Doing Things Right: Shoftim

Doing Things Right

D’var Torah for Parashat Shoftim

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

Dedicated to the memory of David Passer, z”l

It was a vile world of ignorance and superstition, of meaningless magical incantations addressed to gods that thrived on lust and children’s blood.  Every tree, every crag in the rock was a place where malicious spirits dwelled, covetously waiting for their prize and prey.  The spirits of dead people haunted every field, every forest and ruin, and charlatan necromancers pretended to speak to them for you.

Rudimentary justice was already in place, but fair judges were hard to come by.  Often enough the king or tribal head sat in judgment, and anybody close enough or rich enough had the better chance of getting the judge’s ear.  The basic rules by which people lived back then were, as you do so it shall be done unto you.  A leg for a leg, an eye for an eye.  Witnesses were often not necessary; hearsay was enough.

But this world, this society, this culture, was about to be turned on its head. 

The Israelites were coming.

This week’s Torah portion, Shoftim (“Judges,” Deuteronomy 16:18—21:9) does more than give us a list of laws.  It sets up a new model, a different world, one governed by rules of fairness and justice.  Courts of law, judges and marshals, depositions and witnesses are at the foundation and core of this system. The instruction tzedek tzedek tirdof (“Justice, justice shall you pursue,” Deut. 16:20) has a two-fold repetition of the word “justice.”  The reason, say the rabbis, is that one should see the first as a noun and the second as a verb.  Justice is your goal; justice is the process you follow to reach that goal.  That is the entirety of this portion; the rest, as they say, is commentary.

The system of justice which Moses conjures for the Israelites extends from the personal to the national.  Personal behavior as well as societal behavior, teaches the Torah, should be governed by rules of fairness and justice, of consideration for one’s fellow human being.  Our behavior must rely more on focus, attention and intent than on passion, emotion and greed.

Even beyond this, however, lies another concept:  education.  A nation cannot live by separate constitutions.  The same law must apply everywhere, from one end of the land to the other.  To that end, Moses commands that, as Israel’s territory expands, “cities of refuge” must be built, regional and appellate courts, as it were.  Justice is universal, not particular to just one place or another.  One law for one people, under one God.

The king, of course, is the supreme court.  But even the king must be bound by the law (a revolutionary idea in those days).  In fact, two copies of the Torah with all its commandments, rulings and judgments must always be nearby.  One copy is to be kept safe in the Temple.  The other is to be the reference codex, the one that the king must study and rely upon in pronouncing fair verdicts.

It’s an ideal picture Moses paints for his people just a short time before they enter the Promised Land.  Moses is realistic.  He knows that it will take time to make this ideal become reality.  And so rather than make this an impossible ideal, Moses makes it a personal project, one that must begin with me and you even before it expands to include a whole nation.

Even then it isn’t easy.  There are too many shortcuts we can take, too many details we can overlook.  Temptations lie at every turn, and sometimes, thinking ourselves unseen, unobserved, we give in…

In the end, it isn’t big, terrible crimes we stand accused of; it’s the little misdeeds, the minor infractions and oversights.

Ultimately, what this portion wants each of us to do is to become a functioning part of a system of justice.  Far from letting ourselves be manipulated by forces larger than us—be they natural or supernatural—we can actually become involved as partners in a greater collective, each of us adding to the wellbeing of the whole.  Rather than being slave to the system, we become a living contributor to it.

It’s quite a responsibility, but one that we can actually accomplish and achieve if we try hard enough.  One step at a time, one day at a time, one kind deed at a time.

My friend David Passer was like that.

I met David when I became a student at the University of Cincinnati.  I was there for a Master of Music program, and I found housing at Hebrew Union College, just down the street from UC.  David was the first friend I made.  Actually, he befriended me.

David immediately introduced me to his family and opened his home to me.  Our friendship grew and deepened through the years.  David was a chuppa pole bearer when I married my wife, Sally, and he remained a staunch friend through the years. 

David had a huge circle of friends, each of whom could consider himself or herself David’s best friend.  That was David’s way, and he came by it honestly, by simply being there, by being attentive and supportive.

David then moved to Boston and Sally and I moved to Houston, Texas.  But a few years later, when Sally was offered a position at the Harvard Hillel, we got back together again, our friendship as intact as ever.  It was David, in fact, who connected me with the rabbis at Temple Israel in Boston, and the road from there to my own ordination as rabbi is a direct route.

