GOD WILL OPEN FOR
YOU HIS GOODLY TREASURIES, THE HEAVENS, BY GIVING THE RAIN OF YOUR LAND IN ITS
SET-TIME, AND BY BLESSING ALL THE DOINGS OF YOUR HAND; YOU WILL LEND TO MANY
NATIONS, BUT YOU YOURSELF WILL NOT HAVE TO TAKE A LOAN.
(Devarim
28:12)
And what is the meaning of "I
shall be that which I shall be?" Just as you are with me, so am I with
you. If they open their hands and do charity, so, then, do I open My hands, as
is written: "God will open for you his goodly treasuries", and
if they do not open their hand, what is written there? "When He holds
back the waters, they dry; When He lets them loose, they tear up the
land." (Job 12:15)
(Ramban,Shemot 3:13)
The flourishing of your land depends upon climatic phenomena. God will produce them in series which testify to His direct intervention. He will give you an abundance of blessings of all that is good, and when there is a scarcity elsewhere, you are obligated to assist with the surplus of blessings which you possess; but you will never reach the opposite situation.
(Rabbi
Shimshon R. Hirsch, Devarim 28:12)
"If you shall surely hearken to my commandments... But if you shall not hearken..."
The chapter of the Rebuke (tokheha), read
this Shabbat as a kind of preparation for Rosh Hashana, (Maimonides, MT, Hilkhot Tefillah 13.2.)
raises one of the most difficult and vexing issues of traditional Jewish
thought: that of reward and punishment. It states there, in unambiguous
fashion, that if the people obey the mitzvot they will enjoy all the blessings
that God is capable of giving: rain in its time, abundance of grain and fruit
for man and cattle, long and healthy lives, fertility, and security from their
enemies; while if they "walk contrary to me" (in the words of the
first Rebuke, at the end of Leviticus), God will unleash against them the full
force of His wrath, bringing a whole series of disasters.
The problem is obvious:
this picture contradicts much of human experience. There is no end of examples
of righteous individuals who have suffered severe illness, grinding poverty, or
were brutally slaughtered in rioting or war; or, on the other hand, of evil men
who enjoyed all of the pleasures of life, and ended their life peacefully at a
ripe old age. In brief, the classic problem known as Tzaddik ve-Ra lo, Rasha
vetov lo ("the righteous man whom there befalls evil, and the evildoer
to whom there befalls good") or, in the terminology of Western theology,
the problem of "theodicy."
The Jewish people
confronted this in all its severity during the century just past with the
horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, and more than a few pious Jews lost their faith
in the God of Israel in wake of these events. "Holocaust Theology"
has emerged as a whole sub-branch of modern Jewish thought-which, perhaps by
its nature, has posed more questions than answers. But this
problem has in fact always existed. The Shoah differed both quantitatively and
qualitatively from other disasters that preceded it, but in a certain sense, on
the most essential level, it has not presented any new aspects of the
problematics of God's conduct of the world not already known to the author of
the Book of Job or to Rabbi Yohanan, who buried ten sons one after the other.
The Talmud, near the
beginning of Berakhot, already raises this problem. It suggests that,
when a person is confronted with seemingly unwarranted sufferings, he should
"search out his deeds" and repent. "If he searched and did not
find-he may attribute it to bittul Torah, insufficient devotion to Torah
study" - a duty incumbent upon every Jew, at all times. If he may honestly
say that he is innocent even of that sin, "then it is known that these are
yesurim shel ahavah, chastisements of love." (Berakhot 5a.) Elsewhere (inter alia
at Rosh Hashana 17a and Kiddushin 39b), we read of such concepts
as the World to Come, Gan Eden and Gehinnom, in which the Divine
balancing of the scales is postponed until after death, when reward and
punishment are meted out according to all of a person's deeds during this life.
But these solutions are unconvincing and unsatisfying to many people nowadays,
and we cannot elaborate upon this issue here. Hence, despite the efforts of the
best minds of all the generations, the issue of theodicy remains a perplexing,
insoluble problem.
Of course, one might excuse oneself from engaging in the effort by saying, "What have we to do with these Divine mysteries?"-that is, a resigned acceptance of the Divine judgment stemming based upon simple faith-but this still leaves the exegetical problem, the contradiction between text and reality, unresolved.
These seven weeks, during which we read haftarot of consolation, in their optimistic air and their promise of approaching redemption, serve as a kind of antidote or response to Tisha b'Av; but in another sense they stand in its shadow. Thus, I allow myself to briefly "turn back the clock" for a brief discussion of the nature of that peculiar day. Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik ztz"l, in his lengthy and memorable Tisha b'Av lectures at the Maimonides School in Boston, which he intermingled within the recitation of kinot, on more than one occasion spoke of this day as representing an amalgam of two contradictory theological principles: mipnei hataeinu and hester panim-that is, catastrophe as a fitting punishment for the sins and faithlessness of the Jewish people, on the one hand, and the mysterious, inexplicable "concealment" or even "absence" from history of the Divine Presence, on the other. On the halakhic level, this same combination is expressed in the day being a combination of ta'anit tzibbur and aveilut. It is a day of fasting and heartfelt prayer intended to catalyze contrition, repentance and collective soul-searching (See the picture of public fast days drawn in Rambam, Ta’aniyot 1.1-4, 17; 5.1 and elsewhere.); and, on the other hand, it is a day of elegies, dirges, and weeping, coupled with the refusal to accept any facile or superficial justification of God's ways. To translate this duality into more concrete terms: we vacillate between seeing the tragedies in our people's history as an expression of God's seeming arbitrariness, and even indifference to human suffering; and as the consequence of the reality of human evil, which inevitably brings in its wake severe punishment, and in which the good and innocent are at times swept away along with the evil and corrupt.
In speaking of the
aspect of hester panim on Tisha b'Av-the "hiding of God's
face"-the Rav sometimes spoke, surprisingly, like a radical theologian. He
described Tisha b'Av as a day when it is permitted to challenge God, to ask
daring questions, to protest the various disasters that visited the Jewish
People, starting with the Destruction of the two Temples, through the lengthy
Exile, and concluding with the Holocaust of European Jewry. He spoke of Tisha
b'Av as a day symbolizing the idea that God is at times distant, closed off, unavailable
to prayer ("You covered yourself with a cloud, that prayer might not pass
through" - Lamentations 3:44). He cited various halakhic and liturgical
practices expressing this conception: the language of such kinot as
"Ai -Koh Omer" and "Atah amarta haiteiv aitiv imakh,"
and the third chapter of Eikhah, which contain sharp and difficult
questions; the absence of such usual features of the fast day liturgy as Avinu
Malkinu, Selihot, and the thirteen qualities of Divine Mercy; not donning
tefillin in the morning; etc.
For years, I had been
attracted to the more "radical" interpretations of these questions.
But when Tisha b'Av came around this year, I somehow found myself with a
renewed and unexpected understanding and sympathy for the more traditional,
"orthodox" explanation, that all this is "because of our
sins." I suddenly realized that the two emotions: sadness and mourning
over the destruction, coupled with Tzidduk Hadin, acceptance of God's
justice and of the rightness of His decision to loosen his wrath, are not
mutually contradictory. I imagined the prophet Jeremiah feeling that the
sufferings of the Destruction were indeed deserved, for the people had
abandoned God, had lost all sense of justice, decency or compassion toward
their fellow man, and had created a society filled with dishonesty, violence,
unrestrained egotism and endless cheating and chicanery, that everything was
rotten from top to bottom. How could such a society long survive?
And yet, after the fact,
he sat on the ground weeping. The people were evil, but he nevertheless loved
this place, down to the narrow alleys, the scenery, the familiar faces. And
now, all that he had ever known-his home, the familiar street, the market
place, the Beit Midrash and, of course, the crowning glory, the Temple where
throngs of men and women, good people and bad, had gathered on festive days to
worship and to celebrate-were gone. Of course, he knew that it was filled with
corruption, that even the sacred service had become no more than a hollow, empty
ritual-but even the evildoers were among the familiar faces that constituted
the society within which he lived and had his being. For that is how life is:
evil doers don't walk around with a mark of shame in their lapel; more often
than not, they are ordinary people, respectable citizens, perhaps even national
leaders, who behave according to all the accepted social norms, but are corrupt
in their hearts and in their deeds.
How does all this relate to the Rebukes and the other chapters in the Torah, such as the second paragraph of the Shema, which deal with reward and punishment in this world? I see the central message of these sections in the idea that there is a divine law immanent in the universe, which we violate at our own peril. Decent, ethical behavior, grounded in respect for both fellow man and for nature, enables society to survive and flourish, while unmitigated competition and struggle among individuals, "every man to himself," violence and corruption and domination by the powerful, destroys it.
One of the things about these passages which seems to disturb many contemporary readers is its personalistic imagery of an angry, willful, arbitrary-seeming God. But it seems to me that one may apply here the principle that "The Torah speaks in the language of man," that it may be read in metaphorical terms-i.e., the cosmos is structured in such a way that all human actions have consequences, whether immediate or long-term, visible or seemingly unseen. That such an approach is not entirely alien to traditional Jewish thinking may be seen from the following brief midrash, in Deuteronomy Rabbah 4.3:
Another
thing. "See, I have placed before you this day…" [Deut 11:26] R.
Eleazar said: When the Holy One blessed be He said that word on Mount Sinai, at
the same time, "From the mouth of the Most High there do not come forth
the evil and the good" [Lam 3:38]. Rather, evil comes by itself to those
that do evil, and good comes by itself to those that do good.
Taken at face value,
this is a surprising, if not shocking, theological statement. Does it really
mean to say that God is not the author of good and evil? (The literal meaning
of this verse is not our concern here, but rather the intent of the midrashic
author.) Our midrash describes things here in terms of a kind of natural
causality: the good deeds performed by good people begets good in a natural
way, just as the opposite befalls evildoers. A person brings upon himself his
own destiny; it is not a matter of Divine fiat, be it more or less arbitrary.
But read on a deeper
level, this is no more than a variant on the basic Judaic axiom that the world
is ultimately a moral place, and that God rewards good and punishes evil.
However, this is accomplished, not through direct Divine judgment, but by and
large through the structure of the universe itself. Just as God has set up the
various physical and other natural laws governing the universe, so has He
created it with a moral order: a mechanism by which good begets good and evil
begets evil. One might perhaps compare this to the concept of Karma-the
idea found in Eastern philosophies and religions that every action contains the
inescapable seeds of its own consequences. (As I see it, the existence of this idea in
non-Jewish cultures need not bother us; on the contrary, the existence of
similar or parallel ideas in different civilizations, developing independently
of one another, expressed in each one in its own peculiar nuance and lexicon,
is if anything proof of their universal validity.) An immoral society contains the seeds
of its own downfall, in the form of corruption, mistrust, and lack of social
cohesion-which ultimately lead to its disintegration, until it falls to its
enemies like a ripe fruit. This is the essential idea embodied in the statement
that the Second Temple was destroyed by sinat hinam, needless hatred or
dissension. He who has eyes will tremble to look at his surroundings, and take
this message to heart.
Concluding with words of
comfort, let us hope and work for the realization of the words of Rav Kook, ztz"l:
"… 'But the Second Temple, [during whose time] they engaged in Torah and
mitzvot and good deeds-why was it destroyed? Because there existed baseless
hatred' (Yoma 9b). If we were destroyed-and the entire world along with
us-because of groundless hatred, we-and the entire world-shall be rebuilt by
gratuitous love." (Rabbi
Avraham ha-Cohen Kook, Orot ha-Kodesh, III: 324.)
Readers Write:
I had hoped to find in the "VaEtchanan" edition of "Shabbat Shalom" not only refreshing and incisive Torah thoughts, but also some words of consolation. Lo and behold, I find an article which deals with precisely this subject. It strengthened me, but it did not really comfort me - my bereavement is still fresh; a little over a year ago my daughter Malki Roth was murdered in the Sbarro terrorist attack.
But Dr. Waysman's article, which dealt ostensibly with that same subject, only deepened my pain. Like the international media, Dr. Waysman takes pains to even out the moral ground, to equate our victims with those of the Palestinians, to present them as equal victims of brutality. She writes: "In this struggle, both sides are sacrifices. A complex of traumatic memories and threats on both sides is being created."
Murder of innocent citizens in cold blood, in their beds, in their batei midrash, in cafes, in pizzerias and in buses on a scale of massacre - such evil is unique. The losses and the suffering which the Arabs suffer at our attempts to defend ourselves and to prevent further attacks cannot be compared to it.
Waysman chooses to ignore this reality, and to bind
them both together for the sake of some nice message. By doing so, she offends
both the holy memory of our victims and the families which suffer day after day
from the yoke of bereavement.
Frumet Roth
Dr. Weisman
answers:
If in any way I have added pain to the dear Roth
family, I plead for forgiveness and pardon. I totally agree, in judging the
attackers, that there is no parallel between the monstrosities they perpetrate
and the defensive actions taken by our
forces. I was referring only to the victims, the bereaved families. I believe
that a child (or any other innocent person) killed on any side is equal to a
child killed on the other side. I cannot understand fathers and mothers who
encourage their children to become suicidal terrorists. I believe that these
are a minority within the Palestinian population, and that the lives of their
children are very dear to most of their parents, as are ours to us. This was my
intention, and again I apologize for any affront to your feelings. May you know
no further grief!
Devorah Weisssman
The Editor Notes:
Mrs. Roth's letter touched my heart.
Readers' reactions to articles which appear in
"Shabbat Shalom" are very important to us. When I wrote my remarks on
Parashat Nachamu, I thought of too many people who suffered what the Roth
family suffered during the past two years. As Jews who pray, we mention on many
occasions the Akeidat Yitzchak - the near-sacrifice of Yitzchak. But
that sacrifice was only a test, actually nothing happened. To our sorrow, many are
the families which actually sacrificed
sons and daughters, some in military service, some in brutal attack. The
subject of bereavement is emotionally charged and extremely sensitive, and it
is my feeling that it should not be bound up with evaluation of guilt or with
any political viewpoint. It is obvious that there can be no comparison of the
brutality of terrorists who set out to intentionally kill - indiscriminately -
citizens, women, children and the aged, to any situation in which
non-combatants are killed through negligence or because of faulty judgement
(although it is important to prevent this, too, as much as possible). I can
only express my sincere participation in the pain of the Roth family, and hope
and pray that the future provide sources of consolation which will enable them
and others to balance somewhat the experience of loss and bereavement.
Pinchas Leiser
Editorial Board: Pinchas Leiser (Editor),
Miriam Fine (Coordinator), Itzhak Frankenthal and Dr. Menachem Klein
Translation: Kadish Goldberg
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