. Providentially, Rivka appeared (Bereishit 24:15). Eliezer asked her for water. Not only did she give him water, but she drew water for all ten of his thirsty camels, around 140 gallons (Bereishit 24:19/ Rav Hirsch)! This extreme act of kindness marked her as the suitable wife for Yitzchak and a suitable Mother of the Jewish People. We learn from this that the power of praying is huge, when one prays they are capable of elevating themselves to supreme levels and prayer may or may not be accepted or granted, however one needs to pray ideally from the heart and not see prayers as a regular chore.
Once Eliezer realized that G-d had provided him with the correct girl for Yitzchak (Taanit 4a), Rivka, he showered her with gifts and went to her fathers house, Betuel, in order to finalize the marriage negotiations. Betuel and his son, Lavan, accepted the marriage arrangements realizing as Eliezer told them what happened at the ‘well’ that the potential marriage was made from Hashem (Bereishit 24:50). In fact the great sages see this as a biblical proof that it is G-d that decides a man's partner in life (Moed Katan 18b).
In the interim, as Betuel had agreed to give his daughter in marriage to Yitzchak, Eliezer excitingly adorned Rivka with more gold, silver and lavish gifts, however he gave some delicious fruits to Lavan (Bereishit 24:53), this was much less than the greedy Lavan was hoping for, in fact Betuel, the father of Rivkah, wanted to take some sort of revenge against Eliezer for only giving fruits as a present, which in its own right was generous of Eliezer, he tried to poison Eliezer, however G-d sent an angel to kill Betuel instead (Bereishit Rabba 60:12/ Rashi).
As Eliezer brought Rivka to Yitzchak toward the evening, he had just finished davening the Mincha prayer at the time Rivka appeared to him, in fact it is from this that we derive that Yitzchak instituted the Mincha prayer (Berachot 26b). The two of them then got married (Bereishit 24:67). Eliezer shortly after went in to ‘Gan Eden’ alive (Mesechet Derech Eretz) due to the fantastic job he did in bringing the couple together, he was seen to be one of the most faithful servants of any of the leaders ever had throughout Biblical history.
The Torah reading concludes as Avraham remarries a woman named Keturah (Bereishit 25:1) (many say this was his former wife, Hager (Rashi)) and the death of Ishmael at the age of 137 years old ((Bereishit 25:17/Yevamot 64a).
The Haftorah this week is from the first chapter in the first book of Kings, which narrates how Shlomo was the successor to King David, after King David’s death at the age of 70 years (Kings I 1:1-31).
Have a great Shabbat, Shabbat Shalom!
He was 137 years old. He had been through two traumatic events involving the people most precious to him in the world. The first involved the son for whom he had waited for a lifetime, Isaac. He and Sarah had given up hope, yet God told them both that they would have a son together, and it would be he who would continue the covenant. The years passed. Sarah did not conceive. She had grown old, yet God still insisted they would have a child.
Eventually it came. There was rejoicing. Sarah said: “God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.” Then came the terrifying moment when God said to Abraham: “Take your son, your only one, the one you love,” and offer him as a sacrifice. Abraham did not dissent, protest or delay. Father and son traveled together, and only at the last moment did the command come from heaven saying, “Stop”. How does a father, let alone a son, survive a trauma like that?
Then came grief. Sarah, Abraham’s beloved wife, died. She had been his constant companion, sharing the journey with him as they left behind all they knew, their land, their birthplace and their families. Twice she saved Abraham’s life by pretending to be his sister.
What does a man of 137 do – the Torah calls him “old and advanced in years” – after such a trauma and such a bereavement? We would not be surprised to find that he spent the rest of his days in sadness and memory. He had done what God had asked of him. Yet he could hardly say that God’s promises had been fulfilled. Seven times he had been promised the land of Canaan, yet when Sarah died he owned not one square-inch of it, not even a place in which to bury his wife. God had promised him many children, a great nation, many nations, as many as the grains of sand in the sea shore and the stars in the sky. Yet he had only one son of the covenant, Isaac, whom he had almost lost, and who was still unmarried at the age of thirty-seven. Abraham had every reason to sit and grieve.
Yet he did not. In one of the most extraordinary sequences of words in the Torah, his grief is described in a mere five Hebrew words: in English, “Abraham came to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her.” Then immediately we read, “And Abraham rose from his grief.” From then on, he engaged in a flurry of activity with two aims in mind: first to buy a plot of land in which to bury Sarah, second to find a wife for his son. Note that these correspond precisely to the two Divine blessings: of land and descendants. Abraham did not wait for God to act. He understood one of the profoundest truths of Judaism: that God is waiting for us to act.
How did Abraham overcome the trauma and the grief? How do you survive almost losing your child and actually losing your life-partner and still have the energy to keep going? What gave Abraham his resilience, his ability to survive, his spirit intact?
I learned the answer from the people who became my mentors in moral courage, namely the Holocaust survivors I had the privilege to know. How, I wondered, did they keep going, knowing what they knew, seeing what they saw? We know that the British and American soldiers who liberated the camps never forgot what they witnessed. According to Niall Fergusson’s new biography of Henry Kissinger, who entered the camps as an American soldier, the sight that met his eyes transformed his life. If this was true of those who merely saw Bergen-Belsen and the other camps, how almost infinitely more so, those who lived there and saw so many die there. Yet the survivors I knew had the most tenacious hold on life. I wanted to understand how they kept going.
Eventually I discovered. Most of them did not talk about the past, even to their marriage partners, even to their children. Instead they set about creating a new life in a new land. They learned its language and customs. They found work. They built careers. They married and had children. Having lost their own families, the survivors became an extended family to one another. They looked forward, not back. First they built a future. Only then – sometimes forty or fifty years later – did they speak about the past. That was when they told their story, first to their families, then to the world. First you have to build a future. Only then can you mourn the past.
Two people in the Torah looked back, one explicitly, the other by implication. Noah, the most righteous man of his generation, ended his life by making wine and becoming drunk. The Torah does not say why but we can guess. He had lost an entire world. While he and his family were safe on board the ark, everyone else – all his contemporaries – had drowned. It is not hard to imagine this righteous man overwhelmed by grief as he replayed in his mind all that had happened, wondering whether he might have done something to save more lives or avert the catastrophe.
Lot’s wife, against the instruction of the angels, actually did look back as the cities of the plain disappeared under fire and brimstone and the anger of God. Immediately she was turned into a pillar of salt, the Torah’s graphic description of a woman so overwhelmed by shock and grief as to be unable to move on.
It is the background of these two stories that helps us understand Abraham after the death of Sarah. He set the precedent: first build the future, and only then can you mourn the past. If you reverse the order, you will be held captive by the past. You will be unable to move on. You will become like Lot’s wife.
