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 town we did not capture from them] sixty towns, the whole district of Argov [Og's 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 to the human, and said to him, ayekah [where are 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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