Grief, joy and the agony of absence

The Torah as an eternal treasure and guidebook of the Jewish people has constantly demonstrated its ability to offer new inspiration and wisdom as it is reread in each generation. As we enter a highly-charged period of weeks (and perhaps months) in which our nation will experience a complex cocktail of conflicting emotions – joy, grief, fear and frustration – I sat down to review a particularly poignant passage of the Torah with a new perspective. A perspective from the last 15 months in which hundreds of faces of people who had previously been strangers now plaster public areas and inhabit the deepest recesses of our minds; whose families’ unbearable pain and suffering is never far from our thoughts even when we temporarily turn our minds to other mundane matters.

In the opening weeks of the war I attended a gathering at the Kotel of shell-shocked hostage families where we prayed and cried together and tried to find words of support to somehow strengthen those vacant faces suffering unimaginable pain. Pain, and anguish which many of those who I stood with that day have now been suffering for well over a year.

In recent weeks we read once again the episode of Yosef’s 17-year disappearance, the unending grief of an inconsolable Ya’akov and, finally, the tear-filled reunion in Egypt. Having been informed of his son’s disappearance we are told that Ya’akov refused to be comforted; in Rashi’s telling he had a strong intuition that his son was still alive – somewhere – with no idea how or where he was being held, lacking any notion of how to begin to search for him. Unable to grieve or move on with his life, Ya’akov is stuck in a never-ending hell. Barely believing he would see his beloved son again – as he later tells him: “to see your face I never considered possible” – yet unable to set his mind on anything else.

When Ya’akov was eventually informed that his son is alive and that he will reunite with him, his heart skipped a beat in this moment of overwhelming emotion and his “spirit lived again”. Yet a careful reading of the text reveals that he was forever scarred by the experience.

Pharaoh is clearly impacted by Ya’akov’s age and appearance asking him “how many are the days of the years of your life?”. Ya’akov replies “few and bad have been the days of the years of my dwelling”. This strange combination of words is often taken to show that righteous people utilize each and every day of their life. But I believe there is more going on here. While Pharaoh inquires of the length of Ya’akov’s “life”, Ya’akov responds that his “dwelling” has been bad. Rav S. R. Hirsch interprets this to imply that he has not fully lived for much of this time – just dwelt and existed. I would add that the “days of the years” of his life can be taken to mean that each and every day of the years of his life was a separate source of agony and suffering.

As for the moment of reunion itself, the account is both simple and profound. Reading the verses of the Torah we see Ya’akov and Yosef embracing and crying on each other’s shoulders. The overpowering emotion of the moment transcends speech or attempts to capture their thoughts and feelings in words. Digging below the surface, however, we find Rashi citing a tradition that Ya’akov “recited Keriat Shema”.

Whether or not we understand this to refer to a literal recitation of the words, I believe that it encapsulates the religious response to this overwhelming and sensitive moment. The unfathomable joy mixed with the painful realisation that they have lost so many years together – Ya’akov struggles to recognise and relate to Yosef’s new position and family. How can they even begin to understand the role and possible purpose of God in such difficult and complex times – especially while experiencing such powerful emotions. The midrash appears to be teaching the correct response – Shema represents accepting the yoke of Heaven. Accepting and pronouncing that, whether or not we can understanding why things occur or what God’s plan might be, we can have the humility and clear-headedness to recognise that there is a greater plan and a higher wisdom at play.

With such a response, Ya’akov as our forefather has embodied a fundamental example which has guided his persecuted descendants through to this very day.

This post specifically wants to avoid the complex and ongoing debate over the wisdom of the hostage deal, recognizing the very legitimate concerns over the dangers and threat that it creates – there are plenty of places on Facebook and elsewhere where this has, is and will continue to be debated.

For comments and discussion of this post on Facebook, click here.

The excruciating question of hostage negotiation

In dark times such as these, many of us find ourselves looking back to precedents from our tear-stained history for guidance and insight. What we find is not always clear and unambiguous, but even then it can provide a measure of perspective and comfort to know that our desperate struggles and moral quandaries are similar to those which our ancestors have faced over the millennia.

Talmud Reclaimed brings the example of redeeming hostages as one of a series of cases which demonstrate different methodologies through which Rambam and the Tosafists identify rulings from the Talmud. The primary Talmudic passage in (Gittin 45a) presents a clear rabbinic decree prohibiting the redemption of hostages “for more than their value” since this will encourage kidnappers to abduct more Jews and demand ever increasing ransoms. Rambam, in keeping with his usual practice, records this ruling without exception in his legal code (Matnat Aniyim 8:12).

Yet this is far from the end of the story.

The Ba’alei Tosafot (Gittin 58a), consistent with their own Talmudic approach, identified several exceptions to this Talmudic ruling – for example if the hostage’s life is in danger or if a Torah scholar is abducted. Was the Mishnah’s ruling simply too strict and uncompromising to be imposed unconditionally on the nation?

Fascinatingly, when one of the most prominent Tosafists, Maharam MiRottenburg, was kidnapped for a heavy ransom, he refused to allow his community to collect money to redeem him out of fear that this would merely encourage the gentiles to abduct more rabbinic leaders.

This painful moral conundrum has become magnified to an unimaginably horrifying extent in the current nightmare which our nation has been living for the last year.

On the one hand, there is the cold, rational voice of the Mishnah hanging over us. By agreeing to redeem hostages “for any price” we have undoubtedly encouraged our enemies to utilise hostage-taking as a preferred strategy against us. The 1000+ terrorists released as part of the Shalit deal in 2015 have been directly responsible for several Israeli deaths (and arguably indirectly for many more).

Perhaps more significantly, it established the norm that Israel will pay an outsized price to redeem its people (unlike the Ukraine-Russia conflict where prisoner exchanges frequently exchange at a 1-1 rate). When Hamas decided on October 7 to abduct Israelis rather than complete the massacre it was not done for the sake of the Israelis themselves but as a cruel tactic to ensure Hamas’s survival in the inevitable war that would follow. Israel, they predicted, would agree to any price to get its people back – even one that leaves them with a relatively open border to rearm and renew its ability to launch further murderous attacks on Israel.

On the other hand, what are the consequences of not agreeing a deal to bring our tortured brothers and sisters back home? Will seeing our hostages – their devastated families and friends – pleading for their lives yet us turning a blind eye to their pain irreversibly change us as a nation? Is our willingness to do anything to bring our people home, a willingness that our enemies identify as a weak spot, really a source of national strength, pride and unity? Perhaps a refusal to proceed with a deal will bring a pyrrhic victory – militarily degrading Hamas to a point of no return but morally and socially degrading Israel in the process. Will we be the same people afterwards?

It is an impossible question which we are faced with. How can we, as human beings and as Jews, face our hostage families and tell them that their loved ones are not worth the price of military compromise. At the same time how can we ignore that cold rational truth in our heads which predicts the numerous likely Israeli deaths in the years to come from agreeing such a deal – and the knowledge that we are playing along to Hamas’s strategy.

However there is another part of Hamas’s strategy we can and must do more to mitigate. We must keep at the forefront of our minds that our true enemies are not our fellow Jews who balance up these concerns differently to ourselves but the bloodthirsty terrorists who knowingly calculated to put us into this awful moral conundrum in order to tear us apart. None of us are traitors. We all want the hostages home and well as soon as possible and Hamas weakened and degraded to the greatest extent possible. We cannot afford to permit Hamas to turn us against each other with poisonous rhetoric and actions.

May this month, as we prayed this morning, be one of salvation and comforting, life and peace.

Unified we will be victorious. Am Yisrael Chai.