Something of this deep truth drove the work of one of the most remarkable survivors of the Holocaust, the psychotherapist Viktor Frankl. Frankl lived through Auschwitz, dedicating himself to giving other prisoners the will to live. He tells the story in several books, most famously in Man’s Search for Meaning. He did this by finding for each of them a task that was calling to them, something they had not yet done but that only they could do. In effect, he gave them a future. This allowed them to survive the present and turn their minds away from the past.
Frankl lived his teachings. After the liberation of Auschwitz he built a school of psychotherapy called Logotherapy, based on the human search for meaning. It was almost an inversion of the work of Freud. Freudian psychoanalysis had encouraged people to think about their very early past. Frankl taught people to build a future, or more precisely, to hear the future calling to them. Like Abraham, Frankl lived a long and good life, gaining worldwide recognition and dying at the age of 92.
Abraham heard the future calling to him. Sarah had died. Isaac was unmarried. Abraham had neither land nor grandchildren. He did not cry out, in anger or anguish, to God. Instead, he heard the still, small voice saying: The next step depends on you. You must create a future that I will fill with My spirit. That is how Abraham survived the shock and grief. God forbid that we experience any of this, but if we do, this is how to survive.
God enters our lives as a call from the future. It is as if we hear him beckoning to us from the far horizon of time, urging us to take a journey and undertake a task that, in ways we cannot fully understand, we were created for. That is the meaning of the word vocation, literally “a calling”, a mission,a task to which we are summoned.
We are not here by accident. We are here because God wanted us to be, and because there is a task we were meant to fulfill. Discovering what that is, is not easy, and often takes many years and false starts. But for each of us there is something God is calling on us to do, a future not yet made that awaits our making. It is future-orientation that defines Judaism as a faith, as I explain in the last chapter of my book, Future Tense.
So much of the anger, hatred and resentments of this world are brought about by people obsessed by the past and who, like Lot’s wife, are unable to move on. There is no good ending to this kind of story, only more tears and more tragedy. The way of Abraham in Chayei Sarah is different. First build the future. Only then can you mourn the past. SHABBAT SHALOM
A Moment with Rabbi Avigdor Miller Zt"l #301 This was 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
QUESTION:
How can a Rebbi help a weaker student succeed in learning?
ANSWER:
The first thing is, to encourage him. A very big factor in learning is not to give up hope. The truth is, everybody can succeed in learning, it doesn't mean that you'll become a world renowned Gaon, but everybody can succeed in becoming a lamdan. It's only when people find it difficult and they despair, then they can lose out. A Rebbi, if he encourages boys, he'll be surprised with the results. Of course you need help too, but encouragement is a very important factor.
Parents should encourage their children (they should help them too), "keep it up, you're succeeding, you'll be something," and eventually it's going to happen. I remember when I was a boy, one of my Rabbeim who used to talk to me always and give me encouragement when he saw me sitting with a sefer. I cannot forget him, I'll always be grateful, for those words were a source of strength, because people need that more than anything else. Of course they need instruction, but encouragement is what we have to give, and by the way, not only in learning.
The husband needs encouragement when he goes to work; money doesn't grow on trees, it's very hard to make a living. When he comes home from work, the wife should encourage him, and even though he tells her of his failures and difficulties, she should say, "don't worry, eventually we'll make it, eventually we'll pay all our bills, we'll be settled, we'll be happy." These words are like a balm, like a salve, to help the husband maintain the struggle of his existence. And by the way, there's nobody in the world that doesn't have any troubles, everybody has some troubles, and everybody needs encouragement.
Women need encouragement in the home, housework is many times very difficult. People that are not well need encouragement, that despite their illness a few kind words will help many people better than medicine. Therefore, me'oded anavim Hashem, Hashem encourages the humble, encourages the meek; a very important function, to encourage people. If you make it a career to encourage people, you should know you're going to have a tremendous schar for this great form of chessed.
Bais Hamussar #497 This Dvar Torah is dedicated l'refuas Ruchoma Kaila Rivka bas Simab'soch sha'ar cholei Yisroel.
Following Noach's exodus from the teivah, the Torah tells us, "Noach became mundane and planted a vineyard" (Bereishis 9:20). Chazal (Bereishis Rabba 36:4 cited by Rashi) explain that he should have first planted wheat or another more essential food. In other words, the planting of the vineyard was not a problem per se; rather, the planting of other crops should have taken priority and only afterward should he have planted a vineyard. Rav Wolbe (Daas Shlomo) comments that an error simply in the proper order of events, caused Noach - referred to earlier in the parsha as "righteous and pure" - to become mundane!
It appears that acting with seder (proper orderliness), is not merely an added plus, it is an imperative aspect of one's avodas Hashem. Chazal tell us (Shabbos 31a) that when one arrives in the Next World, the very first questions he is asked are, "Were you honest in your business dealings?" and "Did you designate time for learning?" However, in Sanhedrin (7a) Chazal assert that the judgment in the Next World focuses first not on a person's honesty in business; rather it focuses on one's Torah learning.
Tosafos deals with this seeming contradiction, and explains that the Gemara in Sanhedrin is referring to someone who had not learned Torah at all, while the Gemara in Shabbos deals with someone who learned Torah but did not set aside a specific time for Torah study. While he might have studied Torah regularly, he is judged specifically whether or not he set aside a designated time for learning, because seder is so crucial. Whether the subject is planting crops or learning Torah; random performance leaves room for error.
Furthermore, in tefillas ma'ariv we praise Hashem for, "setting the stars in a specific order in their heavenly constellations as He wills." Orderliness testifies to the will and intent of the one who arranged the order. (Parenthetically, Rav Wolbe adds, that this idea is one of the clearest proofs that there is a Creator. The fact that the entire universe is arranged so methodically and all of nature runs so systematically proves that there must be Someone who organized it all.) If a person lacks orderliness in his Torah study or his avodas Hashem, he must make an honest reckoning whether he has a genuine interest in serving Hashem or perhaps his Torah and mitzvos are performed without a clear sense of direction.
The month of Cheshvan affords us the opportunity to "get back on schedule." For some, the return to Yeshiva or Kollel allows them to designate specific times for Torah learning that might have been lacking during bein hazmanim. For others, the steady weekly schedule of the winter months that was absent during the month of Tishrei, provides them with continuity that enables them to actualize their kabbalos for the new year. Cheshvan is the time to take the spiritual gains of the Yamim Noraim and create seder in our avodah, thereby showing Hashem that it is our true desire to serve Him!
Parshas Noach 5776
This was 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
QUESTION:
Why did Hashem divide the oceans?
