FOR THE LORD YOUR GOD,

HE IS THE GOD OF GODS AND THE LORD OF LORDS,

THE GOD GREAT, POWERFUL, AND AWE-INSPIRING,

HE WHO LIFTS UP NO FACE IN FAVOR AND TAKES NO BRIBE, PROVIDING JUSTICE FOR ORPHAN AND WIDOW,

LOVING THE SOJOURNER, BY GIVING HIM FOOD AND CLOTHING.

SO ARE YOU TO LOVE THE SOJOURNER,

FOR STRANGERS WERE YOU IN THE LAND OF EGYPT.

(Devarim 10:18)

 

 

"So are you to love the sojourner, for sojourners were you in the land of Egypt"- the lessons to be learned from the exile.

"So are you to love the sojourner"

Resemble God in love of the stranger who accompanies you from alien lands; by your acceptance of the stranger you will realize that pure humanity is the supreme quality in your view. Equality before the law and the love with which Israel relates to the stranger characterize the nation and the Land as the Nation of God and the Land of God. In other circles, man's status depends upon his ancestry and his property; in the Nation of God and the Land of God only pure humanity, subservient to God, determines the status of man.

  (Rabbi Shimshon Rafael Hirsch, Devarim 10:19)

 

 

"For you were strangers" - All of your misfortune in Egypt was that you were "strangers" there; as such, local custom denied you land, birthplace, livlihood; the natives were free to do with you as they saw fit. As strangers, you were denied rights in Egypt, and this was the root of the servitude and the persecution you underwent. Therefore, watch yourselves - this is the terminology of the admonition - lest you establish human rights in your state on any foundation other than pure humanitarianism, which rests in the heart of every man as a man. Any depravation of human rights will open the door to arbitrariness and to abuse of man - this is the root of the abomination of Egypt.

                                                                                  (Rabbi Shimshon Rafael Hirsch, Shemot 22:20)

 

 

 

OTHER GODS

Ariel Rothaus

 

The parasha of "And if you will heed" which appears at the end of the sidra of "Ekev" presents in clear terms - just like the opening of the following sidra, "Re'eh", - the demand to chose between two paths: To heed the commandments of God and merit His blessings - rain, the early and the late rain - or to stray from the straight path and to be banished from the good land.

The sin which leads to banishment is the failure to withstand the temptation of idolatry: "Be careful lest your heart be seduced, so that you turn aside and serve other gods and prostrate yourselves to them" (Devarim 11:16). This verse, familiar to us all, would seem to need no elaboration; it warns, in simple language, against the dangers of idol worship. But even though the phrase "and serve other gods" is crystal clear in view of the monotheistic view of the Torah and its struggle against idolatry, it nonetheless attracted the attention of the Sages and was subject to homiletic interpretation (droosh) inside and out, in sundry and peculiar ways. Here are some of the derashot found in the "Sifri":

"And serve other gods" - are they, then, really gods? Is it not written: "And burn their gods in fire, for they are not gods" (Isaiah 37:19); why, then, are they called "other gods"? Because they delay the good from coming into the world. (The word "acher" can mean "other", delay", and "be late") An alternate explanation: "Other gods" - they turn their worshippers into strangers. Another explanation: "Other gods" - meaning others consider them to be gods. Another explanation: They are strangers to their worshippers, as is written: "If they cry out to it, it does not answer; it cannot save them from their distress" (Isaiah 46:7) [Sifri, Ekev 11, Piska 43, Finklestein edition, New York, 5729]

It appears that the point of departure of this excerpt from the Sifri (which continues to bring more explications to the verse) is the fear of possible comparison between The Holy One, Blessed Be He, and idols. Idolaters could have understood "other gods" as recognition that idols are in some way similar to The Holy One, Blessed Be He, that these "others", belong to that same category of supernatural, supreme beings, in short - partners with the divinity. Therefore the multiplicity of d'rashot which explain the word "others" in different ways, far from the simple p'shat, all sharing a common purpose - the prevention of that ugly equation. So does Rashi, in his explication of "You are not to have any other gods before my presence", justify the wrenching of the text from its plain meaning: "There can be no other way to explain "other gods" , for to attribute to them divinity is to insult the Almighty".

