Dvarim: Shabbath Chazon

My mother (a"h) was hiding in a wooded area, in a hole in the ground, generally covered with a mat of branches and leaves.  Food was intermittent and had the quality of Seattle compost.   In 1944, when  she estimated that Tisha Baav  had arrived, based upon the  solar month and the lunar cycle,  she decided to fast.  Perhaps, as the war dragged on, food became somewhat more plentiful and skipping a day was more tolerable.  Perhaps, as the Soviet army approached, food was scarcer.   Perhaps she was hopeful that the liberation would come soon and she wanted to do an act of re-dedication to Judaism.  The fast had an element of  correction for the New Years party she had gone to, against her father's wishes, just before the German/Soviet invasion. 

The parsha talks about the first conquests in the environs of he promised land.  The history of conquest is given:  The  dependents of Esau replaced the Chori; the Ammonites replaced the Zumzumites.  Now the Israelites were taking over the lands of Sichon and Og.  

My parents' story makes me consider  what that conquest felt like to the people who were being replaced, those people hiding from the invading army, who may have hidden from the last invading army.  How many invading armies had my ancestors hidden from? 

 Tisha Baav is the commemoration our defeat, when we were vanquished, when we fell from a position of power  Is  Tisha Baav, in part,  an expiation for our acts of conquest?

Matos-Masai:

This is a most disturbing parsha. Is this the ancient origin of the holocaust?

The Hebrew Bible was  understood only by Jews and scholars for millennia.  The range of interpretation was limited.  A troubling passage was put into context   Gutenberg chose it as the first book to be published with movable type.  It became the most popular book in the world.  Catholics, as an article of their belief, would consider the Church as the only agency that could interpret this  sacred book ( written in Latin).  The Protestants, with readily available copies of the Bible, believed that they  could  interpret it for themselves.  They come to this weeks parsha. 

Gd commands a war against Midyan because of their attempt to compromise the Hebrew commitment to the Gd who took them out of Egypt; the Gd that Moshe had discovered while he was in Midyan.

The soldiers return from battle.  The enemy male soldiers are absent:  slain or banished.  The women and children are brought back. Moshe is surprised to see the adult women among the captives.  He points out that these women  ( relatives of his wife? sisters of Pinchas' mother?) were the essence of the problem.  It had been the seductions that had brought the plague. Moshe orders all the adult women and male children  ( remember the edict of Pharoah - from which Moshe was rescued) killed.  Were there gas chambers at that time. would they have used them?

The politics are understandable.  Moshe has been preempted by Pinchas.  When the Midyanite  women began to spread their venereal disease ( the plague) through the people, Gd had instructed Moshe to kill and publicly  hang the debased leaders of Israel.  Moshe cried. Pinchas acted, and by his single, double execution, he rescued the people from The Wrath.  Moshe saw the value of decisive, strong action.

Moshe had been chastised for exceeding his authority when he coaxed water form the rock.  Subsequently, he would consult with Gd before making big decisions ( the stoning of the  Sabbath desecrator, the inheritance laws- as they apply to women heirs).  The matter of Midyan seemed to be time for decisiveness.

  It is important to note that the text makes the decision to kill the adult women and male children Moshe's.  This is not an instruction from Gd.  Gd ( again) is silent.

When I went to Poland, to see the places and people involved in my parents' escape from their genocidal edict, I wondered how the guides and translators, who were unearthing the story with us, felt about the role of their ancestors  in this horror.  I am sure that most of them felt some discomfort at the ( probable) silence of their parents and grandparents.  In that context, I cannot be silent about my (conceptual) ancestors.

It is important to have this incriminating text.  It demonstrates the universal  potential for genocide in the name of a cause. It reminds us of the danger (repeatedly inflicted) to our own people, and that we, under some circumstances,  can be a danger to other peoples/

It is also dangerous to have this text.  It is given a Sacred attribution, a correctness that is not apparent on its surface. Some zealots, in all the Abrahamic religions, use such texts as justification for outrageous actions.

We Jews do not trust our personal readings of the Torah.  I am sure that there is an explanation. But I think that appreciating the story, as written ,is part of the process.

PInchas: inheritance and merit

Pinchas: inheritance and merit

The   theme of  inheritance , tradition  and the transition of office are of the essence in this parsha, Pinchas.  This is preparation for the nest phase, the end of wandering and entry into the Promised Land; passing the baton from the generation of the Exodus to the indefinite future, to people who have only heard of those miracles and will need to integrate their own, lesser, miracles. 

The gift of eternal priesthood given to the the title character, Pinchas is reminiscent of the royal gift of  peerage  to a military or diplomatic hero,  It is a recognition of an extraordinary act which is transmitted through all future generations.  The heritability is an exorbitant award for an extraordinary act.  But there is no guarantee that the future generations will share the qualities that merited this level of reward. 

Being the child of holocaust survivors has some relationship to this title by parentage.  It is a chosen identity and it certainly raises the question  of whether I, or my children, have the qualities of courage, faith, resourcefulness  that my parents had. 

The transmission of leadership, in this case from Moshe to Yehosua, is very different.  Moshe recognizes that a set of skills and qualities need to be replaced.  Moshe appeals to Gd of the spirits (ruchoth).  This could be taken to mean the Gd who recognizes moods.  Depression is called ruach ra, an evil spirit, and a great mood is called Nachath  ruach, a satisfaction of spirit.  Moshe recognized from his own experience, in the incident with the quail (slav)  that depression is an (almost) insurmountable block to leadership,

Gd chooses Yehoshua to be the next leader, not Moshe's son ( who has disappeared from the text long ago) nor his beloved nephew, Eliezer the son of Aaron, who  has a title by legacy and is a key advisor, as the transmitter of the message of Gd.  But the leadership role is not hereditary, it is meritocratic.

The challenge of the daughters of Zelophchad to the inheritance tradition of the time changed inheritance of property from custom to law. The courage of these sisters if reflected in the extra long  long nun, the feminine pleural ending, that emphasizes the femaleness of the request to Gd. Their courage and logic is rewarded with wealth and fame. They transmit their qualities to all the daughters of Israel.

Fortune favors the brave....and their children.

Balak: [inter]nationalism

Jews get it from both sides, but the explosion comes  from the inside.

I do not defend antisemitism,. What the bigots call reasons are actually excuses.  But these excuses have some relationship  to reality and that increases their danger

The parsha deals with Balak, the current king of Moab,  hiring Bilam (a name that can be deconstructed to bli without and am nation ) a Midianite, to subvert the will of Gd and turn it against the  Israelites. 

Balak is a nationist.  even though he is an interloper ( see Rashi: he was an outsider) He wants to protect the nation against a force, the Israelites,  that are in conquest mode. Not only are they an army, but they are carrying threatening ideas of liberation and justice. Interlopers make  the most forceful nationalists ( Napoleon was from Corsica, Stalin from Georgia, Hitler from Austria).To Balak, the nationalist, the Israelites are an internationalist force (bourgeois communists)  that threatens his rule.

Bilam is a global thinker Have parable, Will travel.  He is in contact with Gd, the universal force.  From his perspective,  the Israelites  are a nation,  another people looking for territory,  and possibly,  expansion.

The Jews in the modern world are  subject to these dual and opposing characterizations.  To the nationalists [ Stalin, Hitler ] Jews are internationalists. Jews have interests, stemming from their dispersal and their values, that make the  nation a secondary concern, at best.  The Jews want to bring their version of universal peace and harmony. The Messiah of the Jews brings world peace as well as national prosperity.

To the internationalists, Jews are the Zionists, religious nationalists, willing to displace indigenous peoples for their own religious dreams. They treasure their separateness, their racial purity .  They do not intermarry.

Both  threads are real inside the Jewish community, now,  after the holocaust and after the declaration of the state of Israel.  The Jewish holocaust experience is the basis of an international law that includes concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide ( East West Street)

The election of Donald Trump clarifies how things were before.  Up until now, since, at least the 1940's, the United States was  as much a symbol of freedom, liberty  and protection of human rights  ( despite the hypocrisies) as it was a nation state.   The US was the liberator of Europe, the money behind the Marshall Plan.  Now,  nationalism (fascism?) has ascended.

The story of the donkey is important to remember.  Bilam was among the greatest of prophets, he was a seer,  but he cannot see what the least intelligent beast of burden, the donkey, the ass, can see.  The donkey acts in his benefit and is beaten for her service,

Don't ass ume you see the whole picture.