David was as generous with his means as he was with his time and heart.  He was on the Board of Directors of Temple Israel; he was involved with Keshet, the national grassroots organization that works for the full equality and inclusion of LGBT Jews in Jewish life.  David was an avid reader and could always recommend a book to you; no genre was foreign to him.  He had a subscription to the Boston Symphony Orchestra and was a supporter of the Boston Chamber Music Society.  From one of his earliest positions at the Fenway Community Health Center, David rose to become the Chief Operations Officer at the Rashi School and then the Executive Director of Temple Shir Tikva in Wayland, MA.

But it wasn’t only due to his administrative abilities—awesome as they were! —that David was so treasured.  It was for his heart, as well as for his affinity for doing things the right way.  You could count on that, as you could also count on his always being there for you when you needed him.

“How would David do it?” became a familiar line among many of us.  Because his was the right way of doing things.  You could count on it to be fair, considerate, even-handed, kind and generous.

David found peace and harmony.  Actually, no, he created peace and harmony.  From the everyday relationships with his long term best friend, partner and husband, Marc, as well as with the rest of his family; from the friendships he cultivated and thrived on; from the places where he worked, where he worshipped, and found recreation; on to the organizations where David served and volunteered—wherever David was involved, there you could find a well-balanced system.  It wasn’t a coincidence.  David fully embodied the hope Moses presented to the People of Israel thousands of years ago:  Do things right, and the world around you will be right.

David’s escape was a cabin by a lake in Belgrade, Maine.  There, whether in a kayak or just sitting on a pier gazing at a burning sunset or at glowing constellations in the nighttime sky, David became part of the universe around him.  That’s where he found consolation, inspiration, love and peace.  Having had a hand in making it so, David is now truly a part of the better world he had helped create.

Though not involved in the legal profession, David was the kind of judge that Moses had in mind:  A true teacher, leader and friend.

May his memory be a blessing.

© 2014 by Boaz D. Heilman

Rising Above Evil: Re'eh

Rising Above Evil

D’var Torah for Parashat Re’eh

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

War brings out the worst in us.  Hatred, vengeance and bloodlust combine with other base instincts and turn us inside out and upside down.  From heavenly creatures with lofty aspirations and grandiose dreams we turn into evil-driven beasts, worse than any other animal that creeps or crawls upon the ground.

Maybe that’s why the Torah piles commandment upon commandment, ever trying to restrain the evil within us that yearns to emerge, especially at trying times.

And so it is especially challenging to read, as we do in this week’s parasha, Re’eh (“Behold,” Deuteronomy 11:26—16:17), the following words: 

“You shall utterly destroy all the places where the nations which you shall dispossess served their gods, on the high mountains and on the hills and under every green tree.  And you shall destroy their altars, break their sacred pillars, and burn their wooden images with fire; you shall cut down the carved images of their gods and destroy their names from that place” (Deut. 12:2-3).

It is difficult to read these verses today, as we watch wars of intolerance and religious fundamentalism spread like wildfire around the globe.  It is hard to swallow the fact that even in Judaism, in the very Torah that we believe to be God’s word, such sentiments exist, that a fundamentalist streak exists within Judaism.  Yet, that is precisely what these verses portray.  These, in fact, are among the first obligations Moses places before the Israelites as they prepare to conquer the Land of Israel.

Surely we’ve learned something from our own history and from our own pain?  Why are these words still studied, chanted, repeated, imprinted into our hearts and souls? 

I admit that the longer the current conflict with Hamas extends, the more I tend to see the truth in Moses’s warnings.  Too many good lives have been snuffed by terror; add to these the most current tragedy, the death of a four-year-old boy killed by a mortar round just earlier this evening, as Shabbat was descending on our Holy Land.

The loss of all these beautiful human beings hurts deeply, more deeply than can be described by words.  And along with the pain comes anger.  It’s a natural response.

Yet what has struck me all along this summer has been Israel’s restraint.  At the price of the lives of its own civilians and soldiers, Israel and its army, the Israel Defense Force, has conducted itself in a way no other country or army in the world ever has.  In accordance with its own name, the IDF has acted strictly defensively in the ugly face of outright aggression.  There could have been another way of dealing with the attacks, one more in accordance with the Torah verses we study this week.  But Israel would not allow such behavior.

How did the vengeful, fundamentalist words of this week’s Torah portion turn into something so completely different and opposite?  How did fundamentalism disappear almost completely from Judaism?

