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DEUTERONOMY 29:09-31:30
RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL
"You Know it Ain't Easy, Its Often Unkind;
But You Better Have to Make up your Mind"
SYNOPTIC ABSTRACT:
This week we have two short, but important, Torah portions to read. The
first is Nitzavim from the Hebrew word "standing." Moses renews God's
covenant with Israel and warns against idolatry. He tells the Israelites
that, while God will punish them for being sinful, He will eventually
restore them. Moses says that the Torah will always be accessible to the
people, and not hidden in the domain of the priests. He ends by reminding
the Jews that they have free choice.
Parasha Vayeilech tells of the 120th birthday of Moses. He is about to
leave the people of Israel, and presents them with the Book of
Deuteronomy. He says that during the holiday of Sukkoth, this entire book
should be read aloud. God tells Moses that he is about to die and to
write a song for the people. He gives the reign of political command to
Joshua. He gives spiritual command to the Levites and tells them that he
knows that they will stray, sin , and be corrupt.
These parashat tend to correlate on the calendar with the holiday of Selichot. If you wish to learn more about
these parashat and this holiday, please read on.
"I have placed life and death before you, blessing and curse, and you
shall choose life" (Deut. 30:19). With only three portions left to
conclude the Chumash, (the Five Books of Moses), some of our leader's
final words to us are to "choose life." We have the choice. It is always
in our control. We had it in the Garden of Eden, and we had it
throughout history. The Torah has shown us time and time again how bad
choices bring about disastrous results. Sometimes these calamitous
sequella show up generations later. The Torah is "a tree of life to those
that cling to it."
The parasha insists that Torah be accessible to all. "It is not hidden
from you and it is not distant. It is not in heaven...it is not across
the sea...the matter is very near to you...in your mouth and in your
heart"(Deut. 30:11-14). In Talmud Tractate Niddah 30B we are taught that
a fetus is taught Torah in the womb and is caused to forget it at
birth. What were the sages teaching?
The instructions in the Torah about
how we are to behave to one another, even when read for the first time,
ring true. The rabbis are saying that when we are born, we have inside us
the intrinsic knowledge to know good and to be good. A small child knows
when he or she is being naughty. As we get older, we learn to rationalize
the things we do that are not good. When we rationalize to ourselves, we
lie to ourselves. Whether the lie is "everyone cheats on their taxes, so
why can't I?" or "one little piece of pie won't ruin my diet," lying to
ourselves seems part of the human condition. But we also truly know that
it is wrong. Moses is telling us to continually stay focused, be
rational, and make choices that promote life, goodness, and harmony. But
Moses knew human nature well. He predicted that the Israelites would
return to sin, and soon after Joshua's death, they did (Judges 2:7).
Knowing that we sin, the Torah gives us a way for growth. The Hebrew word
for sin (chet), means to "miss the mark." It is an archery term. We are
not condemned or damned for eternity when we fall short of our goals. We
can say we are sorry to others and to ourselves and vow to do better. The
Hebrew word for "sorry" is selicha. You'll hear this word in Israel
,maybe, on a crowded bus as someone pushes past you. A week before our
new year, we have a holiday called Selichot named from this very word.
Selichot are penitential prayers. They are traditionally recited before
the morning service during the last week of month of Elul, which is the
current month. They are also said between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
When a sacrifice was brought to the Temple in Jerusalem, it was examined
for four days before to ensure it had no blemishes. The sages felt that
we should feel like sacrificial offerings the week before Rosh Hashanah
and do sincere self-examination to lead us to do teshuvah. Teshuvah is
more than repentance. It is from the Hebrew word "to return." It is not
enough to say we are sorry. We need to fix the bad that we have done, if
possible, and not do it again. We are taught that God has forgiven a sin
when we no longer do that sin.
The traditional service is a collection of liturgical poets who lived
during the millennium following the close of the Talmudic era (circa 500
CE to 1500 CE). Originally, the service had groups of biblical verses,
which emphasized the 13 attributes of God which we are to emulate. As the
years moved on , the service adapted the sound of most other services
with multiple kaddishes. Psalm 145 was added, as was a confessional. In
America, with people used to staying up late on Saturday night, the
custom began to have the service at this time, rather than at dawn on
Sunday morning. It is also traditional to have a study session before the
service, at which some aspect of the meaning and the purpose of the High
Holy Days is discussed.
All of us have struggles. As my dear friend Lisa Segal (no relation, but
a wonderful Cantor and woman) wrote, "How we respond to our struggles
is what truly matters." As we have discussed many times, the Torah
teaches us that we are to help one another deal with life's hardships.
Sometimes, the way to choose life has unfortunately been to choose death.
The life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer lends us some modern insights into Selicoth.
When Great Britain's present Prime Minister Tony Blair was asked, "Which
German figure past or present, do you admire most?" he replied,"Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, the German pastor, who spoke out against the Nazis and died
in a concentration camp." Bonhoeffer was one of the few church leaders
who stood in courageous opposition to Hitler. His experience under Nazism
thrust him into profound conflict with much of his religious tradition.