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Mourning, resilience and inspiration: Tisha be'Av in the shadow of 7 October

For more than two decades now, my routine on the night of Tisha Be’Av has seen me take a gentle walk down the hill to Jerusalem’s Old City. There I typically find a quiet spot to read Eichah/Kinnot and ponder their sobering content. Some years I’ve made it as far as the Kotel itself – though more recently I’ve tried to avoid it, finding the mass-singing (and even dancing) jarring and out of touch with the atmosphere of the day.

There are so many occasions better suited for singing and inspiration, I ask myself, shouldn’t Tisha Be’Av be one day dedicated to silently contemplating more somber thoughts?

Paradoxically perhaps, I think the opposite is true this Tisha Be’Av – which comes in the midst of the darkest year in recent Jewish history. A year in which I’ve found myself standing alongside hostage families at tearful prayer gatherings desperately looking for encouraging words of support and visiting the site of the horrific Nova massacre. The collective misery and mourning has dwarfed anything that I’ve previously experienced.

The words of Eichah have, for the first time in our generation, become a reality before our eyes rather than a poetic historical depiction. When we add into the mix the heavy atmosphere hanging over Israel right now as media and security experts predict and play through potential scenarios of impending Iranian and Hizbullah strikes, this Tisha Be’Av must offer a strong element of resilience and inspiration alongside the traditional mourning.

This year of all years we cannot hide from tragedy. But by placing it in the context of the long history of Jewish suffering from which we have grown stronger and rebuilt – as the excellent accompanying video attempts to do – allows us to take away a message of comfort and support.

If I do make it all the way to the Kotel this evening, I will try to dwell on the more positive teaching of the famous Jewish sage, Rabbi Akiva (Makkot 24). Upon finding his colleagues in tears over the destruction of the Mikdash he did not seek to deny the enormity of the loss. Instead he was able show them a bigger picture within which the immediate loss was part of a historical process which would lead the nation forward spiritually towards redemption.

As we sit with our Eichah tonight and contemplate the renewed relevance of its words, we pray for a Rabbi Akiva figure to inspire us, unite us and point us towards that better future we all yearn for.

הֲשִׁיבֵ֨נוּ יְהֹוָ֤ה | אֵלֶ֨יךָ֙ וְֽנָשׁ֔וּבָה חַדֵּ֥שׁ יָמֵ֖ינוּ כְּקֶֽדֶם:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjwrV0wG9E0

Also posted on Facebook, here.

Prayer in war and peace

Prayer in Judaism, while representing a core and fundamental religious act, takes on a surprisingly wide range of forms and guises. On Shabbat-Simchat Torah morning, my early morning outdoor service in central Jerusalem began with serene meditative prayer at sunrise – unaware of the horror unfolding less than 100km to the South. A mid-Haftarah rocket siren quickly snapped us out of our peaceful contemplation. As news of the “situation in the South” gradually filtered through, our prayers became more pointed and desperate – until I felt too sick and distracted to continue and went home to join and try to reassure our younger kids in the building’s shelter.

It occurred to me in the days that followed that Jewish law contains two completely distinct modes of prayer which fulfil entirely different functions. Writing in Hilchot Tefillah, Rambam describes a very idealistic mode of prayer. Basing himself on an accumulation of various Talmudic teachings, he provides precise details of the various forms of preparation that one should go through in order to free one’s mind of worldly concerns and mentally attach oneself to the divine realm. Expanding upon this in the Moreh, Rambam understands that prayer in its essence is a contemplative intellectual exercise which offers crucial assistance to a person trying to enhance their providential relationship with God.

This sort of meditative prayer is not always recommended. In fact, writes Rambam, it is not permitted to embark upon such prayer at a time when one is troubled or weighed down by worldly challenges.

All of this describes the mode of prayer which I was attempting to pursue in the first half of the Shabbat morning service.

But there is also a very different model of prayer which Rambam introduces us to at the start of Hilchot Ta’anit:

“It is a positive Torah commandment to cry out and to sound trumpets in the eent of any difficulty that arises which affects the community, as the Torah states: "[When you go out to war... against] an enemy who attacks you and you sound the trumpets....", meaning to say: Whenever you are distressed by difficulties - e.g., famine, plague, locusts, or the like - cry out [to God] because of them and sound the trumpets.”

This second category of prayer is specifically designed to guide communal and national reaction to times of great distress and tragedy. Rather than a serene theological ascent to commune with the divine realm, it seeks to ensure that our primal crying out in fear and sorrow is directed to God – to know that it is our national covenant with Him which continues to determine our collective fate.

As Rambam proceeds to explain, this form of desperate communal crying out to God is intended, among other things, to direct our attention inwards and help us identify our own spiritual, moral and religious flaws which might have contributed to the crisis in hand.

In our particular situation, there is no great investigation which needs to be undertaken. The serious divisions and infighting which has rocked the country over the last year may well have damaged the army’s readiness, and reportedly was also a major source of encouragement for our enemies. From a spiritual dimension our tradition contrasts King David’s generation, in which many fell in battle since there was quarrelling and in-fighting with the more sinful generation of Ahab which was granted divine military assistance because of their great unity and commendable behaviour to one another.

Poignantly, this very lesson may be encapsulated in the fascinating halachic background to Tefillat Geshem – the prayer for rain which concluded the unusual service this Shabbat morning. Surveying the halachic literature on the subject, it seems uncontroversial that Jews in different countries and climates around the world should pray for rain according to the agricultural requirements of their particular locale. Yet the overwhelmingly prevalent practice over the last thousand years has been for Jews to follow the Talmudic prototype which contains minor variations for Jews in Israel and Bavel.

The Rosh, a leading halachic authority of the medieval period, describes in a responsa (10:4) how he initially pursued a strong campaign to correct this custom. Citing Rambam’s criticism of those who “pray with falsehood” for weather conditions that would actually harm rather than benefit their crops, Rosh consulted with Rabbinic leaders across Ashkenaz who all supported his view.

Nevertheless, the Rosh describes how his efforts to implement these changes provoked serious divisions and in-fighting within the community of Ashkenaz, with significant groups powerfully resisting his attempts to change what they saw as their ancestral custom. Setting aside both his pride and his strong personal feelings for what he believed to be correct practice, the Rosh publicly retracted his position in order to keep the peace and maintain communal unity. His private protest in the form of this responsa was restricted to a close circle of students which included his son.

How exactly this lesson can be integrated into 21stcentury Israel’s political and religious tensions is of course a complex and delicate matter. All sides could benefit however from internalising the spirit of the Rosh’s Tefillat HaGeshem compromise, sacrificing a cause so close to his heart on the altar of communal unity.

May God grant us all strength to cope with the horrendous and savage attack which has been inflicted upon our people and bring us absolute and total victory over our brutal enemy. May He watch over our soldiers going in to battle and bring back all of the hostages safely and speedily. And when this nightmare is over, may we be inspired to realise that we are one united people – notwithstanding our significant disagreements – and arise from this tragedy to rebuild Israel as a stronger and more cohesive society with all the blessings that this will achieve.

First posted on Facebook 10 October 2023, here.

Humans, demons and the depths of depravity

The indescribably brutal terrorist atrocities inflicted on Israeli communities a week ago are the sort of unfathomable events which leave many of us lost for words, despairing of humanity and the depths to which it is capable of plummeting.

Can people ever sink to such depths of depravity that they effectively lose their humanity? Or worse?

Such questions prompted me to recall a passage that I wrote in Judaism Reclaimed.

In yesterday’s parashah, the Torah describes Adam’s son Shet as being in the image of Adam — a term which Rambam (Moreh 1:7) links to the earlier description of Adam as having been created "betzelem Elokim" (in the image of God). Rambam then cites a Gemara which states that, from the moment of his sin until the birth of Shet, Adam bore offspring which were not in his image but rather were "ruchot" or demons.

Tzelem Elokim — the element of humanity that can be said to be Godly — is identified with the intellect. It is through this uniquely human intelligence that people can make moral judgments to distinguish right from wrong, subdue their negative impulses and thereby direct their sophisticated intellectual capabilities so as to benefit the world around them.

In Rambam’s understanding, those who fail in their human calling to use their intellect to refine and control the animalistic aspects of their personality are considered behema betzurat adam (an animal in human form) rather than betzelem Elokim. Membership of this unesteemed group therefore can cause people to forfeit their human privileges such as divine providence and a share in the World to Come.

Far worse than this, however, are those who take this divine gift to humanity of a powerful intellect and use it to subdue and terrorise others. As history repeatedly demonstrates, the greatest misery and hardship experienced by mankind is caused by people who have used their intellect to devise ways of furthering human suffering. These are the sorts of “demons” that, in Rambam’s understanding of the Gemara, were said to have been sired by Adam prior to Shet. It can be presumed that Rambam would offer a similar interpretation of Talmudic accounts of demons who dwell in uninhabited areas, damage unguarded buildings, and attack those who travel unaccompanied at night.

Humans who have fallen to such depths might be viewed as even worse than animals who typically only catch and kill prey out of necessity.

Notwithstanding all this, Rabbi Yisrael Lau – Holocaust survivor and former Chief Rabbi of Israel – warns strongly against the inclination to regard these evil and brutal acts as the work of some kind of “inhuman monsters from another world. In his Out Of The Depths memoir, Rabbi Lau records his own passionate response to one of the witnesses from the Eichmann trial:

“If Auschwitz were indeed another planet, it would be easier to accept the Holocaust. But in truth, the disaster of Auschwitz is that it happened on the very same planet where we had lived before, where we live now, and where we will continue to live. Those who carried out the cruel murders of the innocent where ordinary people, who returned home from their murderous acts to water the flowers in their manicured gardens. They tended the flowers lovingly and carefully so they would blossom, just after they had torn infants to pieces and shattered the skulls of men and women.

Just after shoving thousands of people into the gas chambers to their deaths, they came home to play with dolls together with their little girls, and listen to classical music, eyes closed, engrossed in the uplifting spirituality of Bach and Beethoven…Those were people just like you and me, and that’s the whole problem. When you transfer all those horrors to another planet, you minimise the issue. You are saying that something like the Holocaust can never happen to us again. In my humble opinion, you are wrong…”

In responding to such an outrage – as we must – with full force, we must retain a clear and unrelenting distinction between our use of military power and that of our enemies. Despite the best efforts of foreign media and anti-Semitic critics abroad to blur the boundaries.

On the one hand we have those who idealise the power of the sword and turn it into a national ideology. Describing the traits that typify Amalek, Rabbi S. R. Hirsch writes that it bore a spirit which:

“chooses the sword as its lot, seeks renown in laurels of blood, and strives to realise the ambition of “Let us make for ourselves a name” with which Nimrod began world history. This ambition is realised by destroying the welfare of nations and the happiness of men.

This seeking renown by the force of arms is the first and last enemy of human happiness and Divine Kingship on earth…Amalek’s glory-seeking sword knows no rest as long as one free man’s heart keeps beating and pays no homage to it; as long as one modest abode and happy home remains standing whose residents do not tremble before its might.”

We must remember that our messianic utopia is not a bloodletting of our enemies – it is being privileged to live in a world peace – among nations – in such security that weapons will no longer be necessitated. While we must be uncompromising in responding to such attacks in order to wipe out the evil in our midst, we long for an era in which our swords can be beaten into ploughshares…

The Jewish use of military power, on the other hand is that of a necessary evil. A war to root out evil or defend ourselves against enemies is a great mitzva. But we truly years for a time when the world embraces the truths and teachings of God so that “no nation will lift up sword against nation” and allowing us therefore to beat our swords into plowshares, and our spears into pruning hook.

Until then we continue to pray for the protection of our soldiers in battle, the full healing of our wounded and the return of our captured brethren.

First posted on Facebook 15 October 2023, here.