Among the derashot quoted above, two stand out - their wording is similar, but their perspectives are contradictory, to the point where it might be said that a dialectic contradiction ties them together: "They are strangers to their worshippers" (droosh number four), as against "They turn their worshippers into strangers" (the second droosh).

The expression "gods which are strangers to their worshippers," as a homiletic elaboration of "other gods", is familiar to us from Rashi's commentary on Devarim 11:16 (and earlier in his commentary on Shemot 20:3, but there it appears as an alternate explanation). Naturally we tend to relate this expression - which presents the false gods as being strangers to their worshippers because they lack power to fulfill their requests - to the fierce and dramatic struggles against idolatry described it the Bible. We vividly recall the powerful scene of Eliyahu taunting the prophets of the Baal on Mt. Carmel. The prophets wound themselves with swords and daggers "until blood is spilled on them" (I Kings, 18:28) hoping in vain to merit an answer from their gods. It is possible, however, that the polemical target is not the rituals of idolatry in its primitive, instinctual form, but a different - a much higher and more rational - kind of relation of alienation between god and man, one derived from acceptance of philosophical views of the alien world. Greek philosophical thought developed a abstract concept of the divinity, one which did not encourage an emotional and personal tie between the human and the divine. The apex of the tendency to alienation is to be found in the teachings of Epicurus, who did not deny the existence of the gods, but thought that they are disinterested in humans, and totally indifferent to their fate. It is therefore not unfeasible that the ‘gods who are strangers to their worshippers' are not Baal and Ashtoret or Zeus and Hera, but the gods which are perceived in an intellectual-rational manner alone and/or those who are totally alien to man - the gods of the philosophers.

A different form of alienation is alluded to by the second homiletic statement "gods who turn their worshippers into strangers." This droosh is problematic and forced from a linguistic point of view, but incomparably penetrating from an ideological aspect.

The commentator on the Sifri, R' Moshe Avraham Troyes Ashkenazi, writes that the meaning of the phrase is that idolatry totally excludes the sinner from the ranks of Israel: "This is the meaning of the phrase ‘they turn their worshippers into strangers" - they will be set apart even from their children and will not be a partner even in the Israelite nation" (Toldot Adam, on Sifri, ibid.)

The Netziv explained the expression as follows: "They turn their followers into strangers' - Strangers to The Holy One, Blessed Be He, as though they were not those who were designed and created by God" (Emek HaNetziv on Sifri, ibid.). The alienation created by idolatry is not between the Jew and all of Israel, but between the Jew and his Creator. In this aspect, the phrase is the complete opposite of the one discussed above. There the gods alienate themselves from their subjects; here the idol worThere is in this phrase, however, another aspect not mentioned in either of the two explanations, one which opens a possibility for an explanation slightly different from the phrase itself. This aspect is the relationship between the idolaters - whom the darshan terms "strangers" - to Elisha ben Abuya, who was called "Acher" [the other] by the Sages. That errant scholar who is engraved in Israel's collective memory as the archetype of the true heretic, the person who crosses all the lines and all the boundaries. The reason for this designation is related in the Talmud:

He went out and he found a harlot, and propositioned her. She said to him: "Are you not Elisha ben Abuya?" He pulled a radish out of the garden on Shabbat and gave it to her. Said she: "He is someone else [acher]. (Bavli, Haggigah 15a).

 This story describes a different type of alienation, one caused by deviation from the ways of the Torah: Man's alienation from himself. By extracting the radish on Shabbat, not only did Elisha ben Abuya desecrate the Shabbat, he also executed a symbolic act of complete severance from the roots. In this way he turns back to all his past and to all the good which The Holy One, Blessed Be He, had implanted in him; he makes himself - using the phraseology of the Netziv - as though "it was not him who was designed and created by God." And just as in the story Elisha becomes, in the words of the harlot, "Acher" - someone else - mainly in relation to himself, a traitor to his spiritual mission, so can we say that the phrase under discussion alludes to a similar betrayal. Not only does idolatry have an aspect of infidelity to God, it also is expressed by Israel's denial of its own character, its renunciation of the good which The Holy One, Blessed Be He, implanted in Israel from birth, its abandonment of the spiritual mission which he was to have realized. A Israelite nation which worships other gods loses, first and foremost, its self, just as Elisha lost his self.

The lesson which may be derived from the droosh in the "Sifri" is relevant, then, to every generation; it seems germane especially to our generation. It is difficult to say exactly which type of idolatry we practice today in Eretz Yisrael, but there is no doubt that we have become "others", that we have betrayed our mission, that we have uprooted many radishes on Shabbat.

Of course, each one of us has a different image of "Yisrael Sabba" -"Grandfather Israel" (A term indicating the true, authentic Jew of old.) - by which he defines betrayal of mission. Some think that "Yisrael Sabba" is the ghetto-dweller, others identify him as one who fought to the death at Matsada; according to our chosen image, we bemoans the loss of the path in our times.

Whoever thinks, however, that the statement of the Talmud "This nation has three identifying signs - the merciful, the shy, and those who do good deeds" (Bavli, Yevamot 79a) presents the ideal character of the historical Jewish nation and its preferred mission in our time, will certainly conclude that that the loss of direction lies in the extreme deviation of our society from this paradigm. We live in a society in which those identifying signs of "Yisrael Sabba" are becoming increasingly blurred, in our relations with our neighbors, in internal relations between different groups within the nation, and in our relations with the stranger who lives in our midst. The power principle has replaced mercy and chessed, with brazen insolence and without shame.

We can only hope that we will know how to free ourselves from the evil winds which blow in our land, and we shall return to serve the God of Truth, so that we will no longer be "others", but, once again, our true selves.

Dr. Ariel Rathaus is a literary researcher and a translator.

 

 

"You shall devour all the peoples... Your eye is not to take pity upon them": The Mitzvah and Its Implementation

Initially the king is to wage only a war of mitzvah, and what is a war of mitzvah? This is the war against the seven nations, etc...

(Rambam, Laws of Kings, 5:1)

 

It is a mitzvah to devote the seven nations to destruction, as is written: "You are to devote them to destruction, yes, destruction." Whoever has the opportunity to kill one of them but does not do so transgresses a negative precept, as is written: "You are not leave alive any breath" - and their memory is no more.

(Rambam, ibid. 5:4)

 

... Values have worth and weight only in proportion to the difficulty by which they are attained and the ease by which they are lost. This is the true religious and moral meaning of our national revival and of the return of the possibility of use of power to our hands. Now we are being tested, to see whether we are able not only to suffer for those values we proudly profess, but also to live according to them. It is easy to endure physical and material suffering for values, even to sacrifice life; this demands only physical courage, and this is found in surprisingly large degree in every human society. It is difficult to suffer for the sake of values, when this suffering means conceding things which are considered to be positive values - just needs and interests of the collective. The moral problem exists only when there is a clash between the Good Inclination and the Good Inclination; the eradication of the Evil Inclination by the Good Inclination is difficult, but it is not problematic.

Very undemanding - and therefore also cheap and pathetic - is morality which has reservations about acts of violence and bloodshed when this morality is not accompanied by the responsibility for issues and values for which - or in whose name - these acts are perpetrated and this blood is spilled. Before the establishment of our State, we witnessed in our camp highly moralistic persons, who came to Eretz Yisrael against the will of the Arabs, and lived and worked there under the protection of the bayonets of the British and the pistols of the Haganah, but the right of aliya for other Jews was made conditional upon the consent of the Arabs; aliya by force - without consent of the Arabs - they condemned as immoral...

In our religious-ethical soul-reckoning, we do not justify nor do we apologize over the spilling of blood during war (when more of our blood is spilled than of our enemies). The big problem arises with regard to the manner in which the war - which continues till this day - is conducted, and with regard to what happens after this war. The problem is immense and difficult: Since permission was granted to employ "the profession of Esav" - the distinctions between permitted and forbidden, between the justified and the improper, are very fine - just like that "Handbreadth between Gan Eden and Hell", and we are obliged to scrutinize and examine whether or not we have breached these partitions.

(Y. Leibowitz: "After Kibiya", 1953, from "Torah and Mitzvoth in Our Time", pp.168-170)