“What are you reading, my lord?”

“Words, words, words.” – Hamlet Act II scene 2

אִישׁ֩ כִּֽי־יִדֹּ֨ר נֶ֜דֶר לה’ אֽוֹ־הִשָּׁ֤בַע שְׁבֻעָה֙ לֶאְסֹ֤ר אִסָּר֙ עַל־נַפְשׁ֔וֹ לֹ֥א יַחֵ֖ל דְּבָר֑וֹ כְּכׇל־הַיֹּצֵ֥א מִפִּ֖יו יַעֲשֶֽׂה׃ 

If anyone makes a vow to HaShem or takes an oath imposing an obligation on themselves, they shall not break their pledge; they must carry out all that has crossed their lips. (Numbers 30.3)

In this week’s double parashah, much journeying is recounted without being related. Only the names survive, the names given the places where we stopped and rested, setting up our tents and regaining strength to continue walking. So much living goes unrecorded.

We live so much of our lives

without telling anyone, 

going out before dawn, 

working all day by ourselves, 

shaking our heads in silence

at the news on the radio.

– Telephone Repairman, Joseph Millar (excerpted)

The first mitzvah of this week’s Torah reminds us that we are to keep our promises. How are we to do so if we do not even remember making them?

Some of us keep a journal or a diary, allowing us to return to forgotten days and be reminded of the life we lived in those moments, what we did, and with whom. Many of us do so, whether we realize it or not, in the reams of photographs it is so easy to take these days, now that they are digital and immediately available. (Once upon a time, young’un, you had to take your exposed film to a developer and wait for days – days! – before you received the photos you took.)

Ironically, since Jews are the people of memory, much of our lives goes unremarked, just like the lives of our ancestors in the parshas that end the book of Numbers. Behind us we leave a trail of words and acts that we mostly do not remember. That is why our prayers include this line:

שְׁגִיא֥וֹת מִֽי־יָבִ֑ין מִֽנִּסְתָּר֥וֹת נַקֵּֽנִי Who can be aware of errors? Clear me of unperceived guilt (Psalms 19.13)

Because whether or not we remember what we’ve done, and what we’ve promised to do, the effects of our acts are what create the world in which we  – and others – live.

We might be tempted to downplay the effect of an unremembered promise which went unkept, if it were not for the seriousness of this week’s command.

According to the Sages, when God declared in the Ten Words, “Do not take my name in vain [through oaths],” the entire universe shook. Why did this command frighten the entirety of creation? Perhaps because a שבועה shevua [oath] summons all שבע sheva [seven], all the seven spiritual roots of creation, and invests them in the cause. 

A human is a miniature universe. Since I parallel the world, whatever I do with my soul causes a corresponding effect on the soul of the world. When I make a promise I arouse all the parts of my heart; the physical world then finds all the sources of its existence aroused as well. A false oath weakens every root of mine, and that causes all the channels through which God pours life down to the world to shake with instability. 

– Zev Reichman, Flames of Faith 1.19

Our ancestors, who carried the ancient legend that the entire world was created by words (HaShem spoke and there was), understood that with our words we, too, make and unmake worlds, both by our acts and by our forgettings. This is why we understand promises, or oaths, to be so serious. We see how words manipulate our reality today, as we worry over the trustworthiness of media and public figures; our concern over AI is, in part, a quest to understand where we might ground ourselves in certainty, if more and more of what we read and hear may be false.

Our words create, and strengthen, and undermine, our world. Our words have the capacity to help and heal, or to hurt and destroy. May we take our own words as seriously as those we read, hear, and – most of all – repeat.

פִּֽינְחָ֨ס בֶּן־אֶלְעָזָ֜ר בֶּן־אַהֲרֹ֣ן הַכֹּהֵ֗ן הֵשִׁ֤יב אֶת־חֲמָתִי֙ מֵעַ֣ל בְּנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל בְּקַנְא֥וֹ אֶת־קִנְאָתִ֖י בְּתוֹכָ֑ם וְלֹא־כִלִּ֥יתִי אֶת־בְּנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל בְּקִנְאָתִֽי

“Pinhas, son of Elazar son of Aaron the priest, has turned back My wrath from the Israelites by displaying among them his passion for Me, so that I did not wipe out the Israelite people in My passion” (Numbers 25.11)

אָמַר רַבִּי סִימוֹן, בְּשָׁעָה שֶׁבָּא הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא לִבְרֹאת אֶת אָדָם הָרִאשׁוֹן, נַעֲשׂוּ מַלְאֲכֵי הַשָּׁרֵת כִּתִּים כִּתִּים, וַחֲבוּרוֹת חֲבוּרוֹת, מֵהֶם אוֹמְרִים אַל יִבָּרֵא, וּמֵהֶם אוֹמְרִים יִבָּרֵא, הֲדָא הוּא דִכְתִיב (תהלים פה, יא): חֶסֶד וֶאֱמֶת נִפְגָּשׁוּ צֶדֶק וְשָׁלוֹם נָשָׁקוּ. חֶסֶד אוֹמֵר יִבָּרֵא, שֶׁהוּא גּוֹמֵל חֲסָדִים. וֶאֱמֶת אוֹמֵר אַל יִבָּרֵא, שֶׁכֻּלּוֹ שְׁקָרִים

