Parashat Masei - 5771

I have spent a lot of time this week thinking about the tools of the streams of progressive Judaism—the tools of Wissenschaft des Judentums that have been passed down by our recent sages and handed to us to help redefine how we view our texts and our religious practice. The question I have is if the scientific tools that we have been given – textual and narrative criticism, scientific study of history, archeology, etc. are appropriate parts of the rabbinical tool chest to help elucidate our weekly readings and teachings. Do they have any place in the attempt to address the spiritual and existential needs of a congregation? Can they help at all in the process of tikkun olam – repairing the world?

And then I came to this passage in the current weekly reading from Bamidbar, Parashat Masei:

33:50 The Eternal spoke to Moses in the plains of Moab by the Jordan, across from Jericho. He said: 33:51 “Speak to the Israelites and tell them, ‘When you have crossed the Jordan into the land of Canaan, 33:52 you must drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you. Destroy all their carved images, all their molten images, and demolish their high places. 33:53 You must dispossess the inhabitants of the land and live in it, for I have given you the land to possess it. . . . 33:55 But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land before you, then those whom you allow to remain will be irritants in your eyes and thorns in your side, and will cause you trouble in the land where you will be living.”

This is not the first time we have heard this theme. The idea that the continuous downfall of the Israelites was the constant exposure to the gods and practices of their neighbors and their inability to resist the temptation of these practices plays as a continuous trope throughout the words of Torah and Prophets. The Israelites returned to the land promised to them by the Eternal, failed to utterly annihilate these tribes, and hence left for themselves an untenable and unsustainable reality. The narrative of the Tanakh seems to cry, “If only they had truly destroyed their temptation. If only they had truly conquered in the manner they had been commanded.” It is like the worst and most devastating story of addiction that you have ever heard – this one ending with the destruction of temples, the deaths of uncounted souls and the dispersion of peoples into the four-corners of the earth to live centuries of desperate uncertainty.

Here is where the progressive tools need to come into play—not as a tool to attack Torah chas v’shalom but rather to use knowledge to put the Torah narrative into new possibilities of perception—not to take away from the holiness of Torah but rather to experience the radical amazement of seeing our story in every possible manner.

The problem is, that although this narrative calling for the destruction of idols and high places presented in Torah may indeed reflect the theological truth of Am Yisrael, it possibly does not reflect the historical truth. Although there are many theories of what historically happened, from an academic standpoint I subscribe to the theory that the Hebrew peoples were native to the Canaanite highlands – indeed, were a part of this people and over the centuries differentiated themselves through ritual customs. After some influx of other peoples, possibly even a literal exodus of what would become the Leviim from Egypt, the synthesis became the group that would eventually become known as the Jews. This horrible over-simplification at least points to one travesty in the traditional narrative – that the internal problems of the Jews were projected on external elements – their neighbors and cousins – the Canaanite tribes.

Here then is the crux of the problem. Our “narrative” was partially an attempt to push Am Yisrael to give up their addiction to the gods of their neighbors, who were in all probability for millennia as well there own gods. “You shall utterly destroy their idols” begins to sound an awful lot like “if you just try hard enough you can give up your heroin addiction.” As far as a practical tool to help individuals or groups personally or collectively overcome their addictions, this narrative has utterly failed.

And then it becomes clear that we have indeed followed the example of the narrative of the Bible. We have indeed in various ways at various times projected all of our vices on society. We have attempted to blame the internal lack on an external cause.

If you are an alcohol addict then it is the fault of the alcohol so prohibit the sale of it and decry the evils of alcohol from the pulpit.

If you are a sex addict then arrest the pornographers and enact legislation against creation, distribution and private consumption of pornography.

If you are a drug addict then declare a grand War Against Drugs. And how has that worked out?

Although these items may even somehow sound reasonable they are only the first step, exactly as is reflected in Torah. If we cannot get rid of the object that causes us to sin then we need to get rid of the people behind it—first the liberals and reformers because they question the society that nostalgia tells us must have once been perfect. Then solve our political problems by dehumanizing and calling for the extermination of the ethnic and political groups that do not fit into our narrative. Finally we make it practical and we go after the individuals whose existence is a daily reminder that our nostalgic narrative simply does not exist and may never have existed. Let’s get rid of the gays, those with darker skin, the poor and oh yes if the entire world decides to think and act upon this type of narrative, then don’t forget the Jews that are behind all this to begin with.

But when it is all gone, if there is anyone left to care they will still find the same emptiness inside. The destruction of external symbols can never fulfill an internal emptiness.

I wish I could bow to the inevitable criticism and say that I am being, as we would say in German, übertrieben. Yet there are clear, tangible and provable examples for the drive to do exactly what I just described – our contemporary “destroy all the altars and high places and ashterot.” When someone says we need to return to traditional marriage I ask “which version do you mean? The one where women had no choices and existed in a type of life-indentured servitude and prayed that her completely autonomous man would not take too much advantage of that? Because that traditional marriage was the one that existed up until a few generations ago in western society.”

I am not presenting a grand solution here—I make no claim to such wisdom. I call instead for one of the central messages of Kabbalah and Chassidism – that we need to be aware, to be awakened and to awake. If our lives are full of the emptiness that causes us to lash out against external causes – if we look in the mirror, consider all that we would wish to be different, and lay the blame for all that is wrong at the feet of others – then we are not awake. Awakening means that our internal tikkun olam begins with awareness and then internal solutions. It means that our cherished narrative, personal and collective, needs to be challenged.