Parshat Devarim

For only og king of the bashan remained

From the rest of the rephaim.

Look, his bedstead, and iron bedstead,

Is it not in rabbah of ammonites?

Nine cubits its length

And four cubits its width by the cubit of a man.

(Devarim 3:11)

 

 

For only Og king of the Bashan - This is the reason the Holy One, blessed be He, told him: "Have no fear of him."

Look, his bedstead - the cradle of an infant child... an iron cradle, because he was very strong, and when he would stretch he would smash a wooden cradle, therefore they made it of iron. [the reason for explaining that it was made for an infant is] because an adult who has intelligence has no need of an iron bed. . Look, it is in Rabbah of the Amonites - it still lies in the place of his childhood so that it arouses amazement at his great size even as an infant, but it is not usual to display an adult bed in a single place, but he has beds in many locations.

(Rashbam ibid., ibid.)

 

For only Og king of the Bashan remained –The first letters of this fragment [in its original Hebrew] form an acrostic - mearah - cave. This is because, as is known, Og is Eliezer (Tractate Sofrim 21, 9), who is stationed at the Me'arat HaMakhpela - the Cave of Makhpela, burial site of the Patriarchs, as is explained in the Talmud (Bava Batra 48a).

(Imre Noam on the Torah, Parashat Devarim)

 

 

Tisha ba'av: what it means to remember

Mordechai Beck

If, as Oscar Wilde is reputed to have observed, "Experience is the name we give to our failures," then Tisha B'Av is the Jewish experience writ large.

On the verse in Ecclesiastes "A time to weep," Rashi observes: "This refers to Tisha B'Av." Though he had a wide range of possibilities - he himself lived in Christian Europe at the beginning of the Crusades - Rashi saw in this day the quintessential nature of Jewish experience. When Jews cry, it is for the destroyed Temple, for an unredeemed world.

Yet why, it may be asked, does the great sage not address here the issue of private loss - of parents, children, a loved one. Why does he prefer to focus on a loss which is abstract, deep in history, distant? Is there no connection between public and private mourning?

Perhaps his view is formed by his sagacious forbears and in contrast to popular sentiment. To mourn in the abstract is initially more complex than to weep for someone we have known, but paradoxically such mourning is far more durable.

The loss of kith or kin fades as all those who knew them succumb themselves to the ravages of time. But the loss of a symbol transcends generations. In the words of Amihai (From: Open, Closed, Open):

Verses for the Day of Remembrance, a song of rememberance

For those who died in war, the generation of rememberers, too, is dying out,

Half in good old age, half in bad old age,

And who will remember the rememberers?

Were something similar to the destruction of the Temple to occur today (and certain parallels come to mind immediately), the response would be obvious - huge media coverage of the dying and the dead, graphic 'footage' of savage destruction, the endless display of human misery on television and in the newspapers. The audience would remain impotent, adding their silence to the anguish of the victims. Yet as with much media coverage its 'shelf-life' is limited - a few weeks, a few days or even hours, until another disaster occurs and the focus switches elsewhere.

By contrast, the Rabbis did not use Tisha B'Av primarily to recall horrors. A number of anecdotes do appear in the Talmud, for example in the Tractate of Gittin which describes the parlous condition of the inhabitants of Jerusalem in the years of siege leading to the destruction. Yet descriptions of war and pillage are far more numerous in the apocryphal Books of the Maccabees and in Josephus' "The Jewish Wars."

Similarly, when the Rabbis sought out an appropriate text for the day, they did not take a contemporary account of the actual events but rather the haunting Book of Lamentations, which is a poetic version of what the prophet Jeremiah witnessed at the destruction of the first temple, centuries before the rabbis flourished. Poetry is a sop against grief; it gives us distance from that which would be otherwise overwhelming. The inspired muse outlasts transitory human pain.

According to Professor David Roskies, this approach was intentional:

I'm convinced the rabbis knew exactly what they were doing. They knew how to select events. Not everything was religiously significant. Many historical narratives had to be eliminated in order to allow the new Rabbinic Judaism to emerge. The sages understood that you couldn't mourn day in and day out. The Karaites donned sackcloth and ashes to bewail the ruins of the Temple. Their act was written out of Rabbinic Judaism, anathematized.

Roskies' books - "Against the Apocalypse," "The Literature of Destruction" and latterly "A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling" - confront the question of what is remembered and what is not, what becomes canonized and what is neglected or forgotten:

The normative system of recording and coding events remained in place until the 19th century; to have lasted over such a long time and through so many dispersions is really an extraordinary feat. Moreover, the repertory of the historical events was expanded very little. If you look at the additions to the kinnot (dirges) for Tisha B'Av, only those referring to the burning of the Talmud in Paris in the 13^th century, the Crusades, or the massacre at LeBois are included insofar as they fit the schema of the day. Elsewhere, events are telescoped and then commemorated on the same date. These are Rabbinic strategies for remembering events, as though they reoccur throughout history. It's a kind of ecology of memory.

But this model breaks down. In the past two centuries many Jews have reacted differently to disaster:

"The first thing the Haskala (Enlightenment) movement did," observes Roskies, "was to challenge the theology of Jewish suffering - that sin and retribution are the driving forces of Jewish history. But then they were confronted with the need to find an alternative: "If it was not from God, where was it from?" The members of the Haskala began to examine the immediate historical context, and document each event on its own terms - to be specific.

Why in 1871, for example, was there a pogrom in Odessa? What could possibly have prompted the non-Jews? Things were going so well, Odessa was the El Dorado of the South. What was the explanation: Was it because Jews were isolated, or because they were so steeped in medievalism that they were easy prey to outside forces? And what was the answer - social revolution, emigration, Zionism? Were these ideological responses only to catastrophes?"

These questions reflect a critical turning point in modern Jewish consciousness. They come to a head in responses to the Holocaust, which many see as eclipsing even the destruction of the Temple.

Even Elie Weisel's first book "Night" ends with a call for revenge: Jews go out in search of Nazis! Yet look what happens. Francois Mauriac compares Weisel to Jesus because he has come from the Kingdom of the Dead, he is a witness. Christian theology turns the Shoah into a mystery. Once it is appropriated by another audience - here, a Christian-French one - it loses is specifically Jewish dimension.

This interpretation of events also influences the Jewish world.

"We make video testaments by old survivors, but they are no substitute for a new liturgy," asserts Roskies.

The "March of the Living" on European soil I call the stations of the cross. Young, sensitive school children are sent to these stations - Maidenek, Auschwitz, etc., then taken to the Kotel - after the suffering comes the resurrection. The Shoah has been turned into something outside history, totally existential.

Yet the alternative, of keeping silent, is also no solution.

"I haven't yet said this in print, " confides Roskies, "but I think it is true that Holocaust-deniers among us are to be found among the Ultra-Orthodox. Their return to pre-Holocaust styles of dress, outward appearance, suggests that the Holocaust didn't really effect us, or our relation to God."

A distant echo of Roskies' concern is hinted at in a story related in the Mishna (Nazir 5;4). A group of diaspora Nazarites reach Jerusalem in order to sacrifice their obligatory offering at the end of their period of vows. When they reach Jerusalem they discover that the Temple is destroyed. Though one sage, Nahum the Mede, excuses their vows, the majority opinion declares that their vows are still binding. How is this possible when it is flagrantly clear that they are unable to expedite their sacrifice without the Temple?

It is similarly related of the 18^th century Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev that every time he wrote a marriage contract, he would declare that the wedding would take place in the restored Jerusalem. But if, by the time of the wedding day, the messiah had not arrived, it would take place in Berdichev!

Thus, too, the Mishna. The Rabbis are not being perverse; rather, their decision may be read as a plea to God: restore our Temple, otherwise how will these pious Nazarites be able to fulfill the vows they made to You!

Tisha B'Av is thus a reminder about the function of Jewish memory, not just for us but for God too. Jewish history is not, as the fashionable feminist critique would have it - His Story - it is also and centrally Our Story, a working through of the covenant to which both sides have obligated themselves to fulfill. Without placing ourselves at the center of this dialogue the meaning we give to our collective existence cannot sustain memory. Without bringing God into our historical equations, memory has little meaning.

Mordechai Beck is a Jerusalem-based artist and writer.

 

Transcription of the torah into seventy tongues

Is an expression of its universal message

"On the other side of the Jordan, in the land of Moab, Moshe undertook to expound this Teaching"

(Devarim 1:5)

 

"To expound this teaching" - he explained it in seventy languages.

(Rashi)

 

"And on those stones you shall inscribe every word of this Teaching, explained well."

