Originally published in the Jewish Journal · Table for Five
But you who cleave to the Lord your God are alive, all of you, this day.
-Deut. 4:4
A singular word in this verse begs us to delve into it: hadevekim – “the clingers.” (Its root gives us the modern Hebrew “glue.”) Here it alludes to the ineffable concept of deveikus, an elevated intimacy with God, a merging with Divine consciousness that transcends its shadows of normal human attachment and love. Kabbalists have used ascetic practices and esoteric meditations to try to achieve its ecstasy for centuries. The Baal Shem Tov said it was the highest attainment of the Jew, accessible through suprarational awareness, living every moment of life as a joyful prayer.
Cosmopolitan and assimilated Jews often see hadevekim, the clingers, as deluded throwbacks. It’s a tension that plays throughout Jewish history since Ahab, “who strayed after fetishes – like the Amorites.” Seleucid Jews, those sophisticates, fell under the sway of Greek culture and corrupted Jerusalem until the Maccabees purged them. Following R. Joseph Soloveitchik, I’d suggest that the Maccabees’ deveikus – not their military adventure – is the eternal courage to be celebrated on Chanukah.
Jews have always sought meaning through modernism while ironically scorning the faithful who’ve achieved it by sublimating material desires to spiritual ones, turning their backs on the abysses of fashionable thinking, and clinging to the reality of a living God. Those who disdain them usually subside along with the empires whose allure they can’t resist.
Our verse here could be read cynically as a tautology, but I hear a triumphant promise still being fulfilled: “You who cling to Me are all alive as Jews today!”
