Revenge, Anger and the End of Wisdom

Thinking about Parashat Mattot - July 17, 2014   

Revenge and more revenge.

The widening spiral of pain, anger and retribution broke new ground today, as a passenger plane holding 295 travelers was shot down over Ukrainian airspace by a country or faction still to be identified. The downed flight, covered on the TV news as luridly as one would expect, was instantly triggering for me, as I imagine it was for many of us - transporting us back to our 9/11 horror, watching repeating footage of explosion, irresistibly pressing us to imagine a horrible death, in an act of terror, at altitude. All this getting mixed up with actual sorrow for actual people who actually lost their lives today.

The attack against the plane was the latest volley in a long history of Ukrainian-Russian tension that bores straight back through the Soviet Union and out the other end, for hundreds of years preceding.

If this had been the only new, violent escalation, dayenu, it would have been more than enough. But as we watch this out of one eye, the other remains fixed upon Israel, and the dance of revenge playing out in there. Today Israeli forces are launching ground attacks along the borders of Gaza, in response, of course, to the Palestinian missiles flying toward Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, those in retaliation for offensives that were themselves in response to the murder of three Jewish boys. Which, in someone's mind, was revenge for something before that, which was itself revenge, and back and back and back. Ping pong ping pong ping.

The failure of diplomacy to be of any meaning in either of these conflicts launches me, personally, into a state of despair I haven't felt in a while.


Of course I was also primed for it. Just last weekend, the husband and I rented and watched, by poorly timed recommendation, the chilling Cold War drama, Fail-Safe, starring Henry Fonda as the President of the United States, in a bunker, on the hotline with the Soviet premier, trying to keep the world from coming apart as an American military jet inadvertently and irretrievably heads to Moscow to drop its nuclear payload. The hopelessness and powerlessness seared into the celluloid of this film, and the image of a world where not even good intentions can save the day, much less bad ones, have haunted my sleep for days, before any actual plane got shot out of the sky. Not that I need fiction to enhance my experience of these very real events, but learning that the plane crash was revealed to Putin while he was on the phone with Obama felt like a bit of mocking deja vu.

So I did what I do. I turned to this week's Torah, which often serves for me as a kind of Tarot - what is the insight that this week's cards can bring to the silently articulated question of escalation, revenge, and hopelessness?

Alas, it is a really bad week for this exercise. Our Torah portion, Mattot, is itself about revenge. God commands Moshe to exact a full revenge on the Midianites for having participated with the Moabites in luring the Israelites into sexual misconduct and idolatry. This is meant to be Moshe's last task before he can at long last be gathered to his ancestors. The Israelite soldiers - our soldiers - go and deliver the Midianites a complete defeat. They kill the five Midianite kings, who are specifically named, much as the five daughters of Tzelafchad were repeatedly named in last week's portion and again later in the Book of Joshua.

The kings are killed at swordpoint, and so is Bil'am ben Be'or. You might recall him as the donkey guy, the prophet through whom came the beautiful paean to the Children of Israel, Mah tovu ohaleycha Ya'akov, mishk'noteycha Yisrael: how goodly are your tents, O Jacob, your dwellings, O Israel. He delivered that blessing, but apparently only as a puppet for the ventriloquist God of Israel. Because those words do not seem to mitigate what is considered by Torah and by rabbinic literature to be his irredeemable wickedness - the whole seduction/idolatry thing seems to have been Bil'am's idea. Torah makes a point of saying Bil'am was killed by the sword. Rashi explains that Israel and the other nations swapped strategies in this; while other nations lived by the sword, Israel lived by the word - prayer and praise. When Bil'am gave his mah tovu blessing, he had intended words of curse, and was willing to use the Israelite toolbox - words of power - to do so. And so in punishing him, Israel used the toolbox of his nation, exacting vengeance with the sword's sharp edge.

In any event, the Israelite soldiers get back to the camp having killed every last Midianite man under the rule of the five kings, and bringing back as prisoners the women and children. Moshe, accompanied by Elazar the High Priest, goes out to meet the returning warriors. Moshe is incensed that the soldiers left the women alive, particularly since seduction of Israelite men by Midianite women was the mechanism by which Israel was led astray, according to the story, having brought both moral compromise and outbreak of some disease into the Israelite camp. And while I'd prefer to stop the retelling right here, with Moshe's anger, where really it's bad enough, it did not stop here. Moshe cajoles the soldiers into killing the women, as well as their sons and many of their daughters.

Now, you and I were not there. Sinai maybe, but this moment no. I have not lived in a war zone. I have not been the victim of military attacks. I'm not a Holocaust survivor nor the child of survivors. My inability to imagine what such a complete desire for revenge feels like is a blessing, it truly is, and, alas, a rare privilege on this earth. But still, even we lucky ones might have some wisdom to impart to those who are spinning in the gyre of hatred and revenge. But what?

At last, a breath of air is provided by Rabbi Yehudah Löwe in his Torah commentary, Netivot Olam. Löwe is the Maharal of Prague, the 16th Century commentator known folklorically for creating a golem to protect the Jews. He is no stranger to the threat of violence. Here he retells a piece of midrash to explain why, Moshe having scolded the returning soldiers and pressing them to complete the revenge, it is Elazar the priest, not Moshe, who then begins to articulate Torah to the soldiers regarding how to divide spoils of war and how to purify themselves after having engaged in warfare. This is puzzling to the sages, because it is Moshe who is the archetypal lawgiver, the primary conduit for Torah.

The midrash brought by the Maharal is that in his anger, Moshe is able to give commands of destruction, of violence. But he is unable to articulate law, or wisdom, or prophecy. The Maharal quotes the words of Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish in Talmud (Pesachim 66b):

Resh Lakish said: As to every man who becomes angry, if he is a Sage, his wisdom departs from him; if he is a prophet, his prophecy departs from him. If he is a Sage, his wisdom departs from him: [we learn this] from Moses. For it is written, And Moses was wroth with the officers of the host etc. (Numbers 31:14); and it is written, And Eleazar the Priest said unto the men of war that went to the battle: This is the statute of the law which the Lord hath commanded Moses etc. (Numbers 31:21), whence it follows that [the wisdom/laws] had been forgotten by Moses.

There is nothing surprising or new here. But it is nice to have it articulated not just as world wisdom, not just as common sense, but as Torah. In anger, the wise lose their wisdom, prophets lose their vision. We all know this and are grateful to Talmud, and then Rabbi Löwe, for articulating it. This is the price of anger, even if the anger feels justified.

And this is what we are seeing all around us. Anger begetting anger, revenge begetting revenge. So that wisdom and vision are displaced.

I am not a politician. Or a historian. Or a diplomat. I can't stop wars or reduce tensions, nor can anyone that I know. But we can all feel supported by our own tradition, including even the bloodiest moments of Torah, when we say to leaders on all sides, that revenge is revenge. You may choose to engage in it or, we pray you may choose not to. But do not try to pass it off as wisdom. Do not try to pass it off as prophecy. It is neither.

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.

Vayigash 5769 - The Lion and the Bull

[For Congregation Ner Shalom, Jan. 3, 2009.]

This week’s portion – and this week itself – are both about a bull and a lion butting heads.

Our parashah, Vayigash, offers the dramatic conclusion of the Joseph story, in which disguises are dropped, secret identities are revealed, those thought to be dead show up alive, erstwhile thugs are reformed, and a grand, loud, tearful reconciliation takes place.

Here’s the back story in case you weren’t reading Torah all week. As of last week’s parashah, Joseph has become Pharaoh’s vizier. The same famine that Pharaoh foresaw in his dream – and the rationing plan Joseph has developed as a result – have brought Joseph’s brothers down to Egypt where Joseph, unrecognizable to them, has them in his proverbial clutches.

Joseph does not reveal himself to them, but demands that they go back to Canaan and return with their baby brother, Benjamin. Joseph proceeds to frame Benjamin for theft. He tells the brothers that Benjamin must stay with him as a slave and that they should return to Canaan without him.

This is the suspenseful setup, as we move into Act III of the opera. The Playwright, through Joseph, has set everyone up for redemption or for tragedy or both. If the brothers have changed, they now have a chance to prove it, to behave differently this time than the last time, and to refuse to abandon Benjamin. If they haven’t changed, Joseph has cleverly rescued his little brother from the same men who abandoned him in a pit and/or sold him into slavery, depending on which sage’s interpretation you follow. Here, on the verge of redemption or catastrophe, is where this week’s parashah opens.

The curtain rises and Judah, who has become the brothers' chief and spokesmodel, approaches Joseph and delivers an impassioned speech, worthy of any fine orator or propagandist. Our father is old. He will die if we return to him without Benjamin. Benjamin’s brother is also dead. How much sorrow can we heap on a white-haired old man?

At the end of the speech, perhaps seeing that his arguments are not winning the day, Judah finally volunteers to take Benjamin’s place as Joseph’s slave so that Benjamin can go free and return to their father.

This is what finally breaks the tension and ends the masquerade. Judah is redeemed. They are all redeemed. Joseph, unable to contain himself any longer, reveals himself and bursts into a wailing that can be heard in the palace. The brothers nivhalu mipanav; they were speechless. Then everyone embraces and cries together. And they begin to get reacquainted. “Father is really still alive?” “Yes, 130 takeh.”

Happy ending. Curtain falls.

There was something, though, that our sages found unpersuasive about this wrap-up. In Midrash, they offer a much more detailed version of the final scene. There, instead of Judah making a speech, Judah and Joseph are having a loud and increasingly hostile argument, accusing and counter-accusing each other, each one articulating his sense of betrayal and hurt. Eventually Judah, in a fury, threatens a massacre, and as we know from the story of Dinah and Shechem, these brothers are capable of massacre. “We will paint Egypt red with blood,” he tells Joseph the vizier. “Ah, but you were already painters in the old days,” counters Joseph, “when you painted your brother’s coat in blood and told your father he’d been devoured by beasts.” It was only then, faced with his own shame and guilt at that horrible act, that Judah offers himself up.

The problem with the Midrash, of course, is that Joseph couldn’t have said all these things to Judah without revealing his true identity. After all, how would Pharaoh’s right-hand man know about these details from the brothers’ shameful past. So the Joseph of the Midrash could not have been the Joseph we know, the Joseph of the Torah narrative. The great scholar Nechama Leibowitz, z"l, suggests that the Joseph in this Midrash is in fact Judah’s own conscience. This whole debate, all this rage and hurt, all the accusations and counter-accusations, take place in Judah’s heart, and they are what lead him finally to give up the fight and offer himself up.*

Midrash also says that when Judah approached Joseph, malachei hasharet – the ministering angels – said to each other, “Let us go down and watch the bull and the lion mitnagchim – butting heads.” Of course the lion is the traditional symbol of Judah (which is why so many of us have ancestors named Yehudah Leyb - Judah the Lion). The bull was sacred in ancient Egypt, and here seems to be the symbolic stand-in for the very assimilated Joseph. The Midrash points out that in the real world, bulls fear lions. But now the bull is facing off against the lion – Joseph has taken the position of power.

But what if this is just an internal struggle that Midrash describes? Would the angels watch? Well, perhaps the bitter fight between Judah the Lion and his own bull-headedness might have been exciting enough spectator sport for the angels all on its own.

So why was this Midrash necessary? I think the sages, living in the real world, did not find self-sacrifice credible, when seemingly offered as a strategy. They needed Judah’s offer, his surrender, to be more than a rhetorical device, and frankly, Torah is ambiguous about whether it is or not.

So they supplied this supplemental narrative so that we could see Judah arrive at his self-sacrifice only after all his anger and hurt were sucked out of him. The sages could not believe in someone who offered to drop their arms as part of a negotiation. They needed it instead to be the outcome of great personal struggle. “I may have plenty of right on my side,” they seem to want Judah to say, “but not enough to continue on this path of hatred and guilt and violence. I offer myself up.”

This has also been a week of hatred and violence in our country-away-from-home, in Israel, and in Gaza, whose inhabitants are also our siblings. The lion and the bull have been going at it, aggressively and cruelly; and at this moment I can’t clearly tell you which is which. Each side is acting out of old hurts and old guilt; each trying to unbalance the other. But instead of the barbs of Joseph and Judah, we have bombs and missiles. Both sides promise to paint the other’s territory red. And yet neither side has publicly wondered, like Judah ultimately did, whether they truly are in a moral position to do so. Alas, both sides have, shamefully, become very, very experienced painters.

So if Joseph in the Midrash was Judah’s conscience, and a deep struggle with conscience is what allowed Judah to let go of his need to win at all costs, then we need to stand up and take on Joseph’s mantle. We must continue to be the conscience that challenges everyone’s right to make it worse, over and over again. We must challenge the State of Israel; we must also challenge Hamas.

And we must imagine, really imagine, what it would be like if both sides reached a conclusion, like Judah did, that it might be better to risk losing than to cause more pain.

Imagine if both sides reached that conclusion. Imagine the stunned silence. Imagine the weeping and the wailing and the embracing. Imagine us all able take off our masks and reveal our true selves to each other. Remember me? I am your brother. Imagine if we could, at last, dwell next to each other in peace and say, hineh mah tov umah naim shevet achim gam yachad – behold how good, how pleasant, how obvious, how overdue it is, to dwell, siblings that we are, together.

_________________________
* I am indebted to my friend Rabbi Eli Cohen for pointing out that Judah’s first words to Joseph in the portion, bi adoni, could be understood as “you, my lord, are inside me,” supporting Professor Leibowitz’s view that this Midrash represents an internal dialogue.