ONLY OG KING OF BASHAN WAS LEFT OF THE REMAINING REFAIM. HIS

BEDSTEAD, AN IRON BEDSTEAD, IN NOW IN RABBAH OF THE AMMONITES; IT IS NINE

CUBITS LONG AND FOUR CUBITS WIDE, BY THE FORE-ARM OF A MAN.

(Devarim 3:11)

An iron

bedstead – When

he was young he was very strong and when he lay down he would break a wooden

bedstead. That is why they made it out of iron. But a sensible grown up man would

not need it.

(RaShBaM ad loc)

Not with power

but with My Spirit

And Jacob blessed Pharaoh – Og was there at the time, and Pharaoh said to him:

Didn't you used to say, "Abraham is a sterile mule and cannot reproduce"?

Here are his grandson and seventy of his descendants!

At that moment, Og

gave him the evil eye… Moses started to be afraid, so the Holy One blessed be He revealed Himself to him, and told him: You are afraid

of Og, of whom it is written, his bedstead, and

iron bedstead – why do you care? He is like the grass [k'yerek

eisev]: just as there is nothing [to be afraid

of] in grass, so too there is nothing to him. Of that which is written, Only [ki rak] Og, King of Bashan: do not read it Only [ki

rak], but rather, like the grass [k'yerek].

When Moses saw him, he was afraid; he saw that he was nine

cubits tall and four cubits wide. The Holy One blessed be

He said to him: He is nothing, do not be afraid of him! Why does Scripture have

to say, [We captured all of his towns at that time, there was not a single

kingdom in the Bashan]? In order to tell us of

God's miracles: they had a great populace, and if they would have had to enter

every town to make war, they would not have gotten out for an entire year…Only

Og, why did he live so long? Because he brought

word to Abraham, as it is written, a fugitive came and told Abram the Hebrew…

(Yalkut Shimoni Devarim 810)

Eikhah and

Eikhah

Avigdor Shinan

The word eikhah [how?] appears five times in the

Torah, all of them in the book of Devarim:

How

can I bear unaided

the trouble of you, and the burden, and the bickering (1:12); When you say in your heart, "These

nations are more numerous than I, how will I be able to inherit them"

(7:17); lest you seek out their gods

saying, "How do these people worship their

gods? (12:30);

and when you say in your heart, "How shall we recognize a word as

not having been spoken by the Lord? (18:21);

How

could one chase a thousand, and two make ten-thousand flee? (32:30).

It follows that this word

belongs to the special vocabulary of the book of the Torah that we begin

reading this week. Is it mere happenstance that that we always read parashat Devarim – in which the

word eikhah first appears in the Torah – on

the Shabbat before Tisha B'Av?

I do not know, but in any case, the decision to chose the haftorah

for parashat Devarim – the

first of the three haftarot of calamity – from the

Book of Isaiah, which includes the phrase How [eikhah]

did the loyal city become a harlot (1:21), that was certainly deliberate. And

so the three instances of eikhah join

together. This year, when the Meggilat Eikhah is read Saturday night, we shall hear the three of

them within the space of a few hours.

It seems that one instance of

the word eikhah is not comparable to the next.

While the lamenting eikhah of the Meggilah is also found in Isaiah's harsh rebuke, which condemns

Jerusalem's moral decline: Your rulers are rogues, and cronies of thieves,

every one avid for presents and greedy for gifts, etc., Moses' address to

the people does not sound recriminating at all. He explains that it was

necessary to set up a legal system because the nation had grown so large: and

today you are as numerous as the stars of heaven (1:10), implying a bountiful blessing.

Indeed the midrash discerns

a great difference between the two instances of eikhah:

Three prophesized

with the term eichah,

Moses,

Isaiah, and Jeremiah.

Moses said: How can I bear unaided etc

(Devarim1). Isaiah (1) said: How

has she become a harlot, Jeremiah

said: How does the city sit lonely. Rabbi Levi said: This can be

compared to a matron who had three close companions; one knew her in her

tranquility, the second in her wantonness, and third in her shame. So Moses saw

Israel in their time of honor and tranquility, and said, How can I bear

unaided the trouble of you. Isaiah saw them in their time of

wantonness, and said, How has she has become a harlot. Jeremiah saw them

in their time of disgrace, and said, How does the city sit lonely. (Eicha Rabba, Parasha

1)

The matron, as is customary in

the Sages' parables, is Knesset Yisrael, wife of the Holy One blessed be He. The

companions – those who accompanied her to the bridal canopy and remained her

close friends – are three prophets. The first of these, Moses, saw Knesset Yisrael in her tranquility – in her moment of glory and

greatness. It therefore seems inappropriate to this understanding of the verse

for us to read Moses' words to the tune of Meggilat Eikhah. If parashat Devarim was not read before Tisha

B'Av, the custom might be pointless.

The four letters of the word eikhah appear in one other place in the Torah,

albeit with a different vocalization (it should be mentioned that although the

system of vocalization points had yet to be developed in the days of the Sages,

they certainly possessed traditions regarding the proper reading of the Torah).

It occurs in the book of Bereishit (3:9): And the Lord God called out

you]? If we demur from the literal meaning of the passage (a

straight-forward question regarding the location of the hiding person) or as a

formal introduction to a dialogue (as many read it, including Rashi: "God knew where he was, but wanted to engage

him in speech"), we may then read it as an expression of sorrow over the

plight of the human, who had fallen from a great height to lowly depths, a kind

of lamentation of humanity's degraded condition. Such an understanding of the

verse may be found in Eikhah Rabbah:

R. Abahu began: They as a man [k'adam], transgressed the covenant (Hosea 6) – this refers to Adam. The Holy One blessed be He

said: I placed Adam in the Garden of Eden, and commanded him, but he

transgressed my command, and I sentenced him to be expelled and sent-out, and I

made a lamentation over him, for it is said, and the Lord God took the human

and placed him in the Garden of Eden (Bereishit 2), and He commanded him, for it is said and

the Lord God commanded the human, saying, etc. and he transgressed the

command, for it is said have you eaten from the tree I commanded you not to

eat from? And I sentenced him to expulsion, for it is said, and He

expelled the human, and I sentenced him to being sent out, as it is said,

and He sent him out of the Garden of Eden, and I said a lamentation over him,

for it is said, and said to him, ayekah [where

are you] – which is written like eikhah.

I also entered his children into the Land, for it is said, and I brought

you to the land of the Carmel (Jeremiah 2),

and I commanded them, for it is said, command the Israelites (Vayikra 24), and

they transgressed My commands, for it is said, and all of Israel

transgressed Your Torah (Daniel 9),

and I sentenced them to expulsion, for it is said, I shall expel them from

My house (Hoshea

9), and I sentenced them to being sent out, for it is said, send them

from My presence and let them go forth (Jeremiah

15), and I lamented over them, How does the city sit lonely. (Petihata

4)

R. Abahu, an amora of Eretz Yisrael, creates a surprising and impressive analogy

between the private story of Adam in the Garden of Eden and the collective

history of the Jewish People, which transgressed the covenant as one man.

While connecting the Eden narrative with later historical events, alluding to

the destruction of both Temples, we find in every case a pattern of settlement

in a goodly place, followed by command and sin, expulsion and being sent out,

and finally lamentation. The most surprising thing is that just as the Holy One

blessed be He used the eikhah in His lament

for Adam (according to the midrash), He also lamented

His people with the word eikhah. Thus, the

opening words of the Meggilah become God's words, as

he laments the deeds of his creatures who did not live up to His expectations,

who learned nothing from their first father, and suffered grievously for it. The

celebrated cliché, "The only thing learnt from history is that no

one ever learns anything from it," finds clear expression here. The

possibility of connecting it with other periods of exile is almost

self-evident, certainly within a religious context based upon the belief that "everything

is in the hands of Heaven" and "All that God does is for the best."

