Dvar Torah on Parshat Tetzaveh

This week's portion is called Tetzaveh, which means 'you should command'. The word appears in the first verse of the parsha - "And you shall command the children of Israel, and they shall bring to you pure olive oil, beaten, for light, to place as an eternal light." The Rabbis take notice of the word "command" here (and in a handful of other places in the Torah), and point out that the phrase  "speak to" or "tell" the children of Israel is much more common when God tells Moshe to communicate something to the Jewish people. Why is this specific request, to donate olive oil to be used in the menorah in the Temple, prefaced by the phrase "command the children of Israel", rather than the more usual "tell them"? A  number of solutions are offered, and I'd like to focus on one, suggested by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in the midrash. 

 Shimon bar Yochai says that the word "tetzaveh", which is, by the way, a form of the word mitzvah - commandment, is used when the commandment being discussed entails an expense, a loss of money - when it will cost you something to do the particular mitzvah being taught; in this case, the price of the olive oil. In such cases, people need to be especially encouraged, motivated, in short, commanded, to perform the act, as reaching into one's pocket to perform a religious obligation is especially onerous. Unless they are clearly commanded, people will easily ignore these expensive mitzvot, and not do them.

With this explanation, Shimon bar Yochai sets up an interesting tension between the demand to do God's commandments on the one hand, and concern for one's financial situation on the other. It would seem that people who would otherwise be perfectly happy to do whatever God tells them to do, and fulfill the mitzvot of the Torah, find it hard to do so when it gets a bit too expensive. When you think about it, this almost borders on the anti-Semitic: the Jewish people can be counted on to do God's will, as long as it doesn't cost them anything. When it does - buying olive oil, or animals to sacrifice - they need to be cajoled, threatened, ordered, into obeying. 

In The Merchant of Venice, in the climactic courtroom scene, when Shylock realizes that all his money and property are about to be taken from him, he says:

Nay, take my life and all; pardon not that:
You take my house when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live.

Shylock understands that money, especially for a landless Jew in the middle ages, was necessary to sustain and guarantee life. However, we also meant, I think, to feel uncomfortable with his equating his money and his life. Of course, this attitude is not specifically Jewish - everybody needs to make a living - though one could argue that some Jews, living under the kind of pressure Shylock experienced, got very good at accumulating money. People must work hard to gurantee themselves food, shelter, clothing, the basic necessities of life, and, of course, all kinds of other good things. So, when Shimon Bar Yochai tells us that we need some extra pushing whenever a mitzvah costs money, he's not being cynical about Jews (or people in general) and money. Rather, he is pointing out the very real strain that a religious commitment can put on one's basic need to earn a living. He is also telling us that the Torah wants us to privilege our religious commitment, and buy that fine olive oil for the Temple, even if it costs more than we think we can afford or would like to pay. This position would clearly seem to argue for a set of values which sees our religious commitments as more important than our material and financial well-being. We are meant, to some degree, to sacrifice one for the other, to reach into our pockets and place our religious and communal responsibilities above our concern for the bottom line.  

I can not help but think about something Rabbi Avi Orlow said to me a while back (this is not an exact quote): In the modern world, being an Orthodox Jew, which assumes raising a relatively large family, paying school tuition, camp costs, synagogue dues, giving charity, paying the high cost of kosher food, etc., essentially means that you have to be wealthy. Now, if this is the case - and it is hard to argue that it is not - it would seem that part of the Jewish world (and I think the Orthodox do not have a monopoly on this mind-set at all) has taken the message of Tetzaveh, that mitzvot cost money, and you must sometimes make  financial sacrifices to do God's will, very much to heart. However, rather than using it as a reason to develop a less materialistic world view, in which living a religious life takes precedence over financial success, it has been used it as a way to encourage people to become wealthy, to make being wealthy a value, because, after all, it really does cost a lot of money to be a good Jew. I wonder if this is in synch with Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai's point, that we are commanded to get our priorities straight, and must give up our hard-earned money for the sake of mitzvot, because it is the mitzvot, and not the money, that must be our priority.

The issues of materialism, and the place of wealth in our world, are complicated, and, as I have pointed out above, one could argue that Tetzaveh both encourages and discourages placing a premium on material wealth - we need to have the money neccessary for all the mitzvot we have to do, so money is important, but we have to be willing to freely spend it on fulfilling those mitzvot, so money is not really the goal, the value; mitzvot are.  A conversation about this conflict, and an attempt to figure out where we stand in terms of materialism, wealth, and our Jewish values, is, I think, long overdue.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix