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HaShem and Mensch: Yom Kippur 2013/5774

Rabbi SchulweisI asked my father, “How do you say ‘secular’ in Yiddish?” My father was a Yiddish purist, and I would constantly challenge him to translate English terms into authentic Yiddish. Such as, “How do you say ‘Cornflakes’ in Yiddish? Or Shredded Wheat?”

I was convinced that my father most likely believed that God spoke to Abraham, Isaac, Jacobs, Moses, in Yiddish.   At any rate, Papa said the proper way to say ”secular” in Yiddish was Weltlich -- which means “worldly.” My father’s Jewish home was worldly: Moderner. The home agenda included the Yiddish theater, Yiddish newspapers, Yiddish schools, Yiddish music.

I was taken by my grandfather to the synagogue , and by my father to the theater. At the Yiddish theater, on 2nd Avenue, the performances were substantive: Yoshe Kalb, The Brothers Ashkenazi, the Golem, The Dybbuk, and, of course, Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth, authored by the British–Yiddish writer, you all know as William Shakespeare.   When Shakespeare’s plays were staged, the marquee read Farteiched un Farbesert – “translated and improved” by the Yiddish theater.

My grandfather took me to shul, my father took me to schule – Yiddish school, sponsored by different organizations with less or more socialist and Zionist leanings such as National Worker Alliance, Morgen Dzshornal, Tag and The Freiheit.

My father’s home was always open to Yiddish poets, Yiddish lecturers, politics, economic social interest. My favorite was the poetic readings and one iconic Yiddish poem entitled “The City of Slaughter,” written by the most prominent Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik. This was not an ordinary poem. It was in fact a report written by Bialik who was sent to Kishinev to interview the victims of a pogrom along with a translation of the forged protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was later published by the automobile manufacturer, Henry Ford, and claimed to reveal the plot of Jews to take over the world.

Bialik had been sent by the Jewish historical commission to take the pulse of the Jewish community in Kishinev. A pogrom is a mass attack on a particular group of people planned and designed by the government. Here is an excerpt covering the Kishinev pogram, and published in the New York Times in 1903:

“The anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, Bessarabia , are worse than the censor will permit to publish … Mobs led by priests, following the Russian Easter … babies literally torn to pieces by frenzied and bloodthirsty mobs … streets piled with corpses."

The poem marked a turning point reflecting a major change in the collective Jewish psyche at the start of the 20th century. What was distinctive about the report was its focusing less on hate of Czarist Russia than on shame; the embarrassment of Jewish weakness, Jewish impotence, the humiliation of a people who could not protest or protect their women – the wives, daughters, children, mothers, sisters – from rape, violence and degradation. It was the shame of Jewish timidity, passivity, and hypocrisy. Here is a small excerpt from the City of Slaughter, in which Bialik has God say to the readers,

“They say –we have all sinned. We have betrayed.

But there own heart believes it not

A shattered vessel – can it sin?

Can broken pots have iniquity?

Why are they praying unto Me?

Speak to them.

Let them storm. Let them lift up their fist at Me.

Let them resent the insult done to them and me.

Let them smash the sky and My own throne …

Has none a fist?

God himself is embarrassed for His people’s powerlessness. The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 was the first pogrom in the 20th century, but preceded by massacres in Kiev, Odessa, Warsaw. Three million Jews leave Russia, and in one year, 1897, two secular world Jewish organizations were born – Zionism, and Jewish socialism – both founded outside the synagogue and outside the temple. That drew my father into the vortex of political Zionism.

It’s a short road from Kishinev to Auschwitz. But after Kishinev, a deep rent split open the fabric of Jewish faith – a people mourning the morbidity of God and God’s people. Here are a few lines written by the celebrated Yiddish poet, Jacob Gladstein. His requiem for the Jewish God opens:

“Without Jews, there is no Jewish God

Who will dream You?

Who will remember You?

Who will deny You?

Who will yearn for You? …

Jewish God – you are almost gone.”

Tougher yet, the poetry of Kadia Molodowsky. She writes a a broken “El Male Rachamin”

“God of mercy

For the time being

Choose another people.

We are tired of death …

We have run out of blood…

Look at the peoples of the world

Let them have the prophecies and Holy Days.

And God, grant us one more blessing

Take back the gift of our separateness.”

The Zionists urged a new way of understanding the Jewish condition and a different way of relating to the promises of God. Zionism means a break with the oath recorded in the Talmud cited by Zayde that kept Jewish heart sedated and its Jewish hands chained. The resolution to break with the irresponsibly and fecklessness of Jewish response to persecution, pogrom, and expulsion. The revolution meant more than the acquisition of a state. It meant a freedom from obedience and conformity with the past. It raised a new theological question: Who controls the world? Who makes decisions? Who innovates? Who governs history? Is it God, or is it man? Whose will is it from, above or from below? Whose decisions, whose choices are to be followed and executed? HaShem or mensch? Do we wait for miracles or exercise human initiative?

This summer, I came across three recently published books written by distinguished Orthodox rabbis, all of whom oddly deal independently with the way “miracle” is to be interpreted. Why “miracle”? Why now? Why Orthodoxy? The three authors were the distinguished Talmudist and Jewish philosopher Rabbi Joseph Baer Soloveitchik, and the book published posthumously is called, The Emergence of Ethical Man. The other author was Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and the Commonwealth for over 20 years, and the author of a number of books, including The Great Partnership, a sophisticated examination of science, religion and the search for meaning. And the last book I read also paid attention to the new meaning of miracle was entitled The God Who Hates Lies, by our friend (alev ha-shalom) David Hartman. Three orthodox scholars, but none like Zayde.   Consider Soloveitchik’s judgment:

“The supernatural miracle is not very welcome in the covenant society. We prefer the regular flow of live … the miracle in Hebrew does not possess the connotation of the supernatural. Miracle, in Hebrew (pele and “ness” ) describes only an outstanding event which causes amazement.”

Who would expect this to come from J.B. Soloveitchik, the leading Orthodox interpreter?

Rabbi Sacks draws from the wisdom of Jewish mysticism, from the Zohar. There he finds the disctinction between two types of miracle: One is the “awakening from above” (itaruta leylah) and the other miracle is the “awakening from below” (itaruta deletata). If the miracle comes from above, that is, if it is supernatural, then it will not change human nature. Only you and I, the awakeners from below, can change nature. Miracles from above, initiated from God without man, do not last. Only 40 days after the miracle of Moses bringing down the tablets of the Ten Commandments from above the Jews are found dancing and worshiping the Golden Calf. The original tablets which Moses carried down from the mountain were written by God. The first tablets written were those of God’s work and the writing was God’s writing. Moses shattered them. The letters flew off the tablet out of shame. Moses was left holding a slab of rock.

With the first tablet, Moses plays a passive role, he has nothing to do with the writing of the first tablets. Then God commands Moses to hew two tables of the stone like the first. And because the second tablets are the work of a collaboration between God and man, they remained whole. They lasted, says the Zohar, because the tablets were a collaborative work, a joint partnership between God and man. Divine intervention without human initiative is noise without music.

Without divine and human initiative, the miracle fades. So, only three days after the splitting of the Red Sea, an awakening from above event was followed by the complaint of the Israelites concerning the bitter waters from the desert. So, only forty days after the revelation of the Torah at Sinai, the Jews are found whirling wildly around the Golden Calf.

As I read these Orthodox scholars I am amazed by their effort to inhibit the durability and efficacy of the supernatural miracle. I am astounded by their observation that in the Bible, as you progress from era to era, there are less and less supernatural miracles from above and more and more miracles from below that work.

Listen to Zohar: “Every move from below calls forth a corresponding move from above.” The power above is set in motion from the impulse from below. If the ball is thrown but there is no receiver, it falls to the ground and there is no advance, no progress towards the goal. To be effective, a miracle needs human as well as divine initiative.

Something has led to this interpretation of the miracles. You can read it in these Orthodox minds who wish to give the human partner of a divine-human partnership greater power and greater significance.

God and man have a new relationship. A new metaphor is born. Not that of God as master and Israel as slave, or God as sovereign and Israel as servant. God and man are seen as co-signatories of a covenantal pact.

There is a fascinating midrash, an imaginative parable that explains a new metaphor to explain the collegiality and co-responsibility of Ha Shem and mensch.

In the midrash Tanhuma, Tineus Rufus, a pagan philosopher who taunts Rabbi Akiba with difficult questions, asks him, “Rabbi, whose deeds are greater? Those of God, or those of man?” Rabbi Akiba answers, “Those deeds of man are greater.” Tineus Rufus is shocked. “Are you placing the deeds of man above the deeds of God?”