Despite the midrash's critical and lamenting character, it also

offers some consolation. It s consoling to know that God is the One Who

laments, revealing solidarity with His people and distress at their plight. It

is even more consoling once we take into account the way that the story of Adam

and Eve continues. After being expelled from the Garden of Eden, Adam makes

love to his wife, Eve. Children are born to them. The generations continue,

albeit outside of the Garden, living a limited existence of hard work and

painful births. However, they were spared total destruction. Thus explains R. Abahu to his generation, following the great destruction of

the Second Temple and the stinging failure of the Bar Kokhba

rebellion: We have sinned and have been punished, we have been expelled and

sent out, but the fact that we are lamented by none other than Our Father in

Heaven, the fact that we are like Adam, who continued and did not despair,

guarantees us continuation and hope rather than futility or despair.

There is an eikhah

of bounty and an eikhah of lamentation, and it

is right to distinguish between them. Most importantly – there is be

consoled, consoled My people after How does she

sit alone?

Prof. Shenan

teaches in the department of Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University in

Jerusalem.

Bein Ha'Metzarim – Bein Ha'Metzeirim (Amongst those who suffer)

Shmuel Reiner

The tale of Kamtza

and Bar Kamtza (Gittin 55b) is THE story of the period of Bein Ha'Metzarim. At the core of

the story we find an anonymous powerful man who shows disregard for the

suffering of the weak, named man. The un-named character of the householder,

Bar Kamtza's opponent, serves as a warning sign to us

all. Each and every one of us could find himself behaving in a similarly cruel

fashion.

In these days we are called upon to return

to his story and explicate its significance. We now draw near to a head-on

conflict between two sides which disagree with each other regarding the

question of the State of Israel's future identity. Some see place as being

central to that identity – the Land and its settlement, while others view the

social fabric as being central, and are fearful for Israel's future as a Jewish

and democratic state. Unlike other disagreements, in which we may say, "Both

these and these are the words of the living God," (Eruvin

13b), this serious issue

requires an unambiguous resolution, and its practical implications are

immediate. To my mind, there is no room for compromise: our continued presence

in the Gaza district makes it very difficult for Israel to be run in a

democratic fashion, and threatens its future as a state enjoying a significant Jewish

majority.

However, numerical majority is not the only

important thing. This majority must express cultural qualities of love between

Jews, in the spirit of the Sage's remark, "There are three things that

characterize this nation: they are merciful, bashful, and do works of kindness"

(Yevamot 79a).

A Jewish society is a society that knows how to preserve solidarity in times of

deep disagreement, a solidarity that allows all views to co-exist. At this time

we must make heard a conciliatory voice towards those expelled from their homes,

towards those whose dream has been crushed. We must say to the people of Gush Katif and to their many supporters: true, we disagreed with

your choice to live in Gush Katif, near Gaza. However,

your work was not for nothing. You built illustrious communities that dealt

with the central social questions facing Israeli society: religious communities,

which were productive and humanely sensitive and which can be held up as models

for emulation by the various sectors of the public. Israeli society is in great

need of you in the "day after" – in Nitzan

or anywhere else. Now you are being called to mobilize for the next stage of

Zionism – the building of society.

There are large groups among those who

support the disengagement who say – or who think – that Gush Katif was a mistake from the start, born of sin. These

kinds of statements deepen the rift and strengthen the pain. A person who is

expelled from his home certainly asks himself what the point was of all his

work in the place he is being forced to leave. We must ask him to stay with us,

in our own place.

We must look upon the past with a

conciliatory gaze, and concentrate on the building performed by the settlers

and their contributions to Israeli society. A conciliatory gaze upon the past

is the key to a constructive view of the future. At this time our role is to

embrace, to give relief, to honor, and to find value in the work of years that

is lost as those who performed that work look on.

That which you do – that is beyond the letter of the law. As

R. Yohanan said: Jerusalem was destroyed for no other

reason than that they judged there according to the laws of the Torah. [One

might ask:] Should they have made arbitrary decisions (Rashi:"[creating]

suffering and [applying] force") instead? Say rather: They based their

decisions upon the laws of the Torah, but they did not go beyond the letter of

the law. (Bava Metziya 30b)

Rabbi Shemuel Reiner is a Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat

HaKibbutz HaDati at Ma'alei Ha'Gilboa

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