He raised questions that he was unable to resolve before he was killed in
Flossenburg on April 9, 1945. Like most Christians of his generation, he
believed that God's special destiny for the Jews included their eventual
acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah.
Jewish and Christian scholars evaluate Bonhoeffer's legacy differently.
To Christians, his resistance against the Nazis and his writings offer
new ethics to the Protestant church. Some Jewish scholars contend that
Bonhoeffer acted out of patriotism on behalf of his church and not for
the sake of the Jews.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on February 4, 1906 in Breslau, Germany. His
mother was university-educated and his father was a psychiatrist. He
graduated from the Union Seminary of New York. In 1939 he taught theology
in Berlin. His church, German Evangelical Protestantism, was shaped by
obedience to state authority and by nationalism. Most church leaders
welcomed the rise of Nazism as a response to the liberalism and chaos of
the Weimar Republic.
A group of German Christians, called Deutsche Christen, was the voice of
Nazi ideology within the Protestant Church, and removed the Old Testament
from the Bible as it was "too Jewish." When, in 1933 the Nuremberg laws
prevented non-Aryans from being in civil service, they also forbade
non-Aryans from being ministers or religious teachers. For example, a
Protestant, with one Jewish grandparent , could not teach or preach in
their "pure Aryan" German church. But they went further. Repudiating
Gospel teachings, they said that the non-Aryan Jews were banned from
converting to Christianity.
Bonhoeffer's opposition to this Aryan anti-Semitic Deutsche Christen was
not based upon disagreement with the Nazi's racial policies, but upon the
group's repudiating Church policy as defined in the Gospel. It was a
battle of Church independence from Nazism. The church avoided the deeper
issue of the rights of German Jews. Many of the church leaders who were
against the Deutsche Christen were in favor of the Nazi Aryan policies.
Bonhoeffer opposed the Deutsche Christen, saying that they surrendered
Christian precepts to Nazi ideology. He said if non-Aryan Christians
could not be in the German Protestant church, he would start a new
church, called the "Confessing Church." This church would be free of Nazi
influence. This was a minority view. Most German bishops wanted to avoid
antagonizing the Nazi regime. As the Nazis became stronger, Bonhoeffer's
"Confessing Church" became paralyzed.
In his essay "The Church and the Jewish Question,"published in 1933,
Bonhoeffer called upon the church to defend the Jews. He did so not
because of moral or humanitarian concerns, but because the church needed
the Jews to accept Jesus. He says the homecoming of Jesus happens "in the
conversion of Israel to Christ." But he also broke new ground in saying
that the church must fight political injustice and to help victims of
injustice whether they were members of his church or not. His essay
became an explicit ethical commitment to all those persecuted by the
Nazis. He even drafted a message to rabbi Stephen Wise, head of the
Reform Jewish Movement in the United States.
Theologically, Bonhoeffer still felt the Jewish question would be
resolved if all the Jews converted and Judaism no longer existed. This
was against the Nazi and Deutsche German view of exterminating anyone
with Jewish blood and not accepting their conversion or their
grandparents' conversion. Bonhoeffer's struggle became more with his own
church than with the Nazis. He enlisted help from churches outside of
Germany. He attended the World Alliance Christian ecumenical meeting in
Sofia, Bulgaria, and convinced the delegates to pass the following
resolution in April 1933. "We especially deplore the fact that the State
measures against the Jews in Germany had such an effect on public opinion
that, in some circles, Jewish race is considered a race of inferior
status."
However, when Bonhoeffer's sister asked him to conduct a Christian
funeral for her husband's brother who, like her husband, were converted
Jews, Bonhoeffer succumbed to pressure from his church superintendent
and refused. By November 1933, he regretted this decision and apologized
to his sister. He turned down a parish post in Berlin and moved to
London. His church in London became a haven for both Christian and Jewish
refugees. In April 1935, he returned to Germany to help his "Confessing
Church." One of his members, deaconess Marga Meusel, no longer just
denounced the church and the Nazis for their treatment of Jews who
converted to Christianity. She denounced the Nazis and the church for
their treatment against all Jews. Some leaders of Bonhoeffer's own church
wanted to dispute Meusel's beliefs and only defend Jews who converted.
They actually wanted to go so far as to agree that the Nazis could do
what they wished with non-Christian Jews. This would have given sanction
to the Nuremberg laws by Bonhoeffer's church. His church's synod met and
dismissed Meusel's view and avoided discussions about the Nazi regime.
They simply decided to support the baptism of Jews and support non-Aryan
Christians.
For the next two years, Bonhoeffer taught quietly at the seminary of his
Confessing Church at Finkenwalde. In 1937, the Gestapo declared his
school illegal, as it opposed their Jewish blood laws. Twenty-seven of
Bonhoeffer's students were arrested. During the next two years,
Bonhoeffer traveled around Germany in secret supervising his students,
who were all working illegally in small rural parishes. In 1938, the
Gestapo banned him from Berlin and in 1940 forbade him from speaking
publicly.
