Dvar Torah on Parshat Ki Tavo

This week's parsha takes us right up to the final section of the Torah. Ki Tavo begins with the words כי תבוא אל הארץ - "When you enter into the land" - and contains details about the first things the nation of Israel must do once they arrive in the land of Israel, which will happen after Moshe's death at the end of the Torah. Apparently, the very first thing they are commanded to do is this: "And it shall be, on the day that you cross over the Jordan into the land which the Lord your God is giving you, you shall erect for yourselves large stones, and plaster them over with plaster. And write on them all the words of this Torah, once you have crossed over...". There is a good deal of discussion, both in the Talmud (Tractate Sotah, 35b) as well as among the later commentaries, about how this exactly worked. Besides a conversation about how many sets of stones there were, and where they were ultimately located, there is also a variety of ways to understand what was written on them. The ideas range from writing a list of the mitzvot (commandments) on these stones, to writing the entire Torah. According to one opinion, the entire Torah translated into 70 languages! Any way you undersand this, it is a major undertaking, and its significance, as the very first thing the nation is told to do upon its arrival in its homeland,  cannot be overstated, and must be understood.

It would seem that the commandment to write the Torah on large stones, taken from the Jordan River, immediately after crossing it and entering Israel, is meant to underscore the connection between the land and the law. The society which the people of Israel will create, in the land they have been promised, is meant to be a society in which the rule of law is paramount. The Torah is the constitution of the nation state they are about to found, and they are not allowed to spend one moment in that nation state without making that crystal clear.  This basic principle will be expressed by physically connecting the laws of the Torah to the land, in the form of stones taken from the land itself. I think the primacy of the rule of law is what must be emphasized here. One of the issues the west is currently struggling with is how democracy is meant to work in countries which seem to not really embrace its basic principles.  One close-to-home example of this  problem is the fact that Hamas was democratically elected to rule Gaza (sort of; there was a lot of violence), which is often trumpeted as some sort of proof of something - I'm not sure of what, exactly - concerning Hamas's legitimacy. What is much more significant, I think, is the fact that those elections, which took place back in early 2006, will be the last elections to ever take place in Gaza, if the Hamas has its way. Therefore, I think that, rather than focusing on the relatively democratic nature of  Hamas's rise to power, the emphasis should be on the litmus test of the rule of law, which clearly is lacking in Gaza (all those murders of "Israeli collaborators", and much more). More than anything else,  it is the absence or presence of the rule of law which we should focus on when judging the legitimacy of Hamas's, or anyone's,  rule. Clearly, the Torah is a big fan of the rule of law, which is why we are told to write down the Torah, which contains the laws of the land, immediately, in a monumental, permanent fashion. It is the rule of law which defines civil society, and its presence or absence is what makes a society good or bad. 

I would now like to focus for a moment on the notion that, according to some, the Torah, or at least a list of its laws, was written on these stones 70 times, once for each of the languages of the nations of the world (classically, Judaism divides the non-Jewish world into 70 peoples, each with its own language).  This remarkable position seems, I think, a bit strange to us, and not only because of the awesome amount of work it would entail. After many years of exile and oppression, we have grown fairly shy about our Torah. Jews living as an oppressed minority in Christian or Moslem societies were in no position to confidently share their beliefs with their oppressors; to do so often meant death. Our attitudes towards conversion have been  effected in much the same way. After centuries during which it was unthinkable to actively welcome Christian or Muslim converts to Judaism - the consequences would be (and, in some places, still are today) bloody, we are still foolishly clumsy and uncomfortable with converts and the process of conversion. It would seem that the centuries of exile have made us forget the message of these monumental stones: the truth of Judaism is a universal one, its laws are meant to be displayed openly for us and all the world to see and understand, in all of the world's 70 languages. We are meant to share our values, our truth, with the rest of humanity.

This remarkable openness about the laws of the Torah, the commandment to share them with the world, presents us with quite a challenge. In addition to the exile-based attitudes I described above, which make us rather reticent about the contents of the Torah, I think there is another issue at work. We have failed to "translate" the Torah into even one language - let alone 70 - that really makes much sense to the public at large in today's world. The commandment to translate the Torah, making it accesible to all, surely must go beyond its simple translation into other languages. We need to make the Torah relevant to the world, to the present. The progressive branches of Judaism have done a really great job with the notion of Tikkun Olam, turning into a very popular, powerful, and important universal value, but is that really all there is? We are failing to "translate" basic laws of the Torah into frameworks that make sense today, frameworks that can be helpful and meaningful for the entire Jewish people, and, hopefully, all 70 nations of the world.

An example: As you may know, this coming year, which starts in two weeks, is a Sabbatical year. The basic Torah laws are fairly simple: refrain from agricultural work, allow whoever wants to to eat from the fruits of the field, and cancel all debts. How to do that in a modern society is quite a story, but let's leave that aside. Here in Israel, there is an attempt, called שמיטה ישראלית - Israeli Sabbatical Year - to broaden the mitzvah to include a wide range of social justice initiatives, relevant to city-dwelling  non-farmers and those who haven't lent anyone any money.  The notion is: we used to let people eat freely from our fields, orchards, and vineyards during the Sabbatical year, let's translate that into something we can all do today, in our urban environment. A great idea, a terrific "translation" from what was once, in an agrarian society,  very progressive, foward thinking, and sensitive, to something with real relevance for today. A real step forward.

And then what happens? Sure enough, a well-known and respected MODERN Orthodox Rabbi, not  a Charedi (all right, I'll tell you.  Rabbi Yisrael Rosen, of Tsomet) comes out against this lovely idea, calling it a perversion of the Torah's conception of Shmita (Sabbatical year), which, he argues,  is not about social justice at all, but should be understood as a very limited agricultural-based ritual. I don't want to go into the details of his attack, as they are too depressing. They ended with his accusing the Israeli Sabbatical Year people of nothing less than "starting a new religion, right under our noses". Thankfully, many right-thinking people came to the defense of the more expansive and meaningful Israeli Sabbatical Year, but really! It is this kind of thinking, this inability to understand that we must translate what the Torah tells us into laws and practices which can be shared universally, and are not only relevant for a relatively small number of religious Jews, that is the great failure at the center of traditional Judaism. And furthermore: even for those traditional Jews who keep the "untranslated" Torah, its laws are only relevant as ritual, as symbol, and not as a real-world, this will really make a difference to the way we actually live, legal and ethical system. This "untranslated" Torah is definitely not a constitution, not a real way to run a society and a country.

I'll be honest with you. You look around, and, all too often, religious people are the bad guys. From the creeps who won't give their wives divorces; the lunatic cults, in Judaism and other religions (there was a real doozy in Israel this week), who abuse women and children; the religious institutions that allow and cover up child abuse; the general misogyny found in many traditional communities; the nastiness here in Israel on the part of the religious establishment towards potential converts (and the many who don't even need converting), all the way to the maniacs of Hamas, Qatar, Al Qaida and the Islamic State, lots of very bad stuff seems to be happening in the name of God, and God's Word.  This is happening, to a large degree, because many religious communities seem unable to translate the ancient texts into modern language, to use them to say something of importance about the real issues facing us: global warming, racism, the mistreatment of women, poverty, the growing wealth gap, etc., etc., etc. Faced with this failure, they retreat deeper and deeper into a backward, literalist, fundamentalist reading of their texts and traditions, with disastrous results. Finding themselves unable to make their traditional religious legal system relevant in a modern world, they reject that world, regressing to the middle ages, and beyond.

We can not do this anymore. We must learn how to translate the Torah, to make it the law of the land, integrally attached to the societies in which we live. To write it, in large letters, on very big stones, stones taken from the very land itself, the land in which we live, and translate it, first into our language, and then for everyone else into theirs, so that it's meaning for us, and for the world, today, becomes completely clear, and completely real.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix