July 31, 2009 - TORAH’S BIG THREE

Yesterday was Tishe B’Av, the 9th day in the month of Av. In Jeremiah (52:12), the date of the destruction of the First Temple is given as the 10th day of Av (in 586 BCE), but the Sages reconcile this by stating that the Temple was set aflame the previous evening and it burned to the ground the next day. The Romans burned the Second Temple and reduced Jerusalem to rubble on Tisha B’Av in 70 CE. Betar, the last stronghold in the Bar Kochba rebellion against Rome, fell on the ninth of Av in 135 CE.

Many of the massacres of Jewish communities during the Crusades took place in the summer months, and these unhappy events were added to the Tisha B’Av litany. In more recent times, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain culminated on Tisha B’Av, (Aug 2, 1492), and the Czar ordered his army to mobilize on Tisha B’Av, 1914, leading to a direct confrontation with Germany, which was one of the acts precipitating World War I. We Reform Jews, not having any stake in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem and wanting spiritual separation from the Sacrificial Cult, have tended to ignore the observance of Tisha B’Av. Still and all, I spent part of the day, yesterday, reading from the Book of Lamentations and absorbing its words of grief, shock and utter devastation at the destruction described in its pages.

Tonight’s Torah portion, Va’etchanan, stands in contradistinction to the emotional pall of Tisha B’Av. In contrast to the Day of Commemoration of our devastation, this parasha brings the most important elements of faith and challenge in our Jewish way of life. It contains what we might call the big three of Torah. Can you guess which essentials of Jewish life I am referring to?

The first is the Shema Yisrael, the potent, six word statement of faith that is on the lips of every Jewish child from the moment he or she begins to learn language and about Judaism until the moment he or she prepares to die. The second is the Va’ahavta, the Thou Shalt Love which Moses commands to the Israelites and we repeat, even on this very evening. The third, but far from least important, are the Ten Commandments. It strikes me that there is a connection between these three which essentially undergirds everything else in Jewish life.

The Shema is formulaic. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” This is no commandment, although it is sometimes treated like one. It is, rather, a statement of faith. It conveys two very vital messages. The first is that if you are part of Israel, that is, if you are a Jew, you must pay very, very close attention to the following fact. Whatever else you might believe God to be, whatever powers or attributes you might ascribe to the Almighty, there is one and only one God.

Whether the composer of this most sacred of all phrases was aware of it or not, unifying God’s being places every aspect of life under God’s sovereignty. There is no god of good and god of evil. However much easier relegating those might be in the near term, ultimately, we Jews understood that that sort of bifurcation would and does lead to philosophical and spiritual trouble, not to speak of ritualistic and realistic dark holes. If God is God of everything, we’ll just have to work out our roles in dealing with bad things and love God because of or in spite of the fallout.

For one big example, good people, by now you know that this has been a tough week for B’nai Chaim. The damage which individual congregants had suffered in last week’s horrific hail storm that whipped fiercely through the western suburbs of Denver visited this building several nights later in the guise of a torrential, thirty minute storm which, itself, followed on the heels of a sprinkler head break which had left the grounds of the Temple already saturated with water. Following le deluge, our window wells downstairs filled up like fragile tea cups and several burst, flooding the downstairs. A tour of our Social Hall, which I presently do not advise, will give you a picture of work and expense we have yet before us…and it isn’t as small as it might first appear because of the preventative work that must be added to the cost which, please God, will save us from having to go through this yet again. It has been a week which has worn on the nerves of a number of us.

Now we could look at our misfortune as the work of God, the one God which singled out our little Temple and decided to give us a good wet spanking. In contradistinction, we could take into account that the storms thankfully did not involve any injury to health, life or safety to anyone here or in our congregants’ homes. One must keep life’s hardships and challenges in perspective and not give up on the hope that we shall very soon be able to get in front of these downpours and floods, finally securing this building and our bank account that each successive incident taps into. Should we actually blame God for these occurrences? Only if we are intellectually foolish.

Having been summoned to pay attention to our need to unify the Godhead, not to fall into rote patterns generated by repetition, thousands upon thousands of times; having been called…SH”MA YISRAEL---LISTEN, ISRAEL…hear this, pay heed, people….we then read Moses’ call and command to the people to love God with everything that is in us: heart, mind, and being. This is to say that once we recognize and call out that God’s most precious quality is unity, we cannot and should not stop there; for we have a special relationship with this unified deity; we have a covenant with this God which is reflected in the laws and commandments we must learn to live by, make and keep active in our behaviors, while also making a supreme effort to pass them along to our children.

In Va’etchanan, Moses seems to be creating a linear pathway from belief, to the how-to’s of preserving the elements of that belief, and then, thirdly, to repeating the most important of God’s commands and giving them voice. It is as though Moses wanted to say, “If you really have faith (as expressed by your repeating the Shema) and do thereby publicly unify the Lord, our God; then you must also learn to love God by learning, teaching an obeying our God’s commandments. It’s all of a piece and a package.

Then, too, in the Afternoon Service of Yom Kippur, in the Eleh Ezkara (These I Remember), there is this following explication of the V’ahavtah:
Akiba had defied the decree (of the Romans) and continued to teach. He was among those taken. He was led to his death at the time when the Shema is recited. As his flesh was flayed, he said: SHEMA YISRAEL. ‘Even now? His disciples asked. He replied: ‘All my life this verse has troubled me: “Love the Lord your God with all your…being…”—love God, though you must die for it! I prayed always to be able to fulfill this—and now I can!’

I would contend that the challenge for us today isn’t, thank God, that we must give up our lives for God, but that we should live in a such ways that affirm God and set examples for our children and our neighbors. We do this, at least in part, by keeping the third essential always before us, that being the commandments which God gave us in love.

As I recently told Justin Herrmann, and I was quoting Rabbi Harold Kushner of Why Bad Things Happen to Good People? fame, the Ten Commandments are what keep us out of jail. There are other laws, ordinances, commandments and teachings reflected in Torah which give us ways of living our lives to the fullest.

What are some of these? Lets’ start with: Love thy neighbor as thyself. Or: reserve something of what you produce for the poor. How about: judge all people equally and do not go about as a gossip. Then there’s the one about giving the day labor his salary before nightfall. These and many other laws…and their spirit… give us the direction and the courage to be positive in the face of adversity, to maintain more even-keels when the waters, both literally and figuratively, become rocky or overpowering. They are what keep us on paths of righteousness when others around us veer off in unseemly directions.

Tonight we once again encounter these big three of our Judaism: the Shema, Va’ahavta, and the Asseret Habibrot, the Ten Commandments. Given the week we’ve all just been through, we needed this spiritual shot in the arm which Torah has provided to us this Shabbat evening.