During the period from 1938 to 1940, Bonhoeffer's philosophy changed.
For the first time he described Judaism using the same terminology as he
used for Christianity. He said that in God's eyes the "church and
synagogue" were equal. He said that Jews were the "brothers of
Christians." He said that Jews were the "children of the covenant." These
were radical statements. The regular Protestant movement in Germany just
culminated their 1939 conference on "Researching the Removal of Jewish
Influence on the Religious Life of the German People."
After the November 9, 1938 Kristallnacht, Bonhoeffer protested the Church
leaders who said that this pogrom was "the curse which has haunted Jews
since Jesus' death on the cross." Bonhoeffer rejected this vehemently and
said it was "sheer violence" and revealed Nazism's "godless face."
Bonhoeffer then organized his members. Pastor Heinrich Gruber helped
2000 Jews escape Germany. Confessing Christians who were expelled from
Germany worked with their German colleagues. One was Adolf Fruedenberg,
who helped from Switzerland. Another was Henry Leiper, from the USA,
who was an outspoken critic of Nazism and urged a boycott of the 1936
Berlin Olympics. He worked with Jewish groups to spread the word about
what was really happening in Germany.
In 1939, Bonhoeffer's other brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyl, became a
high-ranking member of the German Military Intelligence under Admiral
Wilheim Canaris. Secretly, Dohnanyl was a member of the resistance.
Dohnanyl told Bonhoeffer that war was imminent. Bonhoeffer left for New
York to teach at the Union Seminary in 1939. By the time he arrived in
America, he realized he belonged in Germany to fight the Nazis and help
the Jews. He returned to the belly of the beast one month later in July
1939. Reverand Dietrich Bonhoeffer made an important, crucial decision.
He joined the resistance.
Bonhoeffer became a double agent for the resistance by working for his
brother-in-law at German military intelligence. The Nazis thought
Bonhoeffer would use his church connections to help the Reich. Instead,
he helped the resistance gain support as he traveled in Italy,
Switzerland, and Scandinavia in 1941 and 1942. However, the Allies
treated him with distrust, because the German generals against Hitler
wanted guarantees of German territorial integrity and their own positions
in power after the war. In 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt said that only
unconditional surrender of the Nazis would end the war and did not wish
to help the German resistance movement of the anti-Hitler Army officers.
When Jewish deportation started on October 15, 1941, Bonhoeffer wrote
detailed memos about it that were smuggled out of Germany on October
18th. Dohnanyl and Canaris ,while running the German intelligence
office, ran "Operation Seven." This secret project smuggled 11 converted
Jews and 3 Jews to Switzerland. Using Jews in the Intelligence under the
Nazis was not unusual. Hitler himself ordered Canaris to use Jews as
spies and send them to America. Canaris was happy to oblige. The only
orders he gave the Jewish "spies" was to escape as soon as they got out
of Germany. The Gestapo discovered this operation by a trail of money
leaving Germany to help the refugees. They arrested Dohnanyl and
Bonhoeffer in 1943 on charges of corruption. Later they realized they
were smuggling Jews.
In July 1944, an attempt by Canaris' group to kill Hitler failed. It was
only after the arrests of the conspirators that the Nazis learned of
Bonhoeffer's true involvement. He was hung at Flossenburg concentration
camp in April 1945, together with his brother Klaus, Canaris, his
brother-in-law Dohnanyl, and others.
In his essay,"Who Stands Firm," Bonhoeffer writes, "Only the one for who
the final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his
freedom, his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all these, when in
faith and sole allegiance to God he is called to obedient and
responsible action: the responsible person, whose life will be nothing
but an answer to God's question and call."
Our parasha this week says
that all of us are "standing today" (Deut. 29:9). Our covenant with God
was sealed not just with those standing with Moses circa 3300 years ago,
but "with whoever is not here with us today"(Deut. 29:14). Our covenant
is binding upon unborn generations. We have a choice whether to accept
Torah's ethical teachings or not. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an example of a
man who, after some starts and stops, decided to choose life. He gave up
his own life for the greater good.
As this Selichot holiday approaches, let us determine to do our best to
choose life-affirming actions. Let us work toward tsaddakah (justice) and
chesed (kindness). As the prophet Isaiah says in this week's Haftarah,
"For Zion's sake, I will not be silent, and for Jerusalem's sake I will
not be still, until her righteousness shall go forth like a bright
light"(Is. 62:01).
Let us begin, or continue, by doing good within our
homes, workplaces and synagogues. Let us begin our own Jewish Spiritual Renewal. Let us "beat down the highway, clear it
of stone, and raise a banner over all the peoples" (Is. 62:10) that will
bring about Tikun Olam (repair of the world) speedily in our days.
Amen!
Shabbat Shalom.
RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL
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