Tag: Zionism

Z-Zero

David Porush

The “Used-to-be-Jews”

I play poker with the same group of guys every week, mostly Jews. One is a fellow on whom life has smiled. He’s even lucky at cards. I’ll call him Paul (not his real name). A few months ago we were talking about the wars in Israel, and he said, “I used to be a Jew.” It’s a phrase I never heard back East, but I’ve heard it several times out here in California. It’s a thing.

The other day, the talk at poker returned to Israel. I think I said something about how tough it still was on my kids being Zionists in Northern California. Paul seemed startled. He asked sincerely, “You’re Zionists? What do you mean?”

I said, “I’m Jewish. So I’m a Zionist. God promised the specific land of Israel to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob thousands of years ago. That’s the origin of Judaism. It’s in the Bible.

“Huh! I never heard that!” Paul said.

“What did you hear?”

“I thought it was an extremist view by a few crazy Jews.”

Failure on the Seventh Front

Hamas brutally attacked Israel October 7th, 2023, raping, torturing and slaughtering. It was followed literally the next day by a global surge of raw hatred of Israel. It seemed spontaneous, but it was fueled by a long-prepared strategic propaganda campaign by a perfect storm of forces conspiring against us, including Islamic states, Western academia, the UN, communist countries, many European countries, progressive politics, media bias, the long-suppressed violence implicit in the hyphen Judeo-Christian …. The assault is global, stark in its persistence, and personal. It’s depressingly resistant to fact or reason. It’s frightening in its emergence from spaces we thought safe, even in our strongest Jewish havens outside Israel, like NYC. Every day brings new propaganda atrocities so absurd they would be funny if they weren’t so malign and effective.

Judging by Paul, it’s working. It sure seems like the world is trying its hardest to finally extinguish Israel, The Jewish State, and with it all the Jews who, our enemies tell us, are Zionists by default. Maybe our enemies know us better than we know ourselves.

Many Jews were forced to declare they were not the kind of Jew who supports Israel. They agreed with the enemy to be a good Jew means you were not a Zionist. Some even became prominent “as-a-Jews” (as Bari Weiss, Bret Stephens and others call them). They performed the charade: “I am Jewish. I denounce Israel because (yes, it’s committing genocide, starving Gazans, racist, colonialist, imperialist, fascist, Nazi…)”.  Younger generations of Jews are turning away from Israel, let alone Judaism.

Israel as the Jewish State doesn’t intend to go away. It has won many victories in its ongoing war against six enemies simultaneously: Hamas, terrorism on the West Bank, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, Iran, and Syria. Astonishing tactics and surprises have given it victories, like the pager maneuver against Hezbollah and the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear weapons. But it’s pretty clear that in the long run to survive, it must also win the war in the “airwaves”—on the “seventh front” of global political discourse.

Jews who remain Zionists responded with a mixture of grief, fear, solidarity, activism and counterpropaganda. Israel reinvested in telling its story (hasbara). In and out of the Diaspora we had great arguments: Jews were there first. We are fighting on the front lines of civilization against barbarism and terror. Israel is just like other nations fighting for our survival, why are you focused on us? Biased media, influencers and nations: you are purposely lying about Israel. It’s not fair.

Of course we need to continue these efforts to shield Israel and hold off the world. But without a deeper foundation, our arguments devolve into fortresses built on desert sands. Our cry for “fairness” or claims “we were here first” or that “we’re defending Western culture” or “truth” are doomed to fail against overwhelming odds – eight billion against fifteen million – much fewer if we count the Jews who even want to fight on our side. We need a firmer, permanent, global basis for how Jews defend Israel’s existence.

Z0

“Show me a place to stand and I can leverage the whole world,” Archimedes said.

Let’s find the place Jews must stand. Let’s boil it down to the bone, the most fundamental axiom, one that will survive the worst sandstorm of Jew hatred and violence in the 21st century:

To be Jewish is to be Zionist.

This is not a proclamation, it is a definition, a simple statement of fact. Jews are heirs to an eternal covenant between a single family and God.

THE COVENANT THAT DEFINES JEWS: As long as this family, its descendants, and converts – adopted into the family – keep their side of the deal, God will give Israel to them and guide their destiny. They will thrive and become a model to the whole broken world until it’s perfected.  

The deal was first announced to Abraham in the 20th c BCE. It was reiterated to his specific descendants Isaac, Jacob (Israel) and his twelve sons who became the Twelve Tribes – the Children of Israel. In the 14th century BCE at Sinai, God then made the deal with them all – Hebrew slaves newly liberated from Egypt, along with plenty of details that He gave to Moses in writing and orally, The Torah. It gives plenty of specifics of what the party of the first part (Jews) has to do to fulfill their end of the bargain and what the Party of the Second Part (God) will do if they don’t. Since then there has been a continuous, documented transmission and elaboration of the deal to us today (the rest of the canon, Talmud, and all that follows) by our tradition.

This covenant is more profound than a contract, more enduring and intimate than a quid pro quo. It’s an understanding that goes all the way down to the deepest sense of self. As Rabbi Sacks said, “A Contract is about interests; a Covenant is about identity.”[2]  Its outlines are simple, though the terms are complex. It’s more like a marriage where there are implicit as well as explicit understandings, things that go unsaid, ineffable intimacies, in this case with a transcendent Partner

When God announced the Covenant to the entire family of Israel and gave it to them in writing it changed the world. It created an entire empire of morals with its source in an absolute authority. The Torah lays out the laws of a utopian, holy nation – Israel – founded on them. It’s the world’s foundational document of liberation, where in Israel everyone is family and slaves all go free.

To put it another way, Jews have a divine right to Zion. God is on our side. All our other defenses stem from this fundamental axiom. Jews and the Jewish State can’t define themselves coherently without it.

I call this Z0 – Zionism 0.0, inspired by my friends, Zack Bodner and Rabbi Amitai Fraiman of Palo Alto who created a growing and powerful movement called Z3. In Bodner and Fraiman’s construction:

Zionism 1.0 is the dream of Herzl in the 1880s that led to the founding of the state in 1948.

Zionism 2.0 assumed Israel would be the sole focus of Jewish life and the diaspora would fade away, a national ideal that sustained Israel from 1948 to early 2000s.

Zionism 3.0 – Z3 – recognizes the mutual strength and interdependence of both Israel and the diaspora, equal partners in ensuring the life and endurance of Jews. Z3’s goal is to map the way forward.

Z0 solidifies Z3 by specifying the immortal bond between Jews everywhere and Israel. Jews in the Diaspora and Israel share a common, cosmic identity, belief and purpose. Z0 declares what they believe, to others and themselves.

The Sturdy Few: A Formula for Survival: She’erit and Pletah

Yet, Z0 is the single fundamental declaration that the some Jews in the Diaspora are unable to make. Even those who passionately support Israel or identify as Jews with one of the brands of Jewish religion (Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative…), or are culturally but not religiously Jewish or already assimilated can’t bring themselves to declare that God gave Israel to the Jews to be a light to other nations. Even many Orthodox Jews, who believe Z0 in their kishkes as an article of faith, keep it to themselves. Over thousands of years of exile, Jews have developed a completely understandable allergy to claiming that they are The Chosen People. As a guest in other nations at very best it’s impertinent, at worst suicidal.

Z0 is the declaration most Jews can’t say even though our religiously-motivated enemies all over the world attack us with a similar weapon: They claim Hamas (Hezbollah, Iran, the Islamic world…) has the right to extinguish the Jewish State because their version of God told them so. A few others – on the Left, the Right, in Europe and Islamic or communist countries – don’t share their belief in a Jew-hating God, but sympathize with their cause to extinguish Jews anyway.

Maybe that’s the Jewish problem. The fierce declaration we need to make sounds like the thing deplorable, benighted and barbaric nations say to justify bloody campaigns. We Jews are too sophisticated, too cosmopolitan, too ethical and compassionate, too civilized, too empathic.

Z0 is exactly the firmness we need to defend ourselves. We need to believe – or at least act like we believe – that we’re marching on a mission from God. We aren’t a race, ethnicity, people, or even just a nation. We are a family who’ve made a Divine Deal. This is the bedrock of emotional and spiritual strength for Jews in the Diaspora and Israel as we face overwhelming forces gathered to annihilate us together.