Rabbi Simon said: When the Holy Blessed One came to create the first human, the ministering angels divided into various factions and various groups. Some of them were saying: ‘Let it not be created,’ and some of them were saying: ‘Let it be created.’ That is what is written: Hesed [Kindness] and Emet [truth] met; righteousness and peace touched (Psalms 85:11). Hesed said: ‘Let it be created, as it performs acts of kindness.’ Emet said: ‘Let it not be created, as it is all full of lies.’  – Bereshit Rabbah 8.5

Israeli settlers kill Palestinian farmer – 48 year old Mahmoud Ahmad Zaal Odeh was tending to his crops in a village near Nablus

Our parashah this week begins in the aftermath of yet another event of communal upheaval. Once again, HaShem is dismayed by the behavior of the people, and once again there is violence and death. We have seen in earlier times of discord that those who are guilty are punished and those who are innocent are lifted up. The scouts and those who believed them are doomed to die in the wilderness; Aaron’s rod flowers while Korakh and his followers are swallowed up by the earth; and now a plague breaks out upon those who chose to undermine Israelite ethics and practices.

In this last case, the violence of the event reaches a disturbing peak, when Pinhas, the hero of the story for whom the parashah is named, takes a spear and runs it through two people. The aftermath of the event is at least as troubling, as HaShem responds by apparently promoting the murderer to a special sort of priesthood:

הִנְנִ֨י נֹתֵ֥ן ל֛וֹ אֶת־בְּרִיתִ֖י שָׁלֽוֹם׃ וְהָ֤יְתָה לּוֹ֙ וּלְזַרְע֣וֹ אַחֲרָ֔יו בְּרִ֖ית כְּהֻנַּ֣ת עוֹלָ֑ם תַּ֗חַת אֲשֶׁ֤ר קִנֵּא֙ לֵֽאלֹהָ֔יו וַיְכַפֵּ֖ר עַל־בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל

“I grant him My pact of friendship. It shall be for him and his descendants after him a pact of priesthood for all time, because he took impassioned action for his God, thus making expiation for the Israelites” (Numbers 25.12-13)

The reaction of the Sages is horrified, and throughout Talmud and other later commentary they seek to isolate Pinhas’ behavior, so that it cannot be allowed to set a precedent (see BT Sanhedrin 82a). If Torah did not record that HaShem rewarded him, Pinhas would have been liable for murder.

The ethical vertigo caused us by this passage is strongly reminiscent of our own day, in which  murderers are too often praised and their crimes rewarded when they suit the political agenda of those in power: Kyle Rittenhouse and others lionized by MAGA Republicans, Moshe Sharvit by Israeli rightwingers who seek to annex the West Bank to Israel and drive out those Palestinians who live there.

Against all this ominous background, the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America occurs this Shabbat, 19 Tammuz. The date is tellingly close to that of the Fast Day of 17 Tammuz, preserved in the memory of the people of Israel forever as the day when the Roman legions breached the walls of Jerusalem. Within a month of this day, the city and the Temple were destroyed, most of the people dead or deported, and home was lost to us for two thousand years.

This, too, is too strongly reminiscent of our own fears for the society in which we live, and the communities we care about. So much seems so far gone already, and the scale of the crisis seems very much like the world-ending moment in which Pinhas acted – and in which his act was praised as restoring order.

Change, and the social upheaval that comes with it, is frightening. Those who lift up people like Pinhas and Rittenhouse and Sharvit do so out of fear of  that change and what they believe it portends for them. How appropriate it is, then, that with the 17th of Tammuz we begin a period known as the Three Weeks, in which our rituals and practices reflect the fearful anticipation of inevitable destruction. It took only three weeks for the Roman carnage to overwhelm Jerusalem, and our people has carried that intergenerational trauma ever since. 

Yet, with all that, Maimonides taught that the 17th of Tammuz does not come to mourn; it is a wake-up call to consider and correct our treatment of others.

“The fast day’s purpose is to arouse our hearts and lead us toward the path of repentence. This will serve as a reminder of the wicked conduct of our ancestors, which resembles our present conduct, and therefore brought these troubles upon them and upon us.” (Laws of Fasts 5.1)

“Our present conduct” does not mean that we are all equally at fault for evil, but rather than all of us suffer from the evil perpetrated by those among us who are enabled by the society we live in together to carry it out. To “arouse our hearts” means that we must turn aware from despair, and continue to care. 

We know through all the prophets that we are to do justice, to seek it out and to pursue it. Similarly, we know that US justice is not brought about by the second amendment, and that Israeli justice, if it would uphold the ethics of the Jewish state specified in its own declaration of independence, must respect the wellbeing of Palestinians as Israelis expect their own wellbeing to be respected.

In short, the story of Pinhas does not fit, and no amount of massaging the text will help. Perhaps the best way to deal with it is to remember that even the Patriarch Abraham misunderstood what HaShem was saying in the story of the Akedah; maybe we have missed the point of the Pinhas story. Maybe it’s not that Pinhas is the hero. Maybe he’s just the grim example of what happens when we let fear overwhelm our knowledge of what is right, and end up making of heroes of those who were better never heard of.