ANSWER:
First of all, most of the oceans are one. The Atlantic and Pacific are connected and therefore they are like one ocean. Inland seas are separate. But I want to tell you this; even the oceans themselves have different climates and different inhabitants. The purpose is, Hakadosh Baruch Hu wanted His world to be a department store from which nothing is lacking. The world is supplied with every kind of marine animal like it has almost every kind of land animal, and all these help to complete the perfection of Hashem's creation.
When people see so many things, especially so many different kinds of fish, like Rashi says in mesechta Rosh Hashana (31a) when you see so many different types of fish, bachamishi omrim harninu, on the fifth day you say, "Make song to Hashem". Why make song on the fifth day? Because He created fish and fowl. And Rashi says because when you see different kinds of fish, various fish and various birds you are struck, you are overwhelmed by what you see. You see the greatness of Hashem's creation and you sing to Him.
If you see only one kind, it's monotonous, you don't notice it. When you see all kinds of birds and all kinds of fish, it makes your mind awake; you're stirred to awareness of the greatness of Hashem, and you sing harninu, sing to Hashem. That's the purpose why there are different kinds of climates in the sea, because different kind of fish and different kinds of marine animals flourish in different parts of the sea.
By: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
For each of us there are milestones on our spiritual journey that change the direction of our life and set us on a new path. For me one such moment came when I was a rabbinical student at Jews' College and thus had the privilege of studying with one of the great rabbinic scholars of our time, Rabbi Dr Nachum Rabinovitch.
He was, and is, a giant: one the most profound Maimonidean scholars of the modern age, equally at home with virtually every secular discipline as with the entire rabbinic literature, and one of the boldest and most independent of poskim, as his several published volumes of Responsa show. He also showed what it was to have spiritual and intellectual courage, and that in our time has proved, sadly, all too rare.
The occasion was not special. He was merely giving us one of his regular divrei Torah. The week was parshat Noach. But the Midrash he quoted to us was extraordinary. In fact it is quite hard to find. It appears in the book known as Buber’s Tanhuma, published in 1885 by Martin Buber’s grandfather Shlomo from ancient manuscripts. It is a very early text – some say as early as the fifth century – and it has some overlap with an ancient Midrash of which we no longer have the full text, known as Midrash Yelamdenu.
The text is in two parts, and it is a commentary on God’s words to Noah: “ Then God said to Noah, ‘Come out of the ark’” (Gen. 8:16). On this the Midrash says: “Noah said to himself, Since I only entered the ark with permission (from God), shall I leave without permission? The Holy One blessed be He said, to him: Are you looking for permission? In that case I give you permission, as it says, ‘Then God said to Noah, Come out of the ark.’”
The Midrash then adds: “Said Rabbi Judah bar Ilai, If I had been there I would have smashed down [the doors of] the ark and taken myself out of it.”[1]
The moral Rabbi Rabinovitch drew – indeed the only one possible – was that when it comes to rebuilding a shattered world, you do not wait for permission. God gives us permission. He expects us to go on ahead.
This was, of course, part of an ancient tradition, mentioned by Rashi in his commentary (to Gen. 6:9), and central to the sages’ understanding of why God began the Jewish people not with Noah but with Abraham. Noah, says the Torah, “walked with God” (6:9). But God said to Abraham, “Walk on ahead of Me …” (Gen. 17:1). So the point was not new, but the drama and power of the Midrash were stunning.
Suddenly I understood that this is a significant part of what faith is in Judaism: to have the courage to pioneer, to do something new, to take the road less travelled, to venture out into the unknown. That is what Abraham and Sarah had done when they left their land, their home and their father’s house. It is what the Israelites did in the days of Moses when they journeyed forth into the wilderness, guided only by a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night.
Faith is precisely the courage to take a risk, knowing that “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me” (Ps. 23:4). It took faith to challenge the religions of the ancient world, especially when they were embodied in the greatest empires of their time. It took faith to stay Jewish in the Hellenistic age, when Jews and Judaism must have seemed small and parochial when set against the cosmopolitan culture of ancient Greece and the Alexandrian empire.
It took the faith of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Gamla to build, already in the first century, the world’s first ever system of universal, compulsory education (Baba Batra 21a), and the faith of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai to realise that Judaism could survive the loss of independence, land and Temple, on the basis of an academy of scholars and a culture of scholarship.
In the modern age, even though many of Jewry’s most distinguished minds either lost or abandoned their faith, nonetheless that ancient reflex survived. How else are we to understand the phenomenon that a tiny minority in Europe and the United States was able to produce so many shapers of the modern mind, each of them a pioneer in his or her own way: Einstein in physics, Durkheim in sociology, Levi-Strauss in anthropology, Mahler and Schoenberg in music, and a whole string of innovative economists from David Ricardo (the law of comparative advantage) to John von Neumann (Game Theory) to Milton Friedman (monetary theory), to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (behavioural economics).
They dominated the fields of psychiatry, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, from Freud and his circle to Viktor Frankl (Logotherapy), Aaron T. Beck (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) and Martin Seligman (Positive Psychology). The pioneers of Hollywood and film were almost all Jewish. Even in popular music the achievement is stunning, from Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, masters of the American musical, to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, the two supreme poets of popular music in the twentieth century.
In many cases – such is the fate of innovators – the people concerned had to face a barrage of criticism, disdain, opposition or disregard. You have to be prepared to be lonely, at best misunderstood, at worst vilified and defamed. As Einstein said, “If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare me a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.” To be a pioneer – as Jews know from our history - you have to be prepared to spend a long time in the wilderness.
That was the faith of the early Zionists. They knew early on, some from the 1860s, others after the pogroms of the 1880s, Herzl after the Dreyfus trial, that European Enlightenment and Emancipation had failed, that despite its immense scientific and political achievements, mainland Europe still had no place for the Jew. Some Zionists were religious, others were secular, but most importantly they all knew what the Midrash Tanhuma made so clear: when it comes to rebuilding a shattered world or a broken dream, you don’t wait for permission from Heaven. Heaven is telling you to go ahead.
That is not carte blanche to do whatever we like. Not all innovation is constructive. Some can be very destructive indeed. But this principle of “Walk on ahead”, the idea that the Creator wants us, His greatest creation, to be creative, is what makes Judaism unique in the high value it places on the human person and the human condition.
Faith is the courage to take a risk for the sake of God or the Jewish people; to begin a journey to a distant destination knowing that there will be hazards along the way, but knowing also that God is with us, giving us strength if we align our will with His. Faith is not certainty, but the courage to live with uncertainty.
Parshas Berieshis 5776- 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
QUESTION:
If Adam and Chava would not have sinned would they still have been required to wear clothing?
ANSWER:
No: They would have not been required to wear any clothing, because then they would have had the full seichel. You have to know Adam and Chava lost daas by the sin. The eitz ha'daas was only a temptation. It was a daas of tov and rah, a knowledge of wavering between good and bad, which means to choose; it was a temptation.
Adam wanted to know how could it be that anybody should be so stupid as to choose rah. He was told that from this tree he would get that attitude of wavering, he wanted to sense what it means. What does it mean to waver? It seemed to him insane for anybody to waver. As soon as he tasted of the fruit, he lost the previous daas and now he wavered. Had it been the previous daas, they would see as clearly as possible who Adam is. His neshama would be shining through his body like a light from a lantern, and it would illuminate his body and everybody could see that he is a divine creature.
It was only after the chet that the light of the soul became dimmed and now the neshama didn't shine out of his body anymore and it was possible to think that he was an animal.
By: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
What exactly was the first sin? What was the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil? Is this kind of knowledge a bad thing such that it had to be forbidden, and was only acquired through sin? Isn’t knowing the difference between good and evil essential to being human? Isn’t it one of the highest forms of knowledge? Surely God would want humans to have it? Why then did He forbid the fruit that produced it?
In any case, did not Adam and Eve already have this knowledge before eating the fruit, precisely in virtue of being “in the image and likeness of God? Surely this was implied in the very fact that they were commanded by God: Be fruitful and multiply. Have dominion over nature. Do not eat from the tree. For someone to understand a command, they must know it is good to obey and bad to disobey. So they already had, at least potentially, the knowledge of good and evil. What then changed when they ate the fruit? These questions go so deep that they threaten to make the entire narrative incomprehensible.
Maimonides understood this. That is why he turned to this episode at almost the very beginning of The Guide for the Perplexed (Book 1, Chapter 2). His answer though, is perplexing. Before eating the fruit, he says, the first humans knew the difference between truth and falsehood. What they acquired by eating the fruit was knowledge of “things generally accepted.” But what does Maimonides mean by “things generally accepted.” It is generally accepted that murder is evil, and honesty good. Does Maimonides mean that morality is mere convention? Surely not. What he means is that after eating the fruit, the man and woman were embarrassed that they were naked, and that is a mere matter of social convention because not everyone is embarrassed by nudity. But how can we equate being embarrassed that you are naked with “knowledge of good and evil”? It does not seem to be that sort of thing at all. Conventions of dress have more to do with aesthetics than ethics.
It is all very unclear, or at least it was to me until I came across one of the more fascinating moments in the history of the Second World War.
After the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, Americans knew they were about to enter a war against a nation, Japan, whose culture they did not understand. So they commissioned one of the great anthropologists of the twentieth century, Ruth Benedict, to explain the Japanese to them, which she did. After the war, she published her ideas in a book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. One of her central insights was the difference between shame cultures and guilt cultures. In shame cultures the highest value is honour. In guilt cultures it is righteousness. Shame is feeling bad that we have failed to live up to the expectations others have of us. Guilt is what we feel when we fail to live up to what our own conscience demands of us. Shame is other-directed. Guilt is inner-directed.
Philosophers, among them Bernard Williams, have pointed out that shame cultures are usually visual. Shame itself has to do with how you appear (or imagine you appear) in other peoples’ eyes. The instinctive reaction to shame is to wish you were invisible, or somewhere else. Guilt, by contrast, is much more internal. You cannot escape it by becoming invisible or being elsewhere. Your conscience accompanies you wherever you go, regardless of whether you are seen by others. Guilt cultures are cultures of the ear, not the eye.
With this contrast in mind we can now understand the story of the first sin. It is all about appearances, shame, vision and the eye. The serpent says to the woman: “God knows that on the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” That is, in fact, what happens: “The eyes of both of them were opened, and they realised that they were naked.” It was appearance of the tree that the Torah emphasises: “The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and desirable to the eyes, and that the tree was attractive as a means to gain intelligence.” The key emotion in the story is shame. Before eating the fruit the couple were “naked, but unashamed.” After eating it they feel shame and seek to hide. Every element of the story – the fruit, the tree, the nakedness, the shame – has the visual element typical of a shame culture.
But in Judaism we believe that God is heard not seen. The first humans “heard God's voice moving about in the garden with the wind of the day.” Replying to God, the man says, “I heard Your voice in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.” Note the deliberate, even humorous irony of what the couple did. They heard God’s voice in the garden, and they “hid themselves from God among the trees of the garden.” But you can’t hide from a voice. Hiding means trying not to be seen. It is an immediate, intuitive response to shame. But the Torah is the supreme example of a culture of guilt, not shame, and you cannot escape guilt by hiding. Guilt has nothing to do with appearances and everything to do with conscience, the voice of God in the human heart.
The sin of the first humans in the Garden of Eden was that they followed their eyes, not their ears. Their actions were determined by what they saw, the beauty of the tree, not by what they heard, namely the word of God commanding them not to eat from it. The result was that they did indeed acquire a knowledge of good and evil, but it was the wrong kind. They acquired an ethic of shame, not guilt; of appearances not conscience. That, I believe, is what Maimonides meant by his distinction between true-and-false and “things generally accepted.” A guilt ethic is about the inner voice that tells you, “This is right, that is wrong,” as clearly as “This is true, that is false.” But a shame ethic is about social convention. It is a matter of meeting or not meeting the expectations others have of you.
Shame cultures are essentially codes of social conformity. They belong to groups where socialisation takes the form of internalising the values of the group such that you feel shame – an acute form of embarrassment – when you break them, knowing that if people discover what you have done you will lose honour and ‘face’.
Judaism is precisely not that kind of morality, because Jews do not conform to what everyone else does. Abraham was willing, say the sages, to be on one side while all the rest of the world was on the other. Haman says about Jews, “Their customs are different from those of all other people” (Esther 3:8). Jews have often been iconoclasts, challenging the idols of the age, the received wisdom, the “spirit of the age”, the politically correct.
If Jews had followed the majority, they would have disappeared long ago. In the biblical age they were the only monotheists in a pagan world. For most of the post-biblical age they lived in societies in which they and their faith were shared by only a tiny minority of the population. Judaism is a living protest against the herd instinct. Ours is the dissenting voice in the conversation of humankind. Hence the ethic of Judaism is not a matter of appearances, of honour and shame. It is a matter of hearing and heeding the voice of God in the depths of the soul.
The drama of Adam and Eve is not about apples or sex or original sin or “the Fall” – interpretations the non-Jewish West has given to it. It is about something deeper. It is about the kind of morality we are called on to live. Are we to be governed by what everyone else does, as if morality were like politics: the will of the majority? Will our emotional horizon be bounded by honour and shame, two profoundly social feelings? Is our key value appearance: how we seem to others? Or is it something else altogether, a willingness to heed the word and will of God? Adam and Eve in Eden faced the archetypal human choice between what their eyes saw (the tree and its fruit) and what their ears heard (God’s command). Because they chose the first, they felt shame, not guilt. That is one form of “knowledge of good and evil”, but from a Jewish perspective, it is the wrong form.
Judaism is a religion of listening, not seeing. That is not to say there are no visual elements in Judaism. There are, but they are not primary. Listening is the sacred task. The most famous command in Judaism is Shema Yisrael, “Listen, Israel.” What made Abraham, Moses and the prophets different from their contemporaries was that they heard the voice that to others was inaudible. In one of the great dramatic scenes of the Bible God teaches Elijah that He is not in the whirlwind, the earthquake or the fire, but in the “still, small voice”.
It takes training, focus and the ability to create silence in the soul to learn how to listen, whether to God or to a fellow human being. Seeing shows us the beauty of the created world, but listening connects us to the soul of another, and sometimes to the soul of the Other, God as He speaks to us, calls to us, summoning us to our task in the world.
If I were asked how to find God, I would say, Learn to listen. Listen to the song of the universe in the call of birds, the rustle of trees, the crash and heave of the waves. Listen to the poetry of prayer, the music of the Psalms. Listen deeply to those you love and who love you. Listen to the words of God in the Torah and hear them speak to you. Listen to the debates of the sages through the centuries as they tried to hear the texts’ intimations and inflections.
Don’t worry about how you or others look. The world of appearances is a false world of masks, disguises and concealments. Listening is not easy. I confess I find it formidably hard. But listening alone bridges the abyss between soul and soul, self and other, I and the Divine.
A dvar Torah for Shabbat Chol Hamoed Sukkot
By: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
The brutal murder of Rabbi Eitam and Naama Henkin in the presence of their four young children has shocked us all. It is hard to enter the spirit of zeman simchatenu, our festival of joy, in the midst of such lacerating grief. Our thoughts are with their children, and with their parents, Chanan and Hila Armony and Rabbi Yehudah and Rebbanit Chana Henkin, two of the great Jewish role models of our time. We ask, Zu Torah vezu sechorah, is this the Torah and this its reward? But we know better than to wait for an answer. In the end all we can do is to join the bereaved in our prayers. These words are dedicated to the memory of those who were killed.
At the end of his life Moses set out the great choice faced not just by Jews but by humanity as a whole: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Therefore choose life so that you and your children may live.”
Why did Moses need to say such a thing? Did we not know, without his telling us, to choose life? Is it not obvious that, given the choice, we would choose the blessing, not the curse? The answer is given in the book we will read tomorrow, Kohelet, one of the most profound of all reflections on the nature of life and death.
The keyword of Kohelet is hevel. It appears no less than thirty-eight times, five times in a single sentence: “Vanity of vanities, says Kohelet, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Hevel has been variously translated as “meaningless, pointless, futile,” as well as “vanity” in the seventeenth century sense, when it meant, not excessive self-regard but rather, “worthless.” Yet none of these is the primary meaning of the word.
Hevel means “a shallow breath.” The Hebrew words for soul – nefesh, ruach, neshamah – all have to do with the act of breathing. Hevel is a short, fleeting breath. What obsessed Kohelet was how fragile and vulnerable life is. We are biological beings of bewildering complexity, yet what separates being from non-being, life from death, is not complex at all. It is mere breath. When I read Kohelet I think of King Lear at the end of Shakespeare’s play, holding in his arms the lifeless body of his daughter Cordelia, weeping and saying, “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life / and thou no breath at all.”
Kohelet is, among other things, a midrash on the first two human children, whose story has become terribly relevant in our time. It is no accident that the victim of the first murder in the Torah was called Hevel (Abel). Hevel represents the fragility of life. All that separates us from the grave is the breath God breathed into us: “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” That is all we are: hevel, mere breath. But it is God’s breath.
What eventually killed Hevel was Kayin (Cain). The Torah says explicitly why he was given this name. Chavah said, “I have acquired [kaniti] a man with God.” Kayin means “to acquire, to possess, to own.” In the end, unavoidably, this leads to conflict. Ownership is, in the short term, a zero sum game. The more you have, the less I have. Since we all want more, not less, the result will inevitably be violence, what Hobbes called “the war of every man against every man” in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” It is this scenario that is currently being played out in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia, Libya, and other bloodstained arenas throughout the world. It was just such a state that led God, before the flood, to “regret He had created man on earth, and He was pained to His very core.”
That is why, fundamental to the vision set forth in the Torah, is the principle that we own nothing. Everything – the land, its produce, power, sovereignty, children, life itself – belongs to God. We are mere trustees, guardians, on His behalf. We possess but we do not own. That is the basis of the infrastructure of social justice that made the Torah unique in its time and still transformative today.
Kayin means: I am what I own, and what I own gives me power. Cain was the first Nietzschean. His religion was the will to power. That is why God rejected his offering. The sacrifice God accepts, that of Abel/Hevel, is one that comes from the humility of mortality. “Ribono shel Olam, I am mere breath. But it is Your breath I breathe, not mine.” When religion becomes the pursuit of power, the result is bloodshed. To this, God says, “Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.”
Even the great Kohelet – Shlomo, whose name means peace – at first sought happiness in what he owned: palaces, gardens, servants, wealth. None of these brought what he hoped for, since none makes us immortal, none defeats death. We remain mere breath. That is why Kohelet in the end finds meaning in the very fact of life itself. He finds joy in simple things: eating, drinking, work, and “seeing life with the woman you love.”
Joy comes not from what we own but from what we are. It comes from the fact that we are alive at all. We serve God by celebrating life, sanctifying life, choosing life. That is why Sukkot follows immediately from the days in which we pray to be written in the book of life. The Sukkah, exposed to the elements, the rain, the wind, the cold, the storm, is the symbol of the vulnerability of life. Yet even so, it is where we celebrate the festival of joy.
The great choice faced by humanity in every age is between the will to power and the will to life. No country in the world today is more eloquent testimony to the will to life than the State of Israel. It represents the collective affirmation of the Jewish people after the Holocaust, “I will not die, but live,” and thus give testimony to the God of life. Almost everything in which Israel has excelled, from agriculture to medicine to life-saving technologies, has been dedicated to enhancing, protecting or defending life.
Surrounding Israel, however, have been countries and cultures willing to sacrifice life to the pursuit of power. The result has been nothing short of devastation for all those caught in its vortex be they Jews, Christians, Muslims, Yazidis, Kurds, or other innocent human beings. The end result will be, as described by Shakespeare:
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.
Those who worship at the altar of power, in the end destroy themselves.
