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CHUMASH CANDESCENCE
PARASHA EIKEV
DEUTERONOMY 7:12-11:26
RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL
"Shas Happens"
SYNOPTIC ABSTRACT:
Moses tells the Israelites that they will receive rewards for following
God's laws. Moses tells them that all the good that comes to them-- food,
land, even their clothing-- is from God. They should never be haughty and
think that it came from their own work. God also tells the Israelites of
the curses to become them if they do not obey Him. This forms the second
part of the Shema. This is found in traditional prayer books. Why is it
deleted from our Reform siddurem? To learn more, we invite you to read
on.
"Beware for yourselves lest your heart be seduced and you turn
astray...Then the wrath of God will blaze against you. He will restrain
the heaven so there will be no rain, and the ground will not yield its
produce, and you will be swiftly banished from the goodly land that God
gives you"(Deut. 11:16- 17). Ouch!
The Reform movement deleted this portion of the Shema from our prayer
books. We do not believe, post-Shoah, in a God who dishes out reward and
punishment. Yes, God is the God of all. He is One. But life is not a bowl
of matzoh ball soup and if it were, some would be fluffy and float and
others would sink to the bottom. Shas happens.
Why my euphemism? Not so long ago, Shas rabbi Ovadiah Yosef said that the
six million who died in the hands of the Nazis, may their names be
blotted out, were "all the reincarnation of earlier souls, who sinned and
caused others to sin and did all sorts of forbidden acts...They came back
to do atonement for their sins." And God, as promised in the verses
quoted above, got them all rounded up by Nazis and sent them to their
deaths in the slaughter houses of Germany and Eastern Europe. The next
day guards were stationed around this Shas rabbi's home as a man was
caught climbing into his home through a window. Rabbi Yosef is extremely
influential among the Sephardic community and his Shas party has 17
members in the Israeli Knesset. Gee, did God send this intruder through
his window?
Why does mankind suffer? Is it divine payback for our sins as the Torah
teaches? The Kabbala gives a much different answer. Mankind suffers
because God suffers. It is not mankind that suffers but God. The
suffering we feel is not our suffering but God's suffering experience
through us as if it were our own. Therefore, the Kabbala teaches, before
we can liberate ourselves from suffering, we most first liberate God from
His suffering.
The Zohar teaches that we know God suffers because mankind suffers.
Genesis 1:27 says that "God created man in the image of Himself, in the
image of God He created him." Therefore, as the Ba'al Shem Tov , the
then-leftist reform founder of the now-rightist orthodox Chassidic
movement said, "Man is a part of God, and the want that is in the part is
in the whole, and the whole suffers the same want as the part." We can
infer that God suffers because we know that mankind suffers.
"From what does God suffer?" the rabbis ask. God suffers from His exile
from Himself. He suffers the separation in His Name--the "YH" divided
from the "VH"-- that took place when He created the world. He suffers to
return to the Unity--the wholeness in Himself-- that was shattered when
He created the world. Therefore God suffers and man is commissioned to
redeem Him from His suffering by returning Him to His former state of
unity. This is what the Kabbalists say we mean when we say in the Aleinu
adoration prayer "On that day the Lord shall be One and His name
One"(Psalm 22:29).
The rabbis then ask "How can we liberate God from His suffering? How can
we return Him to Himself?" The answer is that we must be watchful and
alert all the time for God. As King David wrote "at dawn I hold myself in
readiness for You" (Psalm 5:3). We need to listen for God's voice "I am
listening. What is God saying?"(Psalm 85:8). Then we must speak the words
that we hear God tell us and follow them. To quote the Ba'al Shem Tov
again "When I fix my thoughts on the creator, I let my mouth speak what
it will, for the words are bound by higher roots. The Holy sparks that
fell from Himself when God built and destroyed worlds, man shall raise
and purify back to their source: All things of this world desire with all
their might to draw near man in order that the sparks of Holiness that
are in them should be raised by Him back to their source. And who with
good strength of his spirit is able to raise the Holy spark from stone to
plant, from plant to animal, from animal to speaking being? Man leads it
to freedom, and no setting free of captives is greater than this. It is
as when a king's son is rescued from captivity and brought to his
father. Then you will release God from His suffering and He , in turn,
will 'fill your mouths with laughter and your lips with song'(Psalm
126:2)." This is the Kabbalistic concept of Tikun Olam, repair of the
world, which is a credo of the modern Reform movement, and therefore
cannot philosophically exist side-by-side with the second part of the
Shema that we find in this week's parasha.
"Nowhere is this enantiodromia--this conflagration between good and
evil-- more clearly seen than in the constant interplay of the two
opposing Sephirot (ten manifestations of God), Chesed (good) and Gevurah
(evil)--which individually constitute the Right and the Left sides--light
and darkness, the yin and yang--of the Tree of the Ten Sephirot," writes
Rabbi Yakov Ha Kohain. It is out of this balancing act that this Tree is
born.
The idea of a suffering God is not only part of Christian theology. It is
part and parcel of Judaism as well. Jewish philosophy believes that God,
the father, (not His "son") suffers not on a cross on earth, but in
Heaven. He suffers not because we sin, but because of His separation from
Himself. His former Unity has been shattered. His Holy Queen, the
Sheckinah, has fallen and She yearns to be lifted up and returned to Her
King. This is why in Pirket Avot one reads so many references to the
ways one can bring back the Sheckinah, i.e. studying Torah with another,
discussing Torah while three or more eat together, etc.
For Tikun Olam to be done, for God to "know" and repair Himself, He first
must be known by man. But for man to know himself, he first must know God
as well. The Torah shows us how God perfects man in increments. God
perfects man in order that man may perfect Him, in Zohar terms. This is
what Karl Jung meant when he wrote,"God must become man precisely because
He has done man a wrong through Job. He, the guardian of justice, knows
that every wrong must be expiated and Wisdom knows that moral law is
above even God. Because His creature has surpassed Him, God must
regenerate Himself."
According to the Kabbalah, God went from being whole to fragmentary
during the act of creation. His "face" was shattered. He needs man as
His partner to end His suffering and do the Tikun (repair). The Reform
movement agrees with this and has placed responsibility on us, as people,
to fix our globe, and not think that doing ritual or not doing ritual
determines if good or evil things to occur.
Of course this leads to the question "Is God good?" The sages answer
"yes" and quote Exodus 34:6 "God, God, a God of tenderness and
compassion." But they further ask, "Why does He permit evil?" They answer
that "evil is the throne of good", and that good comes from evil. "The
indwelling Glory of God, embraces all worlds, good and evil...How can he
then bear in Himself the opposites good and evil? But in truth there is
no opposite, for evil is the throne of good." So if good comes from God,
where does evil come from? Evil also comes from God. "Now the spirit of
God left Saul and an evil spirit from God filled him" (1 Samuel 16:14).
The perfection of God lies not in being merely one thing or another, but
all things at all times. God is darkness and light and goodness and evil.
He is One. Satan, again a part of traditional Jewish belief, is not an
opposite of God, but part of God. He is the left-hand side of the Mind of
God. He is the left side of the Tree of the Ten Sephirot. Satan is not a
"he," but an adversarial thought in God's mind. Satan is God's yetzer ha
ra, His evil inclination.
In this month of Av we are taught that great evil befell us on the 9th
day (destructions of the Temples) but that great good came to us on the
15th day (no more people died in the wilderness of Sinai, peace came to
the tribe of Benjamin, the northern tribes were allowed to travel to the
south to Jerusalem again, and the martyrs of Behar (122 CE) were allowed
to be buried). The Kabbalah says that good things are born from evil.
They forecast that the Messiah will be born on the 9th of Av. Holiness
must be found in impurity, just as we as Jews have made the mundane into
the sacred. There is no Torah law commanding us to say a prayer before we
eat. This mitzvah is a rabbinic Talmudic law from Tractate Berachot
35A. The rabbis posit that one who eats before he says a prayer of thanks
to God, is like one who steals from God. There is the mitzvah of saying
grace after meals in this week's parasha (Deut. 8:10).
God loves us, but we are taught traditionally that He can also hate us.
God even tried to kill Moses! "When Moses had halted for the night, God
came to meet him and tried to kill him"(Exodus 4:24). Where as in last
week's parasha we are commanded to love God, in this week's portion we
are commanded to "fear God" (Deut. 10:12) as well as love Him. King David
in Psalm 111:10 writes "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and
they that have sound sense practice it." Or as Jung says "Even the
enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own
limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no
knowable boundaries , who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the
abysms of the earth and as vast as the sky."
How do we as modern Jews today reconcile these theological differences?
What does it mean to us to be fearful of God? Do we walk around waiting
for lightning to strike us because we drove on Shabbat? Do we curse God
when bad things happen, or worse yet, accept the Shas rabbi's view that
we sinned somewhere in the past and we are being justly punished?
The answer lies in this week's parasha. In Deuteronomy 8:11-17 we are
told "Guard yourself...lest you eat, be satisfied, build nice homes, live
in them,... and become haughty, and forget God... and say my own might
and the strength of my hand have made me all of this wealth." Talmud
Tractate Sotah 5A teaches that we are commanded not to be haughty. When
we are arrogant and haughty, we are actually forgetting God. We as spiritual Jews need to remember the many blessings we do have from God and
continually to thank our Creator for them. We need not do it in the
traditional formalized prayer, but we do need to do it. If we forget
about God by being haughty , and only call upon His name when bad things
happen, then our understanding of God is shattered, as we only view Him
as a bandage for our suffering.
As spiritual Jews, we need to continually love God, be thankful to God, be
ever mindful of God, be in awe of God, but not fear God. The reformer,
the Ba'al Shem Tov, says not to do mitzvot because of fear of divine
retribution. He says that is childlike. He says to do mitzvot for our own
spiritual growth. Talmud Tractate Berachot 39A says there is no tangible
reward for doing mitzvot other than a spiritual one. Rabbi Akiva in
Talmud Tractate Berachot 61B compares a Jew without God and Torah to a
fish out of water. If we as modern Jews do not develop a healthy sense of
spirituality when things are going well, it is awfully hard to do so when
things are going poorly. This is the punishment of God's "blaze" and
"banishment." It is of our own making. This is why our movement's rabbis
left the first part of the Shema in our prayer books so that we are
reminded to remember God and Torah so many times during the day.
The parasha's name of Eikev has even caused much debate. In simple terms
it means "if'", as in part of a contingency contract. Rashi translates it
as "because." Onkelos translates it as "reward", and the Midrash says it
means "heal."
What the Midrash is teaching is that it is not the big
commandments that folks tend to forget. Almost all Jews go to synagogues
on Yom Kippur and seders on Passover. The rabbis are trying to teach
that it is the ethical man-to-man laws that we tend to trample with our
heels. Rabbi Aaron Kotler writes that in our day-to-day encounters we
have many opportunities for good deeds that we trample under our feet in
our pursuit of "greater" things in life. Simple kindness and manners are
often overlooked. He writes that these seemingly insignificant encounters
ultimately define us.
As the songwriter Jackson Brown sang "Our character
is what we do when we think no one is looking." The Mishna asks "what is
the path that a person should cling to?" It does not answer
"halachah"(Jewish ritual law) which actually comes from the Hebrew word
for "path." The rabbis answer is "shachein tov....be a good neighbor!"
All we as spiritual Jews can do is the best that we can do as people. As
Isaiah, the author of this week's Haftorah says, we are to be a "light to
the nations "(Is. 49:06). Our goodness and kindness to others will yield
its own spiritual reward. "Shas" will happen. Our role as good Jews and
good people is not to be haughty, but to do ahavath chesed, acts of
loving kindness, to help each other when the inevitable bad things of
life do occur. This is the essence of our Jewish way of life. This is how
we can deal with the universal truth that "shas happens."
Shabbat Shalom,
RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL
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