Dvar Torah on Parshat Behaalotecha

Here in Israel, the relationship between the Charedi (ultra-Orthodox) community and the rest of the country is a very hot topic. The big issues are the current exemption charedi men have from serving in the army, and what is called here the "core curicullum." Currently, Charedi schools teach Torah almost exclusively; very little, if any, secular studies are offered - no math, scienece, English and other languages, etc. The government is comitted to denying public funding to Charedi schools unless thay start teaching a core curicullum, which will include the basics needed for life in the modern world and Charedi entry into the workforce in far greater numbers than is currently the case.

The Charedi communtiy is united against this plan, threatening civil disobedience, a willingness tio go to jail rather than go along with the plan to draft them and educate them into the general workforce. Even some non-Charedi Rabbis and religious leaders have defended the Charedi position, citing the importance of Talmud Torah (Torah study) and the Charedi commitmernt to a life devoted, in theory, almost exclusively to prayer and study.

Although the argument about the draft often gets very dramatic - it is, after all, a question of life and death - I would like to focus on the question of education. Should we see it as a value to devote oneself almost exclusiovely to Torah study, eschewing even the basics of secualr studies? What Jewish (or human) value is there to secular studies, and what should our attitude towards them be?

In the parsha of B'ha'alotchah, there is a very dramatic rebellion of sorts against Moshe. The people are hungry. Sick of the manna, missing the fish and watermelon of Egypt, they demand meat. Moshe loses it, complaind to God about the nation's behavior, and ultimately asks God to put him out of his misery, he can't do this anymore. God, teaching us a lesson about sensitivity and knowing when to give in, suggests that Moshe does in fact need help, and tells him to deputise seventy men to work with him, as the elders, in leading the people. 

Nachmanides (Rav Moshe ben Nachman, knows as the Ramban, 1194-1270) takes this opportunity to discuss the number seventy. He points out the well known Rabbinic belief that there are 70 non-Jewiah nations, each one with its own angel in heaven, ruling over it as it were, and its own language. The Ramban explains that this number, containg as it does all the various peoples of the world, actually represents all of the powers, all of the approaches and opinions in the world (similar to the well-known Rabbinc statement that there are 70 facets to the Torah). The number represents a fullness, a wholeness of thought and action. This is why this number is chosen for the number of elders, as well as judges in the Sanhedrin, the inclusion of "all the powers" insures that "nothing will be too difficult for them." The Ramban explains that the 70 are presided over by the nasi, or head of the court, which parallels Moshe standing over the 70 elders in the desert, and which, radically, parallels the Heavenly Court, where God presides over the seventy angels of the nations of the world.. The Ramban goes a step further, and explains that the 72 letter name of God indicates the dynamics of the 70 non-Jewish nations, plus Israel seperate from them as the 71st, all overseen by God, "who is the masster over them all", the number 72.

This dynamic, so central to major elements of Jewish life and thought, has very clear implications for what we think about the non-Jewish world. Rather than dismissing non-Jewish wisdom as irrelevent, or even antithetical to Jewish justice and law, we see that Jewish justice is meant to entail and embrace - and ultimately trancend - the gamut of non-Jewish thought and experience. Our wisdom is literally supported by that of the 70 nations, references it, and somehow synthesizes it all into a Jewish world view. We do not ignore the wisdom of the 70 nations, locking ourselves into some sort of wholly hermetic Jewish wisdom; we see Jewish wisdom as interacting with that of the entire world, and emerging, after that interaction, as Jewish.

It would seem clear from this structure that it is a deeply Jewish value to, in some way, subsume the knowledge of the world, to know all seventy aspects of wisdom, to understand all possible points of view. It is, after all, from this position that the Jewish people are meant to be led, first by Moshe and the elders in the desert, and, later, by the Sanhedrin, the highest Jewish legislative and judicial body. These institutions are meant to represent not a hermetic, inward-looking Jewish wisdom, but, rather, a wisdom which is based on all wisdom, a knowledge which entails all knowledge, specifically that which is non-Jewish - the wisdom of the seventy nations. It is for this reason that the Rabbis tell us that members of the Sanhedrin needed to know all 70 languages of the world. In addition to the practical need to take testimony in whatever language the wirtness might speak, the judges had to be men of the world, men familiar with all the opinions, all the powers, of Gods's creation. 

The lesson for us, today, could not be clearer. Rather than fighting the core curicullum, our Jewish tradition demands of us that we embrace the wisdom of the world, and somehow rise above  the specific parochial view of each of the seventy nations to create a unifiesd vision, the 71st position, that of Moshe, and of the head of the Sanhedrin, who embraces all the insights of humanity. That is the Jewish way, that is the wisdom of the Torah.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix