Cruelty and Compassion -- A Tale of Two Camps: Bo

Cruelty and Compassion:  A Tale of Two Camps

D’var Torah for Parashat Bo

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

This week’s Torah portion, Bo (Ex. 10:1—13:16), relates the final three plagues with which Pharaoh and the Egyptians are inflicted.  At the conclusion of this portion, the People of Israel are given the rules for the Passover—both for the very first celebration, and then for all Passovers to follow, for eternity. For Egypt, the downfall is complete; For Israel, the story of its glory is about to unfold.  Where one ends, the other begins.

The Exodus from Egypt serves as an eternal reminder for Israel of God’s might and role in our history:  God redeemed us in the past; God redeems us in the present, and God will go on redeeming us for as long as we adhere to our Covenant with God.  It’s a lesson we must pass down to our children and their children, to all generations. Its importance is reinforced at the conclusion of the portion with words familiar to us from V’ahavta:  “It shall be a sign upon your hand and as frontlets between your eyes.”

But what is the real lesson here?  Is it just of God’s greatness?  Do we really need an annual reminder that there are forces out there greater than us?

There is, in fact, a huge lesson here about God and what God wants of us.  Indeed, it is so important that it is to be binding not only on us, God’s chosen people as it were, but truly on all humanity. “There shall be one law (“Torah”) for the native as well as for the stranger” (Ex. 12:49).  One God, one law, one earth, one humanity.

What is this law, this lesson, this teaching that stands true for all humanity?

We can find it in the story of the plagues, and particularly in Pharaoh’s reactions to them.

For each of the first five plagues, we are told that after Moses and God offer relief, Pharaoh stiffens his heart (a metaphor for stubbornness).  This reaction is a conscious act on the part of Pharaoh.  It is he who initiates it, he who flexes his muscles as a show of power and strength.

By the sixth plague, however, something changes.  It is no longer Pharaoh who is in charge.  It is God who hardens Pharaoh’s heart.

This act of God is mystifying.  Of course God can do anything God chooses to; but is this an example of the ethics God would have us follow?  Does God have the ethical and moral right to take away freedom of choice—the most sublime gift with which God endows every human being?  Isn’t the lesson of Yom Kippur that a person may change his ways, repent—offer t’shuva—and return to God, even up to the last moment and breath?

This seeming paradox did not escape the rabbis and commentators of the Torah throughout the centuries.  Yet, despite the many explanations, the question still stands, and we still struggle with it today.

My understanding of what happens here is that this stubbornness is part of a process.  It begins as freely chosen behavior.  A bit like alcohol or tobacco, a person tries it out as a matter of choice.  At some point, however, the choice disappears and is replaced by a physical or psychological need.  This need then becomes an overpowering craving, and finally it turns into a force that can no longer be reversed without outside intervention.

Is there a point where an addict no longer has the choice to return and recover?

All too often the answer is, tragically, yes.  At some point, another law takes over.  

So what was this overwhelming addiction that caused Pharaoh’s downfall?

It was cruelty.

In this world, there are basically two camps, two philosophies, two ways of interacting with the world.  One is cruelty; the other is compassion.

Time and time again, Pharaoh showed his zeal for cruelty.  A political and social system founded on slavery and domination is, from its inception, on dangerous footing.  Entrapment, a secret police, gulags and concentration camps, murder and genocide are the hallmarks of any such system.  Insatiable hunger for ever-more power, ever-greater control, combines with fear and paranoia, and ultimately leads to insanity.  Cruelty pervades and even characterizes such a system and its leaders.  But it’s a dead-end street, bound for total collapse within a few years or, at most, decades.

Compassion, on the other hand, is the other camp. Compassion is the bond that unites human to human, that keeps families and nations united.  It strengthens society and prepares us better for the challenges we face every day. 

It isn’t only justice we want from our God.  We want compassion.  We want God to understand what pains us.  Relief from the pain is good, yes; but sometimes, when all we can do is just be there for someone in pain, that is already enough.  Compassion is the opposite of a stiff heart.  It’s listening and understanding; it’s lending a hand; it’s sharing space and time; it’s offering comfort.  Compassion is innate within all human beings, a product of being loved, held and comforted.  Compassion is the greatest gift we can offer to another living creature.

The ancient gods were crafty, unjust, and ultimately cruel.  The God that emerges in Exodus is the total opposite.  He is a God of love, a God of compassion.  It is this God that overpowers and defeats cruel Pharaoh.

Cruelty, however, still abounds all over the world.  We human beings are, after all, the only species that engages in cruelty as a sport.  We don’t just kill for food; we don’t even merely play with our prey, as some animals do.  In some perverse extension of the natural order of survival, we humans engage in cruelty as systemic behavior.  We torture and abuse.  We inflict physical, psychological and emotional pain, sometimes even on the people we love the most.  Often enough we even claim to be motivated by some higher power, some perverse god, as we engage in this cruelty. 

The Ten Plagues were meant as a course of learning opportunities.  At each moment, with each plague, Pharaoh was given a chance to repent.  But only up to a certain point.  And then the law of God took over. 

Cruelty is an overwhelming addiction. Compassion is the only antidote.

Parashat Bo reminds us of this law and warns us to teach it to our children so that they, too, may know and choose wisely between the two camps.  There is no middle ground.  It is the law of God for all of us.  It’s the law of death and of life.

May we always choose life for us and our children, that we may live.

Kein y’hi ratzon—may this be God’s will.

© 2015 by Boaz D. Heilman

Faith in the Power of Freedom: Va'eira

Faith in the Power of Freedom

Sermon/D’var Torah for Parashat Ve’eira

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

In this week’s Torah portion, Va’eira, the second portion of the book of Exodus (6:2-9:35), God takes matters into God’s own hand.  In the first portion, Moses discovers his mission and first delivers God’s message to Pharaoh. That, however, doesn’t go very well and only results in Pharaoh’s making life harder for his Hebrew slaves.  It is against this background, that at this point God takes the lead.  “Now I’ll show him who’s boss of this world,” God basically says.

And with that begins the series of plagues so familiar to us from countless Seders, from countless drops of wine we remove from our filled cups, from various depictions in Haggadahs and Hollywood films.  Blood, frogs, lice, boils, hail… all the way to darkness and that most horrible of all, the death of the first-born.

There have been many attempts to explain the plagues.  A sequence of natural calamities, one leading to the next, is one rationale.  An ancient rabbi proposed that the order of the plagues shows progression from the collective to the personal, from ailments that affect the general population and environment to those that affect only the Egyptians, and then, specifically, Pharaoh.  It is only when his own son dies that Pharaoh gets the message.

We are sometimes stupid that way.  We don’t get it until we are personally affected.  The famous quote by the Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller comes to mind: “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Socialist.  Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Trade Unionist.  Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.  Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Maybe it’s fear that blinds us; maybe it’s a weird, even perverted, optimism that things can and will get better, that bad things only happen to other people, or that “by the grace of God,” we ourselves might be spared.

The truth, however, is that once society begins to decay and collapse, there is no stopping it.  Like a sand castle at the water’s edge, the moats fill with water, the highest retaining walls crumble, and everything else follows in close order.

Probably the best way to see the Biblical plagues is as the gradual collapse of the grand empire that Egypt had once been.  First its foundations go—the Nile River, the bearer of life—then all the safeguards that had been so carefully built up.  One by one, the plagues strikes at the gods that the Egyptians worshipped and believed would protect them.  Ultimately, it is Pharaoh himself who is brought to his knees.  The man who believed himself the earthly embodiment of Ra, the most powerful god of all, is made to recognize that there is a power far greater than he could even imagine.

Throughout history, there have been many like Pharaoh, people who thought themselves so grand as to be above the law of morality.  They had golden statues crafted in their image and erected in temples; they commanded taxes, sacrifices of gold, silver and often, human life.  They imposed on their subjects a single way of thinking and an unquestioned belief system that precluded any other, thus eliminating any possible challenge to their own power.  Their sense of their own importance and glory knew no bounds.

Confrontation with another belief was seen as a threat by these demigods, and they took every precaution to forbid it.  A system of spies, a secret police, the Gestapo, the Inquisition—these are the machinations used by tyrants from time immemorial to bolster their power and prevent their own downfall.  One by one, however, they all meet their inevitable fate.  One by one, their defense systems crumble, as one plague after another strikes at their economy, their society, their land forces and naval armadas, their natural reserves, and finally them in person.

Throughout history, we’ve seen many repetitions of the Biblical story of the plagues.  Society after society, one civilization after another has fallen by the wayside, victim of its own arrogance.  Yet some people still fail to get it.

In our own day, we are witnessing a similar clash between arrogance and its inevitable collapse.  This struggle shows itself in wars and atrocities and all over the world, taking its toll of thousands of lives every day—not only in Israel or Paris:  Think of the 2000 who were killed last week in Nigeria by extremist Islamists; or the nearly 200,000 who have been killed so far in the in the Syrian civil war.  The conflict isn’t really between East and West.  Nor is it a struggle between Islam and Christianity, Islam and Judaism, or Islam with anything else.  At the root of it all, this struggle is deeply embedded within Islam itself.  The struggle is between, on the one hand, those who believe that they possess the final word on God’s intentions; and, on the other hand, those who believe that every human being has the freedom to interpret God’s message for him- or herself, in a more personal way, in a way not dictated by another human being.

As different factions within Islam vie for supremacy, for the power to tell others how to behave and what to think, one tries to outdo the other in acts of horror and atrocity.  Each group eagerly claims credit for beheadings, kidnappings and enslavement, as though power can be measured by the amount of blood on the sidewalk.

