Parshat Yitro

Torah

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The ten expressions. Not the ten commandments. Words… expressions.

We are used to think that in the Revelation at Mount Sinai, God dictated commandments to be fulfilled.

But the Torah speaks of “words”: “And God spoke all these words, saying” (Exod. 20:1). If we still have doubts, some chapters later, in parshat Ki Tissa, the Torah explains that what is written in the Tables of the Covenant are indeed ten expressions [words], but not ten commandments: “And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten words [aseret ha-diberot]” (Exod. 34:28).

Why such a fundamental and important issue is not presented as a commandment, as a mitzvah? Moreover, we generally think of these expressions as commandments.

But they are not. Why so?

Is it possible that “Thou shalt not murder”, “Thou shalt not steal”, “Honour thy father and thy mother”, “Thou shalt not covet…” and all the other sentences are not commandments, indeed?

In this section they are not. Not at the Revelation encounter. Not at the first contact between God and the People.

The commandments related to these themes appear elsewhere in the Torah, but not in the list of the ten fundamental sentences.

A mitzvah, important as it may be, does not generally bring forth responsibility in the person. It is a very strong law. We have to obey it without reasoning. The matter of the mitzvah is important, but it is not the cause for its fulfillment. The mitzvah has a dimension of mechanic response.

The Human Being has free choice, of course. He or she can decide either to obey or not. But not fulfilling a mitzvah is a kind of rebellion or resistance against the Commander. In the mitzvah, in the commandment, there is a relationship of authority: there is One who says what to do and the other who either obeys or rebels.

On the contrary, in the words, in the expressions, in the sentences, there is a dimension of advice, of wish, of invitation. They call the person to put into practice his/her responsibility, reasoning, thought and desire concerning the contents of the sentence.

The ten expressions do not speak of the prohibition of murder or theft. They are rather an invitation to understand deeply in the soul why murdering or stealing is bad. They are an invitation to make of these fundamentals an inseparable part of the soul: so as no person should even think of a declaration like: “Wasn’t it forbidden, I would murder”.

It is about a deeper spiritual layer that demands of us the full commitment and involvement of our soul.

That is why they are called “words of the covenant”: in a covenant there are two parties standing at the same level. As if it were that God said: “You are My partners and I propose you to accept these fundamentals, since it is by them that you will build a sound spirit within a positive person”

The commandments will come, yes. But we should not become obeying machines who fulfill mitzvot for the sake of fulfilling. We should develop into Human Beings who understand the depth and the wisdom of the mitzvoth in the Torah.

Parshat B’shalah

Torah

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After having crossed the Yam Suf safe and sound, the children of Israel bursted into song and praise: “Then sang Moses and the children of Israel this song unto the Lord, and spoke, saying: I will sing unto the Lord, for He is highly exalted; the horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea.” (Ex. 15:1).

The terrible enemy, the Egyptians who sought their ruin, were drowned in the sea and the danger disappeared. The natural response is joy – the euphoria is a perfectly expected reaction.

Nevertheless, there is midrash stating that God does not rejoice in the death of the wicked ones: “Rabbi Yohanan says: Why is it written ‘ and the one came not near the other all the night’ (Ex. 14:20)? The angels wanted to sing a song of praise and God said to them: ‘My creatures are drowning and you want to sing?'” (TB Meguillah 10b and TB Sanhedrin 9b).

There is hence another stance on the same incident in the Yam Suf, on the very defeat of the cruel and merciless enemy. This stance teaches that even though there is deliverance here, there is loss there. Even though it relieved the persecuted one, the situation is far from being perfect. The joy and happiness cannot be the only manifestation when there is loss in lives, albeit this loss is unavoidable when there is no other way to stop the evil.

Rabbi Yohanan’s opinion expresses a deep spiritual understanding that the respect of God’s creatures is a fundamental principle in the Torah. It follows the call in Proverbs (24:17): “Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thy heart be glad when he stumbleth“.

The joy after salvation is natural, but we must learn to regulate it when the death appears as the cause of this salvation. We are happy and joyful because of the deliverance, but we are not happy on the death of other human beings.

It is better if the situation was different, if there were no cruel people who wish to humiliate, annul and even annihilate others. It would be better if evil was nonexistent and if every person knew how to respect the lives of the others. But the naiveté of this ideal is not a reason for celebrating the death of the enemy.

The joy is for the salvation and not for the death.

We have learned this is a spiritual lesson in the course of many generations. The Song of the Sea still expresses the primordial human reaction: an exultant joy on the death of the enemy and the end of his threat of killing us. Nevertheless the Torah demands us to transcend the animal level. And we arrived to understand that we must rejoice life and not celebrate death. There may not be another way to get rid of a persistently cruel power but to destroy the source of evil, notwithstanding this is not a reason to rejoice, but to increase the motivation for transforming the human destructive nature into a constructive and positive power.

This understanding finds a strong expression in Purim. The festival does not fall on the date when we were forced to kill in order to defend ourselves. We do not celebrate the bloodshed and the death of our enemies. On that day we fast – it is a time for the accounting of the soul. We rejoice in the deliverance and we celebrate it the morrow of the battle, because we are happy for having been saved, but not because our enemies were killed.

There is a tension between the drive to rejoice when our enemy falls and the respect of life the Torah demands of us. We have to live and to cope with this tension so as to elevate our souls to the level sanctity and to induce ourselves and our fellow persons to build a humankind worthy of sharing God’s likeness.

Parshat Va-Era

Torah

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If God is omniscient, how does it come that the Human Being has free will?

This question stands before us in the first quarter of Parshat Va-Era and will go with us all along the next parshiot, until the crossing of the Yam Suf. God said to Moshe: “And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply My signs and My wonders in the land of Egypt. Pharaoh will not hearken unto you, and I will lay My hand upon Egypt” (Ex. 7:3-4). Pharaoh has apparently no possibility of accepting Moshe’s request. Even if he would have wanted to do that, God’s would harden his heart. Where is there the justice, here? God not only requires something the person cannot possibly accomplish, but He punishes him because of the stubbornness God Himself causes!

The interpreters dealt extensively with this problem. There are some who say that Pharaoh would have had to resist God’s decree, since the Human Being has the power of changing a little what is innate (Ibn Ezra, commenting on Deut. 5:26). Others consider there is no strict fate here, but a plain prophecy, as if saying: “You shall see, this is exactly what he is going to do, I know him”. (Pesika Zutarta, Midrash Sekhel Tov). Another group of interpreters think that Pharaoh was being punished because of former sins (Rashi, Rav Hayim Paltiel).

In midrash Shmot Rabbah (13:3) we are told in the name of Shimon ben Lakish: “[God] warns him once, twice, thrice, but if he does not reconsider his deeds, God closes the gates of repentance”. Resh Lakish teaches us here that the person has many opportunities to do well and to chose a positive way, one of construction and of respect of his/her fellowmen. The person has many opportunities to amend his/her mistakes and to change the destructive choices he or she has made by good and constructive choices. It is the personal experience of Resh Lakish, who demonstrates, not only by means of theory, but by concrete facts, that one may transform a life of destruction into one of building. He did it himself. He does not speak from the arrogant heights of a preacher moralizing according to a perfect theory, but from the practical experience that illuminates the abstract idea.

However, when the person stubbornly remains in a closed position that does not respect the others, a position of powerful egocentrism; he or she loses the capacity of change. At a certain point the decline is inevitable and unstoppable. The strongest of the wills shall not succeed in modifying the trend of destruction and loss – of self destruction and loss.

This is what happened to Pharaoh. His bullheadedness, his obduracy, led him to lose the capacity of overcoming and managing his destructive tendencies. He turned into an automaton and conducting himself and his followers into a catastrophe.

 

Parshat Vaiyehi

Torah

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Yaakov is approaching his last days. He asked Yosef to bring his two children, Menashe and Efraim, so he could bless them.

Yaakov is old. He does not see well any more.

Yosef places Menashe at his father’s right side, while Efraim stays at the left side. Yaakov, however, puts his right hand on the head on the second son, Efraim. On the firstborn’s head, on Menashe, he puts his left hand.

Yosef tries to correct the situation. His father does not see well; maybe he didn’t realize, or he got confused. Perhaps he has mistaken Efraim by Menashe.

But Yaakov answers: “I know, my son. I know”.

He’s well aware of what he does. He is not confused, he is not mistaken. He sees something that Yosef cannot see.

He feels in Efraim something that goes beyond the perception of physical senses. Yaakov is open to understand something that is not within the boundaries of the consensus, that is not the acceptable thing “because this is the way it always was, because this is what has to be and will be”.

He has always dared try what had never been tried before. He has always had the courage to break the mould because he understood that the person is not fixed according to a rigid pattern. The Human Being builds himself and changes. There are basic conditions, he or she have limitations, indeed. But the person is not fixed.  With the basic conditions and the space enabled by the limitations, the Human Being changes, renews himself, surprises.

Yaakov does not want to establish the foundation as structure. In other words, he does not want that the primary conditions (or the known conditions established by a preconception) set one only development option for the person, be it the physical or the spiritual development.  That’s why Efraim is not the second, even though he was originally the second. And Menashe is not the first only because at the base he was the first. They developed differently and Yaakov understood that. He expressed this understanding in the way he chose to bless his grandchildren. Grandchildren that he declared his own children, since the original evidence of being Yosef’s children does not prevent them to develop into Yaakov’s spiritual sons.

We, his descendants, we are called to open our spiritual eyes as he did, to see what is unexpected in the Human Being, what is not fixed in the Human Being, what is not defined.

We are called not to surrender to a simple and automatic repetition, but to dare find the person veiled by the masks of predefinitions.

Parshat Miketz

Torah

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Shimon was not being heard.

Yosef, the great Egyptian vizier, forces his brothers to leave one of them as hostage, and he chooses Shimon. There is apparently no complaint, or resistance, or plea neither from the brothers, nor from Shimon himself.

Thirteen years earlier, when the brothers caught Joseph and threw him into the well, we did not hear any complaint or cry, neither. Joseph also was silent.

Was he?

In our parashah we finally discover that he did cry, he did ask for his brother’s compassion… but they did not hear: “We are being punished because of our brother. We saw his distress when he pleaded with us, but we would not listen” (Gen. 42:21). Why the Torah did not tell us at that point, in parshat Vayeshev, that Yosef spoke up and pleaded? Maybe it is so to let us feel that lack of listening from his brother’s side. Yosef cries and, like his brothers, we do not listen. The Torah teaches us by means of a hard example, together with a tangible experience.

Maybe Shimon also cries and claims, but they are not ready to hear.

The difficulty to listen, the difficulty to accept the voice of the other, is a central issue in Yaakov’s children relationship.

Now they talk in front of Yosef; they speak of their younger brother’s cry while being thrown into the well – a cry that they were not willing to listen to. They speak, but they still ignore the presence of their fellow person. Yosef listens, understands, but they do not take him in consideration. They assume he does not understand; and if he does not understand, he is not significant. Let’s talk in his presence without taking him into account.

Yosef, on the contrary, is open to listen to his fellow distress. He listens to the other and is open to hear and to understand. That is why he has the ability of interpret dreams, which are the hidden language of God and of the soul.

The brothers are too busy with themselves to grant the fellow person the status of existent: Yosef is there, but they do not recognize him; Shimon is there, but they do not hear him. Yaakov cries: “You have bereaved me of my children: Yosef is no more, Shimon is no more, and now you would take Binyamin!” (Gen. 42:6), but his children are not able to understand his clamor. Reuven even offers him to magnify the loss: “Kill my two sons, instead“… these are Yaakov’s grandchildren! Instead of three, Reuven suggests losing five of the family!

Yosef’s “exercise” is intended to cause them feel directly what it is not to be heard. They tell him who they are what their intentions are, but he makes like he does not listen and considers them to be spies: “Your servants have never been spies… We are twelve brothers, the sons of one man” (Gen. 42:11-13). But all explanation was useless: “It is as I said to you. You are spies” (idem 14). They feel the hopelessness of that who says and is not listened to.

The long and painful experience that Joseph makes them go through, produces a change in their souls and they are now ready to understand what they did not understood previously. They begin hearing one another, they quit each one’s bubble of isolation and become able recognize and accept the existence of their fellow person

This evolution in their souls is the founding point of the development of the People of Israel, a people ready to accept the Torah, to listen to God’s voice, to elevate the existence of other persons to the level of vital respect, and to persist in reading, listening and understanding every evening and every morning.

Parshat Vayeshev

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We usually consider little actions to be of little importance. Even things we utter by the way, we do not think of them as having any big consequences. It is as if crucial outgrowths could only come from important and programmed deeds. Moreover, drastic changes in history come only from famous people, who are experienced and well known in the field which is being transformed. At least, this is the widespread opinion.

Our parashah shows us a different reality, a more frequent one that happens every day, a reality more like ours. We may think it is a fortuitous reality. But it is not.

Yaakov had sent Yosef to search for his brothers, who went to pasture their father’s flock at Shechem. Yosef did not find them. He wandered seeking them, but it was of no avail.

Up till now, this is a simple story of something that could also happen to us. We set an appointment at a certain place but we cannot find each other. What do we do? We wait, we search, and after a while we decide to go back. We couldn’t meet this time, so we’ll do it later on.

But in the parashah Yosef finds a man, an anonymous man, whose task is to ask him “what are you looking for?” meaning “have you lost something? Have you get lost? May I help you?” A simply deed of everyday life. A generous one, but simple all the same. Something done by an unknown person. A deed that is not intended to cause any significant revolution. “They went to Dothan”, this is all the contribution of this anonymous man.

Is it?

Wasn’t this man interested in Yosef and hadn’t he offered him this simple information, Yosef would neither have been sold, nor would he have arrived to Egypt, nor would he have become Vizier. He would not have brought his father and siblings into Egypt and would not have become slaves in a strange land. We would have then never been liberated, would not have received the Torah at Mount Sinai, we would have never entered the Promised Land and the slavery we suffered would have never become the example and the basis for foundational mitzvoth of the Jewish civilization such as Shabbath, loving the stranger, respecting the rights of the slaves and paying them a compensation for slavery time, judicial justice, justice for the vulnerable, social justice and support for the needy.

It was only because one little thing by an anonymous man that our history developed as it developed.

God had said to Abraham that his descendants would be enslaved in a strange land and that He would redeem them. But He did not state neither the place, nor the time, nor how things would develop. He did not even say who exactly would be those involved and how they may respond to the developments. All this was in man’s hand.

And that anonymous man, with his so little deed, changed our whole history.

We all are that anonymous man. We should never belittle the importance of what each one of us may do. We should neither forget the power of our words – power either to build or to destroy.

Parshat Va-Yishlah

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“We came to your brother Esau; he himself is coming to meet you, and there are four hundred men with him.” (Gen. 32:7 (6))

What did Yaakov’s messengers really mean? A well-known explanation says that Esav was coming to fight him: “We came to your brother, but he behaves towards you like Esav, the one who hates you” (Bereshit Rabba, Pseudo Jonathan, Rashi, Radak). Others consider they reported only plain facts: “he comes to see you the same as you come to see him” (Ibn Ezra, Nahmanides). Other commentators see here the happiness of the reunion: “Esav comes with a large retinue to welcome his brother joyfully and cheerily” (Rashbam, Hizkuni).

So, how should we deliver a piece of information? How should we tell somebody, somebody else’s message?

Even though there is not an exclusive way or technique to do that, three basic qualities are to be met by a messenger: objective approach, empathy and control of emotional sensitivity.

Objective approach: to rely on facts, without adding or omitting elements.

Empathy: to try and understand what the receiver of the news feels (not “how”, but “what” he/she feels), without being emotionally involved. Emotional engagement may lead us to not to understand other person’s feelings, but to be engrossed in our own feelings and to react according to the latter.

Control of emotional sensitivity: to understand the emotional process we go through, so as to prevent these feelings from interfering.  Our feelings may lead us to detachment and coldness (out of distress to deal with the facts), or to overexcitement, or even to decide not to deliver information that is hard for us to grasp (assuming it will be hard for the receiver to hear). In other words, our feelings thwart our real understanding of the fellow person, they dazzle the soul and may lead us to act in a paternalistic way (“my feelings know better what is good for him or her”). At any rate, we should not annul or neutralize the feelings – the real challenge is to control them.

These three qualities must be present together. Relying on only one of them may cause us to deliver a wrong message, an inappropriate one, which consequences may be disastrous… even having the best of the intentions… like Yaakov’s messengers.

They failed to apply two out of the three qualities. They were very objective in their report, but they were neither empathetic, nor did they measured their own feelings. They described the facts without taking on account Yaakov’s situation, his problematic relationship with Esav, his fears, or even the threat of death because of which he fled the land he’s now returning to. Maybe they felt it was better for Yaakov not to return. Maybe they were full of anger against Esav. It is possible that they preferred not to influence Yaakov in any way, so they took the objective approach. At any rate, they did not measure the emotional sensitivity required by the situation.

The messengers transmitted only facts, without any context. Over-objectivity, that was not objective at all, since the context was lacking. And the context is a built-in part of reality.

In this way, they let Yaakov’s fear and anxiety tint the information with tonalities of loss and destruction. His apprehension coming from the past conquered him and prevented him to properly judge the now different current reality.

It is not easy to put in practice the three basic qualities of transmitting a message. Especially hard are empathy and control of emotional sensitivity. But to ignore them is tantamount to disembarrass oneself of the great responsibility of being a messenger of truth.

The Sanctuary, God and us

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When Moses tells the people of Israel the commandments of God regarding the building of the Tabernacle, what to do and how to do it, the Torah repeats the same data already detailed ten chapters earlier. The parasha Vayaqhel seems to copy in a kind of routine the contents of the parasha Terumah.

There is a little omission, though; there is a short sentence that Moses did not tell:

“V’asu li mikdash v’shakhanti b’tokham”, “They will build Me a sanctuary and I will dwell among them” (Exo. 25:8).

How is it possible that Moses failed to remember such an important thing, the reason and the goal of the whole act of building?

Maybe he did not forget.

Maybe Moses gave us the interpretation of what this building had to be.

Let’s see – God said to Moses, even before telling him the list of tasks for the construction, “they will build Me a sanctuary and I will dwell among them”. Moses told the people, even before transmitting God’s orders regarding this building, “work shall be done for six days, but on the seventh day there shall be something sacred for you [yihyie lakhem kodesh]” (Exo. 35:2)

Moses did not say that the seventh day shall be holy, but rather that ON the seventh day (“UVAyom hash’vyi’yi”) there shall be something holy, something sacred for you (“yihyie lakhem kodesh”)

This is the sanctuary, the Mikdash (Kodesh and Mikdash come from the very same Hebrew root) that is to be built, for God to dwell among us. This is the true mobile Temple, the true holy place. It is not a physical place, but a kind of island into the time: it is the Shabbat. It is an island into the time that we have to build with our soul, putting the week between brackets; this week full of rush, troubles and desires. In doing so we give birth to a new dimension that reveals its sacred nature.

Moses teaches us that God’s commandment “they will build Me a sanctuary” really means “on the seventh day there shall be something sacred for you”, something sacred that we have to create, to build, so as to let God dwell among us: “and I will dwell among them”.

Let’s be good builders of the sacred.

Parshat Va-yetze

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Yaakov is a very complex character that presents dilemmas and experiences that are very close to our own life. His way to respond to the challenges compels us to reflect upon our stances, our beliefs, our principles. How would we react if we were in his place? What does he teach us, his descendents, by his behaving?

A very common situation in our daily life is the doubt that affects our confidence in the Almighty. We use to think that this is a direct consequence of modern times, of an era of spiritual skepticism derived from the scientific attitude in modern society.

But in our parasha we discover that this phenomenon existed always. One of the expressions of this doubt regarding the confidence is the lie that both Abraham and Yitzhak told regarding their wives. They lied out of fear that the local dwellers kill them in spite of God’s promise!

Yaakov, for his part, he establishes conditions to accept the Almighty ad his God! The Torah says: “Jacob made then a vow, saying, “If God will be with me, if He protects me on this journey that I am making, and gives me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and if I return safe to my father’s house, then the Lord shall be my God” (Gen. 28:20-21).

Many commentators try to understand that Yaakov did not really establish conditions for his belief. Some consider that he was afraid of losing God’s protection because of his possible future sins (Radak and Hizkuni, among others). Other commentators say that Yaakov was actually swearing that after having enjoyed of the Almighty’s protection, he will worship God in that very place (Ramban, Rabenu Bahya ben Asher, Rav Hayim Paltiel, Rosh, Keli Yakar)

But the simple reading of these verses put forward the doubt, the dilemma, the lack of confidence of Yaakov. He does not know for sure whether God’s promise will indeed become true. He is only beginning his spiritual journey. His belief comes from his parents and his grand-parents, but he has not yet developed his own in his soul.  Up till now his life experience may have taught him the incertitude of the confidence: his father prefers his brother and he himself receives a blessing by deceiving; but the blessing is intended for somebody called Esav. His mother assured him that if anything goes wrong with the deception, she will carry the consequences instead of him (“Upon me be your curse, my son“); but now it is Yaakov who must run away and his mother does not defend him.

This doubt is not only his, although. It is also ours. We find ourselves all the time in the twilight zone of our confidence in God’s promise to the Jewish People. We believe, yet we ask questions. We are confident and skeptic at the same time. Sometimes we feel that we can rely on nobody, but God. And some other times we feel that we can rely on nobody, period.

Our spiritual growth and our dialogue with God are not constructed without doubts. They are forged by struggling deeply with spiritual doubts and by building again and again our confidence and our belief in God. Yaakov’s spiritual development is the symbol of this struggle, of this going from the doubt towards the deep understanding of the relationship between God and Israel His People. Yaakov learnt in his childhood how difficult it is to trust, but in time he understood that even if “my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up” (Psalms 27:10). In that moment, he became Israel and ceased being only Yaakov. Yaakov establishes conditions, while Israel is grateful to God. Yaakov runs away, while Israel comes back. Yaakov is plenty of doubts, while Israel seeks to trust. Yaakov looks for one only answer to his needs, while Israel knows that life is too complex and there is not only one solution to the challenges we face. As it is written: “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for You are with me” (Psalms23,4)

Parshat Toledot

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One of the challenges that parshat Toledot forces us to face is whether we develop independence or dependency in the parent-children relationship.

The Torah opens by: “these are the generations of Yitzhak” [v’ele toledot Yitzhak], yet it does not go on with the latter’s children (like in other instances in the Torah) but with the generations of Abraham: “Abraham begat Yitzhak”. A known midrash tells us that God formed Yitzhak’s face similar to Abraham’s, for everybody to know that it was he who fathered Yitzhak (see Midrash Agadah, Bereshit 25:19 and also Rashi). Maybe our Sages felt how difficult it was for Yitzhak to get free from his father’s influence. We find indeed in our parashah, Yitzhak mirroring many times Abraham’s behavior. But his results weren’t as successful. Imitating the success of the previous generation is not a way of gaining accomplishment.

Yitzhak’s dependency on his father, or Abraham’s difficulty in letting the son of his old age go and develop himself, all made it hard for Yitzhak to walk independently. Who knows? Maybe the story of the Binding of Yitzhak, the Akeda, symbolizes the sacrifice of the dependent child on the altar of a parent who cannot release him … and yet God says to him: “Let him go!”

A lesson for all the generations.

We meet then the two siblings: Esav and Yaakov, who struggle with the imprint cast by their parents – the names, that fix behavior; the preference, that fixes behavior. The names: Esav, a man of doing (esav-aso = alef-samekh-vav = to do), a man of handwork. A practical person without any thought, reflection or cogitation, without any ability to evaluate. He’s a man of here and now – either he does, or he dies. And Yaakov, a person who arrives at his goal by indirect ways – he tracks [okev], he bypasses [okef] , he follows [meaqev], he hampers [meakev]. They both mirror what their parents established for them. And everybody, parents and children alike, enter into a series of actions/mistakes that only perpetuates the difficulty of recognizing the value and the dissimilarity of each one of them, as well as the value of being dissimilar.

Another lesson for all the generations.

It will take two parshiot, 21 years, and a lot of suffering from both sides (mainly from Yaakov), until both brothers would be able to be free from repeating the model established by their parents… and to meet… and to recognize each other… but the wounds and the scars will remain.

Everyone meant well and thought of the wellbeing of their children. But they not always regarded their children. In fact, they saw in their children their own reflection, forgetting that “toledot”, generations, speaks of “going forth” and not “going back”. It speaks of “we give, we guide, we show, we teach… and you must go on without imitating”.