Eshcol to arms

 My wife started a new job recently, which is great. That also means commuting, which is less great. It’s much less great (that can’t be right!) when it’s a demo day.

What’s a demo day? If you grew up in a reasonably temperate climate, you’ve probably heard of a snow day. If you live or work in Jerusalem, those are pretty rare, but demo days — when protestors shut down the roads — are all too frequent. Your 40-minute bus or car ride just became two hours. Schools and businesses may close early in anticipation of the impassable.

Now, many demonstrators protest for many reasons, but if they’re actually closing down roads in the capital, it’s probably a haredi (ultra-Orthodox) protest. If you ask me, they have a pretty sweet deal: no army service, voluntary unemployment, stipends to learn in yeshiva. And if you ask them, that only makes sense, because Torah study and prayer are what REALLY get results. Unless you want to protest the government, because then you have to leave the study hall and block some roads, throw some rocks, maybe burn some dumpsters.

Some will say that the roadblockers are the extremists, which is of course true. However, the policy they support, of wholesale opposition to the draft for haredim, is THE position of haredi society. There have been a handful of haredi MKs with short-lived careers who have suggested otherwise–Tzvia Greenfield (Meretz), R’ Haim Amsalem (Am Shalem), R’ Dov Lipman (Yesh Atid)–but notice that none of them belong to haredi parties or are in Knesset anymore. In fact, the most powerful haredi politician of this generation, Finance Committee Chair Moshe Gafni has stated that it’s impossible to be haredi and work.

Now, if these fine bochurim manage to make their way back to the study hall, they might read in this week’s Torah portion about our Patriarch Abraham, who hears his nephew Lot has been captured in a war against Sodom (Gen. 14:13-14):

A man who had escaped came and reported this to Abram the Hebrew. Now Abram was living near the great trees of Mamre the Emorite, a brother of Eshcol and Aner, all of whom were Abram’s allies. When Abram heard that his relative had been taken captive, he called out the 318 disciples born in his household and went in pursuit as far as Dan.

Abraham goes out to war; his disciples go out to war; even his Emorite allies go out to war. When the battle is won and the King of Sodom offers Abraham the spoils, he replies (ibid. v. 24)

“I will accept nothing but what my men have eaten and the share that belongs to the men who went with me—to Aner, Eshcol and Mamre. Let them have their share.”

Centuries later, a fateful split occurs among Abraham’s descendants, the Israelites. After the Exodus from Egypt, Moses sends scouts to survey the land, and ten of them reach the decision that they cannot defeat their enemies on the battlefield, with two dissenting. This ultimately leads to a decree of death for the generation that left Egypt and four decades of wandering. And where does the fateful split among the scouts take place? Wadi Eshcol, echoing the name of “Eshcol, boon companion of Abraham” (Num. Rabba 16:16).

If the students of Abraham left their yeshiva for the battlefield, I would not dare to reckon myself better than them. If Eshcol the Emorite and his brothers enlisted for the cause, shouldn’t a fellow Jew do the same? After all, we do not want to reenact the scene at Wadi Eshcol, where God’s promise to accompany us into combat was rejected.

Our nation is worth fighting for.

Kol Yisrael Aravot

The tale is told of a group of 19th-century yeshiva students who got into a physical interaction with some maskilim (students of the Enlightenment). Their rosh yeshiva demanded to see them in his study to explain their actions.

 

The leader said: “Rebbe, did our Sages not say that the Four Species of Sukkot mirror the Jewish people? The etrog, which has a pleasing taste and smell, reflects those who have both Torah and good deeds, while the odorless, tasteless aravot represent those who have neither Torah nor good deeds. Well, don’t we beat the aravot on the ground on the last day of Sukkot? That is what we were doing to the maskilim!”

 

The rebbe frowned and replied: “Since you have twisted words of Torah to justify bad acts, it appears to me that you lot are the aravot!”

That may be my favorite traditional tale, possibly because I made it up yesterday. However, I think the moral still applies. The Midrash Rabba on Leviticus 23:40 does say the aravot represent those Jews who have neither the wisdom of Torah nor the compassion of good deeds, but it also says they could represent our Matriarch Rachel.  Or her son, Joseph. Or the stenographers who record the rulings of the Sanhedrin. Or God Himself.

Still, the most popular interpretation is undoubtedly the one in which taste represents Torah and smell represents good deeds. The lulav has the former, hadasim the latter, the etrog both and aravot neither. God binds them all together so that each may atone for the other.

It is a stirring message of ahdut, unity. But as often happens with ahdut, the underlying assumption has a certain undercurrent of condescension. We may paraphrase the Talmudic phrase “Kol Yisrael arevim zeh be-zeh” as: Kol Yisrael aravim zeh be-zeh. Each group considers the other to be deficient, but in the name of unity, the aravot/ aravim are tolerated. (Aravot is the plural in Mishnaic Hebrew, aravim in Biblical Hebrew.) Is that really ahdut? If we view others as less, as inferior, as here only by our sufferance, how much is that vision of unity worth?

In Temple times, everyone would approach and dance around the altar with aravot. No one would be so brazen as to consider themselves an etrog, or even lulav or hadasim. Everyone took humble aravot, every day of Sukkot, to come before God. Because if God is found in the aravot too, we can at least aspire to that level.

Yes, we do beat them at the end of Sukkot, not out of anger or contempt at the other, but to realize our own failures, the times we lack wisdom or compassion, with the hope that we will grow over the course of the next year. And yet, we never quite get there, as we always need a Yom Kippur to purify us before rejoicing before God on Sukkot.

Sometimes we’re the etrog, sometimes we’re the aravot. True ahdut means that we embrace Godliness, in ourselves and in others, even on the worst of days.

Don't let them

 Don’t let them tell you it’s too soon. The fact is that it’s too late for the next massacre, and the one after that, and the one after that. The stockpiling is ongoing. But we want to mitigate the first massacre of 2020.

Don’t let them say it’s not terrorism. When the public is so scared and intimidated that it throws up its hands and says, “Nothing to be done!”– that is the textbook definition of terrorism.

Don’t let them talk about rights. The unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness precede all others.

Don’t let them parse the classes of weapons. There is a reason we hand soldiers assault weapons, not rocks or pillows.

Don’t let them strawman you over self-defense or sports. Setting aside how sporting gunplay is or is not, setting aside the likelihood of homeowners being shot with their own weapons, this is not our goal. It never has been. Toddlers and suicidal people will still have free access to the guns in their homes, have no fear.

Don’t let them act shocked when weapons designed for no other purpose than to slaughter dozens of people are used to slaughter dozens of people.

Don’t let them offer thoughts and prayers. When those are cynical substitutes for plans and actions, they are far more abhorrent than silence.

Don’t let them pretend that they will hold off the artillery, ordnance and nuclear firepower of a superpower with their pea-shooters.

Don’t let them blame cable TV or video games or any other media. Imaginary guns are not implements of death.

Don’t let them perpetrate the myth of the “good guy with a gun.” Off-duty law enforcement officers and military personnel aside, it’s a myth.

Don’t let them ignore the experience of the rest of the planet.

Don’t let them portray an extremist minority as the moral backbone of the nation.

Don’t let them distract with talk about mental health (which they have no interest in addressing either) or domestic abuse (ditto) or international politics (of countries they can’t find on a map).

We are stronger. We are many. And we will prevail.