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And it shall be, if you indeed heed my commands
with which I charge you today
to love the Lord your God and to worship Him
with all your heart and with all your being
I will give you the rain or your land in its seasons
early rains and late,
and you shall gather in your grain and your wine and your oil...
Watch yourselves lest your heart be seduced and you
swerve
and worship other gods and bow to them.
(Devarim
11:13-16)
And I will give the rain of your land in its time - In the proper time for sowing and when you
find in it satisfaction, and so explained our Sages (Taanit
22b) "And I will give
you rains of your land in its seasons" - neither overly-saturated nor
thirsty but middling, for when the rains are heavy, the land becomes muddied
the earth and does not produce fruits. Another explanation of "in its
seasons" - on Wednesday nights and Shabbat nights., in the days of
Rabbi Shimon ben Shetach
rain would fall on Wednesday night and Shabbat night until wheat kernels
reached the size of kidneys, and barley kernels reached the size of olives, and
lentils like gold dinari, and the sages drew analogies
for future generations to illustrate how much sin can cause, as is written (Yirmeyahu
5:25) " It is your
inequities that have diverted these things, your sins that have withheld the
bounty from you" and so we find that during Herod's reign, while the
Temple was under construction, rain fell only at night, on the morrow the winds
blew and the clouds scattered, and the sun shined, and they would wake up and go
out to work, to declare that they were doing the work of Heaven.
And you shall gather in your
grain and your wine - Our Sages homiletically interpreted (Berachot 35b), But is it not written (Joshua 1:8) "Let not the Book of the Teaching
cease from your lips"?, But, follow the usual custom of the land, a
time for this and a time for this, it is good that you hold on to this, but
do not neglect the other.
(Rabbeinu Behayey, Devarim
11:14)
Sum up what we have said concerning beliefs as follows: In some cases a
commandment communicates a correct belief, which is the one and only thing
aimed at - as, for instance, the belief in the unity and eternity of the deity
and in His not being a body. In other cases the belief is necessary for the
abolition of reciprocal wrongdoing or for the acquisition of a noble moral
quality - as, for instance, the belief that He, may He be exalted, has a
violent anger against those who do injustice, according to what is said: And
My wrath shall wax hot, and I will kill, and so on, and as the belief that
He, may He be exalted, responds instantaneously to the prayer of someone wronged
or deceived: And it shall come to pass, when he crieth
unto Me, that I will hear; for I am gracious.
(Rambam, The Guide
of the Perplexed III:28)
Not by might, nor by power,but by my spirit
Dedicated to our daughter Naama
and to Shachar,
in
honor of their marriage.
May they merit building a true Jewish home
within a just and peace loving Israeli society.
The renewal of Jewish settlement in Eretz Yisrael, and even more so,
the existence of the State of Israel, presented the Jewish people once again
with the need to employ force (excepting, of course,
the armed rising in the ghettoes during the Shoah).
The establishment of the State in a region partially populated earlier by
another people - in contrast to one of the misleading statements attributed to
Lord Balfour: 'A land without a people for a people with-out a land' - created
a situation of national conflict which, through the years, developed into a
violent conflict yet to be concluded,.
It is interesting, in this context, to note
that the chareidi (ultra-Orthodox) rabbinate objected
to the Zionist Movement and the establishment of the State of Israel prior to
the coming of the Messiah. The sharpest formulation of this approach was penned
by the Rabbi of Satmar, Rabbi Yoel
Teitlebaum, mainly in his book "Vayoel Moshe" and in the essay published after the Six
Day War "Al Hageulah V'al
Hatemura." In his writings, primarily in "Vayoel Moshe", the rabbi bases his firm opposition to
Zionism on the "Three Oaths" midrash
which he reads as halachic law negating struggle for
establishment of a Jewish state. The midrash
is based upon three passages in The Song of Songs:
I adjure you, O maidens of
I adjure you, O maidens of Jerussalem,
by gazelles or by hinds of the field, do not wake or rouse love until it
please.
I adjure you, O maidens of
This midrash
is built upon the traditional interpretation of The Song of Songs, which reads
the scroll as a metaphor for the relation between the Holy One and the
Congregation of Israel.
What are these three oaths?
One - That
And one - that the Holy one
adjures
And one - that the Holy One adjures the idolaters
not to oppress
Rabbis and religious thinkers who supported
Zionism - or at least did not oppose it on theological grounds - coped with the
Satmar Rabbi's theological arguments in various ways,
Some saw the "three oaths" as aggadic texts without halachic significance.
Others argued that the oaths have already been voided, because the nations of
the world have already violated them. And there were also rabbis who
interpreted "not to rise up on the wall" as not building a
A group called "Brit Shalom", a
movement established in 1925 by Jewish intellectuals, even sought to create co-existence
between Jews and Arabs by relinquishing the right to set up a national homeland
for Jews in the
Even Rabbi Aaron Shmuel
Timrat (1890-1931), who was a proponent of spiritual
Zionism and a critic of political Zionism and an especially acute opponent of
the glorification of force, pointed to the spiritual danger lurking for the Jewish
people:
How great the pain! How terrible the loss! If
there was a single nation in the world, Knesset Yisrael,
which longed for the vision of Isaiah: "No nation will lift a sword to another
nation" - along come our "Balfourian young
men [In the Hebrew original 'avreichim Balfouriim' - a caustic reference to Yeshiva students -
Trans,] and they dishonor that too... for the sword has not left the nations'
hand for a second, and they are sunk in battles and skirmishes from generation
to generation. The force of inertia pushes them to war. But that Jews should
suddenly crave the beauty of "the warrior's hip' wearing a sword - they
are degrading the prophet Isaiah with raised arm" (Timrat:
Three Unethical Matches, p.
40, in: Holzer, E., A Double Edged Sword: Military Activism in
Religious Zionism. The Judaism and
I do not intend, within the framework of this
dvar Torah, to examine the arguments of
the opponents of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel in a historical
perspective; the State of Israel is an existing fact and for this we bless the
Lord, but there is no doubt that these currents within Jewish thought raised
moral dilemmas to the surface, and it seems that we cannot ignore them.
Our parasha can
prove an interesting lab for testing to what degree the Torah cautions us
against the ethical dangers awaiting us upon our entering the
This stern statement identifies the position
of "my strength and the power of my hand" with "and you will
forget the Lord your God". This position leads the Jewish people to
destruction and its fate will be no different from that of the residents of the
idolatrous residents of the land. Further on, Moshe points to an additional danger
awaiting the people upon its entry into the land (Devarim 9:4-5):
Do not say in your heart when the Lord your
God drives them back before you, saying,
"Through my merit did the Lord bring me to take hold of this land and
through the wickedness of these
nations is the Lord dispossessing them before you. Not through
your merit nor through your heart's rightness do you come to take
hold of their land but through the wickedness of these nations is the Lord our
God dispossessing them before you and in order to fulfill the word that the
Lord swore to your fathers to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.
An Israelite nation entering the promised land, when other nations have been evicted because
of their sins, is liable to deceive itself and think "It will not happen
to us", because we are better. In these passages, our teacher Moshe
warns the people against this dangerous illusion: You are not better;
the natives were expelled because of their behavior, the land was given to you
because the Holy one entered into a covenant with the Patriarchs, but Eretz Yisrael, a land "where
the eyes of the Lord your God are upon it" is sensitive to the behavior of
all who dwell upon it, it vomits the evildoers, and if you behave as did your
predecessors, your fate will be similar to theirs.
Some might say: These words were said by our
teacher Moshe for his particular time, in the context of a final testament of a
leader aware of what will happen in a future not under his control, There is no
doubt that the admonitions in the Book of Devarim
reflect, on a human and literary level, the understandable concern of a leader
who knows that his time has passed; there is much pain in these chapters, and
many midrashim describe Moshe's difficulty in
accepting death and the fact that he will not enter the Land of Israel.
But are we to be content with this literary
and psychological reading, seeing in these words only the story of Moshe and
his generation? It seems to me that we can apply some of Moshe's concerns and
his warnings to every historical situation that a nation exiled from its land
has to cope with when establishing a sovereign and independent society on its
land, with new challenges and dilemmas not faced "in the desert". A
condition of plenty and wellbeing are liable to be taken for granted; accomplishments
in various fields (security, science, tech-nology,
sport, economics) are liable to engender moral blindness. After the Six Day War
- and the many songs of victory are testimony to this - the sense of power-intoxication
grew, and somehow many of our leaders - and not necessarily the less
intelligent among them - believed that "time works in our favor". Many
of our leaders and not inconsiderable segments of the nation understood sooner
or later that this illusion is rooted in "my strength and the power of my
hand." Sadly, this faith that all our problems can be solved by the
employment of force and that "what doesn't work with force will work with
more force' is still found among some of us. Even the Second Lebanon War did
not succeed in arousing some degree of doubt regarding the limits of power. Even
more - the statement "in my merit did the Lord bring me" is liable to
instill in us the feeling that we are always right in whatever we do. This
feeling sometimes blinds us to the inequities done by us as a result of this
arrogance.
Rav Kook was also aware of the moral and
spiritual danger hidden in the return to "world politics":
We left world politics due to coercion, which
contained inner desire, until the arrival of a fortuitous hour, when it will be
possible to lead a kingdom without wickedness and barbarism; this is the time
for which we hope. It is understood that in order to realize it, we must awaken
with all our forces, to utilize all means which the hour provides, all
controlled by the hand of God, creator of all worlds. But the delay is a necessary
one; our soul is disgusted by terrible sins of government in bad times. Now the
time has come, very close, that the world will be established, and we can
already prepare ourselves, for we can already administer our kingdom on
foundations of goodness, wisdom, justice and clear divine enlightenment. Yaakov
sent Esav: 'Pray let my lord cross on ahead of his
servant' - it is not advantageous for Yaakov to engage in government at a
time when it must be bloody, when it demands the capacity for evil. Of
necessity we received only the basis for establishment of a nation, and once
the stock reached maturity we were denied rule, we were dispersed among the
nations, we were sowed in the depths of the earth, until (such time as) "The
blossoms have appeared in the land, the time of pruning has come; the song of
the turtledove is heard in our land." (Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak HaCohen
Kook, Orot p.13)
Has the time come to forgo the enlightened
use of power in the face of realistic security threats? Unfortunately, this
time has yet to arrive, but it does seem to me that at "age 64" we
cannot and perhaps we even must not allow ourselves to ignore the essential
moral dilemmas, to differentiate between the judicious use of certain methods
without glorifying them and converting them into an ideal, as in the words of
the prophet Zachariah (4:6):
This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel: Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit - said the Lord of Hosts.
Rabbi Abraham Ibn
Ezra explained: Not by might, nor by power - As I saw the oil, made without
human assistance and burning, so will the Temple be rebuilt, not by Zerubbabel's great might nor by his power, but by the
spirit of God and His assistance.
Pinchas Leiser, editor of Shabbat
Shalom, is a psychologist
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
shall surely destroy them." Whoever has the opportunity
to kill one of them but does not do so transgresses a negative precept, as is
written: "You shall let no breathing creature live" - 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)
"He will hear the cry of the poor and
save him"
Who does justice:
Although He is lofty, He does justice for the orphan and the widow for there is none who aids them,
as in the expression Father of
orphans (Psalms
68:6). And so too regarding the stranger - He provides for him when he
depends on Him; and since the Lord loves the stranger, you are [also] required to love him.
(Ibn Ezra Devarim 10:18)
And place these, My words upon your
hearts
Next to your
hearts, as in the verse and place it as a cover with it upon the
(Hizkuni Devarim 11:18)
Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotzk used to say: Why is it written upon your
hearts and not in your hearts? Because sometimes the heart
is closed up and cannot open itself to certain words, so in the meantime they
shall rest upon your hearts, so that one day, when the heart
opens up, they will be able to enter...
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