Receiving the Torah, Moving Toward Wholeness

Giving of the Torah: Becoming Whole

ראוים היו ישראל לקבל התורה במדבר דווקא, כי האדם שנקרא על שם האדמה, כאשר אין לו תורה נחשב כמדבר שאין  בו עשב וצמח האדמה. ובשביל חסרון האדם שהוא כמו מדבר ניתנה לו התורה להשלימו, ואז האדמה הזאת מוציאה אילנות וצמחים שלה.

It was appropriate for Israel to receive the Torah in, of all places, the wilderness, for a person, adam, is named for the earth, adamah, and when a person is without Torah they are considered like a wilderness, in which there is no green and no growth. It is in order to respond to the lack in a human being, which makes us like the wilderness, that the Torah was given to us, to make us whole, and then this “earth” is able to bring forth trees and growing things.  

attributed to the Maharal of Prague in Itturei Torah, Shavuot

In his college ethics class, a young product of Jewish community practice and learning recently told his mother, he discovered that he already knew much of what is considered basic Western ethics. Of course he does; the way we are meant to treat others is found in our Torah, and transmitted through not only our small Jewish community over the ages but adopted and spread far and wide via Christianity – which is the foundation of modern Western ethics even in the secular world.

We tend to believe that our sense of right and wrong is ingrained in us, in some way: we “just know” what’s just and what’s a travesty. Yet one has only to study comparative anthropology to discover that very much, if not all, of our ethical foundations are relative to our culture. This relativity unmoors certainty and left thinkers of the Enlightenment scrambling for grounding, gifting us all the –isms of modern philosophy. 

This is not to say that Torah contains perfect ethics, but that is, anyway, not a Jewish argument for authority. As Dr Byron Sherwin ז״ל used to say, where Christianity may assert that they have a certainty couched in their messianic ethics, all we have is “messy ethics”. The Torah does not offer universal (Kantian) ethics; to look for them in the revelation gifted to us via Moshe at Mount Sinai is to be stymied, discouraged, and, for many, finally, dismissive.

This is a misunderstanding of the gift’s meaning, which might be better grasped by way of the metaphor often used for the Sinai moment between HaShem and the people of Israel: a marriage, with the Torah as our ketubah. 

Consider the traditional Jewish ketubah: it consists of a promise that, in the years to come, the parameters of mutual trust and respect specified in the document will be followed, and, in the ancient language, the groom “will provide for his bride the way a Jewish man ought to”. Beyond the initial details, none are laid out; the text does not indicate exactly what trust and respect, or “ought to”, means. Why? because each case is different, and each outcome of a successful marriage is unique. No two human beings are alike; no link between two will resemble each other by very much. Most of the relationship is worked out in the living of it, and the balance that succeeds between two (or more) who are committed to each other in a family is a constantly changing reality.

The Maharal of Prague, Rabbi Judah Loew (1524-1609), offers us the best metaphor for understanding the gift of Torah in this season of the spring harvest, as green thrives around us and life turns its face to the warming sun, we are each a creature just like the earth upon which we live. We, too, turn toward the sun; we, too, are capable of giving forth growth, and fruit that nurtures not only ourselves but others. 

Torah is key to understanding our potential, because it does not present a perfect, finished system followed by saints. It is a record of ongoing struggle and very human failure on the way to the occasional joyful success, and even fulfillment. The Torah does not tell us; it shows us the way toward growth, and toward thriving. It is not and will not ever be a finished, perfect thing; it is a relationship. Between you and me; between us and HaShem. 

We exist between and among and because of, and instead of looking for an endpoint we need to get used to the idea that what we have been gifted is a support and a guide, not a book of answers that can be wielded like a recipe book of potions and spells. The only magic here is what we make, when we take the offered gift seriously enough to let it support us in the daily struggle to make sense of our failures and our – please let there be some – successes.

That is why Torah study never ends. There is always some new context, some different thought, something that didn’t come up before. The context may be similar, but something is different; the details resemble some other situation, yet there’s something new here. The answer is not on the page, nor in our hearts and minds, but somewhere in between, which is where HaShem has always promised us that we can find it. Eternally present yet always new.

In the Jerusalem Talmud this was expressed by Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, who asserted that אֲפִילוּ מַה שֶׁתַּלְמִיד וָותִיק עָתִיד לְהוֹרוֹת לִפְנֵי רַבּוֹ כְּבָר נֶאֱמַר לְמֹשֶׁה בְּסִינַי “Even what a competent student will discover before his teacher was said to Moses on Sinai.” (Peah 2.4) This is a way of saying that whatever we see has already been seen, yet what we see is entirely new, and no one ever saw it before. And both of these are true within a truly growing relationship with a loved one, with a community, and with HaShem.

Hag Shavuot sameakh, may you recognize and celebrate your harvest on this Shavuot holy day. May you feel yourself well and truly on the path, at least sometimes, toward your  wholeness.