Netzavim: nysteries

The parsha is complex.  It starts by saying: "You are all standing here today" and then proceeds to declare that the covenant covers both those present and absent.  I can feel myself standing there.   I was absent, not yet born, this is millenia before my birth. I am included in the coveneant.  tt is my turn to stand. 

Verse 29:28 is very disturbing. The Nysteros, the hidden, are for Hashem our Gd and the revealed things are for us and our children, forever, to perform all of the sayings of this Torah (teaching).  

What are these hidden things? The commentators contextualize this to mean the transgressions   that we are not aware of.    Failure to act on a known transgression is a big problem, In these few days before Rosh Hashana, it is certain that this phrase does not excuse the unexamined  person.  Failure to search one's memory is not an excuse.  But failure to understand actions after scrutiny might invoke some lessening of responsibility. 

Perhaps these hidden things are how the world works, the science of the thing.  The hidden energies beyond electricity , the unfindable exact position of the particle, the status of Schroedinger's cat, the location of the Divine  dice.  We post Goedel moderns, post  Google consumers, understand, in a new way, that all human knowledge is incomplete and a little inconsistent,  The mysteries are the completeness of knowledge, the truth. 

There is a very  dark interpretation of the verse.  On the border between the scientific and traditional  reading, there are the letters with dots over them.  In this verse, the words "us and our children" are dotted.  The dotted words are, as if ( half) erased, they are  faded words.  The existence of us and our children is tenuous in this verse.  In that context, the hidden: is Gd hiding the Countenance, Gd releasing benevolent mastery over the world for the instant that  it takes to make our continuation a question.   The psalm suggests fear as proper reaction to Gd hiding the face. Mystery implies danger.  Nysterv, all the more

Regardless, we have a job. Our job is the revealed.  The implication is that each person's mission can be found by self examination.  The mission is obscured by the nysteries... but let them go, they are not your business.  Every soul has its combination of the obvious and the obscure.   Choose life is how the parsha ends.  The choice is obvious

Ki Thavo: Are we there yet?

The journey is long. The child asks again and again and again: are we there yet?  Is this an opportunity  to teach Zeno's paradox? We can never get there.  We can, possibly, get arbitrarily close, but there is no there there. 

So the pioneer declares: Now I declare ...  that I have arrived... Perception is what matters.  The arrival invokes obligations.  The parsha starts with taxes,  the first fruits, income tax  Arrival involves the blessing of becoming a tax payer, paying dues for the privilege of ownership. 

Every day, several tines  each day, I pronounce the hope that Jerusalem will be rebuilt.  This week, I attended my daughter's wedding in the cities of Judah, in the outskirts of Jerusalem.  There we heard the call of joy and gladness, the voice of the groom and bride. We saw the prophecy fulfilled.  And glasses (wrapped in aluminum foil) were broken while singing a song longing for the restoration of Jerusalem.  We were surrounded by a city of 600,000 longing for a capital of 10,000 that was destroyed 2000 years ago.  

We are there when we declare it, when we pay taxes and dues, when we accept the obligation of place, to protect and defend all the people of our place.  We are there when the system is viable, when the rules apply. 

Are we there yet. Zeno?

Ki Theitza: What if

The parsha plays on the  multiple meanings of ki; if, when, because, so that...Ki conveys a sense of cause along with probability.  It lives in the actuarial world.  Ki deals with things that will happen by the "laws" of probability, but we don't know how or when  or  to whom  they will happen, 

We do not know when, or if, the Israelite soldier will go out to fight a war.  But we begin, now, to deal with the contingency of his finding a woman among the captives overwhelmingly attractive,  The junior son will, occasionally be favored over the firstborn ( it has happened before.) An occasional adolescent son will become a rebellious, sodden, glutton who is a danger to society.

The parsha deals with contingencies.  It is the forerunner  of  insurance. It recognizes the virtual certainty of the infrequent 

It also recognizes catalysis, how circumstances may make certain behaviors more probable.  War leads to lust, lust leads to fatigue , fatigue leads to contempt,  A domino effect, sequential catalysts. 

Over a large population, such problems are so likely that they can be considered inevitable, 

Don't be a statistic!

Shoftim: truth

The mandate to apoint judges and that they judge righteously inttroduces  the difficulty of finding and confronting truth.  Special people are needed to see this truth, ordinary people  are not reliable to the task  Even the judges must be reminded to persue the path of justice. 

The parsha deals with several authorities, several sources of reality: beyond the judge:  the king (the government), the prophet ( the expert), the priest ( the aristocrat).  All of these are potential sources of truth, authors of instruction, 

The parsha moves on to paradigms of ambiguity,  Which trees can be used to build ramparts? Is the tree a warrior, that it should be felled?  The tree has a complex role  in the world.  It is the product of time and soil and rain and survival.  It is a potential source of food and other benefits.  How much more so the warrior that will be felled. 

The parsha ends with the ceremony of the decapitated calf.  The ritual of frustration that the truth cannot cannot be found.  The murderer cannot be found, but the homicide certainly happened.  The exact circumstances are hidden, but every murder is, in part, the fault of the society as a whole  The elders wash their hands over the useless copse of the beheaded calf, admitting their failure to protect the citizen that came under their jurisdiction.  

Some truths cannot be discovered.  

Re'a:  The Sect

לֹ֣א תַעֲשׂ֔וּן כְּ֠כֹל אֲשֶׁ֨ר אֲנַ֧חְנוּ עֹשִׂ֛ים פֹּ֖ה הַיּ֑וֹם אִ֖ישׁ כָּל־הַיָּשָׁ֥ר בְּעֵינָֽיו׃You shall not act at all as we now act here, every man as he pleases,. In the exile, in the desert, every person did as he understood, worshiped Gd , within limits, as she saw fit. There were limits , both explicit and social, but within those limits, it appears that life in the desert was (more) free.  The major commentators ( Rashi, Ramban, Ibn Ezra) relate this sentence to its context: the sacrificial rite ( which, in this parsha, is mixed up and differentiated from eating meat in general) Once they entered the promised land, the ritual would be defined, it would be high church,  a spectacle of rigid participation,It is hard to hear this message of conformity. But the conformity simplifies.  It reduces error, it helps  achieve,  The ritual strengthens the hierarchy,  ensconces the priesthood,  It unifies the people, it becomes a heritage, it identifies those who are in and excludes those who are out. The orthopraxy assures substance, a set of rules with the imprimatur of tradition,  This is what Gd has always liked,I live in the country that celebrates diversity.  When George Washington welcomed the Jews to  the US,  he quoted   the prophet Micha:
But every man shall sit Under his grapevine or fig tree With no one to disturb him. a statement of universal tolerance,  Everyone can think as she pleases. even the Jew.  This tolerance for diversity has allowed the Jews to survive and thrive in America and, as the ethos of tolerance spread, around much of the world, throughout the tolerant world. The call for invariance  echoes our modern enemies; the Taliban, Isis, etc,  We are horrified as they enforce, with murder and violence, their definition of The Uniformity, Allah's demands.  The adherence to Chasidic custom shares this quality: our group does it this way,  The Rebbe's nuance ( perhaps his error)  becomes the only proper way for the chasidim.There is room for variation. Evolution  is based upon variation creating a range over which survival selects.  We have evolved  I pray for the evolution of our enemies ,,, and friends.