As in ancient Egypt, there is a war going on today, too.  It is a war between ignorance and knowledge, between madness and wisdom.  However, unlike the ancient world, in today’s global world, this war isn’t limited to only one geographical area; and as weapons get more sophisticated and ever more powerful, the dangers extend far across oceans and continents.  No country or nationality is immune.  At its core, the struggle may be internal.  Yet, we are all affected.  Terror today knows no boundaries.

In fighting this war, the free world will need to use all its resources—people, technology, and spirit.  We know that in the end, as in ancient Egypt, cruel tyranny will meet its downfall.  But, unlike the story in the Bible, this time it won’t be God doing the fighting for us.  This war is one that we, people all over the world who want to be and remain free, must fight.

Yet while waging this war, we must also be careful not to resort to similar tactics as our enemies.  Terror strikes indiscriminately at the heart of the population, at the weak and unprotected.  We who strive to live by a higher morality must distinguish between the guilty and the innocent.  Generalizing and profiling whole populations will lead only to more tragedies and greater turbulence, making it that much more difficult afterwards to reconstruct our civilization.

Parashat Ve’eira sets the stage for the emergence of the Hebrew nation from Egyptian slavery.  How sad that throughout history, all humanity, as it casts off the fetters of slavery, must do so amidst much turmoil and bloodshed.  Then as now, it sometimes seems that we’ve learned nothing at all from the progress of history.

And yet, we have learned something.  We’ve learned that tyranny never lasts; that a greater power, be it from heaven or from somewhere deep within our souls, always emerges to strike one blow after another until the tyrant finally falls, making freedom possible.

This is the faith that sustained us in ancient times; this is what will help us overcome terrorism today.  It’s the same faith that helped Moses convince the Israelites, and eventually Pharaoh too, that tyranny can never last, that a people who’ve tasted freedom will never again allow themselves to be enslaved.  It’s faith in the power of freedom.  It served us well in the past and will continue into the future as well.

Kein y’hi ratzon, may this be God’s will.

© 2015 by Boaz D. Heilman

Arms Linked In The War On Terror: In The Aftermath of the Paris Terror Attacks

Arms Linked In The War On Terror

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

January 12, 2015

The terror attacks in Paris this past week are but the latest in a string of attacks by Islamist militants all over the world.  Somehow, lost in the shadow cast by Paris, was last week’s massacre of 2000 men, women and children from one single village in Nigeria by Boko Haram.

Still, for any number of reasons, the Paris attacks at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and at the Hyper Cacher (the Jewish supermarket), attracted world leaders from 40 countries to a rally also attended by nearly 1.5 million Frenchmen.  They marched with linked arms to show solidarity in the fight against Islamist terror.

One result of the attacks is that as of today, French military presence is there to guard a number of Jewish schools that are perceived to be in the line of danger.  Another result has been an upswing in attacks against Moslem targets—including mosques—in 13 or more cities throughout France.

The anger is understandable; the violence is not.

The truth is that even though most of the terror attacks are perpetrated by extremist Islamists, not all Moslems are terrorists.  Islam in itself is no more a religion of terror than Christianity or Judaism (and we must remember that they all have been used in the past to impose and terrorize).  The problem is not religion; the problem is that people and governments use religion to wield power.  Separation of state and church is a wonderful ideal, but one that is rarely—if ever—actually possible.

In our disgust and anguish over terrorism, we must be careful not to generalize and exact revenge from entire populations.  As it turns out, a Moslem helped save more than a dozen shoppers in the kosher market in Paris, and the first police officer to arrive at the scene of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the one who—with the whole world watching—was murdered in cold blood by the terrorists, was a Moslem.

Jewish teaching reminds us that only the wicked must be punished.  Likewise, the essence of Abraham’s argument with God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is that even a small kernel of goodness can cause the entirety to be saved.

Certainly, western governments need to be extra vigilant, much more than they have been in the past (and that includes the United States). We must be on our guard particularly when it comes to individuals and groups that are already on our radar screens—and others that yet may emerge.  Among all free people, there must be greater trust and cooperation, less divisiveness and recrimination.  The only way the free world will win this wave of attacks upon its life and values is if we unite as we did during World War Two, overcoming petty nationalism and individual brawling. 

It is time for all free countries to cooperate and be more proactive in fighting those who would see our destruction.  Yes, there will be “collateral damage” (don’t we all love this impersonal terminology describing the deaths of innocent victims?), but we must be prepared for this too.  It’s going to be a long and difficult struggle.  Freedom comes with a heavy price.

As far as Jews and Israel are concerned, there is yet another concern.  There is a widely held perception that Israel, while perhaps not the cause of all this upheaval, is certainly at its core.  Whether that is true or not does not matter.  The perception is there, and that makes it real in itself.  Israel somehow must become part of the solution.  How to do that is up to the diplomats of the world, including the US, the EU, Arab governments and certainly also Israel’s leaders.  That is one of the many issues facing Israel as it gears up to elections this coming spring. 

Sunday’s million-plus march against terror in Paris made a huge statement.  It had world leaders link arms in unity.  Netanyahu and Abbas were both there; they may not have exchanged words, but their very presence in that front row now places them in the position where they will need to follow up with real action, with real steps that will help lead to the end of terror and mayhem.  Otherwise, all this will be in vain, and terror will win in the end.

So let’s take example from the show of unity in Paris.  Let us all link arms—Moslem, Jew, Christian, atheist or follower of any other religion—and stand up to the terror.  Together, let us build a wall that will prove stronger than hatred.  Together we will win.

In the words of the psalmist, Adonai oz l’amo yitein, Adonai y’varech et amo bashalom:  “May God give strength to His people, may God bless His people with peace.”

© 2015 by Boaz D. Heilman                                                            

Vayechi: The Song of Israel's Life

Vayechi: The Song of Israel's Life

D'var Torah by Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

With this week's Torah portion (Vayechi, Genesis 47:28--50:26), the first book of the Torah comes to its conclusion. As the third Patriarch of the Jewish people, Jacob, prepares to die, he asks his sons to gather around his deathbed. He looks around, remembering the long journey that had brought them to that moment. Even as he recalls the many travails, he is also keenly aware of the many blessings that had enriched his life. Hardship, exile and separation are done and over. His family is reunited, reconciled and looking forward to a new chapter in the story that is about to unfold--their life not merely as individuals, nor even as tribes united by a common heritage and past. From this moment on they will no longer b'nai Israel--the children of Israel--but rather B'nai Israel, the People of Israel. 

Individual yet united, they are about to embark on a path that will take them far and wide, to places and times yet unexplored and unimagined.

Always a dreamer and visionary, Jacob musters his last strength to bless his children, continuing a tradition he knew yet from his father's and grandfather's home. Yet his words don't replicate the words spoke to him by his own father, Isaac. Each son receives his own blessing, one that embodies past, present and future. Jacob knows his sons well. He remembers their past deeds and misdeeds, the arrogance of Reuben, the violence of Shimon and Levi, the courage and wisdom of Judah. It is Joseph however, first-born of Jacob's beloved Rachel, who receives the double portion. Jacob's love knows no bounds as he embraces Joseph's two children, Ephraim and Menashe, and accepts them as his own.

One family, comprising so many individuals and so much history, all unite at this moment to become one people. 

From early on, Jacob had seen visions. But whereas in the past these visions were of God and angels, now he can see into the far future of the people who will bear his name: Israel. Individual, stubborn, determined, independent, they will outlast empires and outlive civilizations; they will become builders, explorers, scholars, poets, philosophers and healers. Yet, while remaining one nation, they will remain, as at this moment, fiercely individual. 

This glorious vision was no more evident to me as this evening, as I sat with my mother, brother and sister-in law around a table in the dining room of a hotel in Eilat, a resort town on the Red Sea, on the southern tip of the Land of Israel. The table was covered with a white tablecloth, a bottle of wine and challah at the center, next to a fresh and sweet smelling red rose. We welcomed Shabbat with blessing and song, one of many families that came to enjoy a weekend of R&R, away from the daily pressures and tensions of the workweek. 

They came from all over Israel, some from other countries as well. You could hear Hebrew of course, but also French, English, Arabic and many other languages. Yet, as each family in its generations gathered around the tables, one commonality united all--Shabbat. Fathers blessed their children with ancient words and chants they had learned from their own fathers and grandfathers. Shabbat songs from different communities blended together in strange and wonderful harmonies and rhythms; more versions of L'cha Dodi than could be imagined intertwined. Shalom Aleichem invited angels of peace to dwell at some tables while Birkat Hamazon-- the blessings at the end of meals-- rose from yet other tables. The amazing variety of foods at the long buffet tables represented this richness and diversity of cultures. Gefitle fish resided next to majadra, braised lamb lay side by side with mafrum, chopped liver along with baked tilapia.

Parashat Vayechi is so much more than about Jacob's death. It's about the life that continues past him, beyond his own "few and sorrow-laden" days. It is really about the history of Israel, the people. It's about their diversity, the richness of their heritage, the beauty of their many traditions--and even more: it's about their unity. The recognition of our common past and heritage is what has kept us together despite our many journeys and exiles. Only here and now can we understand more fully the blessings Jacob bestows upon his children. The Land of Israel is where our past and future coalesce into one luminous present. It is an eternal blessing, as rich and varied today as it was thousands of years ago, as filled with life and song as it will ever continue to be. It is the song of Israel's eternal presence.

©  2015 by Boaz D. Heilman