(Devarim 27:5)

 

"Explained well" - in seventy tongues.

(Rashi)

 

In the Tractate Sotah (32a), Chazal elucidate "explained well" in line with "Moshe undertook to expound this Teaching". "Explained well", then, teaches that the words must be elucidated and understandable. From this they learned that that copy of the Torah included translation so as to facilitate comprehension by the nations of the world. Israel is far from the particularism attributed it by others; from the outset it saw its mission as bringing spiritual and moral salvation to all humanity. With the entry of the Torah into Eretz Yisrael, future redemption of both Israel and all nations commenced. Yet more. The Talmud (ibid.) teaches that this translation included the reason for the expulsion of the Canaanites tribes: "lest they teach you to do all that ..." - this reason, too, was brought to the attention of these nations, and was repeated and explained in this copy of the Torah, so that this be known and understood by all the nations of Canaan; they can expect expulsion if they persist in their views and their idolatrous ways. If, however, they return to observance of the general mitzvot of humanity, there is no reason to deny them the right to dwell in the land.

(Hirsch, Devarim 27:8)

 

"...but (in the time of) the Second Temple, when they engaged in Torah and mitzvot and good deeds - why was it destroyed? Because there existed baseless hatred, thus teaching us that baseless hatred is comparable to three sins - idolatry, incest, and bloodshed.

(Bavli, Yoma 9b)

 

"...for the Second Temple was destroyed because of baseless hatred, and - because of our many sins - we are still not cleansed of this sin; therefore the son of Yishai has not yet come. The conclusion, then, is that the sins of the First Temple were between man and the Omnipresent, i.e., idolatry, which is the opposite of "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul," and the sin of the Second Temple was between man and his fellow, i.e., baseless hatred, which is the opposite of "You shall love your fellow as yourself."

(Sefer HaShelah, Taanit 57)

 

What is the connection between Parashat Devarim, the Vision of Isaiah, and the Ninth of Av?

Shabbat "Devarim" is "Shabbat Hazzon" the Shabbat of the Vision, the Shabbat preceding the Ninth of Av ...at first blush there would seem to be no connection between this harsh haftara and the parasha itself. The parasha does not deal with destruction, but with building; it is Moshe's summing up of the journey of the Children of Israel on their way to the Land. He recounts all the failures occasioned by the generation of the desert; but despite all these failures, they reached the Land ...they had already conquered the lands of Sihon and Og, converting them into lands of Israel; it is assured that they will conquer all the land and will replace the earlier inhabitants, and the land will be an inheritance for them. 

One gets the impression that the people will inherit the land, and that others will make way for them, regardless of Israel's character, its behavior, and its actions. This would seem to be something new in history. The words are quite explicit: "Behold, I have given you the land ...come and inherit the land which God swore to Avraham, Yitzhak, and Yaakov, and to their descendants after them."

But let us consider: Amidst all these words which imply a uniqueness of the Jewish people in terms of its God-decreed historical destiny, there are references to other nations, to neighbors of the Jewish people and their lands, including nations which are Israel's historical enemies. This is quite surprising, for it would seem that there is no direct connection to the matter of the giving over the Land of Canaan to the Jewish people. With regard to Edomites: "Do not stir yourselves up against them, for I will not give you of their land so much as the sole of a foot can tread on, for as a possession to Esav I gave the hill-country of Se'ir." The same terms of inheritance or dispossession appears in reference to another nation, one which is not only the Israelite nation, but is actually its enemy...

And just like in the case of Israel's displacing of the Canaanites, we are told that in that in the very same land which is today the Land of Moab, there once dwelt the Emites, and they were destroyed by the Moabites...

What is the significance of all the accounts of other nations' histories, of conquests and displacements at the hands of others? It is to teach us that Israel's uniqueness lies not in historical events. All human history - that of the Jewish people and that of all other nations of the world - is either totally the natural course of events, or is totally divinely determined. If there is something unique about the Jewish people, it lies not the conquest of the Land nor in its settlement, nor in its displacement of other nations - it lies in its obligations within this land, in the responsibilities imposed upon it and not upon other nations. God also displaced other peoples to give the nations their land. Therefore there lies deep significance in the fact that these matters are read on Shabbat Hazon, before Tisha B'Av.

(Leibovitz, Remarks on the Weekly Parasha, pp. 111-112)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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