Sukkot tells us that life is vulnerable, yet it is all we have. We may be mere breath but it is God’s breath and it is sacred. The day will come when the world will see that the will to life must defeat the will to power if we are to survive at all, our humanity intact. Only when this happens will there be peace in the Middle East. Only when this happens will the children of the world have a future of hope.
Until then, we cherish the memory of two beautiful human beings who lived and taught the sanctity of life. May their example live in all our hearts.
Parshas Nitzavim 5775
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
QUESTION:
Why do we have to be tested in this world? Hashem knows beforehand what we're going to do.
ANSWER:
When Hakadosh Baruch Hu wants us to do certain things, it's not to find out what we're going to do, but the doing of the thing is our great opportunity to change ourselves, to mold ourselves; I'll explain.
The Ramban says this: There's a difference from having something in you b'koach, something potential, or it should be yotzo m'koach el hapoel, it should come out from the potential into actual practice.
Therefore, let's say you're a charitable fellow, you like to give tzedaka, but you don't have a poor man around; you'll get reward. Chisheiv la'asos mitzvah v'ne'enas vlo asu'uh, if a man wanted to do a mitzvah, he walked out with a pocket full of money looking for a meshulach, and he can't find one. Who'll accept money? Nobody wants any money. So ma'aleh aluv hakosuv keilu asu'uh, it's considered as if he did the mitzvah. But if you're still more worthy, Hashem sends along a poor Jew from Eretz Yisroel who has twelve children, and that Jew needs the money like nobody's business, that money means bread, and if he'll give let's say a hundred dollars to that Jew, the giving of that money takes his potential kindliness and chesed, his potential mitzvah and it makes it into an actual mitzvah and he becomes a new man; he's a different man. And that's a big zechus that he has.
That's why Hakadosh Baruch Hu gives us tests, for our benefit. That's what the midrash says, achar hadvorim ha'eileh ho'elokim niso es Avrohom, what does niso mean? Like it says, v'suh neis l'kabeitz goluseinu, raise up a banner, ness is a banner. The word nusuh, nun, sin, aleph, to carry, to lift up, and nun, samech, heh, to make a test, and nisayon are the same word. Elokim nisah es Avrohom, Elokim elevated him. How did He elevate him? By giving him an opportunity to do a thing in actual practice. Avrohom in his mind, he had the potential for the akeida, but when he was actually making the akeida, when he tied his son on the mizbeiach and he lifted a knife over his neck, then he gained something that was a great privilege, he was elevated.
This week’s parsha raises a question that goes to the heart of Judaism, but which was not asked for many centuries until raised by a great Spanish scholar of the fifteenth century, Rabbi Isaac Arama. Moses is almost at the end of his life. The people are about to cross the Jordan and enter the Promised Land. Moses knows he must do one thing more before he dies. He must renew the covenant between the people and God.
Their parents had entered into that commitment almost forty years before when they stood at Mount Sinai and said, “We will do and obey all that God has declared” (Ex. 24:7). But now Moses has to ensure that the next generation and all future generations will be bound by it. He wanted no-one to be able to say, “God made a covenant with my ancestors but not with me. I did not give my consent. I was not there. I am not bound.” That is why Moses says:
It is not with you alone that I am making this sworn covenant, but with whoever is standing here with us today before the Lord our God, and with whoever is not here with us today. (Deut. 29:13-14)
“Whoever is not here” cannot mean Israelites alive at the time who were somewhere else. The entire nation was present at the assembly. It means “generations not yet born.” That is why the Talmud says: we are all mushba ve-omed me-har Sinai, “foresworn from Sinai.”[1]
Hence one of the most fundamental facts about Judaism: converts excepted, we do not choose to be Jews. We are born as Jews. We become legal adults, subject to the commands, at age twelve for girls, thirteen for boys. But we are part of the covenant from birth. A bat or bar mitzvah is not a “confirmation.” It involves no voluntary acceptance of Jewish identity. That choice took place more than three thousand years ago when Moses said “It is not with you alone that I am making this sworn covenant, but with ... whoever is not here with us today,” meaning all future generations.
But how can this be so? There is no obligation without consent. How can we be subject to a commitment on the basis of a decision taken long ago by our distant ancestors? To be sure, in Jewish law you can confer a benefit on someone else without their consent. But though it is surely a benefit to be a Jew, it is also in some sense a liability, a restriction on our range of legitimate choices. Why then are we bound now by what the Israelites said then?
Jewishly, this is the ultimate question. How can religious identity be passed on from parent to child? If identity were merely ethnic, we could understand it. We inherit many things from our parents – most obviously our genes. But being Jewish is not a genetic condition. It is a set of religious obligations.
The sages gave an answer in the form of a tradition about today’s parsha. They said that the souls of all future generations were present at Sinai. As souls, they freely gave their consent, generations before they were born.[2] However, Arama argues that this cannot answer our question, since God’s covenant is not with souls only, but also with embodied human beings. We are physical beings with physical desires. We can understand that the soul would agree to the covenant. What does the soul desire if not closeness to God?[3]
But the assent that counts is that of living, breathing human beings with bodies, and we cannot assume that they would agree to the Torah with its many restrictions on eating, drinking, sexual relations and the rest. Not until we are born, and are old enough to understand what is being asked of us can we give our consent in a way that binds us. Therefore the fact that the unborn generations were present at Moses covenant ceremony does not give us the answer we need.
In essence, Arama was asking: why be Jewish? What is fascinating is that he was the first to ask this question since the age of the Talmud. Why was it not asked before? Why was it first asked in fifteenth century Spain? For many centuries the question, “Why be Jewish?” did not arise. The answer was self-evident. I am Jewish because that is what my parents were and theirs before them, back to the dawn of Jewish time. Existential questions arise only when we feel there is a choice. For much of history, Jewish identity was not a choice. It was a fact of birth, a fate, a destiny. It was not something you chose, any more than you choose to be born.
In fifteenth century Spain, Jews were faced with a choice. Spanish Jewry experienced its Kristallnacht in 1391, and from then on until the expulsion in 1492, Jews found themselves excluded from more and more areas of public life. There were immense pressures on them to convert, and some did so. Of these, some maintained their Jewish identity in secret, but others did not. For the first time in many centuries, staying Jewish came to be seen not just as a fate but as a choice. That is why Arama raised the question that had been unasked for so long. It is also why, in an age in which everything significant seems open to choice, it is being asked again in our time.
Arama gave one answer. I gave my own in my book A Letter in the Scroll.[4] But I also believe a large part of the answer lies in what Moses himself said at the end of his address: “I call heaven and earth as witnesses that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your children may live” (Deut. 30:19).
Choose life. No religion, no civilization, has insisted so strenuously and consistently that we can choose. We have it in us, says Maimonides, to be as righteous as Moses or as evil as Jeroboam.[5] We can be great. We can be small. We can choose.