Z0 counters and resists the malevolence of “as-a-Jews” and the ignorance of many others who have separated Jews from Zion. It sends us into battle on the Seventh Front with a powerful weapon: the conviction that Israel’s destiny transcends our current crises and will survive the frothing of a noisy anti-Zionist world that threatens us.

Z0 is an invitation to everyone who calls themselves a Jew, by definition.

Yet we know some Jews will define themselves out of the Z0 definition. Awe may lose more Jews. Many, including Israeli Jews who’ve bled and suffered in waging these wars since 2023, won’t and don’t accept it. It sounds like it demands becoming religious.

Z0 means declaring that God gave Israel to the Jews, but it doesn’t require religion. It doesn’t require wearing a black coat or even observing the Shabbat or keeping kosher. It doesn’t mean following the strictures of Judaism. It only means knowing and acting like Israel’s right to exist as Jewish State and being Jewish are completely identical. Jews and Zion are born inseparably at the same instant in history when Abraham and God shake on it.

Nevertheless, we know Z0 will lose many Jews. They won’t be able to make this leap of faith anyway.And while we need as many Jew-Zionists as we can get and it seems unnecessarily zealous to draw this line in the sand, it’s not a numbers game.  Our history clearly demonstrates that after every cycle like the one we’ve now begun, only a fragment of Jews remain to carry on. And our Torah prophesies it.

A single remarkable verse in the book of Genesis encapsulates the prophesy. Joseph has become the viceroy of Egypt through his obvious talent and a miraculous-seeming series of coincidences. The famine that Joseph prophesied drives his brothers from Canaan to Egypt to seek refuge. They come before the imposing Viceroy of Egypt. They don’t recognize him, having assumed Joseph is dead. Joseph stays in disguise and plays the role to the hilt. He exacts some revenge and gets them to fetch his little brother Benjamin and aging father Jacob to Egypt. Only then does he reveal himself. After a tearful reunion, they are remorseful for their original crime and seek his forgiveness. Joseph comforts them with this remarkable phrase:

   וַיִּשְׁלָחֵנִי אֱלֹקים לִפְנֵיכֶם לָשׂוּם לָכֶם שְׁאֵרִית בָּאָרֶץ וּלְהַחֲיוֹת לָכֶם לִפְלֵיטָה גְּדֹל

V’yishlachani Elokim liphnaichem l’soom l’chem she’erit ba’aretz olhachayot l’chem l’pleitah gadol

And God sent me before you to place you as a remnant(she’erit) in the earth and to keep you alive as a mighty survivor (or “as a great rescue”) (pleitah). Gen 45:7 

She’erit means “the remnant.” Pletah means the “act of deliverance” or “the survivor.” The plain sense is this: God orchestrated a painful fate so that Joseph would be the remnant, the solitary Jew, who ploughs the field of destiny for the survival of his family. As viceroy, he restructures the whole nation of Egypt and secures Goshen for his family, paving the way for the survival of all the Children of Israel.

This verse encapsulates a prophecy of the entire Jewish story and models a strategy for eternal survival:

The small but faithful remnant of Israel survives catastrophe to be the seed of a mighty renewal.

Against all odds, millenia of Jewish history fulfills this prophecy over and over again, confounding historians:

  • Moses only took a fraction of the Hebrew population out of slavery in Egypt. A stunning 80% stayed behind. They died because they preferred the material guarantee of survival over belief in the abstract God of Moses. In other words, they assimilated.
  • When the Assyrians destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, they slaughtered, enslaved, or dispersed ten of the tribes. They were lost. Judah (the Southern Kingdom) remained, but barely.
  • Babylon captured Israel in 586 BCE, laid waste Jerusalem and the First Temple, exiling several hundred thousand Jews to Babylon. Fifty years later Cyrus of Persia set Jews free and urged them to return and rebuild the Temple. But only a small minority did. Ezra gives a marvelously specific census: “42,360 Jews, 7337 servants and 200 singers came back under Zerubbabel.” Only a fraction returned – maybe 5-10% – because Jews thrived and became materially comfortable in Babylon.[iii]  Our tradition tells us that Judea after the return was “poor and thin” in population.[iv] Only the “righteous remnant” returned,[v] “to rebuild.”[vi]  Modern historians confirm this picture.[vii]
  • When the Seleucids (Greeks) reigned over Israel in the second century BCE, many Jews adopted Hellenism. It was modern, enlightened, liberal, sophisticated. It had an alluring, rational, scientific picture of the cosmos. In 164 BCE, Mattathias and Judah Maccabee led a faithful core of a few thousand to an impossible victory against overwhelming odds. They purified the Temple and initiated the Jewish revival we now celebrate at Chanukah.
  • The Great Revolt of 66–70 CE ended with large-scale destruction and depopulation of Israel. The Romans destroyed the Temple and renamed the devastated country Palestine after the Jews’ perennial enemies, the Philistines. Josephus reports over a million Jews were slaughtered and a hundred thousand enslaved. Although his numbers are likely inflated, archaeological and demographic studies confirm Judea’s population shrank to a few hundred thousand.[xii] Shimon bar Yochai survived (he wrote the Kabbalah while hiding in a cave for thirteen years). He emerged to lead a small remnant of Jews to regroup at Yavneh, reestablish a court and maintain the traditions.
  • A Roman historian reports that in the failed Bar Kochba revolt (132–135 CE), 580,000 Jews were killed, a figure modern historians treat cautiously but accept as indicating massive losses.[xiv] Again, a remnant survived. They relocated to Galilee, where the sages eventually produced the Mishnah around 200 CE.[xv] Josephus reports that only about 6,000 Pharisees preserved halakhic Judaism.[xi]
  • In the centuries following Hadrian, Judea remained sparsely populated by Jews, while Babylonia held a large and thriving community of hundreds of thousands.The remnant there, thriving from the original Babylonian Diaspora, developed the Babylonian Talmud, 1500 years later still the central text of traditional Judaism.
  • In the millenia that follows Rome, the cycle comes every four generations or so virtually everywhere Jews have tried to make a home. The countries that formally expelled and/or systematically killed Jews is a dark trace of history itself: Byzantine Empire, Almohad Caliphate, Mamluk Sultanate, England, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Hungary, Russia, Soviet Union, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Croatia, Slovakia, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco…

We Must All Be Maccabees

The same formula traces a dark fall line with mechanical regularity through the chaos of history, as if a divine force is stirring the pot of Jewish destiny.  Jews disappear because they are slaughtered or assimilate. They have forgotten or given up hope or simply abandoned the covenant, and with it, the promise of the Promised Land of Zion that defines what it is to be a Jew.

After Oct 7  we are willy nilly facing the same choice. We have to reconcile to the facts and embrace Z0 as our definition, our strategy, our destiny. We don’t need to be religious zealots. We need only claim that to be a Jew is to be a Zionist. It is our impregnable rock against the enemy’s attempt to split every Jew from his or her essence. Only Jews who are firmly convinced that they must fulfill God’s deal will ensure Israel’s survival. Now, we must all be Joseph, or Judah Maccabee, or Shimon bar Yochai.

This remnant-survival cycle may be depressing, as we see our Jewish family splinter and get lost, but it also strengthens us collectively and psychically as individuals. It explains our history and why we are so few. It gives us the courage to fight and the promise that we will. Against all odds, after horrible catastrophe, we’re still here: refined to a core of what Paul, my “used-to-be-a-Jew” friend, thinks are the crazy, zealous exceptions.

Anyway, it sure seems like God is on our side. How else should we explain that we’re still fulfilling an ancient prophecy, the remnant sent ahead to keep us alive until the perfection of the world?

Patient Zero: 

David Porush

The source of the Jew Hatred virus is a negative miracle

The nations wish to vex God, but cannot, so they vex Israel – Exodus Rabbah 51

Jews and Jew-hatred were born together.  The Bible’s case study of Pharaoh, Patient Zero, shows the source of the disease is, like the Jews themselves, Divine.

Jew hatred as plague

After October 7, Jew-haters worldwide have mounted massive and terrifying protests against Israel and Jews. Otherwise ordinary citizens seem to be spontaneously afflicted with Jew-hating fever. They rip down posters of women and children who were abducted by Hamas as if it were their righteous duty. Mobs took to the streets of Western countries in the hundreds of thousands waving Palestinian flags and chanting, “From the River to the Sea.” Even when many of them couldn’t name what river or sea they were referring to, they understood what they wanted: celebrate bloodthirsty Hamas, prevent Israel from retaliating, and erase the Jews and the Jewish State from the map. The global pandemic of Jew hatred this year makes “Never Again” only a self-delusional slogan

A black hole. Image from NASA.

      The multiple ironies will drive you mad. As early as the next day, before Israel had even acted in Gaza, a chorus of calls for a ceasefire began as if a huge population was waiting for just this sort of moment to act against Jews. It is still intensifying today. Absurdly, after suffering the largest pogrom since the Holocaust, Israel was tried for genocide at the International Court of Justice at the Hague, though the word “genocide” was invented to describe what was done to the Jews by the Nazis and though Israel was trying to stop Hamas, terrorists explicitly dedicated to the genocide of Jews, or at least Zionists. The charge was so unfounded, even the ICJ, no friend of Israel, found no grounds.

Israelis are routinely called Nazis. Such evil inversions are one of the hallmarks of the Jew hatred.

     The UN, world leaders and governments, noisy Palestinian partisans, well-meaning but naive and ill-informed peaceniks on social media, Hollywood stars, reflexive liberals – all were in truth calling for Jews to lay down their arms and suffer barbaric slaughter without responding, to be less than human. They devalue Jewish lives while demanding that Jews show superhuman forbearance. Jew haters attacked Jews in what they thought were their safe spaces: Western countries, Jewish cities like New York, on U.S. college campuses, even in public schools and town councils in the US, and in their private psychic and political bubbles. Jews who faithfully signed up for the agenda sympathetic to all victims – Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+ rights, DEI, undocumented immigrants and all the other array of intersectional and righteous victims now suffered cognitive dissonance. How could my allies not only refuse to express shock at the worst Hamas atrocities, including the weaponized rape of women, but celebrate them?  Their comrades’ implicit response was, “The Jews had it coming to them.” In the algebra of this ideology, Jews can’t be victims of Palestinians. They’re white colonialists. The implied conclusion was a familiar one. “Die, Jews!” 

In short, Jews found themselves in their history again. Jew hatred is as old as the Jew. Eventually it happens everywhere we live. There’s a Jewish tradition, rooted in both mysticism and statistical truths about the order of the world, that our hosts in the Diaspora only suffer us for about four generations before they expel or kill us. Many Jews deluded themselves into believing America was different, but now it seems they are doomed to join their forebears in Spain or Germany or anywhere else we enjoyed a few decades of peace and hospitality. What explains this? Over the last centuries, millions of words and thousands of books, articles, and scholarly papers have documented this phenomenon and tried to diagnose its cause.  They blame politics, culture, psychology, education, history, sociology, demagogic ambition, human nature, scapegoating,1 jealousy, Jews’ insularity, or some combination of these. They inspire paranoid conspiracy theories, blood libels, superstitious fears, and psychotic fixation: their allegiance is to Zion, to an internationalist family, to their network of global finances, to a secret cabal, to dark arts, to bloody rituals, to religious “protocols.” While every psychic, political and social route ends in forced conversion, state-sponsored genocide, expulsion or genocidal violence, none of these theories have satisfactorily explained the multiform ubiquity, irrationality, fluidity, virulence, spontaneity, disproportion, and inevitability of Jew hatred. In other words, no one has identified the root cause, much less offered any remedy.2 

Many have said that Jew hatred is a disease, an ineradicable virus. If the analogy runs deep, then let’s be rigorous about applying the methods of epidemiology to find a cause. When epidemiologists study a pandemic, they talk about finding “Patient Zero,” the first person they can identify as having the disease. If they find Patient Zero it sometimes enables them to pinpoint the source of the virus, then the virus itself, and then formulate an inoculation against it. This is our goal here: to identify the cause, what legalese calls the “cause in fact” as opposed to the many “proximate causes” that we often confuse for it.3  

Patient Zero

I believe this Patient Zero has always been right in front of us, hiding in plain sight in the Jews’ own origin story of their time in Egypt. It is the aboriginal and archetypal Diaspora for all future Jewish Diasporas, from Babylon through America. Pharaoh of the Book of Exodus is the first leader of another nation who contends with the Hebrews after they’ve dwelled among them for several generations. He is also the first to exhibit all the symptoms of the full-blown Jew hatred virus.4 Here’s his back story:

Slave traders bring a captive Joseph to Egypt. Pharaoh dredges him out of jail because he has learned that Joseph has a special gift for interpreting dreams. Pharaoh is tormented by a strange nightmare his own wise men can’t decipher. Joseph tells him that his dream means that seven years of abundance will be followed by a seven-year famine in Egypt. Pharaoh is so impressed by Joseph’s preternatural insight that he appoints him as his second-in-command of all Egypt to put in place a strategy to prepare the kingdom for its impending disaster. Joseph’s first act is to rescue his eleven brothers, his father, and all their family and livestock from Canaan and settle them in Goshen, the fat of Egypt, on the Nile Delta in the northeast, closest to the land promised to their patriarch Abraham. Joseph then reorganizes the whole power and economic structure of Egypt to prepare them. He institutes a system of taxes of grain and produce to set aside during the fat years for the lean years, and builds a network of storehouses.  During the famine, Egyptians run out of food. Joseph sells them the reserves of food and grain. When they run out of money, they sell him their land. When they run out of land, they have nothing to sell but themselves, and they beg Pharaoh to accept their offer of indentured servitude. Finally, Joseph makes all Egyptians move from their hometowns and resettles them elsewhere, presumably for efficiency. In short, Joseph has created a completely re-organized Egyptian empire consolidated under Pharaoh, who is now the complete hegemon and absolute ruler of the state, nominal owner of all the land and all its citizens. If ever a ruler owed a debt to another party for giving him power, it is Pharaoh to Joseph and his descendents. However, as the Bible says:

And Joseph died, and his brothers and their entire generation. And the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and grew very, very mighty and the land was filled with them. 

Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who didn’t know Joseph. And he said to his people, ‘Look! The people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we. Let’s deal wisely with them before they multiply, and when we’re at war they will advocate for our enemies and add to the hatred and go up out of the land.’  Therefore, they set taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, namely Pithom and Raamses. But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew. And they loathed the faces of the children of Israel. And Egypt made the children of Israel labor hard, and they made their lives bitter with hard servitude, in mortar and in brick, and in all kinds of slavery in the field: all their service, wherein they made them serve, was severe. 

And the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives…and he said, “When you midwife the Hebrews … if it’s a son, then kill him…” And the midwives [failed and] said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are animals, and birth before the midwives come to them.” .. And the people multiplied, and grew very mighty. …And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, “Every son that is born you shall cast into the River…”

A Clinical Evaluation of Patient Zero

As this Pharaoh observes his empire. I imagine him in a high tower of his palace in Memphis, surveying a bustling capital city filled with many peoples like any cosmopolis. He looks just to the northeast, up the Nile Delta to the fertile Land of Goshen. The Hebrews are flourishing. Instead of seeing his diverse nation with satisfaction, he is unnaturally focused on the Children of Israel. Their success and growth don’t just unsettle him, they anger him and make him afraid. He conjures an Israelite population bomb and sees them filling the land when, of course, that was impossible. His paranoia makes him see them as a fifth column, lying in wait to join Egypt’s enemies in the event of a war, adding to some vague foreboding “hatred” for which he has no prior evidence. The accusation is all-too familiar; we’ve heard it throughout history from demagogues in Europe and Arab countries, and even in America at various times: those Jews don’t have patriotic allegiance, nationalist loyalty. They are simultaneously lower, dirtier, more animalistic and coarser than us natives, and at the same time threatening in their outsized dominance and superiority, as they succeed in the marketplace with preternatural ability and arcane practices. At best they have dual loyalty, dividing their dedication between us and Israel, the land promised to them in their mythology. At worst, they are just awaiting their chance to betray Egypt, already actively plotting against us in secret, stirring up imaginary hatreds among our enemies. Fueling his animus, although the Bible tells us that this Pharaoh has no connection to, no memory of and therefore no allegiance or gratitude to Joseph, it’s much more likely that he is all too keenly aware of the debt he owes to him and his descendants for the power and control Joseph gave him, and like many tyrants he resents any claim on him, so he seeks to erase any legacy with murderous intent.5 

Seized by his sudden irrational hatred and fear of Jews, he riles up his counselors. “Come,” he urges them. “Let us deal wisely with them.” He hatches plans to suppress the Israelite population. First he imposes “taskmasters” to extract progressively more burdensome taxes from them.  He starts oppressing them physically, appropriating their labor to build treasure cities.6 Then he turns to genocidal plotting, first hiding his crime by conspiring with midwives to strangle Hebrew males at birth. When this doesn’t work – the Egyptian midwives compare the Hebrew women to “animals” who give birth too quickly – he goes public, rallying his nation as many tyrants did after him, declaring a pogrom to kill first-born male Hebrews. Clearly he must have prepared the way with demagoguery and propaganda to turn his people against the Jews and arouse their collective hatred.7 Pharaoh’s hatred becomes a national obsession, the virus a pandemic. Since he controls the airwaves – hieroglyphic scribes are closely held priests of the pharaonic cult and most of the population is illiterate in the complex script8 – he is able to move the culture, and so it turns on a dime. 

What arouses Pharaoh’s hatred? “Mighty and swarming” Hebrews

Pharaoh may have had many proclivities, habits of mind, environmental circumstances and personal attributes – narcissism and megalomania – that made him prone to infection by Jew hatred. Like any king, he was responsible for foreseeing and planning to avoid threats to his kingdom. Like many tyrants, he is thin-skinned and defensive, quick to declare himself the victim of imagined slights, easily inflamed by his own imagination. Everything is personal. He sees no distinction between attacks on the state and attacks on himself. (L’etat c’est moi.) He is volatile, prone to sudden, extreme bouts of anger and changes of heart. He’s tormented by psychic events, like his dreams, and he acts on them.9 Where did the virus come from?

The original Hebrew of the Bible holds the key. As always, furtive meanings play across the text. Hebrew is at once more impoverished and yet richer and denser than our English. It contains hidden messages in the multiple connections among words. More akin to poetry, words skip their meanings across the text like stones on a pond, spreading ripples of overlapping echoes and meanings. Many of these hidden intents are lost in translation into English, which simply reads more stiffly than Biblical Hebrew.10

The Hebrew word for their proliferation is “rav,” Pharaoh sees Jews filling the land, overestimating their numbers wildly. Magnifying the size of the Jews (not to mention their power and influence) is one of the symptoms of the disease we’re studying.11 He conjures a dark future when the Hebrew population bomb overrun his kingdom.The Torah in its typically allusive fashion, echoes his dark vision in the swarming plagues (arov) that overrun Egypt. Pharaoh’s malign delusion about the Hebrews as a plague – the metaphor for the Jews throughout their history used to arouse natives to loathe them – manifests it in his divine punishment. God has a sense of humor – or at least of *poetic* justice. The plague of Jew hatred is answered by divine plagues. But the equation is made. They have a common source.

The core of Pharaoh’s pathology, what sickens him, though, is his absurd hallucination that the Hebrews are “mightier than” Egypt.  That’s even more fundamental than his distorted vision of their numbers, for surely were he to go to war to subdue the Israelites, he could easily do so with all the state military apparatus at his command. The root of the Hebrew word for this perceived mightiness is atzum. Two verses before Pharaoh’s vision, the text tells us that indeed, the Hebrews grew “very, very mighty” (וַיַּעַצְמוּ בִּמְאֹד מְאֹד). Here he says “many [rav] and mightier [atzum] than us” (רַב וְעָצוּם מִמֶּנּוּ).

The word for might, atzum, also mean “bone.,” It is a relative of “tree” etz [עֵץ] and “spine”; in other words, the sturdy, deeply rooted core or essence of something. It is used to describe the logic of an argument. Pharaoh has an instinctive and profound insight into the Israelites’ strength: they have backbone and interconnectedness, like roots and branches of a tree. Like his dreams, his irrational argument has a tinge of prophecy in it. He perceives that the essence of the Israelites is that they are all one family.  However numerous they become, they are still aware of and feel a deep blood connection to each other. They are all literally one family tree, all the “children” of Israel – Jacob’s second name – the father of the twelve brothers who come to Egypt and spawn the tribes of the nation-to-be. 

The Darwinian Jewish Project: to evolve Domestication

This idea of the Hebrews as a family is not just a nice theme or metaphor, it is the deepest premise of the Jewish story in the Bible. The Hebrew epic adventure of their origin is filled not with mighty warrior deeds, but episodes that unfold a vast Darwinian project across centuries in selective breeding. Its purpose is to evolve a properly domestic human with the sensitivity to nurture family.12 In Genesis, the sons or their wives who are selected to carry the “Jewish” gene are the domesticated, sensitive ones. God wipes out Noah’s whole generation with a flood because they corrupt family purity. Abraham favors the meditative well-digger Isaac over the angry Ishmael. Isaac chooses nurturing Jacob over the violent Esau. Jacob prefers the creative (if overweening) Joseph over his unreliable older brothers. Even the little we know about Cain is that he was sensitive (perhaps too sensitive).The civil laws throughout the Bible assume that all Jews are branches of a single family who deserve the respect and allegiance of blood loyalty. Converts attain the same status. This is one family you can join. 

The result is a culture of divine domestication. When Esau and Jacob finally reconcile and Esau offers to accompany Jacob on his journey home, Jacob draws the line as keenly as any place else in the family saga when he averts the dangerous offer as diplomatically as he can:

‘My lord knows that the children are frail and that the flocks and herds, which are nursing, are a care to me; if they are driven hard a single day, all the flocks will die. Let my lord go on ahead of his servant, while I travel slowly, at the pace of the cattle before me and at the pace of the children, until I come to my lord in Seir.’ (Gen 33:13-14)

The other great thread of the Bible is that the laws it promulgates at great length are entirely aspirational. They form the utopian constitution of a nation not yet created, the prospective State of Israel that won’t be founded until the Jews finally reach the Promised Land forty years later. The chronicle of the Five Books of Moses ends just before this point, the world’s first and greatest cliffhanger, so while the entire story of the Hebrew is looking forward and idealized, the foundation is in the family, the blood shared among all citizens. Pharaoh sees the Israelitish idea is revolutionary and disruptive to his hegemony. Imagine a code of laws where justice is based on familial senses of allegiance, gentility, fraternity, generosity, mutual responsibility – even tenderness – instead of punishment. The Bible often uses the word “achim” – siblings – for the citizens of the future state of Israel. It took three thousand years for the French Revolution’s ideal of fraternité to re-imagine a nation based on it. Even the harshest of civil relations imagined in this future country, when a Jew becomes the slave of another Jew, is an economic transaction borne of unfortunate necessity, not oppression. Slaves have rights and their “owners” have responsibilities to them and owe them measures of respect. Slaves are still included in the religious circle of Judaism. The endpoint and goal of slavery everywhere else, (say, the Old South) was for the slave to be a perpetual motion machine for wealth: free labor with the great boon of making more slaves for free. The goal of Jewish slavery was for the slave to achieve freedom after seven years. At the end, owners must give their liberated slaves livestock, grain, and wine as a parting gift. 

A nation defined by this mystical unity of blood is awesome and threatening indeed. Egyptian citizens are serfs and supplicants, not brothers and sisters, at least since Joseph reorganized the Egyptian economy for his predecessor. The Jews’ numerical size is not their threat, it’s their idea of humanity and nationhood. Their omnipresent, omniscient all-powerful infinite God demands that all humans treat each other as one family in order to make the world holy and thereby, know Him. 

