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Eikev Conditions on the Land 5784

This week’s parashah is Eikev. Moshe is continuing his extended speech to the Israelites people before they enter the promised land without him. Jackson will be speaking tomorrow about what he understands to be the core of Moshe’s message – and it’s a good one, so I hope you’ll come around for it.

In Torah study this week, however, our participants couldn’t help but be troubled by the premise of this Torah portion, which recurs throughout most of the portions in Deuteronomy: that the Israelite people are about to enter and conquer and, as the fifth verse in the Torah portion says, “devour all the nations that Hashem your God delivers to you, showing them no pity.” In this fraught moment, especially in the land of Israel, how do we encounter a text that, as Rabbi Shai Held has put it, seems to call for genocide?

It is an important question, and one that we shouldn’t avoid, especially when some of our fellow Jews clearly believe that the promise of the land gives Jews the right today to attack their fellow inhabitants, even outside the actions of war. Just today, Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported that Ronen Bar, the chief of the Shin Bet Israeli intelligence agency, warned the government that “Jewish terrorism” – his phrase – against Palestinians in the West Bank has become an existential threat to the state.[1]

One might think that we can trace those terroristic impulses to the commands in Deuteronomy to wipe out the other nations. But it is not so simple. If we go back to the Talmud, In Masechet Shabbat, 28a, and to the great medieval legalist Maimonides, in laws of Kings and Wars (5:4), there is a general understanding, spanning more than one thousand years of Jewish history, that the original Canaanite “seven nations” that the Jews were commanded to destroy have already been destroyed:

back in 722 bce when Sennacherib of ancient Assyria conquered the whole eastern Mediterranean, and exiled and displaced the inhabitants of the lands he conquered – including the 10 tribes of the northern kingdom of Israel – what we call, the 10 lost tribes. They didn’t wander off and get lost, but their collective identity what destroyed through the Assyrian policy of displacement and dispersion. Those lost tribes were never recovered, and neither, apparently, were the tribes that Moshe was commanding our ancestors to annihilate – and clearly, our ancestors had not annihilated them since they were only destroyed hundreds of years later by the Assyrians!

But the point of my historical digression is that anyone who claims that driving Palestinians out of the land of Israel or killing unarmed Palestinians is fulfilling a mandate from Deuteronomy is being, frankly, anti-halachic and ahistorical. Palestinians are not considered to be ancient Canaanites. If anything, they are likely also to be descendants of ancient Judaeans.

But, you might say, that doesn’t address the problems of the verses themselves, to which I would say, Torah itself is not a monolith, but often contains its own internal critique. In this case, there are two moments in this very parashah that contain a warning that God’s promise to the Jewish people does not give us carte blanch of how we can behave in the land of Israel.

In Chapter 9, verses 4 and 5, Moshe warns, “when Hashem your God has thrust [the nations] from your path, say not to yourselves, “Hashem has enabled us to possess this land because of our virtues”; it is rather because of the wickedness of those nations that the LORD is dispossessing them before you. (5) It is not because of your virtues and your rectitude that you will be able to possess their country; but it is because of their wickedness that Hashem your God is dispossessing those nations before you, and in order to fulfill the oath that Hashem made to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

The 19^th century Commentator Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin makes the implication explicit, when he writes, “Do not think that even if you sin with idolatry, Hashem will not find another nation better than you.”[2] And Chaim Ibn Attar, the Or HaChaim, writes, “From this we learn that in addition to G’d’s promise to the fathers it is also essential that their descendants be worthy of that promise. Accordingly, Moses told the people that their righteousness was not enough by itself to bring about their conquest of the Holy Land. In fact their righteousness did not even help the oath to Abraham to be fulfilled. The only thing it was good for was to ensure that their conduct was no impediment to the good that G’d had promised being fulfilled now.”

Throughout Torah, we have reminders that the promise of dwelling in the land is conditional on how we behave, and that a people who behave in an unholy way will not continue to be allowed to dwell in the land.

And in fact, rather than suggesting that the promise of the land means we get to behave however we want, there is a suggestion that the inhabitants of the land of Israel will be held to a higher standard than the inhabitants of other lands.

Near the end of the torah portion, in Chapter 11, verses 10-12, Moshe makes an odd theological claim: “the land that you are about to enter and possess is not like the land of Egypt from which you have come. There the grain you sowed had to be watered by your own labors, like a vegetable garden; but the land you are about to cross into and possess, a land of hills and valleys, soaks up its water from the rains of heaven. It is a land which your God יהוה looks after, on which your God יהוה always keeps an eye, from year’s beginning to year’s end.”

This seems to be saying that God takes a greater interest in the weather in the land of Israel than others land, but to what purpose? In Masechet Rosh Hashanah, pages 16 and 17, the sages discuss how God judges the world for rain – and particularly the land of Israel for rain, based on the behavior of the Jews who live there. Collectively, good behavior earns abundant rainfall, bad behavior means the rains will be withheld.

I am not suggesting that I believe in this stark theology of divine reward and punishment. But neither do I believe that our ancestors were fools. Certainly, we know even better than they did that human behavior can and has changed the weather – and who ever heard of a thunderstorm in Eugene in August before? So It is not foolish or superstitious, but perhaps wise to say that a society that cannot behave morally is not going to survive for very long.

What does this mean for us? As American Jews continue to navigate how we best support our Israeli siblings and cousins, we must remember that as far back as the Torah, there are clear conditions on our right to the land. And while we can and should call out the antisemitism of those who would hold Israel and Jews to a double standard, we must uncomfortably acknowledge that Torah does demand that we hold ourselves and our people to a higher standard of behavior than the nations around us. May we be able to see that high standard not as an impediment to thriving in the land, but as the necessary condition for doing so.

[1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-08-22/ty-article/.premium/shin-bet-chief-warns-pm-and-ministers-jewish-terror-is-jeopardizing-israels-existence/00000191-7b9a-de04-af9b-7b9b38070000?gift=bf2c590f0faf4b41b3d37a7d1ef5500f&lts=1724450848598

[2] https://www.sefaria.org/Haamek_Davar_on_Deuteronomy.9.4?lang=bi

Eilu v’eilu (Sept/Oct 2024)

This summer, the TBI Board voted to designate our theme for the year, “אלו ואלו,” “Eilu v’eilu” – “these and these.” This is a reference to the story in Masechet Eruvin 13b in the Talmud, which describes the legendary debates between the schools of the great sages Hillel and Shammai. After three years, those debates culminated in a bat kol, a heavenly voice, declaring, “[Both] these and these are the words of the Living God, though the halacha [Jewish law] is in accordance with the house of Hillel.”

As long as there have been Jews, there have been arguments about how we should practice as Jews. The arguments that Hillel and Shammai had – from how to appropriately observe Shabbat, to what invalidates a marriage – felt no less life or death than the arguments Jews have today about how we relate to Jewish community locally and globally. The story from the Talmud reminds us, emphatically, that there is not one exclusively correct one. At the same time, the story goes on to explain that Jewish law follows the house of Hillel, “because the students of Hillel were kind and gracious. They taught their own ideas as well as the ideas from the students of Shammai – and even taught Beit Shammai’s ideas first.”

The students of Hillel understood that it is not enough to be right. For “the halacha to go accordingly”, one has to be willing to consider and even honor the viewpoints of those with whom one disagrees. As we prepare for a new Jewish year in our community and for what will likely be a contentious election season in our country, I hope we will commit to considering truths not only from those whose opinions we share, but from those whom we find challenging. I hope we will remember that our community is more diverse than we think, even and sometimes especially on questions that feel enormously existential. In the spirit of “Eilu v’eilu,” I’ll be working with a small advisory group to create programming where we can gather to practice machloket [passionate dispute], and build our skills as hanging in with each other through disagreement and discomfort. Respectful conflict iso ne of the great Jewish arts – it’s one we can and should reclaim.

May we do so while remembering, like the students of Hillel, to be kind and gracious with each other.

Losing sight of the pregnancy in abortion debate

The Register-Guard (December 2021)

Two years ago I underwent a harrowing medical condition. For nine months, my body housed a rapidly expanding uterine growth. It drained my energy, created arthritic symptoms in my joints and caused weight gain of almost 40 pounds. I expelled it from my body in a dangerous process involving 17 hours of increasingly intense pain.”¯I required several weeks of recuperation.

I willingly put up with this””twice! I wanted the babies, and I love the children they are becoming. But as abortion is relitigated, and the issue remains framed as “pro-choice” or “pro-life,” I feel perturbed.

We largely don’t talk about pregnancy when we talk about abortion “” about lawmakers decreeing that other people’s bodies must house something that is excruciatingly uncomfortable and potentially mortally dangerous for nearly a year. In our society, this process coincides with lack of support for the well-being of those women’s bodies and insufficient time to recover from the physical exhaustion of pregnancy and birth.

When I recall this exhausting condition, I am pained at the idea that anyone who doesn’t want to be a parent would be forced to endure pregnancy.

I strongly believe in protecting innocent life. While my faith tradition doesn’t teach that human life begins at conception, I can respect that belief. I can even agree that in an ideal world, abortion would never happen outside of medical necessity; people would have the knowledge and resources to prevent unwanted pregnancy and every conception would be wanted.

The Bible demands that we all care for the widow, the orphan, the stranger: the vulnerable who tend to be invisible and neglected. But as a spiritual leader, I am also aware that it is easy “” and even cheap “” to demand that someone else do the caring. The harder and more important spiritual challenge is recognizing the obligations in our own lives to care for the vulnerable.

Rob Schenck, an evangelical minister who spent decades working to ban abortion, wrote a New York Time op-ed in 2019 about his change of heart. He admitted that pro-life work often ends at birth, failing to provide any social or financial support for young mothers and children.

In his words, “I can no longer pretend that telling poor pregnant women they have just one option “” give birth and try your luck raising a child, even though the odds are stacked against you “” is ‘pro-life’ in any meaningful sense.”

Pregnancy is difficult enough when it is wanted, as mine were. In a society that fails to prevent sexual violence or offer even basic sex education, let alone health care, parental leave or other services, it is immoral to require women to just “take responsibility” for an unwanted pregnancy.

Those who refuse to advocate for welfare, guaranteed food, housing, child care and medical care for needy families are guilty of cheap caring when they simultaneously demand that women find room within their very bodies for fetuses they do not want.

It’s easier to demand another person put her own body at risk to nourish a life than it is to accept a personal share of responsibility for all the lives already here.

Her column will resume after she completes a five-month sabbatical in June 2022.