The ancients with their belief in fate, fortune, moira, ananke, the influence of the stars or the arbitrariness of nature, did not fully believe in human freedom. For them true freedom meant, if you were religious, accepting fate, or if you were philosophical, the consciousness of necessity. Nor do most scientific atheists believe in it today. We are determined, they say, by our genes. Our fate is scripted in our DNA. Choice is an illusion of the conscious mind. It is the fiction we tell ourselves.
Judaism says No. Choice is like a muscle: use it or lose it. Jewish law is an ongoing training regime in willpower. Can you eat this and not that? Can you exercise spiritually three times a day? Can you rest one day in seven? Can you defer the gratification of instinct – what Freud took to be the mark of civilization? Can you practise self-control – according to the “marshmallow test”, the surest sign of future success in life?[6] To be a Jew means not going with the flow, not doing what others do just because they are doing it. It gives us 613 exercises in the power of will to shape our choices. That is how we, with God, become co-authors of our lives. “We have to be free”, said Isaac Bashevis Singer, “we have no choice!”
Choose life. In many other faiths, life down here on earth with its loves, losses, triumphs and defeats, is not the highest value. Heaven is to be found in life after death, or the soul in unbroken communion with God, or in acceptance of the world-that-is. Life is eternity, life is serenity, life is free of pain. But that, for Judaism, is not quite life. It may be noble, spiritual, sublime, but it is not life in all its passion, responsibility and risk.
Judaism teaches us how to find God down here on earth not up there in heaven. It means engaging with life, not taking refuge from it. It seeks, not so much happiness as joy: the joy of being with others and together with them making a blessing over life. It means taking the risk of love, commitment, loyalty. It means living for something larger than the pursuit of pleasure or success. It means daring greatly.
It does not deny pleasure. Judaism is not ascetic. It does not worship pleasure. Judaism is not hedonist. Instead it sanctifies pleasure. It brings the Divine presence into the most physical acts: eating, drinking, intimacy. We find God not just in the synagogue but in the home, the house of study and acts of kindness, in community, hospitality and wherever we mend some of the fractures of our human world.
No religion has ever held the human person in higher regard. We are not tainted by original sin. We are not a mere bundle of selfish genes. We are not an inconsequential life form lost in the vastness of the universe. We are the being on whom God has set his image and likeness. We are the people God has chosen to be his partners in the work of creation. We are the nation God married at Sinai with the Torah as our marriage contract. We are the people God called on to be his witnesses. We are the ambassadors of heaven in the country called earth.
We are not better, or worse, than others. We are simply different, because God values difference whereas for most of the time, human beings have sought to eliminate difference by imposing one faith, one regime or one empire on all humanity. Ours is one of the few faiths to hold that the righteous of all nations have a share in heaven because of what they do on earth.
Choose life. Nothing sounds easier yet nothing has proved more difficult over time. Instead, people choose substitutes for life. They pursue wealth, possessions, status, power, fame, and to these gods they make the supreme sacrifice, realising too late that true wealth is not what you own but what you are thankful for, that the highest status is not to care about status, and that influence is more powerful than power.
That is why, though few faiths are more demanding, most Jews at most times have stayed faithful to Judaism, living Jewish lives, building Jewish homes and continuing the Jewish story. That is why, with a faith as unshakeable as it has proved true, Moses was convinced that “Not with you alone do I make this covenant and this oath … but also with those who are not with us today.” His gift to us is that through worshipping something so much greater than ourselves we become so much greater than we would otherwise have been.
Why Judaism? Because there is no more challenging way of choosing life.
Here's a new shiur entitled "Ori B'Rosh Hashana" just in time for this special Yom Tov. We have also made the shiur on Yom Kippur from last year available in case you didn't yet have a chance to listen.
Our work at Ani Maamin never stops! While we continue to travel around the world strengthening Emunah in classrooms and homes, we have also been working tirelessly on producing updated and new material.
The newly revised and expanded series "Know What to Answer to Yourself" has been very well received. Those who already enjoyed the older version were especially delighted with the additional information. The new book "Emunah, A Refresher Course" will IY"H be in stores by Chanuka! The feedback from leading Mechanchim and Rabbonim who reviewed this project has been extremely positive and encouraging.
We daven and hope that these efforts and tools will enable all Yidden to continue strengthening their Emunah and the Emunah of those around them.
Wishing you a כתיבה וחתימה טובה און א גוט געבענטשט יאהר,
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
QUESTION:
We always talk about Yesh m'ayin as the greatest miracle of all time, but ifHashem existed already, so how do we say it's Yesh m'ayin; Hashem was there?
ANSWER:
Hashem was there, Hashem is the Ayin; when you say Ayin it means Hashem.M'ayin yovo ezri? From Hashem, that's the Ayin, because He's by himself, you don't see any gashmius at all. Yehi He said, then the gashmius that we know came into existence, but He is the Yesh, He's the only Yesh there is, there's no Yesh except Him.
Our yesh is only, b'dvar Hashem shamayim na'asu, by His word it came into existence. Whatever you see now is just dvar Hashem. L'olam Hashem d'vorcho nitzav ba'shomayim, Your word standsba'shomayim. Which word? Yehi, that word, is standing ba'shomayim. If you take back Your yehi, the whole shomayim will turn into nothing. So the whole world is nothing but the dvar Hashem, andHashem we call Ayin, but He is the only real Yesh there is. That's the Yesh.
Parshas Shoftim 5775
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
QUESTION:
Sonei matanos yichyeh, it means if you hate gifts from human beings you're going to live; please explain?
ANSWER:
And the idea is, what is life? Life is one thing, life is only bechira, free will; that's all life is. Life doesn't mean to be happy, because happiness really is in the next world, this world is not the real place. The true happiness is in the world to come. So why should a person worry if he's afraid he might die chalila? He's losing the opportunity to eat chicken? No. He's afraid because now he's going to lose that great gift of free will. That's what death means, death means your free will comes to an end. No more free will forever. Happiness, yes to no end in the next world, but no free will.
If you accept gifts from somebody you are giving up part of your free will, because you cannot speak up and say your mind anymore. If you take gifts like Reb Chaim Brisker said, when he came to Brisk for the rabbonus, the first baal habos who gave him a dollar burned a hole in his palm; it never healed, he said. It means he wanted more. Once you start taking from people, you lose your free will.
Let's say you're going to visit someone. You're rich, you have plenty to eat at home, but you visit him and eat on his table. If you eat at his table then you're bound, you cannot help it; you have to laugh at his jokes.
And if he says a d'var Torah, no matter how much it's lacking, you have to say...very good. Sometimes he says things that are not virtuous, but you can't help yourself because you're his guest. That's why if you hate gifts you are going to live longer. Hakadosh Baruch Hu sees you utilize your free will, so He says this man deserves to live more to practice more free will.
But from Hakadosh Baruch Hu you can take and take, because if you lose your free will towards Him, that's alright. If you're more humbled before Him, that's alright.
So sonei matanos from human beings, yichyeh; but from Hakadosh Baruch Hu we're already mortgaged up to our ears anyhow, so you might as well take and take.
The Mishnah tells us that: “No days were as festive for Israel as the 15th of Av and Yom Kippur.” (Tractate Ta’anit) What is Tu B’Av, the 15th of the Hebrew month of Av? In which way is it equivalent to Yom Kippur?
Our Sages explain: Yom Kippur symbolizes God’s forgiving Israel for the sin of the Golden Calf in the desert, for it was on that day that He finally accepted Moses’ plea for forgiveness of the nation, and on that same day Moses came down from the mountain with the new set of tablets.
Just as Yom Kippur symbolizes the atonement for the sin of the Golden Calf, Tu B’Av signifies the atonement for the sin of the Spies, where ten came bearing such negative reports which reduced the entire nation to panic. As a result of that sin, it was decreed by God that the nation would remain in the desert for 40 years, and that no person 20 or older would be allowed to enter Israel. On each Tisha B’Av of those 40 years, those who had reached the age of 60 that year died – 15,000 each Tisha B’Av.
This plague finally ended on Tu B’Av.
Six positive events occurred on Tu B’Av:
Event #1 – As noted above, the plague that had accompanied the Jews in the desert for 40 years ended. That last year, the last 15,000 people got ready to die. God, in His mercy, decided not to have that last group die, considering all the troubles they had gone through. Now, when the ninth of Av approached, all the members of the group got ready to die, but nothing happened. They then decided that they might have been wrong about the date, so they waited another day, and another…
Finally on the 15th of Av, when the full moon appeared, they realized definitely that the ninth of Av had come and gone, and that they were still alive. Then it was clear to them that God’s decree was over, and that He had finally forgiven the people for the sin of the Spies.
This is what was meant by our Sages when they said: “No days were as festive for Israel as the 15th of Av and Yom Kippur,” for there is no greater joy than having one’s sins forgiven – on Yom Kippur for the sin of the Golden Calf and on Tu B’Av for the sin of the spies. In the Book of Judges, Tu B’Av is referred to as a holiday (Judges 21:19).
In addition to this noteworthy event, five other events occurred on Tu B’Av:
Events #2 and 3 – Following the case of the daughters of Zelophehad (see Numbers, chapter 36), daughters who inherited from their father when there were no sons were forbidden to marry someone from a different tribe, so that land would not pass from one tribe to another. Generations later, after the story of the “Concubine of Giv’ah” (see Judges, chapters 19-21), the Children of Israel swore not to allow their daughters to marry anyone from the tribe of Benjamin. This posed a threat of annihilation to the tribe of Benjamin.
Each of these prohibitions were lifted on Tu B’Av. The people realized that if they kept to their prohibition, one of the 12 tribes might totally disappear. As to the oath that had been sworn, they pointed out that it only affected the generation that had taken the oath, and not subsequent generations. The same was applied to the prohibition of heiresses marrying outside their own tribe: this rule was applied only to the generation that had conquered and divided up the land under Joshua, but not future generations. This was the first expression of the merging of all the tribes, and was a cause for rejoicing. In the Book of Judges it is referred to as “a festival to the Lord.”
Over the generations, this day was described in Tractate Ta’anit as a day devoted to betrothals, so that new Jewish families would emerge.
Event #4 – After Jeroboam split off the kingdom of Israel with its ten tribes from the kingdom of Judea, he posted guards along all the roads leading to Jerusalem, to prevent his people from going up to the Holy City for the pilgrimage festivals, for he feared that such pilgrimages might undermine his authority. As a “substitute,” he set up places of worship which were purely idolatrous, in Dan and Beth-el. Thus the division between the two kingdoms became a fait accompli and lasted for generations.
The last king of the kingdom of Israel, Hosea ben Elah, wished to heal the breach, and removed all the guards from the roads leading to Jerusalem, thus allowing his people to make the pilgrimage again. This act took place on Tu B’Av.
Event #5 – At the beginning of the Second Temple period, the Land of Israel lay almost totally waste, and the wood needed to burn the sacrifices and for the eternal flame that had to burn on the altar was almost impossible to obtain. Each year a number of brave people volunteered to bring the wood needed from afar – a trip which was dangerous in the extreme.
Now, not just every wood could be brought. Wood which was wormy was not permitted. And dampness and cold are ideal conditions for the breeding of worms in wood. As a result, all the wood that would be needed until the following summer had to be collected before the cold set in. The last day that wood was brought in for storage over the winter months was Tu B’Av, and it was a festive occasion each year when the quota needed was filled by that day.
Event #6 – Long after the event, the Romans finally permitted the bodies of those who had been killed in the defense of Betar (in the Bar Kochba revolt) to be buried. This was a double miracle, in that, first, the Romans finally gave permission for the burial, and, second, in spite of the long period of time that had elapsed, the bodies had not decomposed. The permission was granted on Tu B’Av.
In gratitude for this double miracle, the fourth and last blessing of the Grace After Meals was added, which thanks God as “He Who is good and does good.” “He is good” – in that the bodies had not decomposed, “and does good” – in that permission was given for the burial.
To this day, we celebrate Tu B’Av as a minor festival. We do not say Tahanun on that day, nor are eulogies rendered. By the same token, if a couple are getting married on that day (and, as we will see below, it is the custom for the bride and groom to fast on their wedding day), neither fasts.
Beginning with Tu B’Av, we start preparing ourselves spiritually for the month of Elul, the prologue to the coming Days of Awe. The days begin to get shorter, the nights get longer. The weather, too, helps us to take spiritual stock: the hectic days of the harvest are over for the farmer, and the pace has slowed down considerably. Even on a physical level, the heat of the summer makes it hard to sit down and think things out, and now that the days and nights are cooler, it is easier to examine one’s actions.
In earlier times, it was the custom already from Tu B’Av to use as one’s greeting “May your inscription and seal be for good” (ketiva vahatima tova), the same blessing that we today use on Rosh Hashana. Those who work out the gematria values of different expressions found that phrase adds up to 928 – and so does the words for “15th of Av.”
About the Author: Yisrael Meir Lau is the Chairman of Yad Vashem and Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv. He previously served as the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel. At age 9, Rabbi Lau was the youngest person liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp, and he came on the first boatload of Holocaust survivors to Israel. He is the author of numerous books and the recipient of the Israel Prize for lifetime achievements to the State of Israel.
Important Numbers
