WE ARE ALIVE

“Now, Israel, heed the statutes and the ordinances that I am teaching you to perform, so that you will live, and you will come and take possession of the land that the Lord, God of your fathers, is giving you. You shall not add to the matter that I am commanding you, and you shall not subtract from it, to observe the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you. It is your eyes that have seen that which the Lord did concerning Baal Peor, as every man who followed Baal Peor, the Lord your God destroyed him from your midst. But you, who cleave to the Lord your God, all of you live today.” (Devarim 4:1-4)

The last verse of the above passage is well known to everyone who attends shul regularly. It is recited by the congregation immediately after the gabbai calls up the Cohen for the first Aliyah. After announcing the honouree’s name, the community says loudly, “But you, who cleave to the Lord your God, all of you live today!” What is the meaning of this verse and why is it recited immediately prior to the reading of the Torah? Rabbi Yaakov Emden (Germany, 18^th century in his siddur Beit Yaakov) focuses on the word “today” – “For one who reads from the Torah it is as if he received it this very day from Sinai.” This mirrors a comment of Rashi later in our parsha on the verse (Devarim 6:6), “And these matters that I command you today shall be upon your heart.” Rashi explains, “They [the words of the Torah] should not be in your eyes like an old proclamation [of the King] that nobody has any interest in, rather, they should be like a new proclamation that everyone runs to hear.” Thus, according to Rabbi Emden, the congregation is reminded that the Torah reading taking place now is actually a new act of receiving rather than a reenactment of an old episode.

Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaCohen Kook (1865-1935), the first Chief Rabbi of Israel (cited in Siddur Avodat Halev) focuses on the words “all of you live”. He writes, “This verse teaches us that a life which is not Godly is not to be termed life at all. This conviction is inscribed on the soul of every Jew.” According to Rabbi Kook, only those “who cleave to the Lord your God” can be described as being alive. People who have no connection to God, through His Torah, might appear to be alive but they are not. They are living, much the same way as animals are, but they are not alive in the spiritual sense.  

Rabbi Kook was a mystic with very deep views about life and Judaism. How do we understand this teaching of his? I believe the starting point is the previous verse, “It is your eyes that have seen that which the Lord did concerning Baal Peor, as every man who followed Baal Peor, the Lord your God destroyed him from your midst.” Moshe is referring to a recent episode in which many Israelite men strayed after Midianite and Moabite women and worshipped their deity, Baal Peor. The culprits, 24 000 in total, were struck down suddenly in a plague. This was not an event that the Children of Israel would forget anytime soon. Hence Moshe was telling them: “Do not think that you can seek other ways of living, lifestyles that focus on pleasure and material success only. You attempted this with Baal Peor and the results were immediate death. Consider that those who did not stray after Baal Peor but instead clung to God, are still alive today!”

It is futile for a Jew to attempt to detach himself from God and if he does, the result is either death or a life that is akin to death. Jeremiah seems to say something similar (2:13), “For My people have perpetrated two evils: Me have they forsaken, the Source of living waters; to dig for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” For a Jew, there is no replacement for God and His Torah. Any attempt at replacing God with some or other “ism”, such as Socialism, Communism, Social Justice, and Pluralism etc. is like digging broken cisterns that cannot hold water.

Relevant to this is a fascinating passage from a book I have just read by the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks entitled ‘Crisis and Covenant – Jewish Thought After The Holocaust’ (Maggid 2023). The book is based on a series of lectures Rabbi Sacks delivered at Manchester University in 1989. On page 228 Rabbi Sacks writes, “There is no precedent for the depth of disagreement that currently characterizes Jewish thought. To be sure, there were profound intellectual disputes in the past. But they took place within clearly defined boundaries. Premodern Jewish commentators and philosophers shared a cluster of commitments that made them recognizably participants in the same tradition, adherents of a single faith, speakers of a common language. That cannot be said today. It would not have occurred to any Jewish thinker prior to the nineteenth century that there could be Jewish faith without belief in the divine revelation of Torah, or that there could be Jewish identity that was not religious identity, or that there could be Jewish peoplehood in the absence of the unifying bond of halakha. Even the events which more than any other have shaped modern Jewish consciousness – the Holocaust and the State of Israel – have given rise to a bewildering variety of interpretations. For some they have confirmed religious faith. But for others they have refuted it.”

For almost all of Jewish history, other than the last 200 years, a Jew was defined by his belief in God and his adherence to the Torah. It was inconceivable that a Jew could be a Jew without God, Torah and mitzvoth.  All of that changed with the Enlightenment which, in the words of Rabbi Sacks, “fractured” Judaism as it was known for centuries. The result, as he traces in the book, has been mass assimilation, intermarriage and the splintering of Judaism into multiple denominations, many of which do not define themselves as Torah Judaism. Rabbi Sacks (page 136) cites the scholar Daniel Elazar who sums up the present situation: “Perhaps 80 percent of world Jewry today no longer see themselves bound by halakha, however much they may or may not see themselves as ‘religious’ or ‘good Jews’ and however much they may preserve in their lives Jewish tradition and mores.” The Orthodox, alone, continue to define Judaism in terms of God, Torah and mitzvoth. This is what Rabbi Kook meant. When a Jew severs his connection to Godliness, by detaching himself from the Torah, he is not alive. He is like the people who strayed after Baal or like those who dug broken cisterns. It may last for a while but it has no permanence and the results of such abandonment can be dire, as the situation of world Jewry today attests.

Lee, Chani Merryl and Naomi join me in wishing you Shabbat Shalom!    

Rabbi Liebenberg

Link to Rabbi’s YouTube message for Shabbat: https://youtu.be/noQSFjHAKHs?si=t2R79tCKBzWdXCkD

TU B’AV – THE 15^TH AV (Monday 19 August 2024)

This Monday is Tu B’Av, the 15th of Av. The Talmud (Ta’anit 26b) refers to it as one of the two happiest days on the calendar in ancient Israel (the other being Yom Kippur when sins are forgiven). Several reasons are given: (i) The Tribes of Israel were permitted to intermarry after an initial ban barring all women who inherited property from their fathers not to marry a man from another Tribe. (ii) The woodchoppers completed the lengthy task of procuring wood for the altar in the Temple. (iii) The generation that came out of Egypt ceased to die in the wilderness after 40 years of wandering. (iv) The guards set in place by the king of the Northern Province of Israel, Yeravam ben Nevat, to prevent Jews from the north making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, were removed. (v) Those killed in the city of Betar during Bar Kochba’s failed rebellion against Hadrian were finally brought to rest after being denied burial by the Romans.