From the earliest days on, going back to the first century or even before, the Rabbis have understood the dangers built into Deuteronomy’s harsh commands.  For every conceivable reason, fundamentalism is inherently and forever dangerous.  From the start, then, the ancient Sages have interpreted these verses in such a way as to limit such behavior, to take it out of our hands.  While waging war against evil is necessary and even mandated, the final destruction of evil is, and must remain, God’s prerogative. The great 11^th century commentator, Rashi, reiterates the warning.  These verses are a caution, he says, a warning to all Jews not to follow the temptations of evil, not to indulge in foreign cults and rituals or even behave in a similar manner as those who practice them, but rather to remain faithful to the concepts of freedom, justice and compassion that are the true basis of Judaism. Because as clearly as day follows night, so will all evil be obliterated in due time, and all evildoers will meet the same fate.

The extent to which we have internalized this teaching finds proof in the way Israel has been conducting itself during the current war with Hamas.  In any war, there will be casualties, many of them innocent.  Holding back its vastly superior forces, Israel has continuously chosen to wage a limited, defensive war, aiming its weapons as much as possible only at those guilty of launching attacks against it, whether by air, by sea or by land.  The price Israel has paid for this restraint has been dear, but the IDF will not be drawn into a war of extermination, into a war of indiscriminate bombing and utter destruction.

Fundamentalism is a dangerous concept.  Maybe that’s why we kept these difficult verses the Torah.  They are there to constantly remind us of the danger that lurks within every human being and within every religion.  We study these words and repeat them—but never without the rabbinic commentary and cautionary moral that accompanies them. 

To be Israel means to struggle with divine as well as human beings.  It means to struggle with our baser motives and urges and even with our own beliefs.  To be Israel means to overcome instinct and strive for higher standards, especially at difficult and trying times.  That’s why Parashat Re’eh, along with its cautionary message, is so important to study, especially today, when we see full-blown fundamentalism in all its barbaric savagery and brutality all around us. 

Despite the harsh words of Deuteronomy, the lesson of Judaism is ultimately that there are moral and ethical restrictions to what may or may not be done in the name of God. Fighting evil is mandatory.  Behaving like the evildoers, however, is forbidden. 

© 2014 by Boaz D. Heilman

Blessings And Consequences: Eikev

Blessings And Consequences

D’var Torah for Parashat Eikev

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

On April 11, 1909, some 70 people gathered on sand dunes a short distance from the ancient port city of Jaffa in Israel.  An old black and white photograph shows them facing a speaker who is standing on the sandy slope.  Though his words are not recorded, the image is indelibly marked in the annals of the founding of the modern State of Israel. 

On that day, on land purchased from the ruling Ottoman Turks, the city of Tel Aviv was founded and the first housing plots were allocated among those who were gathered there.

What did they see in those dunes that made the first settlers of the first modern city of Israel want to settle there?  They saw a future.

Tel Aviv was named so to indicate its two functions.  Tel means “hill,” but even more than that, the word refers to a mound of ancient ruins, one tumbled historical eon on top of another.  Aviv means “spring,” and refers to the rebirth that comes to the land after the winter rains and storms.  Tel Aviv, then, combines past and future all rolled into one.  In establishing the city, its founders sought to bring new life to the ancient people as well as to the ancient land.  They built their first homes in a city that was designed from the first to be a modern urban center, built around parks and fountains, with broad streets and the most current architecture. 

They sure had some imagination.  Jaffa was, after all, the center of culture in those days.  It was through Jaffa that immigrants arrived to the Land of Israel.  Jaffa was the seaport and also the rail station that stood at the intersection of Europe and Africa.  Restaurants and inns abounded there.  Surrounded by orchards and groves, Jaffa was a cultured city in which you could find just about anything you wanted or needed.

But on that day, as they looked over the sand around them, the gathered families saw a new horizon and a new future before them.  They knew that the work ahead would be hard.  The summer heat, the uncompromising humidity, the swamps that lay to the north and east along with their malaria-bearing mosquitoes—all these would have to be conquered in order to make the dream come true. 

A similar vision must have stood before Moses’s eyes as he described the Land of Israel to his people.  Viewing the Land from the top of the mountain, he describes a land filled with rivers and streams, nourished by the heavens themselves.  He sees the seven kinds of grains and fruits that represented the Land’s abundance and fruitfulness.  He sees the minerals that could be mined from its mountains.

Moses compares the new land that his people are about to settle to the old land of Egypt from which they arrived.  Though some of the Israelites still recalled Egypt as a land of plenty, watered by the Nile River, producing an abundance of fruit and vegetables, Moses reminds them of the degradations and misery that were their lot there.  Life in Israel would be, by comparison, easy.  It was blessed by God, after all, and all we had to do in order to enjoy the land’s bounty was to follow God’s word.

Moses was optimistic.  Israel’s terrain and climate are harsh; it is a highly contested piece of land, warred over by fearful empires.  Just ahead there would be wars to fight and strongholds to be conquered.  The cynics among the people could easily accuse Moses of being overly optimistic, unrealistic, perhaps even delusional.

But Moses knew what he was saying.  The key to the future was in his hand.

This week’s Torah portion, Eikev (Deuteronomy 7:12—11:25), holds out the carrot and the stick. The Land, indeed, is a blessed land.  It is, Moses tells Israel, “A land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing; a land whose stones are iron and out of whose hills you will dig copper” (Deut. 8:9).  Yet within these words, one can hear a cautionary message.  Though the land holds out much promise, the realization of its potential would not be easy.  Iron is not easy to hew, and copper does not grow on trees.  Cultivation of the land would require hard work, along with purpose and determination.

Eikev means “as a result.”  The goodness of the Land of Israel, embedded in its soil and rocks, is not something we can take for granted, Moses tells us.  Yet it isn’t merely the labor of our hands that will unlock the Land’s promise.  The Hebrew word eikev comes from the same root as the name of our ancestor, Yaakov, Jacob.  Moses reminds us that the greatness of our Land is closely tied with our tradition.  All that abundance isn’t there just for the taking.  It will be the result of hard work, yes, but the labor must be combined with the message and purpose of our heritage.  The fruit of the land, the fruition of its potential, the realization of the dream, will come about as a consequence of Israel’s following God’s commandments.

Rashi, the great 11^th century rabbi and commentator, explains:  Never to be taken for granted, God’s blessing will come only when we pay attention to the minor details of our behavior, those that are all-too-often considered trivial, that all-too-often are trampled with the heel (‘akeiv).

Lands are too often distributed by cultural, economic and political laws.  Greed and conquest determine who gets what.  The promise of Tel Aviv was to be different.  The 66 families who bought the first plots paid equal amounts for equal parcels of land.  These then were distributed by lot, so that nobody could claim favoritism or accuse another of gains achieved by political maneuvering. 

Just so was the vision Moses held for the Land of Israel and its people. Justice, fairness and equality would be the underpinnings of the new culture about to be built on the ancient land. 

It was an idealized view, yet one that has held true for Jews throughout our long history.  Israel’s strength, today as always, is due to our purpose and identity. What characterizes the Israel Defense Force today is not only its technological prowess, but also the fact that it is the most moral army in the world, representative of a people that aspires to the highest ideals of morality and ethics in every aspect of its life.

From its humble beginnings, Tel Aviv has grown to become a center of justice, health, culture and education.  It has fulfilled the dream of its founders as they stood on the slopes of a sand dune, a dream they shared with Moses as he viewed the Land from his perch on the top of Mount Nebo. 

© 2014 by Boaz D. Heilman

Prayer Without Limit: Va'etchanan

Prayer Without Limit

D’var Torah for Parashat Va’etchanan

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

The imagery of this week’s portion, Va’etchanan (“I pleaded,” Deut. 3:23—7:11) is rich and powerful.  Moses pleads with God to be allowed to enter the Promised Land, but is told instead to climb a mountain and merely view the land from afar.  Moses is not granted his prayer.  He will not be able to enter the land to which he led his people; it will be Joshua, the warrior, who will lead them onward instead.

And so, overcoming anger and frustration, Moses turns to the people and proceeds to remind them of their own encounter with God, forty years earlier, at Mount Sinai.  The fiery mountain, the smoke and clouds and God’s booming voice are recalled, the people’s fear and wish that Moses speak for God, the commandments and ordinances that are powerfully uttered and willingly accepted.  It is a moment that Moses urges the Israelites to remember forever, to carry with them throughout the generations, throughout their journeys.  It is the crux of their relationship with God, the power behind their survival and the context for their purpose on earth.

One would think that after all Moses had done for the Israelites—and for God—he would be granted his prayer.  Yes, Moses had made some mistakes, but then who of us does not?  Yet shouldn’t his relationship with God—direct, upfront, face-to-face—count for something?  If ever there was anyone whose pleas and prayers at this moment should have been heard, it would be Moses!

There is much discussion of whether God’s refusal to accept Moses’s prayer was justified or not, whether the punishment was proportional to the sin.  Leadership has its own heavy price; even Moses was not exempt from responsibility; his momentary loss of faith (striking the rock instead of commanding it to yield water) bore long-term repercussions.

But there’s another lesson that is less often talked about in this story, and that is the limit of prayer.

I thought about this yesterday while watching a moving story about one of the fallen soldiers in Operation Protective Edge.  Shai Kushnir, z”l, of blessed memory, was an only child, his father’s only son, the only connection to the future that his family, immigrants from Russia, would ever have.  As an only child, Shai had to get his father’s signature before he could join a combat unit.  For a long time, the father refused to honor Shai’s wishes.  In the end, however, he couldn’t resist his son’s pleas any more.  Tears streaming down his face, the father told how, if he could change anything at all, if he could go back in time to any one moment, the moment he signed that paper would be it.  “There’s nothing left now,” he said, his voice breaking.

Shai’s grandmother, her head covered with a mourning veil, spoke tearfully with her heavy Russian accent.  “Why does there have to be war?” she cried over and over.   “There is room for everyone here.  Why do they have to fight wars?”

For several days, her husband, Shai’s grandfather, had lied to her.  Hoping to spare her worry and pain, he didn’t tell her that Shai was fighting deep in Gaza; he was in the Golan, up north, he told her instead.  And so Shai’s grandmother turned her gaze to the mountains, to the distant north, and she prayed.  Devoutly, she said the “Sh’ma” twice a day, beseeching God to protect her only grandchild, to keep him safe from harm, distant from war.  There was a pause in her story.  Then, looking up, she said, “I guess God didn’t hear my prayers.”

How many other such prayers were not heard?  How many pleas made by parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, girlfriends, boyfriends, fiancées and children were not accepted by God?  It would be blasphemous to say that God accepted some prayers but not others.  We don’t understand God’s vast plans, but if goodness and prayer held any guarantee at all, none of those killed and wounded would be hurt, and there would be no evil in the world at all.

But isn’t the purpose of prayer to protect us? Is the lesson that Moses teaches us in Va’etchanan not that, as long as we say the “Sh’ma” and the “V’ahavta,” that as long as we obey the Ten Commandments, we would be safe and that our life would be blessed and long?

This, however, is the real lesson of this powerful portion.  This is what Moses learns when he pleads for the privilege of leading his people into the Promised Land.  Only when he understands and internalizes the reason behind God’s refusal can he turn to the Israelites and teach them what he just learned.

What Moses had hoped for was not merely to continue leading his people.  Nor did he wish—for more than a moment, at any rate—for his sin to be forgiven.  Moses was too wise, too old, too humble to wish for those.  Moses’s greatness was always in his great concern for his people.  What he truly prayed for was to have that moment of holiness, the encounter of God and Israel at Sinai, to last forever.  More than anything else, he wished that the holy experience they all sensed together then would never end.  His most devout prayer was that God’s holiness would encompass the entire people, forever, like a tallit that was all blue, endless as the vast heaven, with no loose threads or overhanging fringes.

But that was not to be. 

Heaven and earth are not one and the same.  Reality has its own rules.  There’s death, and pain and suffering.  There are victories and there are losses.  There’s a time for war and a time for peace.

That’s why Moses enjoins his people to remember the moment when they heard and saw God’s presence at the Mountain, to keep it in their minds and hearts.  Wherever else life might take them, that’s where holiness would exist for them.

Prayer might not protect us from bullets, missiles and bombs, but prayer does keep us on a path of justice, love and compassion.

In yet another touching moment associated with Operation Protective Edge, Lt. Eitan, the commanding officer of Hadar Goldin, z”l, came to pay a condolence visit at Hadar’s home.  Hadar, you might remember, was the soldier who, for a couple of days, was feared kidnapped by Hamas.  Terrorists emerged from a tunnel, fired on our soldiers and snatched Hadar’s body before running back into their hellhole.  It was Lt. Eitan who, upon realizing that his friend’s body was missing, without a moment’s hesitation and against IDF regulations, leaped into the tunnel and chased the terrorists.  Now, with the fighting nearly over, he came to return Hadar’s personal effects to his family.  One by one, he gave them Hadar’s notebook, cell phone, prayer book and his tefillin (phylacteries).  Hadar, of blessed memory, was an observant Jew.  He wore a kippah on his head; he observed the Commandments; he said the Sh’ma and the V’ahavta three times a day.  He carried the memory of Israel’s eternal encounter with God in his heart, mind and body.  That didn’t save his life, but that is what made him a good person, a righteous man, a true hero in Israel.

Prayer has its limits, as so many of us have come to know and understand.  But prayer also has enormous power.  It brings holiness into our life, surrounding us with an eternal tallit that has no ends, sheltering us in God’s embrace even in the midst of war.

This is what Moses came to understand at this pivotal—and possibly greatest—moment in his life, when he accepted God’s verdict, when he realized that now it was Joshua’s turn to lead the Israelites, into battle, into the gritty reality of life, into the Promised Land.

© 2014 by Boaz D. Heilman