The plague of the Jews is a negative miracle

This plague of the Jews has terrible ambivalence, two meanings at once: it both plagues them and makes their enemies see them as a plague. Even without a metaphysical explanation, we can see why it has no cure: Jews and Jew-hatred are twins. Pharaoh helps give birth to them; he is in effect their midwife. His dark plot leads to their enslavement, but also to their redemption. Everywhere we exist outside our home throughout history it follows us. It is the dark, mystical aspect of Jewishness itself, the other side of our coin. Jews cannot exist without Jew hatred. Our charge is to keep ourselves distinct – that is the meaning of the Hebrew word for holy (kadesh), but our distinctiveness arouses hatred.

Personally, the irrationality, inexplicability, spontaneity, persistence and ubiquity of antisemitism are dark testimony to the existence of God. Traditional Jewish writers often say antisemitism is “causeless [or baseless] hatred” [sinat chinam]13 which at first seems tantamount to a shrug of the shoulders. But there’s nothing in the cosmos that doesn’t have a cause.

When an inexplicable reality intrudes on ours we call it a miracle. In the instance of Jew hatred, it’s a negative miracle, evidence that the Finger of God stirs the pot of history, the violent price Jews pay for their mission, a negative miracle among the many positive ones that intervene in our history or surround us every day. It’s as if God needs both a holy force to encourage Jews forward to their redemptive destiny, and an evil one to drive them there. Perhaps it’s why the leaders of Jew hatred always seem to know more about us, our mission, than we do ourselves. It is no accident that Hamas perpetrated their horrors on Simchat Torah. The source of Pharaoh’s hatred isn’t that he is deluded about the Israelites, it’s that he sees the truth of them. If the superior Israelitish manner of organizing society is allowed to spread, it will drown him and his world. When Jews forget or abandon their mission and become more German than the Germans, the goad is waiting to remind us. This is the summary of all the Prophets on one foot, the story we tell ourselves.  

The realpolitik calculations of a supreme ruler like Pharaoh or a sheerly materialistic view of society like Marx’s or Epicurus’ don’t explain the cause of Jew hatred. Its provocation and foundation is in a supernal realm that unites everything in the universe. If they are honest and insightful enough, when confronted with a superior paradigm, worldview, or system of organizing culture, or operating the cosmos, or being in the world, they will see the truth, just as scientists when presented with a superior theory must ultimately bend to the truth. 

If Jews really do pose a threat to their host country, it is not by their number, nor by the potential for sedition or violence against their hosts, but by the transcendentally mighty idea they represent.14 As history has sadly shown, you can repress their number but not their symbolism. Even if they are a tiny fragment of a remnant in the world – less than 0.2% of the global population, and even if personally any particular Jew has little attachment to their tradition – they have a vision of the cosmos that enables their success, protected by a greater unity that no power on Earth has so far succeeded in eradicating. 

The cure?

If indeed the source of Jew hatred is transcendent and congruent with the idea of the Jew itself, then there really is no cure short of the vision written into the other part of the Jews’ script: complete redemption of the world. 

In the interim, while we endlessly await a Messiah, there is a kind of inoculation that might work with individuals, Jew-hater and Jew alike. Before the individual hater grabs a gun and comes to kill, before the psychic virus has completely dominated the reasoning faculties of a patient, before he or she joins the mob bent on pogrom, then perhaps there is still time. But it’s the exhausting, never-ending battle for truth. Jews, as they do in the International Court of Justice and the twittersphere, must continue to face the hatred with truth. For the Jew-hater has a weakness. He always lies, usually by first stealing the Jew’s truth, then trying to cover up the crime by erasing the witness, spiritual parricide. Though they invented the monotheism at the core of Christianity and Islam, they are its greatest enemy. It’s an exhausting and often fruitless fight, but it’s the only one that gives Jews any hope.

2024

  1. Even the late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the U.K., embraces this conventional and powerful explanation. He writes, “Much of the theoretical basis for analyzing the scapegoating phenomenon was laid several decades ago by the French-born philosopher Rene Girard. In Violence and the Sacred [ Johns Hopkins U Press (1972)] he wrote, ‘The victim or victims of unjust violence or discrimination are called scapegoats, especially when they are not punished for ‘the sins’ of others, as most dictionaries assert, but for tensions, conflicts, and difficulties of all kinds…Scapegoating enables persecutors to elude problems that seem intractable.” Girard’s definition covers many aspects of the scapegoating of Jews and Israel.” With all due respect to R’ Sacks, he misses the point. Rene Girard was my thesis advisor. He was a devout Catholic who understood that the source of scapegoating was theological, following the typology of Jesus who was for Girard (and Christianity) the ultimate archetype of the sacrificial scapegoat. But he expresses this in a veiled way, in terms of sociology and innate human instincts (he calls it mimesis): the phenomenon that leads to scapegoating begins with  mimicry, then jealousy, then rivalry, then antagonism, and finally violent confrontation of the Other, ending when the stronger vanquishes and erases (or murders)  the weaker. R’ Sacks was correct when he saw that this dynamic perfectly explains the repetitive violence against Jews.  After all, Jesus was also a Jew. ↩︎
  2.  The Wikipedia article on “Antisemitism” has over 300 bibliographic entries and “The History of Antisemitism” another 300. Many offer explanations, few offer solutions, and the ones that do have obviously failed. ↩︎
  3. The other car veered into my lane and hit mine: that was the proximate cause. But the cause in fact is that the driver was drunk because he just broke up with his girlfriend and was trying to drown his sorrow. ↩︎
  4. Peter Schafer, writes, “Antisemitism may have originated in Egypt and been spread by the Greek retelling of Ancient Egyptian prejudices.” In modern history (since the Greeks) it becomes “universal and virulent.” Schäfer, Peter, Judeophobia, Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 208
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  5. Some speculate that this Pharaoh represented a new regime that rose to power when the Hyksos rulers of the Fifteenth Dynasty (c. 17th-16th c BCE, who have been closely associated with a “Canaanites”)  were supplanted by the Eighteenth Dynasty of Akhmose in the 14th c BCE. ↩︎
  6. Ironically he is following the script by which Joseph both rescued and subjugated the Egyptians for his predecessor. ↩︎
  7. Midrash – commentary on the Torah by Jewish sages – say that at first, the Egyptian public were still admiring of the Hebrews and would have been too civil and thus resisted Pharaoh if he suddenly declared war on them.
    ↩︎
  8. See The Origins of the Alphabet: Part 2 and The Origins of the Alphabet: Part 3 ↩︎
  9. Theodore Rubin described the psychopathology of antisemitism in depth. He calls it “symbol sickness.” In Anti-Semitism, A Disease of the Mind (NY: Continuum, 1990), he shows how antisemites project onto the Jew whatever psychic frailty they suffer from, externalizing their  internal conflicts: guilt, envy, self-doubt, defensiveness, scapegoating, identity confusion. Yet, these describe the mechanics of the disease, rather than its cause. Why do Jews particularly become the symbol of deep seated troubles rather than, say, Hispanics or Asians? ↩︎
  10. It has a lexicon of only about 9000 words as compared to, for example, the 200,000 in English; it lacked vowels, so the same three consonants that form the root words of Hebrew could have more than one possible meaning at a time and many other technical features. See “Literature, Letterature, Liturgy” at Literature, Letterature, Liturgy 
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  11. On a flight to Albany, NY in 1995, I sat next to a history professor at Williams College. When he made a remark about the Jewish lobby controlling our foreign policy towards a presumably evil Israel, I asked him, “How many Jews are there in the world?” He seemed startled and then said, “Oh, I don’t know. About a quarter of a billion?” When I eventually told him the real number (15 million maybe), he didn’t believe me, got angry, and didn’t talk to me the rest of the flight. Similarly, many people are shocked to see the true size of modern Israel on a map of the region, let alone the world.
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  12. See  The Mystery of Mysteries” Part 2: The Bible’s Darwinian Experiment ↩︎
  13. Dovid Fohrman, https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/watch-what-is-sinat-chinam-or-baseless-hatred/ 
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  14. There’s never been a case of Jews mounting sedition against their host country in all the history of the Jewish Diaspora, unless we count pathetic ones like the Warsaw Ghetto during WWII or in Egypt in 115 CE, both of which were crushed (by the Nazis and by Rome, respectively). ↩︎

TRUE LOVE: The Torah’s Afikomen

David Porush

Matot-Masei 5782

Is the Torah a Comedy?

The story of the Israelites’ journeys really ends at the finale of the fourth of the Five Books of Moses, Numbers.

The official fifth book of the Torah is the next one, Deuteronomy, but only one thing happens in the entire book. Moses gives a five week long motivational speech to all the Israelites on the Plains of Moab. Then he exits. It’s an Aristotelian tragedy. It has unity of time, unity of place, and unity of action.

Five-tier wedding cake

It’s not like the fifth book doesn’t have plenty of drama. After all, the Israelites are poised to enter Israel. Everything up to this point has been for this moment, to seize the promise God made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob more than four centuries ago. The suspense alone is magnificent: the Israelites seem to hold their breath as Moses expends his. Everyone, including Moses himself, knows he is about to die before he enters Israel, because God told him so. In a monumental effort, he gives one of the most inspiring – and certainly the longest – series of motivational speeches in history. For five weeks, he recaps, deepens and enhances the entire teaching from the prior four books. He adds plenty of clarifications, new laws and cosmic views. He achieves soaring heights of inspired poetry and fiery rhetoric that capture the transcendent pathos of the moment. He exhorts, inspires, cajoles, admonishes, rebukes, and threatens. He even breaks into a transcendent song filled with a keening sense that his own lifecis about to end even as Israel is about to be born in full. The official tradition grants that Moses delivered all of the book as a speech that is later transcribed and added to the four prior books.

The Greek name for the book captures this flavor: Deuteronomy – the Second (deutero-) Telling (-nomy). The Recap. Or as we say in the literature game, the denouement, the unknotting.

So the end of the epic of Hebrews for all intents and purposes is the end of the Book of Numbers. The Israelites are encamped at the other side of the Jordan River on the plains of Moab. They know they’re going to war once they swoop down on the Canaanite tribes that live there. But that book lands on what seems a very curious, sputtering choice for a climax. After the story of Creation, the Flood, the romance of the patriarchs and matriarchs, the descent into Egypt, the plagues, the redemption and exodus out of Egypt, the many failures and dramas in the wilderness, Numbers’ final concern seems to be to clear up a technicality left dangling from several chapters ago: the rights of women to inherit land if they marry whomever they choose.

What makes the daughters of Zelophechad and the legal back and forth about their rights worthy of such a premier position in the Torah?

If we dig into the language, we find a joyous, celebratory climax is right there before our eyes. Like the afikomen at the Passover seder, it’s hidden in the beginning but it comes out at the end, a dessert with rewards to the children who discover it. In fact, the word ‘afikomen’ is the perfect analogy: it also comes from Greek (transported into the seder through Aramaic, the language of the Talmud sages). It means ‘dessert’, specifically the dessert at the end of a wedding feast: afi (from epi – ‘on top of’) and komon (from comus – the name of the fertility rite and the pagan god who presides over it). The same name gives us the word ‘comedy’.

Let us unwrap the afikomen from where we discovered it – just where my Pop placed it every year, under the tablecloth – and taste the dessert. I believe it will reveal that the Torah, if we end at the Book of Numbers, is a comedy. Though it may not be apparent at first glance – it’s been a long and rocky road for the Israelites to get to the Promised Land and figure out how to fulfill their deal with God – the final verses make it clear that the Torah has been a love story all along that is now being consummated. It even has a happy ending. In fact, we could call the end of Numbers a comedy – a komus – in the classic tradition. It ends with a merry festival of love.[1]

The Daughters of Zelophechad Inspire Two Revolutions

The people of Israel haven’t even begun to conquer the land of Israel, but they have already divvied it up among the tribes proportionate to their size and then by individual clans by lottery. A good deal of the last portion of Numbers detail the borders of the tribal states and specify the land given to the clans within them. It’s a divinely inspired strategy designed to forestall any territorial squabbles. At the same time, it shows amazing self-confidence: these former slaves have been forged into God’s warriors. They are completely certain of victory in conquering the Canaanites.

But wait. There’s a fly in the ointment. A few chapters ago, the parents of five daughters have died, leaving them with no brothers. They want to keep their father’s inheritance in the family, but women are not allowed to inherit the land. Shouldn’t they have the right to continue their father’s legacy like any other heirs?  So they screw up their courage to appeal directly to Moses. Their gumption – and love of the prospective land – is compelling, but Moses is stumped. This is beyond his pay grade. Nothing like this has ever happened, or at least ever before in recorded human history. Prior teachings of the Torah don’t cover it. Moses appeals to God. In a stunning innovation not only of the rules for the Israelites but for all human civilization, God makes an incredible new decree on the spot in the daughters’ favor. These brotherless women, the daughters of Zelophechad, shall inherit their father’s land.

Yet this creates another problem, a loose end which the finale of Numbers dramatizes in its last short chapter. The heads of the daughtes’ tribe, Menashe, now protest to Moses. What happens if these girls marry a guy from another tribe? We’ll lose our lands to them! Not to mention the gerrymandering – the broken patchwork of territorial rights – this will cause. There could be a hostile clan’s reservation right in the middle of our state!

You’ve got a point, Moses agrees. So here’s the solution according to God. He then offers another neat reconciliation:

This is what G-d has commanded concerning the daughters of Zelophehad: They may become the wives of anyone they wish, provided they become wives within a clan of their father’s tribe. (Num 36:7)[2]

But is this really deserving of the closing shot? It all seems like such an anticlimactic technicality, a Talmudic dispute you might hear a couple of millenia later, but not the finale of the Hebrew epic in the 13thc BCE.

The future feminine plural of active creation

This is the second part of the text I quoted above in Hebrew:

 תִּהְיֶינָה לְנָשִׁים אַךְ לְמִשְׁפַּחַת מַטֵּה אֲבִיהֶם תִּהְיֶינָה לְנָשִׁים׃

….they become wives within a clan of their father’s tribeNumber 36:7

The Bible seems eager for us to look at those two words (in bold) that it repeats. The Hebrew is “tihyeynah l’nashim” (תִּהְיֶינָה לְנָשִׁים). It’s hard to translate perfectly into English. It’s the future feminine plural of the verb ‘to be’. We first encounter the basic verb in the Genesis 1:3 as God declares “’Let there be light’ and there was light!” (יְהִי אוֹר וַיְהִי־אוֹר׃ ).

Hold that thought, because it reveals a critical shortcoming in most standard translations.

Most translations of our repeated phrase fold it into the passive or at least ambiguous sense of “becoming wives” like this comon mis-translation of the Hebrew above: “They may become the wives of anyone they wish, provided they become wives within a clan of their father’s tribe.”

But the verb is the future feminine plural of active creation. The daughters don’t just become wives, they now get to choose to make themselves wives, to wed by their own volition.

 The next verse of Torah gives God’s reasoning. Most translations separate it out as a standalone declaration:

וְלֹא־תִסֹּב נַחֲלָה לִבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל מִמַּטֶּה אֶל־מַטֶּה

The inheritance of the Children of Israel is not to go ‘round from tribe to tribe…
(Num 36:7)

But this is also a mis-translation. This rationale sounds like a command. Don’t make a mishmash of tribal boundaries through intermarriage. Wait. In one breath the daughters are told they can choose to wed anyone they wish, and in the next that it has to be a man from their own tribe?

But there’s a sneaky “and” (vav) at the beginning of that line, conjoining its logic to the prior verse. It is still ambiguous whether this makes it an imperative – And marry in your tribe! – or a conditional. Make yourselves wives of anyone you love; wed in your tribe and you inherit the land.  

The repetition of the words tihyeynah l’nashim suggests there are two separate possibilities, a choice the consequences of which this next line spells out. Choose anyone you wish from any tribe, but only if you marry intra-tribally (the technical term is endogamy) do you keep your inheritance.

This more liberating reading is confirmed in our celebration called Tu B’Av (the 15th of the month of Av) when we are commanded to be joyous, perhaps as a tonic to the deepest day of mourning six days prior, Tisha B’Av (the 9th). The sages tells us that the reason for joy is that it’s the exact date of this ruling (15th of Av, 1273 bce), “when tribes were permitted to intermarry.”[3]

So a better reading of the two verses, putting it all together, would be this:

Women should wed anyone who pleases them, but if they want inherit the land, they should choose a husband from their own tribe so land doesn’t circulate from tribe to tribe

Yes, God told them in a revolutionary moment, women deserve their father’s inheritance. And now, perhaps even more monumentally, God reveals to them and the world that women can wed whomever they please, from any tribe. But to balance it all, in exchange for your newfound freedom, He says, I gotta restrict the other revolutionary liberty I gave you (to inherit the land) so that you get it only if you choose to wed someone from your own tribe. Otherwise, the inheritance of the children of Israel will circle from tribe to tribe, mash up the neat map we just drew, and our peaceful utopia will be doomed before we even get there.

The deepest love

If this is a perfectly logical rationale, the next line is soul music. In the next breath, the same verse, God then explains – or mandates – the deeper spiritual force behind His compromise between love and inheritance:

כִּי אִישׁ בְּנַחֲלַת מַטֵּה אֲבֹתָיו יִדְבְּקוּ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל׃

 “…because each Israelite must cling to the land of the tribe of his father.” [4] (Num 36:7)

The text’s word for ‘cling’, or the more antic ‘cleave’[5] – d-b-k, devek –  is the same word Torah uses for other transcendent attachments, good and bad. It’s the same word for the God-given mystical connection between a man and his wife in Genesis. It describes Shechem’s deep, illicit lust for Dinah and also how persistent the plagues against the Israelites were, clinging to them. Later it applies to the deepest embrace between the Israelites and God. “You must cling to Him, for He is your life.” In later Jewish tradition it inspires the deep mysticism of devekus. But here it’s the engine of a love triangle: the Israelites love of Israel equals the love between man and woman equals the love between us and God.

And as if winking at us the Torah confirm this reading a few lines later. There are those same words bracketing this end of this story – tihyeynah … l’nashim:

תִּהְיֶינָה מַחְלָה תִרְצָה והגְלָה וּמִלְכָּה וְנֹעָה בְּנוֹת צְלפְחָד לִבְנֵי דֹדֵיהֶן לְנָשִׁים׃ (Num 36:11)

The verse says, “They chose (Tihyeynah )- Mahla, Tirtza, Hogla, Milka and Noa the daughters of Zelohechad”– the Torah names them here again to honor their importance – “to their cousins to be wives (lenashim).” The sages say Moses wasn’t telling them what to choose, but offering good advice from God. They heeded Him.

Having motivated two earthshattering revolutions through their chutzpah, they now show their modest wisdom. They choose to wed their cousins “so that their inheritance went along with the tribe of the clan of their father” (Num 36:12). It’s a great call. They get to have their wedding cake and eat it too.

With such a satisfactory wrap up, Numbers is quick to close the curtain with a swift last line: “These are the commandments and the laws that God commanded by the hand of Moses to the Children of Israel, in the Plains of Moab, by Jordan-Jericho.” (Num 36:13) Good show. Cue the soaring happy score.

Torah’s afikomon

We usually read the final weekly reading of Numbers, Masei, along with the one before, Matot. Together they create the longest reading of the year. The significance of the climax to Numbers may slide by us in the rush to get through the reading and as we get tangled in the technicalities of the revolution in marriage laws. The commentary is silent mostly about the startling fact that we’ve just heard the announcement of an unprecedentedly massive wedding, a five-fold celebration of women choosing their own mates. This even beats Shakespeare’s record in his comedy As You Like It, which famously ends with four simultaneous weddings.

Once we join the party, the message for the sweep of the epic narrative of the Hebrews starts getting deeper and clearer. It is really a celebration of the entire joyous covenant of the Torah, its climax. So let’s swiftly recap that epic in the light cast back by this happy moment.

Israel preserved its identity since the promise to Abraham through slavery in Egypt. They hear God pronounce His pact with them, newly-liberated slaves, on Sinai. They then get it in writing from Moses. It includes a detailed constitution, a set of laws for establishing a prospective heaven on Earth in the union of the people and land of Israel. They should have been eager to rush across the Red Sea and Sinai to seize their destiny, but they are not up to it. They fail every which way imaginable: through idolatry, cowardice, doubt, backsliding, violence, rebellion, complaining, lawlessness, debauchery, ambition, treason. Others have peeled away to return to Egypt. Some disappeared through assimilation with pagans. Some withered by wandering off in the desert. By far, God’s many plagues, afflictions, earthquakes, fire and snakes have eliminated the bulk of the spiritually weak, the rebels, the sinners and the merely conflicted. Their failures doom them to wander 40 years in the wilderness until the entire generation of former slaves die out. Even at the last moment, Moses faces two breakaway tribes, Reuben and Gad. They want to take the fat, fertile Moabite territory on the other side of Jordan, outside the borders of Israel proper. Moses first loses his temper when he hears their request. He compares them to the spies whose cowardly refusal to take Israel when they had the chance was the immediate cause of their wandering. But then Moses relents. Maybe he thought it would be better to let them pursue their corrosive greed outside of the utopia now rather than risk them rotting the future Israel from the inside, spiritually. Even so, to make sure they’re not just dodging the draft for the impending war against the Canaanites, he cuts a deal with them. He demands that they fight with their brethren before they take up residence across the border, build their cities and graze their cattle. Reuven and Gad readily agree. In fact, they’ll serve as shock troops, the most daring of the warriors. They’ll win the war and only then return to occupy their fat Transjordan lands. Are they loyalists who can’t resist their materialism or are they mercenaries? No matter. Moses has made the final selection of the spiritually fittest.

The only Israelites left are a new generation of fearsome, enspirited warriors. They’ve defeated the Sihon and Og, the Bashan, the Ammonites. They’ve just overcome the Moabite’s evil prophecy with superior God prophecy. They then completely decimate the even stronger Midianites for trying to seduce their whole nation.[6] They leave almost nothing alive, taking only the cattle, gold and remaining virgins as booty. Then they carve up the land of Israel as if the outcome is assured, though they haven’t yet stepped foot in it.

In short, these vital Israelites are about to take, in the very Biblical sense, Israel. Israel the people are about to consummate their long-forestalled, pent-up ecstatic promised union with Israel the land. It’s a magnificent climax.

Jewish mystical tradition and literature overflow with the metaphor of groom and bride in this union between the people and the land.[7] They interpenetrate and fertilize each other. They are meant to cleave to each other, just as bride and groom in the three-way union of man and wife with God as the not-so-silent partner. History proves the mysticism is real. When Jews occupy the land, it is fertile. Josephus in 75 CE testified to Israel’s abundance before the Romans destroy the Temple and scatter the Jews.[8] To humiliate them, the Romans call it Palestine after the Jews’ bitter enemies the Philistines. The land never recovers for almost two thousand years. Empire after empire, Rome, Byzantium, the Holy Roman Empire, Ottomans, England – all try and fail to make it anything less than desolate. Ramban (1194-1270), flees Spain for the Land of Israel. In Acco, he couldn’t even find nine other Jews to pray with. He wrote to his son, “Many are Israel’s forsaken places, and great is the desecration. The more sacred the place, the greater the devastation it has suffered. Jerusalem is the most desolate place of all.” He prophesied that Israel will remain desolate until the Jewish reoccupy the land.

Riding on horseback through what is now is the fertile Jezreel Valley in 1867, Mark Twain observed, [9]“There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent – not for 30 miles in either direction.” He calls it “the curse of a Deity… that has ruined its fields and fettered its energies. …Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince.”

Travel to Israel today and you can see immediately the instantiation of the metaphysical inter-fertilization of people and land both named Israel. When I last visited with my brother and sister, we traveled up and along the middle and northern borders – along the territory known as the West Bank, up north along Lebanon and Syria. Driving around and up the hairpin steepness of two lush mountains in Golan, a sudden gap opened in front of us.  It was a vista of a forsaken, arid landscape in the distance, framed by green

 “What’s that?” my sister asked, startled by the contrast.

“It’s Syria.”

“It looks dead.”

When the Jews are absent from Israel, the land suffers. Where they go, the land blossoms. Yes, there are exceptions. The territories Reuven and Gad bargained for, now Jordan, are still mostly lush, though I doubt anyone there still calls themselves a child of Israel. They still make wonderful wine in the Bekaa valley (mentioned in the Talmud) of southern Lebanon. Yes, there are mundane explanations for Israel’s fertility: Wealth, education, pent-up historical yearning, Western science and technology, sheer energy. But the mundane meets the miraculous halfway and the former disguises the latter from our dim mortal sight.

The Jews of Israel today are a testament to this mystically fertile union, especially after many of their great grandfathers shriveled (physically) in the shtetls of Europe before being incinerated. Brown, robust, social. Almost every man and woman serves in the military when they are 18. Their voices have music in them. In the last worldwide survey, Israel is one of the top countries for self-reported happiness despite the fact they’re surrounded by enemies, neighbors regularly pledge to eliminate them (the Palestinians and Iranians), and they’re despised by many nations of the world who should know better.

So why end with these women who have been given the new right to marry for love? Because their wedding is neither by force nor convenience. They’ve been given the Divine right to choose to marry whomever they wish, whoever they love – men who “find grace in their eyes” as the Hebrew literally says. They have expanded the domain of human joy and freedom by actively choosing their own paths. The daily ubiquitous miracles we mistake for the coincidences of material reality require us to meet divine will at least halfway on the road to fulfilling it.We’re not in Egypt anymore. we’re free to choose and act. You can’t just lay about and huddle in your hovel and wait for the hand of the Almighty to intervene. After all, He sent you a raft, a rowboat and a helicopter. You have to choose to take the ride. Israel the nation is now, finally, stepping into the boat. Tihyeynah.

What is a more fitting, complete ending to our epic adventure of the Hebrews than a five-fold wedding that we commemorate for all time? We celebrate it like that other, best of all liberation meals, the Passover seder. We end with the special dessert that, in its very name, celebrates the fertile conjugation of wife, husband and God through their separate deliberate acts of choosing, creation. It was set aside from the beginning only to be fulfilled now. It’s the Torah’s afikomon.

Tihyeynah. The future feminine plural. The Torah doesn’t have to tell us how the comedy ends. The daughters lived happily ever after. After all, this is true love.

– David Porush

Simchateo 5782

Aug 1, 2022

ENDNOTES

I am indebted to my study mates in our Friday Noon Parsha Shmooze for delving this reading of Matot-Masei with me: Nicolas Cruz, Ron Kardos, Bobby Lent, and Brad Diller. I am also indebted to Rabbi Yossi Marcus for his Shabbos drash on the significance of Aaron’s yahrzeit being mentioned here out of place (it’s the 15th of Av; Aaron dies on the 1st). Aaron earns the only yahrzeit date explicitly mentioned in Torah. It comes to teach us the fundamental aspect of love for our fellow humans suffused in the Torah through Aaron. Finally, I am indebted to Rabbi Yitzchok Feldman for confirming the meaning of the key word here – t’hiyeynah – as the future feminine plural of “to be,” and even more so for responding positively to this particular reading of the end of Numbers as a comedy.

[1] As Lord Byron quipped, “All tragedies are finished by a death. All comedies are ended by a marriage .” Most Shakespearean comedies end with a wedding: The Taming of the Shrew, All’s Well That Ends Well, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, many others. As You Like It ends with four weddings.

Going further back, we see the modern wedding comedy as a civilized version of its primitve pagan roots. The genre of comedy originated in ancient Greece as Dionysian fertility revelries. Komus was the Greek god of merrymaking who brought wine to his father, Dionysus, for his infamous parties. The annual spring rituals of komus weren’t so much weddings as festive orgies of appetite.

[2] The Contemporary Torah, Jewish Publication Society, 2006.

[3] Rabban Simon b. Gamaliel said: “Never was there any more joyous festival than the fifteenth of Ab and on the Day of Atonement, etc.” It is readily understood why the Day of Atonement should be a day of rejoicing, because that is a day of forgiveness, and on that day the second tables of the Law were given to Moses; but why should the fifteenth of Ab be a day of rejoicing? “Because,” said R. Judah in the name of Samuel, “on that day the members of the different tribes were permitted to intermarry.” What passage did they interpret to prove this? (Num. 36, 6) [Ein Yaakov (Glick Edition), Taanit 4:11]

[4] In fact, Ramban berates Rambam for not listing the imperative for Jews to “cling to the land” as one of Rambam’s 613.

[5] The word is a contranym; it means two opposite things at the same time. Cleave could imply “to bind or unite”, or it could mean “to sever completely, (as with a cleaver).” The implication is that two entities have a deeper wholeness or unity.

[6] There’s another whole drash to be written about the connecting theme in Matot-Masei of willful, feminine choice, encoded in the verb of “to be.”  This one is the contrast between the daughters of Zelophechad and the evil choice of the Midianite women to seduce the men of Israel: The consequence of their debased choice is that all the women are slaughtered and the virgin daughters become booty בָּזָז׃. “The Israelites seized the women of the Midianites and their children and all their beasts, all their herds, and all their wealth as booty. [Num 31:9]… “Moses became angry with the commanders of the army, the officers of thousands and the officers of hundreds, who had come back from the military campaign. Moses yells at them: “You have spared every female! Yet they are the very ones who made it happen  הָיוּ to seduce the sons of Israel to the bidding of Balaam, to trespass against HaShem in the matter of Peor, so that G-d’s community was struck by the plague.

[7] From the Kabbalistic tradition: “Behold the holy Torah and Eretz Yisrael have a unique relationship. So too the Jewish people have a unique deep spiritual relationship to the land of Israel. This can be seen from the prophet Ezekiel (chapter 48) dividing up the land between the twelve tribes, granting each tribe the parcel of land best suited for its needs. This was accomplished by each tribe bordering the place from where the soul of his tribe emanates from. Thus each mitzvah performed in Eretz Yisrael ascends and adorns each of the borders in relationship to the soul of each tribe. In this way, the completeness of the soul is dependent upon which portion of land it dwells in. And the fulfillment of the land is dependent upon the souls that dwell there in accordance with its existence. The essence of this is that Zion is the point of the original creation (Gemara Yoma 54b) For, from that point the rest of the world unfolded. That point of course is associated with the Shechina.” Chabad https://www.chabad.org/kabbalah/article_cdo/aid/380682/jewish/A-Land-for-Every-Nation-21.htm

Also Kabbalah: “The land of Israel and its cities also represent a sexual aspect. The first sin caused a split be­tween the masculine principle of the divine powers (symbolized by the sefirah of Glory or Foundation) and the feminine principle (symbolized by Kingship). The coupling of the two principles is already symbolized in early Kabbalah by the unification of “Zion” (Glory or Foundation) and “Jerusalem” (Kingship). Since the righteous person simi­larly is symbolized by the sefirah of Foun­dation, the sexual aspect is also reflected in the fact that only perfectly righteous people can possess the land.”  https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/mystical-israel/

[8] “These two Galilees, of so great largeness, and encompassed with so many nations of foreigners, have been always able to make a strong resistance on all occasions of war; for the Galileans are inured to war from their infancy, and have been always very numerous; nor hath the country been ever destitute of men of courage, or wanted a numerous set of them: for their soil is universally rich and fruitful, and full of the plantations of trees of all sorts, insomuch that it invites the most slothful to take pains in its cultivation, by its fruitfulness; accordingly it is all cultivated by its inhabitants, and no part of it lies idle. Moreover, the cities lie here very thick, and the very many villages there are here are every where so full of people, by the richness of their soil, that the very least of them contain above fifteen thousand inhabitants.” Note how Josephus connects the robustness of the warriors and their dauntless spirit with the fertility of their land. Josephus, The Book of Wars transl. by William Whiston, (London: 1737) 3, 3:2

[9] Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad (1869)