Founders' Syndrome and the Ethical Will

For Congregation Ner Shalom

So when I read the Book of Deuteronomy, I confess I get kind of bummed out. Don't get me wrong, I also get plenty bummed out in Leviticus. But for different reasons. Leviticus, with its baroque elaboration of laws: impartiality and impurity and sacrifice and sex, some of it beautiful and universal, some of it punitive and painful; Leviticus, with its repeated refrains of "I am Adonai your God," presents itself as God's word, as direct as we can get it, despite the lurking presence of unnamed and invisible editors. I read Leviticus, and know that I am stuck with this difficult text, which is a very Jewish predicament; and I struggle with it, which is a very Jewish privilege.

But in Deuteronomy, I get bummed out for Moshe Rabenu, Moses our teacher, our great prophet and liberator, making his final speeches to the Children of Israel before they pass into the Promised Land which, Moshe obviously grasps, he will not be doing with them. We are still in the wilderness, but only barely. It is year 40 of the Great Wandering: the 40th year, 11th month, 1st day. Just one moon away from leaving behind nomadic life and becoming instead conquerors, occupiers, settlers and farmers. The life of Israel is about to be unrecognizable. With fewer exceptions than you can count on one hand, there is no one left in this mass of humanity who remembers the slavery in Egypt or the Parting of the Sea. In fact, there's no one who can even remember receiving the law at Sinai except perhaps in a vague and unsettling childhood memory.

This is the final chapter of Moshe's story and the fulfillment of his great work. In partnership with God he changed history, he changed the world. But unlike his Partner, Moshe is about to be left behind. At his death, a few chapters from now, Torah will say that there never arose in Israel another prophet like Moshe. And I suspect Moshe foresees this. He and God had something special, for sure, seeing each other face to face like they did. There would never again be anyone who could know God's will with such certainty or could relay God's word with such credibility.

But there's also something amiss in what should be Moshe's triumphant moment. As he redelivers God's laws, he does so with an extra punch. In this week's portion, Parashat R'eh, he places blessing and curse before the people, offering reward for obedience to God's mitzvot, threatening punishment and death for those who transgress or who worship other gods on the sly. This stuff coming from God in Leviticus might be problematic, but the problem is theological. This stuff coming from Moshe in Deuteronomy is somehow personal and somehow tragic. One hears in it Moshe's sadness and anger and fear at his own mortality.

Poor Moshe. Who am I, nebuch, to pity him, yet I do. Moshe was great, but also tragic. And while other tragic figures like King Lear overtrust the future, Moshe undertrusts it. And so, with nothing short of desperation, he tries to control what will happen next by promising and lecturing and threatening and cajoling. All that we have are his words, which can be interpreted in various ways. But if Deuteronomy were a movie, there would be reaction shots of Israelites listening to him, and we'd know a bit more by seeing whether they were filled with the fear of God, or impatience at Moshe's long speech, or a mix of love and sadness for this lonely 120-year-old man, now in his dotage.

Moshe seems to have a case of what, in the non-profit world, we might call "Founder's Syndrome." He founded the Israelite people as we know them; he did the immense, unimaginable task of leading them - perhaps hundreds of thousands of them - out of slavery and away from their homes and the only life they'd ever known, to reconstitute them with new identity and vision and ambition.  But now Moshe digs the heels of his sandals in deep because he knows change is coming. He doesn't think there is a successor equal to the task of leadership. And he doesn't see the possibility of the people as a whole exerting authority, even though the people who will experience this new life are, arguably, more qualified to step up and lead than Moshe, who can only guess at what the future might bring.

Moshe responds to his not knowing by trying all the harder to control. A calmer, saner Moshe could not possibly have thought that a law that says, "neither add to nor take away from my commandments" could ever be workable. With all due respect to Justice Scalia, one cannot legislate the principle of "no change ever." Yet Moshe makes this very demand as he stands before the people, fiercely protecting what he brought into the world while, my heart imagines, envying, even begrudging the people the future that they will enjoy. Moshe, our Founder, insists that it must happen his way; he can only imagine disaster if it doesn't. 

Of course what also makes Moshe's desperate clinging to his work product tragic is that there but for the grace of God goes any one of us. We all like things to go our way. We all want our contributions appreciated and remembered; we all want legacy; we all want our thumbprint on the future. It is in our nature; perhaps because our spirits feel eternal to us, despite the mortality of our bodies. It seems natural to want to be part of whatever happens next.

But we are all mortal. We all stand at the brink of death, whether that brink is a day or a decade or, God willing, much wider. And most of us realize that we can't orchestrate the doings of things and people that will outlive us. Change will happen, change has to happen. Our successors will do things differently; they will have to. And certainly Moshe knew this. In fact there is a famous midrash that when Moshe ascended the mountain to receive the law, God temporarily transported him to the classroom of Rabbi Akiva, living millennia later, where Moshe Rabenu sat in the eighth row and didn't understand any of the Torah that Akiva taught, despite Akiva calling it Torat Moshe, the Torah of Moses.

Who knows, maybe it was that very vision of a strange and unintelligible universe that made Moshe clutch the Torah that he knew all the tighter.

So in an ever-changing world, what thumbprint can we hope to have on the future? Perhaps the best any of us can do is embodied in the Jewish custom of the ethical will. A message to the future that embodies our values without coercing adherence to them. I have had cause, sadly, to hear the reading of some truly beautiful ethical wills. Full of advice and humor and encouragement and vision. Revealing what moved the writer's soul, written with the hope that it might move the reader's as well.
I think that is the best we can hope for. To provide an ethical legacy, in writing or through our deeds, communicating the great principles that inspired us.

Maybe the Book of Deuteronomy is in fact Moshe's ethical will, albeit a flawed one. And if so, then I think that perhaps the great principle that drove him was kedushah, the holiness that he breathed in when he saw God face to face. This is what inspired him and what he wanted for us. But, growing up in the palace of Pharaoh, his toolbox for constructing kedushah on earth contained more law than poetry. How different might it all have been if Moshe had grown up not in the home of a monarch, but of a musician or a midwife or a mystic? Perhaps the ethical lesson he would have taught would have been closer to one shared in a 14th Century ethical will written by one Asher ben Yechiel who wrote the very opposite of what Moshe expresses in this week's portion. Instead of saying, "I have set before you blessing and curse," Reb Asher writes to those who survive him, "Do not obey the law for reward, nor avoid sin from fear of punishment, but serve God from love."

Ultimately, if we are going to be of service to the future, we must leave a legacy of love and of hope and possibility. Nelson Mandela, right now only 25 years Moshe's junior, will, when he goes, leave a legacy not about how to govern a people but about the possibility of freedom and equality and love. And it will then be other people's jobs to find the right vessels for those values.

We can't see all paths; we certainly can't control them. Still, we owe the future our best efforts - our love and care, even without knowing what the specifics will be. None of us is timeless. Moshe was the leader for his time. We must be the leaders for ours. And we must let future generations lead in theirs. If we are to be prophets, let us be prophets who reassure those who come after that there is always the possibility of making this world better. As it says in the book of Isaiah, mah navu al heharim raglei m'vaser mashmia shalom. How pleasant the footfalls of those who, climbing to the peaks, peek into the world ahead, bearing messages of peace!

Parashat Toldot: Brothers, Birthrights and Blessing

For Congregation Ner Shalom and B'nai Israel Jewish Center

Hineh mah tov u-mah na’im shevet achim gam yachad.

These words, set to one melody or other, are among the basic sound bytes of Judaism that we all got in Hebrew school; for many this is one of the few phrases that stuck with us on the long road from childhood. Hineh mah tov u-mah na’im shevet achim gam yachad. How good and how pleasant it is to sit, side by side, like brothers," says the text.

The older I get, the more I grasp why these words, which constitute the opening verse of Psalm 133, are so very catchy and compelling. When you’re young, they sound like a platitude. But as you get older, you realize that they point to the difficult problem of siblinghood. It is good and pleasant to sit together as siblings not because it is easy or natural or always fun. It is good to sit together as siblings precisely because it is not easy. The sibling relationship is complex. The pushme-pullyou of it: the inevitable jealousy and competition. But also the natural intimacy. You are tethered to each other by a common history, heritage and upbringing; by shared relatives, playthings and hated living room furniture. No one will ever know you as well or, God willing, as long as your sibling. And no one else – not even your spouse – is stuck with you in quite the same way. A married couple can divorce. We might think it’s terrible, but we know it happens and we sigh, “Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.” But when siblings break up, it somehow goes against the nature of things.

Exhibit A: Brothers

I had a chance to closely observe and appreciate the ties of siblinghood – especially the bonds of brothers – over this past week. I went with my husband and his brother, and my mother- and father-in-law, to their ancestral homeland of Vancouver, British Columbia. There we visited my father-in-law’s cousins – a band of three brothers, who are the sons of one of my father-in-law’s several uncles. They had children and grandchildren in tow, more sets of brothers among them. My father-in-law himself had two brothers who are no longer living. I watched these generations, as I would waves on the beach. Repeated incursions of brothers, some at hand in the room, some whose presence could only be felt by inference.

My father-in-law hadn’t visited the Vancouver family in some six years; my husband hadn’t in maybe twenty. And I’d never met them at all. Since my in-laws live in Israel, the route of our family visits has always traversed the Atlantic but never the 49th parallel. And because my father-in-law had made aliyah to Israel at a young age, he was more myth than fact to the younger Vancouver generations. So here we were, like visiting nobility. A great party was thrown in honor of the return of the Slozbergs from exile. Children, grandchildren, siblings, nephews, nieces, cousins – all here in abundance. And I loved it. I moved easily from family group to family group, learning names, memorizing relationships, asking for family stories. It was easy for me to experience this as hineh mah tov umah na’im, as good and pleasant. Because I didn’t know them. I knew no back-stories. I had no grudges and I was not charged with maintaining anyone else’s. In fact, it took days more to discover that there had been any.

Torah makes much of the tensions and grudges of siblinghood, perhaps because they’re universal, and because they can be read on both micro- and macro- levels: literal siblings and figurative siblings, individuals and nations. But Torah almost never treats the subject more intensely than in this week’s parashah, Toldot. This is the helping of Torah that brings us from Jacob and Esau struggling already within Rebecca’s womb, to a hungry Esau selling his birthright to Jacob in exchange for a bowl of soup, and finally to Jacob masquerading as his minutes-older brother in order to abscond with their father’s blessing.

We all know this story and our reactions to it are, I would guess, mixed. One can, and generations have, argued that Jacob was chosen by God, and in this story he does what he must in order to claim his destiny. One can argue it, but it’s hard to feel good about it. Jacob is one of our avot, one of the patriarchs. Here he steals what is understood to be our inheritance, making our own heritage hot property. It’s hard not to feel a little shame.

And as a story, it’s just plain sad to see it go this way. We know what siblings can accomplish together at their best. Think of Orville and Wilbur. George and Ira. The Brontes. Venus and Serena. Click & Clack.

But we also know how it can go so very bad. The famous fraternal feuds. Adi and Rudi Dassler, the founders of Adidas and Puma, respectively. Anne Landers and Dear Abby. AS Byatt and Margaret Drabble. Cain and Abel.

Often these breakdowns are over insignificant things; small jealousies and misunderstandings that snowball. And sometimes they’re based on very significant things. The items of controversy in this story are two: a birthright, or bechorah in Hebrew, and a blessing, or berachah.

The first of these, the bechorah, the birthright, Esau, tired and hungry, agrees to sell to Jacob rather than have to make his own dinner. The bechorah is about property rights – the larger share of land and livestock that the eldest son was entitled to inherit. The sages have questioned whether the sale of an inheritance that had not yet been received was even valid, but the story itself doesn’t questions it. It might have been poor form to sell your birthright, like refusing to go into the family business, but it wasn’t illegal. And, as for one who would squander a birthright on a bowl of lentils, you might apply the axiom, caveat venditor. Let the seller beware. No sympathy here.

But the blessing – the berachah – distinct in Hebrew from the bechorah by the mere reversal of two letters, as if they are flipsides of each other – the blessing seems another matter. This is the juicy bit. It cannot be bought and sold. It is bigger than the inheritance, and deeper too. It carries intention. It exists not in the legal realm but the spiritual one. Blessing engages our hopes and even our fears. Blessing implies something transcendent, something bigger, maybe something divine. The bechorah, the birthright, speaks to the wallet. The berachah speaks to the heart. By analogy, I’d say the institution of the civil union is an example of bechorah. But marriage is about berachah, which is why it is so desired by those who can’t have it, and defended so fiercely by some who can.

So if the bechorah here was land and livestock – conveyable property – what was the berachah? What was the blessing that was so desirable that Jacob drew it from Isaac by cunning and guile? It was this: the dew of heaven; the fat of the earth; grain; wine. Prominence over nations and precedence over brothers. This was the father’s blessing. Were they in fact Isaac’s to give? Are the words prediction or prophecy or magic to bring it about?

Esau, when he discovers the fraud, also begs for a blessing. His rapidly failing father cannot refuse, but is unable to offer a blessing to undo the one he’d given Jacob. That blessing was already uncorked and released into the world. But he nonetheless offers what he can: again the dew of heaven and the earth’s produce; plus the means to survive oppression and ultimately overcome it. This is the blessing given to Esau, that by all rights should have been given to Jacob – and inherited by us. And, given our history, it would have been a useful one.

But it was not the blessing Esau wanted. And who among us gets the blessing we want? In Deuteronomy, God says, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose blessing. Choose life.”

We are instructed to choose life, to choose blessing, but with no real guarantee about its content. It might be our lot to rule; it might be our lot to be ruled. It might be our lot to throw off the yoke of oppression. We must say yes, without knowing which it will be. But in any case, we can still be blessed, as both Jacob and Esau were, with the dew that flows down from the heavens, as the ancients believed, dew that flows just like the Kabbalists imagined blessing itself to flow, downward from source to us.

Psalm 133, hineh mah tov, “how good and pleasant it is to sit together as siblings” continues for three more verses:

Kashemen hatov al harosh yored al hazakan, z'kan Aharon sheyored al pi midotav.
K’tal Chermon sheyored al har’rey Tziyon
Ki sham tzivah Adonai et habrachah – chayim ad-ha’olam.

Like the good oil on the head,
Streaming down onto the beard of Aaron.
Like the dew of Hermon that trickles down
To the Mountains of Zion;
Where Adonai commanded this blessing: life, always.

Sitting together as brothers and sisters is not just good and pleasant: it is blessing embodied. It is like the oil of anointment flowing down, onto the priestly beard of Aaron, himself an older brother who stands in the shadow of a younger brother and a sister too. It is like dew, like shefa, the divine trickle-down, whose flow sweeps us back to the place where we are reminded that we must choose life and we must live it, with all its inequalities and sorrows and joys and possibilities.

Being together like brothers and sisters – ultimately coming together despite grudges and hurts - that is the blessing. Isn’t that the case in this story? These bought birthrights and stolen blessings seem like nothing but trouble until twenty years and five chapters later when Esau and Jacob finally fall on each other’s necks and weep. Weep for the time lost and the fears outlived and the differences not fully resolvable and the future never quite knowable. But they weep together, as brothers, and they sit together, like brothers. Hineh mah tov u-mah na’im.

Isn’t that blessing? And if Esau and Jacob can do it, then why not Isaac and Ishmael? Why not us, their descendants still caught in the shock wave of their brotherly grudge, playing it out this very week with missiles aimed at houses, each side claiming the bechorah, the rights of the firstborn, when really what each of us wants is the berachah, the chance to be blessed?

The image of Jacob and Esau, reunited even if not fully reconciled, holding each other, sitting together in the soothing light of evening – this is the blessing we must choose, that we must seek, that we must create, that we must steal if necessary. In Yiddish, to cross a border is called ganeven di grenetz. You “steal” the border. You don’t wait for passage to be offered to you. Instead you tiptoe up, you do a little dance, like a snake charmer, and you charm that border until it is yours. It is what Jacob failed to do when he clumsily drew verses of Torah from his unwitting father. And it is what Jacob and Esau succeeded in doing so very elegantly and naturally when they strode past the border of their fear and into an embrace.

So let us be, like Jacob and Esau, stealers of blessing. Let us ganeven di grenetz, let us face borders, or oceans, or parallels, or fences. Let us approach the borders and use all our charms, all our wiles, all our hearts, to draw down blessing. So that we might know the goodness, the pleasantness, the berachah, of sitting, at long last, as brothers and sisters together.

Hineh mah tov u-mah na’im shevet achim gam yachad.

May it be so.