JustASC

My synagogue is reading Arnie Eisen’s book “Taking Hold of Torah” in preparation for his scholar-in-residence appearance in March. On Shabbat I gave a d’var Torah based on some themes in the book, and obviously echoing some of the things I wrote about in this column on the Gaza war.

Here’s a draft, after the jump:

“A little lower than the angels”
Arnold Eisen and Exodus
Parshat Beshellach, Feb. 7, 2009

Arnie Eisen’s book, “Taking Hold of Torah,” uses the Five Books of Moses as a springboard for his agenda for Jewish renewal. For the Book of Exodus, he writes, “I want to ask, in particular, how immersion in history is connected to acceptance of covenant.”

Throughout the book, Eisen refers to a basic dichotonmy he sees running thru all of Jewish life: covenant vs. normalcy.
Covenant is the ideal, normalcy the real. Covenant is “extraordinary reality”; normalcy is the day-to-day facts of life. Covenant is Sinai, revelation; normalcy is loss of innocence.
Writes Eisen:

“It seems utterly crucial to the Torah that the contract we will ‘sign’ at Sinai be thoroughly grounded in the historical world as it is and always has been. This teaching is not meant as a blueprint for individual enlightenment (though it certainly contains such guidelines). The path up to the mountain, like the path down from it, leads straight into and through the most concrete of historical realities.”

He also writes that “the covenant we are making with one another and God is to be enacted in the human world – pre-eminently social and political – that we all know from experience. It does not pertain to some fantasy utopia not yet created. God wants us to know God here, now, as we are, as the world is. It is this story God wants changed by our reading and our labors.”

The Song of the Sea, in parshat Beshallach, can also be read as a tension between the ideal and the real – about utopia vs. compromise.

Moses, Miriam and the people of Israel behold the destruction of the Egyptians and sing a song. It is a natural expression of the people’s relief, exultation, thanks, and even pride. Right? Who isn’t proud after an unexpected victory? Shira Milgrom has called the Song at the Sea “the paradigmatic call to liberation from all enslavements.”

But we also know the famous Midrash, from Talmud Megillah, that the angels wanted to join the Israelites in the triumphant song. But God rebukes them: “My children are drowning and you want to sing?”

We usually teach this as a cautionary midrash – it warns us, that even in the middle of a justifiable act of violence or self-defense, we can’t lose our capacity to grieve for human life, even those of our enemies. This is the reason why we spill drops of wine from our second cup of joy, at the seder: “to remind ourselves that because others perished, our joy in our liberation can never be complete.”

But there is a detail of the midrash that sometimes overlooked, and even mistold: As Rabbi Joyce Newmark points out in the NJJN this week, God is speaking to ANGELS, not to human beings. “You may not sing” he tells the angels. “But they – the Israelites – can sing.”

Angels are inhuman – maybe ideal, but certainly not complex, ambivalent, flawed and conflicted the way human beings are. Angels can be wholly peaceful or wholly violent – after all, when the people of Israel were released from captivity in Egypt it was an angel, or angels, which struck the Egyptians with plagues: “He unleashed against them his hot anger, his wrath, his indignation and hostility – a band of destroying angels” (Psalm 78:49)

But angels are not human. In fact, the Midrash (Genesis Rabbah 50:2) tells us “One malach cannot perform two tasks.”

In contrast, a human being has the ability to do two contrasting things at the same time: F. Scott Fitzgerald : “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” That’s being human.

Arnie Eisen suggests that taking hold of Torah recognizes the tension between the real and the idea: “We are not free of responsibility for the evils in which we acquiesce, and, what is more, we share in guilt for the evils in which we join – and perhaps to a lesser extent, for the evils of which we approve,” he writes. “‘Few are guilty, all are responsible,’ Heschel liked to say. Some of us may choose pacifism as a result of thinking deeply about the costs of the spiraling cycle of violence in the world. This choice, too, involves responsibility and incurs guilt, of course, every bit as much as the decision – based in part on repeated encounters with the story of Israelite suffering in Egypt – that some evil must be stopped by force if necessary.”

It is through this lens that we can view recent events like the War in Gaza. Do we celebrate when our enemies are vanquished? Do we weep for the widows and orphans? Do Jews fall short of a covenantal ideal when they resort to violence? And do those who criticize those who kill so that Jews may live forget the message of normalcy – that we can only fully take hold of Torah when we recognize that we live in a real world, where Israel and the Jews must defend themselves in a violent and threatening neighborhood.

Eisen urges us to ask these questions, but, again, quoting Buber, asks that we do so by recognizing that people of goodwill can disagree. 

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 3:42 pm and is filed under JustASC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.