Dvar Torah on Parshat Matot

As I imagine you have heard, here in Israel we are currently engaged in an important and fascinating conversation about השוויון בנטל - sharing the (national and social) burden equally. This discussion mostly revolves around the place of the Charedim - ultra-Orthodox Jews - in Israeli society, and touches on a few topics. The first, and most dramatic, is the military. Charedim  currently can get an exemption from army service by claiming to be students in a Yeshiva - a religious seminary. Thousands take advantage of this exemption, and do little or no army service, while most Israeli men and women do three or two years of service, respectively. Many see this as unfair, whereas the Chardedi position is that the importance of their Torah study is equal to (or greater than) that of the actual army.

There is more. To get this exemption, you have to be studying in a Yeshiva, and not working. This creates a situation where tens of thousands of Charedi men put off working for a very long time, many forever, to remain in Yeshiva and study, placing a strain on the economy - fewer people earning money and paying taxes, more people on various forms of public assistance. In addition, Charedim attend Charedi schools, which offer very little in the way of secular studies (although they are supported financially by the government), making it difficult for Charedim  who finally do choose to leave the Yeshiva to work to actually gain employment. Charedim  therefore typically live near or under the poverty line, and, as a result, get various forms of welfare and many tax breaks, most notably on municipal property tax.

Trying to address these issues is what is meant when we talk about "an equal share of the burden", and includes discussion about the Charedi educational system, the draft, taxation, welfare and child support, etc. Let's take a look at what a story in this week's parsha might have to tell us about this issue.

This week we read Matot and Mas'ay  together, completing the book of Bamidbar. The nation of Israel is approaching the end of its 40-year sojourn in the desert, and is preparing to cross the Jordan to enter Israel. On the way, they have engaged militarily with  nations immediately to the east of the Jordan, and conquered their lands. At this juncture, at the end of parshat Matot, we are told that members of two and a half of the twelve tribes, Reuven, Gad, and half of Menashe, have an idea. First we are informed that "Much livestock was owned by the sons of Reuven and the sons of Gad, really an awful lot. They saw the land of Ya'azer and the land of Gil'ad, and behold, the place was a place for livestock." This being the case, members of Gad and Menashe  approach Moshe and the rest of the leadership with a proposition: "Atarot and Divon and Ya'zer and Nimrah and Cheshbon and El'aleh and Shvam and Nevo and B'on [these are all names of places in Trans-Jordan]. The land which God smote before the Congregation of Israel is a land of livestock, and your servants have livestock...let this land be given to your servants as a possession; do not take us over the Jordan."  These tribes, in possession of sheep and cattle, see the lands east of the Jordan that Israel has already conquered as perfect for grazing their animals, and ask to part ways with the rest of Israel and not enter the land, remaining behind to live just next door. 

Moshe's response is interesting: "האחיכם יבאו למלחמה ואתם תשבו פה"  - "Shall your brothers go out to war and you will sit here? Why will you dishearten the people of Israel from going into the land which God gave them? This is what you fathers did, when I sent them...to see the land. and they went...and they saw the land and they caused the people of Israel to be disheartened, so as to not enter the land which God had given them." Moshe raises a number of issues here, and I'd like to take a look at each of them.

His first response seems to speak to fairness. There is something obviously and intuitively wrong with some of the people sitting back and enjoying peace and quiet - and profits - while allowing the rest of the people to risk their lives for the national project. It seems selfish and unfair to act this way, not the way that brothers should behave.

Moshe then goes on to explain that it gets worse. Not only is there something unseemly in this selfish behavior, it also has a negative knock-on effect on the rest of the people. They will be disheartened by your inaction, and will be persuaded to give up the national project of taking the land of Israel. The decision by these tribes to sit out the conquest of Canaan will lead to a total failure of the nation's mission.

Moshe then finishes with an interesting historical angle: This behavior, and the effect it will have on the entire nation, follows a pattern, one which was started by your fathers forty years ago, when the spies spoke against the feasibility of trying to enter the land of Canaan. At the time, this position was quickly adopted by the rest of the people, who clamored to return to Egypt, rather than face the difficulties of conquering Canaan, as described by the spies. Angered by the people's abandonment of the goal, God punishes them (and basically grants them their wish) by forbidding them entrance to the land. They are condemned to wander the desert for forty years, until the last of them dies off, and the next generation will inherit the land. Moshe is warning our cattle-loving friends that their behavior could have the same tragic effect.