To answer, Rabbi Akiba calls for a plate upon which is placed sheaves of wheat, and then for another plate upon which is placed bread. “Which of these is a greater deed? Clearly, the deeds of man. You, Tineus Rufus, think in split categories, in terms of either-or – either man or God, either grain or bread. But when we bless the bread and celebrate the interdependence of the divine and of the human. The motzi is a blessing of cooperation, not of competition. Here, on one plate, you have the gift of nature: soil, seed, sun, water – none of these did the human being create. Neither you or I. It is a gift but left alone the raw grain is inedible and indigestible. The seed, the soil, the sun, the water, are potentialities but left unattended they leave us hungry and unfulfilled. Only with the cooperation of man does grain turn into the bread that sustains the heart. God and man are partners. And without man, there is nothing to eat, nothing to satisfy the pangs of human hunger. God is the partner who gives, and man is the partner who cultivates the ground, plows the field, plants the seed, waters the earth, fertilizes the ground, cuts the harvest, grinds the wheat, bakes and seasons the flour. This is the deeper meaning of the Motzi. It applies not only to grain but to life itself. As the sages put it, everything in this world requires repair.

The created world is imperfect, incomplete. The lupine must be soaked, the wheat must be ground, the flour mixed and the human being must be perfected, sanctified, realized, actualized.” This is the depth of the motzi. Note that before we eat the bread we do not recite the blessing “Ha motzi lechem min ha shamayim” -- who brings forth bread from the heavens. But the bread we bless is made with the human sweat of our brow, with our human wisdom. And for this, we praise the divine-human blessings of cooperation.   Ha motzi lechem min ha aretz -- that brings forth bread from the earth. And so it is with the Sabbath and Festival Kiddush. The Kiddush is recited not over grapes, but over wine. The wine for Kiddush is part of nature and part of human nature, the talent of man to transform grape into wine.

We are instruments of Godliness. And who are we to be considered the allies of God on earth? Who are we to bear such am elevated responsibility? Read it in the book of Genesis, in which God creates everything by fiat, by command. “Let there be mountains and let there be trees and let there be water and moon and sun.”  Everything is created by command alone. Except my creation and your creation – human creation.   Here the biblical language is distinctive: It reads, “Let us make the human being, male and female, in our image.” Who is the “us” in “Let us…”? And who is the “our” in “our image.”   The “us” is the human self added to the divine. God cannot create man perfect. Man must love, must grow, must feel, must sanctify himself and the civilization around him. With all our best intentions, a child will not grow by depending upon the intervention of the parent. The infant will not walk by itself without the self reaching out towards greater maturity. The child must be allowed to falter, to fall, to stumble, to stutter before it runs and speaks.

Who are we then, you and I? We human beings are the repairers, menders, sowers, of the world. Healing, helping, comforting, soothing. And the grand design, the grand purpose is the last word of the Sh’ma. That word is Echad. Look at your tallit with four fringes, each of those fringes are wound a number of times and divided into seven windings, eight windings, eleven windings, and thirteen windings. These windings translated from numbers into Hebrew letters spell out Adonai Echad, the oneness of God’s universe.  

I read Soloveitchik with surprise. Consider his stunning sentiment about death: “Death in Judaism is not the result of sin but of biology.” This means to me that when I die or when I fall, my death or illness have nothing to do with my immorality; it has everything to do with my mortality.   If I fall, God did not trip me nor did I inherit original sin from my ancestors.

If illness and death are not the result of sin, it is foolhardy to turn adversity into guilt, shame or self-recrimination.

Soloveitchik’s turn to naturalism flows out of the logic in the Talmud. In Avodah Zarah, we encounter a brilliant insight: A rabbinic sage argues, “Suppose a man steals seeds of wheat and plants them in his own field. Din hu shelo titzmach elah olam k’minhago noheg. It would be right for the seeds not to grow. But nature pursues its own course.

Suppose a man has intercourse with his neighbor’s wife. Din hu shelo titaber – it would be for her not to conceive. But nature pursues its own course.

Flowers wither. Branches break, floods drown. Nature is amoral. We Jews do not worship nature. Our tradition is to sanctify nature. We drain toxins from contaminated waters, build safer bridges, and stronger dams to contain raging waters and furious fires.

Zayde and Papa are not in me, nor I in them. My children and my children’s children are not me, nor I they. Judaism evolves, Jewish denominations evolve, we are a tradition of change.

Zayde and Papa each taught me a song, “Voss mir zenen mir ober yiden zenen mir.” That was my fateher’s song. My zayde taught me to prolong the last word of the Sh’ma to expand the sound of “Echad.” It was to embrace the oneness of God, the oneness of our people, the oneness of humanity.

The secularity of Papa and the orthodoxy of Zayde are not as distant in Judaism than in its daughter religions.   The piety in secularism and in Humanism in Jewish faith meet and with wisdom they meet in the dialogue between Papa and Zayde.

Thu, March 28 2024 18 Adar II 5784