Portraits of the Holy Land – Sefirah Study
A CCAR and HUC-JIR Joint Commission Program
Week 4, Digest 1 - Messages:
To add to our discussion, email your comment or question to sefirah@huc.edu.
From: Barry Chazan
Subject: re: Comments on Week Four
Thanks to Dr. Hollander. This was such a terrific packet of material. I found it rather like putting puzzle pieces together, with the guidance of his excellent study materials. And it was so timely.
There is so much to comment upon, I'll just touch on a few issues.
As I see it, the three midrashim talk about the challenge of what to do after one wins a big battle. The first deals with guilt and fear over the issue of "collateral damage" (what a horrid term!), although it dismisses the concern, saying that those who died were "just thorns". The second raises the issue of how one can win the battle and still lose the war (hello, Donald Rumsfeld!). And the third deals with the neurotic feeling we all have when things go too well, that we've somehow used up all our mazel and thus have something really bad coming at us.
The question is so important, for Israel and for America, too. What does one do in the aftermath of victory? This has been Israel's dilemma since 1967, and continues to tear up the country. It is now America's dilemma in Iraq.
How interesting what Rashi does with that first midrash. He has God telling Abraham that he will not be punished for the lives he has taken--but, crucially, does not dismiss those lives as "thorns." For Rashi, even a just war takes a terrible toll; a toll for which Abraham is not punished, but is no less real in its tragedy. Rashi somehow was especially attuned to the realities of war and catastrophe, to the fact that they don't follow a simple calculus of good people living and bad people dying. As I recall, he comments that innocent people died in Noah's flood as well. That is a sensitivity we need badly.
And if I got my chart right, by Rashi, David is the vulture, wanting to destroy the nations (carcasses) and Abraham is acting in the place of God, restraining him, noting that this kind of final justice is only for the days of the messiah. Ramban follows the more standard and expected reading: the nations (vulture) attack us and our way of life (carcasses) and we fight them off.
If this is the case, Ramban echoes the Jabotinsky revisionist strain in Zionism, which sees the world in terms of us vs. them, and emphasizes first and foremost the need to prevail against our external enemies. Rashi is, by contrast, more concerned with the cost of power, the toll it takes even though it is necessary. He worries about the enemy within, our own desire for vengence and propensity to violence. He doesn't deny the genuine threat posed by external enemies, but like Pogo, he also says: "We have met the enemy--and he is us."
Rabbi Dan Fink
Boise, Idaho
I think Dan’s explications of the explications of the texts are very useful in pointing to a dynamic tension which characterizes the Kaffit table and Israel since statehood. There is a world-view rooted in a classical Zionist in one strain of classical Jewish historiography which sees the world as “we” against “they”. Unfortunately, the realities of the twentieth century – both the Shoa and then the ongoing struggles of Israel for 57 years – have - for some - re-enforced that world view. And in a modern country with public education, army duty, and the tragedies that occur daily, that world view has a chance to be re-enforced.
There is the other voice which in Israel one hears so often in the press, among the young, in the army, among some enlightened sectors of the religious community, among intellectuals, among academics, and among many Emek Refaiim people which is deeply concerned with what Dan calls the cost of power. So many (of us) worry about this issue and fortunately for Israel it is an issue that major thinkers and institutions take seriously.
The complexity of course is that for those who live in Israel these are pressing human issues having to do with life’s most immediate demands. The readings and Dan’s comments help underscore how the modern State of Israel is a major laboratory and testing ground for some the core and cherished principles of our Tradition.
Barry Chazan
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