My strength
and the might of my hand
Pinchas
Leiser
The renewal of Jewish settlement in the Land
of Israel, and even more pointedly, the establishment of the State of Israel,
reacquainted the Jewish People with the need to use force (not taking into
account, of course, the armed rebellions on the ghettoes of the Holocaust period). The establishment of the State of Israel in a
territory which - despite one of the false slogans attributed to Lord Balfour,
"A land without a people to a people without a land" – was partially
settled by members of another people, created a situation of national conflict
that grew violent through the years and has yet to be resolved.
In this connection it is interesting to note
that the Haredi rabbinic world opposed the Zionist movement and the project of
establishing the State of Israel before the Messiah's arrival. This approach was given its sharpest
expression by the Satmer Rebbe, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, principally in his book,
VaYoel Moshe and in an essay he published following the Six Day War,
titled Al HaGeula Ve'al HaTemura.
In his writings, and especially in VaYoel
Moshe, the Satmer Rebbe basis his absolute rejection of Zionism upon the
midrash of the "Three Oaths" which he understood as giving halakhic
instruction that opposes any struggle for the creation of a Jewish state.
The midrash is based upon three verses from
the Song of Songs:
I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles
or by the hinds of the field, that you neither awaken nor arouse love until it
please. (2:7)
I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles
or by the hinds of the field, that you neither awaken nor arouse love until it
please. (3:5)
I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem; why should you
awaken, and why should you arouse love until it please?(8:4)
The midrash on these verses takes the
traditional exegetical approach to the Song of Songs, interpreting it as an
allegory for the relationship between God and the Jewish People:
What are these
three oaths?
One - that Israel
not ascend the wall,
and one - that the
Holy One, Blessed be He, adjured Israel not to rebel against the nations of the
world,
and one - that the
Holy One, Blessed be He, adjured the nations of the world not to oppress Israel
overmuch. (Ketuvot
111a)
Rabbis and religious thinkers who supported
Zionism, or who at least did not oppose it on theological grounds, contended
with the Satmer Rebbe's theological arguments in various ways. Some of them viewed the "Three Oaths"
as a midrashic dictum lacking halakhic force.
Others claimed that the oaths had been annulled, since they had been
transgressed by the nations of the world.
Some rabbis held that the expression "ascend the wall" refers
strictly to the building of the Temple and does not prohibit massive aliyah and
the founding of a state.
In 1925 a Jewish movement called Brit Shalom
was founded by a group of Jewish intellectuals.
They strove to promote Jewish-Arab coexistence by abdicating the right
to establish the Jewish national home in the Land of Israel which had been
recognized in the Balfour Declaration.
They favored the creation of a bi-national autonomous body under the
rule of the British Mandate in which Arabs and Jews would enjoy full equality
of political and civil rights.
Among its members and supporters could be
found Arthur Ruppin, the philosopher Martin Buber, the philosopher Shemuel Hugo
Bergman, the kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem, the educator Ernst Simon, and
Yehudah Leib, the first president of the Hebrew University. Other supporters included the businessman
Shlomo Zalman Schoken and the British statesman Herbert Samuel. The movement became a marginal factor within
Zionism after the majority of the Zionist Congress rejected its views and
sought the creation of a sovereign Jewish state, freed of the British Mandate's
authority. The Arabs were also unwilling
to collaborate with the movement and it was dissolved in 1930.
It is not my intention in the context of
this devar Torah to evaluate from an historical perspective Brit
Shalom's arguments against the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of
Israel. The State of Israel is an
existing fact and we should be glad for it, but there is no doubt that these
streams within Jewish thought brought up dilemmas which cannot be ignored.
It is interesting to turn to our parasha in
order to see to what extent the Torah warns us against the moral dangers that
we are likely to contend with upon entering the Land of Israel.
In chapter 8, verses 11 through 20, Moses
points out one such problem:
First Moses tells the Israelites that, the
Lord your God is bringing you to…a land of wheat and barley, vines and figs and
pomegranates…in which you will eat bread without scarcity…and you will eat and
be sated. Satiation
brings its own dangers: Beware that you do not forget the Lord, your God, by
not keeping His commandments…lest you eat and be sated…and your heart grows
haughty, and you forget the Lord, your God, Who has brought you out of the land
of Egypt, out of the house of bondage…And then: you will say to yourself, "My strength and the
might of my hand that has accumulated this wealth for me." And if you forget:
And it will be, if you forget the Lord your God and follow other
gods, and worship them, and prostrate yourself before them, I bear witness
against you this day, that you will surely perish. As the nations that the
Lord destroys before you, so will you perish; since you will not obey the
Lord your God.
This powerful statement identifies the attitude
of My strength and the might of my hand with you forget the Lord your
God. It is an attitude which leads
the People Israel to ruin, leaving it to a fate not different from that of the
idolaters who had lived in the Land previously.
Later, Moses mentions another danger
awaiting the people upon their entry to the Land (Devarim 9:4-5):
Do not say to
yourself, when the Lord, your God, has repelled them from before you, saying,
"Because of my righteousness, the Lord has brought me to possess this
land," and [that] because of the wickedness of these nations, the Lord
drives them out from before you. Not because of your righteousness or because
of the honesty of your heart, do you come to possess their land, but because of
the wickedness of these nations, the Lord your God drives them out from before
you, and in order to establish the matter that the Lord swore to your
forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
The People Israel enters the Promised Land at
the same time as other nations pay for their sins by being expelled from
it. The Israelites might deceive
themselves into thinking "It can't happen to us" because we are
better. In the verses just quoted Moses
warns the people against this dangerous illusion: You are not any better than
the others. The peoples who inhabited
the Land were banished because of their deeds and the Land was given to you
because the Holy One blessed be He made
a covenant with the patriarchs. However,
the Land of Israel is a land upon which the Lord your God sets His eyes;
it is sensitive to the behavior of those who dwell within it. It will vomit out those who practice
injustice, and if you act in the same manner as your predecessors, your fate
will be similar to theirs.
Some will say that these words were spoken
by Moses as the will and testament of a leader who knows that he lacks control
of future events. The is no doubt that
the passages of rebuke in the Book of Devarim give human and literary
expression to the understandable worries of a leader who knows his time has
past. These passages are rife with pain
and many midrashim describe the difficulty with which Moses accepted his
imminent death and the fact that he would never enter the Land of Israel.
However, can we be satisfied with this
literary and psychological reading, which makes the passages of rebuke into nothing
more than part of Moses' ancient biography?
I think that it is possible for us to apply
some of Moses' concerns and warnings to every situation in which an exiled
nation finds itself re-establishing a sovereign and independent society on its
own soil and must contend with new challenges and dilemmas which it had not
encountered while wandering in the "wilderness." Wealth and plenty can be taken for granted;
achievements in various areas (security, science, technology, sport, and economics)
can cause moral blindness. After the Six
Day War (as the songs of victory bear witness) we became intoxicated with power
and many of our leaders – and not necessarily the stupid ones – thought that
"time is on our side." I think
that many of our leaders and a significant portion of the citizenry eventually
understood that this illusion might stem from the mindset of My strength and
the might of my hand.
Unfortunately, voices can still be heard in
the style of, "Let the IDF win," reflecting from the belief that all
of our problems can be solved through force, "And whatever can be solved
through force can be solved by more force." Even the Second Lebanon War did not raise any
doubts in such people's minds regarding the limits of power.
In addition, the attitude of Because of
my righteousness, the Lord has brought me can still lead us today to the
feeling that we are always justified in everything we do. This arrogant attitude sometimes blinds us to
the injustices we perpetrate.
Do I live with the illusion that the time
has come to abandon the considered use of force in dealing with genuine security
problems? Unfortunately, we have not yet
arrived at such a time, but I think that at the mature age of 60 years we can
allow ourselves - and perhaps we are obligated - to stop turning a blind eye to
authentic moral dilemmas. We must
appreciate the reasonable use of certain means without glorifying them or
turning them into an ideal, as the prophet Zachariah (4:6) put it:
Not by valor
and not by power, but by My spirit,' says the Lord of Hosts.
And
Rabbi Avraham Ibn Ezra explains: Not by valor and not by power – As when
I saw the oil coming into being of its own account and burning, so the Temple
shall be built – not through Zerubavel's great power and numerous troops, but
rather through the Lord's spirit and assistance.
אין תגובות:
הוסף רשומת תגובה