This last piece is extremely interesting, as it seems to me to be the first example of a Jewish leader appealing to the lessons of Jewish history to instruct the people on how they should deal with a contemporary problem. The sin of the spies is seen by Moshe as an archetype, a model of misbehavior, one that we should have learned to avoid. He is telling these tribes that they are guilty of repeating this sin, of falling into a pattern of behavior which they should realize, from their knowledge of recent Jewish history,  is unacceptable, and could lead to catastrophe. 

Taken together, the elements of Moshe's response give us an interesting understanding of how we are meant to share the burden equally in our society. In addition to the very basic, intuitive, and obvious inappropriateness of this kind of selfish, insensitive behavior - "Shall you brothers go out to war and you will sit here?" - there is also an appeal to the lessons of Jewish history: think where this behavior led in the past. And, crucially, Moshe is teaching us a profound and sophisticated historical lesson in  mutual responsibilty, which every member of the community is meant to feel. The livestock-rich tribes have an obligation to consider not only how their behavior will directly and immediately effect their brothers - fewer Jews sharing the burden of fighting the nation's battles -  they are also asked to consider the psychological and social impact of what they are doing. If their behavior will impact badly on the attitudes and actions of the rest of the people, they must abandon it, and behave differently.

This is  a remarkably spophisticated and demanding level of social responsibility. It denies us the option of hiding behind any technical exuses we might have for opting out of the national project -"they have enough men without us, they will manage, I don't plan to live there anyway", and demands that we take into account the effects our actions will have on public attitudes and perceptions. This is a deep level of concern for, and understanding of, what it means to be part of a society. It posits that history has shown us (the sin of the spies) that we have the power to shape other people's attitudes through our behavior, and demands that we accept responsibility for doing so. We are denied the option of simply shrugging our shoulders and saying "what I do is my own concern, I am not hurting anyone or taking anything from anyone. I am simply minding my own business and doing what's right for me." In Moshe's understanding of how a society works, we are never simply "minding our own business." The two and a half tribes may have good reasons for what they propose to do, and one could argue that, as long as they do not want any of the land of Israel they have the right to opt out of the fight for it, but Moshe teaches them, and us, that being part of a nation demands a higher level of responsibility. We are all in it together,  in terms of how others' attitudes and actions are shaped by what we do and say. (This assumes, of course, that we are, in fact, all in it together. The question of how much a group or individual really does see itself as part of the larger collective, and cares about the larger collective, is a complicating factor here - groups can live in a society, but feel or act in ways which indicate that they are not really of it, and have more loyalty to their particular subgroup, but this is a seperate aspect of our topic.)

An example of how this works in modern society was recently explained by Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale, who says the following, about confidence in the economy: "People intuitively know what other people are thinking, which is why confidence is so important. Confidence isn't about my personal confidence as much as it's about my perceptions of others' confidence, and my perception of others' perceptions  of others' confidence. That's what an economic slump is. It's everybody knowing that it's bad times." The fact that we are deeply bound together psychologically, and that if, for example, enough of us think the economy is headed for a slump then that's what will happen, is precisely the insight Moshe is teaching us here.

Now, this is not a simple thing to actually carry out. The case we have here - the peoples' attitude towards war - has other laws, which also revolve around one's responsibility to the collective consciousness, byt which actually can take us in the opposite direction. I am referring to the laws in Parshat Shoftim (Devarim, 20, 1-9), which exempt a person who is  "fearful and fainthearted" about fighting from participating in battle, "lest his brothers' hearts melt as his heart has". Here, we again have the principal of being concerned that my attitudes (here, my fears) will adversely affect those of my brothers, but the solution is very different: get me away from the battlefield before the panic I am feeling spreads to the rest of the army. That is the best contribution I can make to the war effort.

So, it isn't easy, or straightforward. But one would hope - actually, one would expect - that all of us involved in this conversation about sharing the national burden will have, as our first goal, coming to an honest assessment of how our decisions, attitudes, and actions affect the rest of the Jewish people, how the way we behave doesn't only materially and practically make a difference to the national effort - as important as that is - but also goes into the psychic mix of how well or poorly the nation is able to deal with the many challenges it faces. It is that level of sensitivity, concern, and commitment to the common good, that the Torah is demanding of us, that is, if we want to be an "us".

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix