Post by Rabbi Neil on Aug 11, 2017 21:19:31 GMT
V’atah yisrael, mah adonai elohecha sho’el m’imach? (Deut 10:1) And now, oh Israel, what does the Eternal your God demand of you? Words from this week’s Torah portion. Throughout the first chapters of Deuteronomy, we have kept having the repetition of the phrase sh’ma yisrael – hear Israel – but now with this question the injunction isn’t to listen, it’s to act. Not to plan for the future, not to address social justice crises in committees, but to act in the immediate present. V’atah yisrael – NOW, Israel – what are you going to do now?
So that there’s no doubt, Moses answers the question very clearly – “just this – to revere the Eternal your God, to walk only in God’s ways, to love God, and to serve the Eternal your God with all your heart and soul.” And in case that seems like he’s saying to just pray and meditate on our connection with God, he clarifies, “which means keeping the Eternal’s commandments and laws.” In order to achieve this, we have to “therefore cut away the thickness around [our] hearts and stiffen [our] necks no more.” And since God “upholds the cause of the orphan and the widow and befriends the stranger, providing them with food and clothing, so too must [we] befriend the stranger.” Finally, Moses adds, “You must revere the Eternal your God – only God shall you worship and only to God shall you hold fast and only by God’s Name shall you swear” (Deut. 10:20).
These things are all one. They are all one and the same answer to one question that was posed. What does God ask of you? The idea of being asked, of having demands, is often uncomfortable to the modern mind. We are free and autonomous individuals, after all. We don’t owe anybody anything, we are not commanded by anyone any more. We choose, we buy in, we select our own lifestyle. Except, as much as that may be the message from our Western culture, it’s profoundly untrue. That message is based, at least in part, to the capitalist message that we are responsible for our own financial success. Implicit in that is the converse that those who have not succeeded have not tried hard enough. Those who spoke to the young adults who were homeless who stayed in our community know without question that that’s palpably false. For many individuals in this world, in this country, in this city, the deck is stacked so heavily against them that no matter how hard they try, they will not be able to succeed financially, they will not have the same opportunities as other people. Sometimes that is because of the colour, or their religion, or their gender, or their sexuality, or their family finances, or many other potential reasons. Here in Deuteronomy, Torah says, “Right now, right now, the reasons aren’t important. What’s important is helping the person in immediate need.”
But is that really all we’re asked to do? Are we not meant to change society? Nowhere in Torah are we commanded to radically alter the globalised marketplace in order to relieve suffering. Nowhere are we told to address the root causes of racism, of sexism, or prejudice. We are told to address the issue in the moment. Imitatio Dei, the imitation of God, is not in radically changing the world, it’s in changing the immediate present, in relieving the suffering that is immediately in front of us. We are commanded to act justly, but nowhere are we commanded to ensure the world is a just place. What we tend to do as Reform Jews is to take that immediate need and apply it further in terms of social justice. We take quotations such as that from Proverbs 31(:9), that says, “Speak up and judge fairly, defends the rights of the poor and needy” and say that to defend their rights we have to change society. But that’s not really what the quotation means – it means to protect the poor and needy in the immediate present. Don’t judge them, just protect them. Even the famous quotation from Isaiah 58 which we read on Yom Kippur deliberately to shock us out of the stupor of religious self-righteousness, adjures us to loosen the chains of injustice, to untie the cord of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and to break every yoke, to share our food with the hungry, to provide the stranger with shelter and to clothe the naked when we see them. When we see them. There’s nothing pre-emptive about this. All these things are responses to the immediate presence of suffering when we see them. A Midrash on the Book of Psalms (on 118:17) says, ‘when you are asked in the world to come “what was your work” and you answer “I fed the hungry,” you will be told, “This is the gate of the Eternal, enter into it, you who have fed the hungry.” What it doesn’t say is “You who changed the structure of society so as to prevent hunger.” It doesn’t say, “You who rallied against the selfish capitalistic society.” The people who are rewarded are those who immediately act when they see suffering. At the central point of Torah, Leviticus 19, the Holiness Code, we learn “lo ta’amod al dam rei’echa” (Lev. 19:16) – “you shall not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.” The blood is right there, begging for a response. Again, this is an immediate response, v’atah yisra’el, now, oh Israel, now you need to respond.
And yet, despite all this, we have a Social Justice Director. Not a Tzedakah Director, but a Social Justice Director. One of my interfaith clergy colleagues this week said that there is a difference between charity and social justice. Charity, she said, addresses the immediate need, whereas social justice addresses the underlying causes. She asked the ILA, the Interfaith Leadership Alliance of Santa Fe, to stop just focusing on charity and also to focus on social justice, on addressing larger causes to suffering. The word tzedakah comes from the root letters of justice – tzedek, tzedek tirdof… justice, justice, you shall pursue (Deut. 16:20). In Jewish thought, tzedakah isn’t a handout, it’s an act that makes the world a just place or, at least, as just as it can be. After all, Deuteronomy (15:11) clearly tells us that “there will always be poor people in the land” and therefore that our obligation is “to be open-handed towards those] who are poor and needy.” In this, Torah seems to accept the injustice of the world. It accepts that there are rich and there are poor, there are those who have opportunity laid out before them and there are those who have doors shut in their face. One could, of course, see that as quite callous, as accepting of suffering, but I believe that’s not the case at all since we are commanded to relieve that suffering. But it does seem to accept that our acts of tzedakah will feel like Sisyphus, rolling the boulder back up the hill once more. We are destined to help one impoverished person, only to have another fall into poverty.
It was only in the 1950s that the term tikkun olam, repair of the world, was extrapolated from the second paragraph of aleinu to lean towards a larger vision of social justice for Judaism. In that paragraph, which ironically we have not until now read regularly in our community, we pray of a time when the world will be brought together, or repaired – l’taken olam b’malchut shaddai – under the presence of God. The theological message of the original text is clear – that by bringing everyone in the world together in the glory of God, the world would become perfected. But, using an interpretive style that is totally synchronous with rabbinic methods of interpretation, this was reinterpreted as the need to repair what certainly seems to be a broken world. God would be found in that repair, instead of being the main focal point of that repair. As liberal Jews gained a stronger voice with the growth of Reform Judaism, this idea of tikkun olam as repair of the world, meaning a vision of social justice, took hold in Jewish communities and is now a fairly well-established, almost assumed mantra. My guess – and it is a guess – is that this happened because as Reform Judaism tended to move away from a specific focus on a Messiah figure and instead started to look at a vision of the Messianic Age and how we might bring it about. Instead of waiting for the Messiah to come – “I believe in the Messiah even if he may tarry” – Reform Judaism really focused on us actively bringing the Messianic Age to us. Then, and only then, would Deuteronomy’s statement that the poor will always exist on the land be replaced with a statement like that from Isaiah that “there will never again be gloom for those who were in distress” (Isaiah 9:1), or like that from Micah (4:4) that every person “will be able to sit under their vine and their fig tree and no-one shall make them afraid.” Because poverty is frightening, injustice is terrifying.
So, perhaps one of the most remarkable transformations of Judaism took place in the last seventy years. Through that transformation, Judaism went from a religion that focused on removing immediate suffering while waiting for God to bring about redemption of all humanity to a religion that focused not just on removing immediate suffering – tzedakah – but also on social justice – tikkun olam – as co-partners with God in the perfection of the world. That change has theology at its core. And that brings us back to our original text – mah adonai elohecha sho’el mei’imach – what does the Eternal your God ask of you? God asks only so much – act in the now, relieve the suffering in front of you. But then God asks us to remove the thickness around our hearts. Perhaps that is the arrogance or the laziness of us waiting for God to fix the world for us. God asks us to stiffen our necks no more. Perhaps that means no longer just looking at the suffering in front of us, but also turning around to see the suffering around us, or the causes of that suffering, and to address that, too. But God only asks so much. We choose – we choose – to do more than what God asks of us. We choose to transcend the Divine command. We choose to exceed God’s expectations. We choose to become co-creators in a world redeemed. God can ask us to engage in tzedakah, in making the world a fair place through immediate acts, but we choose to engage in tikkun olam, in making the world a fair place through social transformation.
Mah adonai sho’el me’imach – what does the Eternal God demand of you? Not enough, and that is why we choose to do more.
May God support us in all the work we do, and support the work we do.
So that there’s no doubt, Moses answers the question very clearly – “just this – to revere the Eternal your God, to walk only in God’s ways, to love God, and to serve the Eternal your God with all your heart and soul.” And in case that seems like he’s saying to just pray and meditate on our connection with God, he clarifies, “which means keeping the Eternal’s commandments and laws.” In order to achieve this, we have to “therefore cut away the thickness around [our] hearts and stiffen [our] necks no more.” And since God “upholds the cause of the orphan and the widow and befriends the stranger, providing them with food and clothing, so too must [we] befriend the stranger.” Finally, Moses adds, “You must revere the Eternal your God – only God shall you worship and only to God shall you hold fast and only by God’s Name shall you swear” (Deut. 10:20).
These things are all one. They are all one and the same answer to one question that was posed. What does God ask of you? The idea of being asked, of having demands, is often uncomfortable to the modern mind. We are free and autonomous individuals, after all. We don’t owe anybody anything, we are not commanded by anyone any more. We choose, we buy in, we select our own lifestyle. Except, as much as that may be the message from our Western culture, it’s profoundly untrue. That message is based, at least in part, to the capitalist message that we are responsible for our own financial success. Implicit in that is the converse that those who have not succeeded have not tried hard enough. Those who spoke to the young adults who were homeless who stayed in our community know without question that that’s palpably false. For many individuals in this world, in this country, in this city, the deck is stacked so heavily against them that no matter how hard they try, they will not be able to succeed financially, they will not have the same opportunities as other people. Sometimes that is because of the colour, or their religion, or their gender, or their sexuality, or their family finances, or many other potential reasons. Here in Deuteronomy, Torah says, “Right now, right now, the reasons aren’t important. What’s important is helping the person in immediate need.”
But is that really all we’re asked to do? Are we not meant to change society? Nowhere in Torah are we commanded to radically alter the globalised marketplace in order to relieve suffering. Nowhere are we told to address the root causes of racism, of sexism, or prejudice. We are told to address the issue in the moment. Imitatio Dei, the imitation of God, is not in radically changing the world, it’s in changing the immediate present, in relieving the suffering that is immediately in front of us. We are commanded to act justly, but nowhere are we commanded to ensure the world is a just place. What we tend to do as Reform Jews is to take that immediate need and apply it further in terms of social justice. We take quotations such as that from Proverbs 31(:9), that says, “Speak up and judge fairly, defends the rights of the poor and needy” and say that to defend their rights we have to change society. But that’s not really what the quotation means – it means to protect the poor and needy in the immediate present. Don’t judge them, just protect them. Even the famous quotation from Isaiah 58 which we read on Yom Kippur deliberately to shock us out of the stupor of religious self-righteousness, adjures us to loosen the chains of injustice, to untie the cord of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and to break every yoke, to share our food with the hungry, to provide the stranger with shelter and to clothe the naked when we see them. When we see them. There’s nothing pre-emptive about this. All these things are responses to the immediate presence of suffering when we see them. A Midrash on the Book of Psalms (on 118:17) says, ‘when you are asked in the world to come “what was your work” and you answer “I fed the hungry,” you will be told, “This is the gate of the Eternal, enter into it, you who have fed the hungry.” What it doesn’t say is “You who changed the structure of society so as to prevent hunger.” It doesn’t say, “You who rallied against the selfish capitalistic society.” The people who are rewarded are those who immediately act when they see suffering. At the central point of Torah, Leviticus 19, the Holiness Code, we learn “lo ta’amod al dam rei’echa” (Lev. 19:16) – “you shall not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.” The blood is right there, begging for a response. Again, this is an immediate response, v’atah yisra’el, now, oh Israel, now you need to respond.
And yet, despite all this, we have a Social Justice Director. Not a Tzedakah Director, but a Social Justice Director. One of my interfaith clergy colleagues this week said that there is a difference between charity and social justice. Charity, she said, addresses the immediate need, whereas social justice addresses the underlying causes. She asked the ILA, the Interfaith Leadership Alliance of Santa Fe, to stop just focusing on charity and also to focus on social justice, on addressing larger causes to suffering. The word tzedakah comes from the root letters of justice – tzedek, tzedek tirdof… justice, justice, you shall pursue (Deut. 16:20). In Jewish thought, tzedakah isn’t a handout, it’s an act that makes the world a just place or, at least, as just as it can be. After all, Deuteronomy (15:11) clearly tells us that “there will always be poor people in the land” and therefore that our obligation is “to be open-handed towards those] who are poor and needy.” In this, Torah seems to accept the injustice of the world. It accepts that there are rich and there are poor, there are those who have opportunity laid out before them and there are those who have doors shut in their face. One could, of course, see that as quite callous, as accepting of suffering, but I believe that’s not the case at all since we are commanded to relieve that suffering. But it does seem to accept that our acts of tzedakah will feel like Sisyphus, rolling the boulder back up the hill once more. We are destined to help one impoverished person, only to have another fall into poverty.
It was only in the 1950s that the term tikkun olam, repair of the world, was extrapolated from the second paragraph of aleinu to lean towards a larger vision of social justice for Judaism. In that paragraph, which ironically we have not until now read regularly in our community, we pray of a time when the world will be brought together, or repaired – l’taken olam b’malchut shaddai – under the presence of God. The theological message of the original text is clear – that by bringing everyone in the world together in the glory of God, the world would become perfected. But, using an interpretive style that is totally synchronous with rabbinic methods of interpretation, this was reinterpreted as the need to repair what certainly seems to be a broken world. God would be found in that repair, instead of being the main focal point of that repair. As liberal Jews gained a stronger voice with the growth of Reform Judaism, this idea of tikkun olam as repair of the world, meaning a vision of social justice, took hold in Jewish communities and is now a fairly well-established, almost assumed mantra. My guess – and it is a guess – is that this happened because as Reform Judaism tended to move away from a specific focus on a Messiah figure and instead started to look at a vision of the Messianic Age and how we might bring it about. Instead of waiting for the Messiah to come – “I believe in the Messiah even if he may tarry” – Reform Judaism really focused on us actively bringing the Messianic Age to us. Then, and only then, would Deuteronomy’s statement that the poor will always exist on the land be replaced with a statement like that from Isaiah that “there will never again be gloom for those who were in distress” (Isaiah 9:1), or like that from Micah (4:4) that every person “will be able to sit under their vine and their fig tree and no-one shall make them afraid.” Because poverty is frightening, injustice is terrifying.
So, perhaps one of the most remarkable transformations of Judaism took place in the last seventy years. Through that transformation, Judaism went from a religion that focused on removing immediate suffering while waiting for God to bring about redemption of all humanity to a religion that focused not just on removing immediate suffering – tzedakah – but also on social justice – tikkun olam – as co-partners with God in the perfection of the world. That change has theology at its core. And that brings us back to our original text – mah adonai elohecha sho’el mei’imach – what does the Eternal your God ask of you? God asks only so much – act in the now, relieve the suffering in front of you. But then God asks us to remove the thickness around our hearts. Perhaps that is the arrogance or the laziness of us waiting for God to fix the world for us. God asks us to stiffen our necks no more. Perhaps that means no longer just looking at the suffering in front of us, but also turning around to see the suffering around us, or the causes of that suffering, and to address that, too. But God only asks so much. We choose – we choose – to do more than what God asks of us. We choose to transcend the Divine command. We choose to exceed God’s expectations. We choose to become co-creators in a world redeemed. God can ask us to engage in tzedakah, in making the world a fair place through immediate acts, but we choose to engage in tikkun olam, in making the world a fair place through social transformation.
Mah adonai sho’el me’imach – what does the Eternal God demand of you? Not enough, and that is why we choose to do more.
May God support us in all the work we do, and support the work we do.
