Israel is not Made in Germany (Derashah Naso 5769)

These words from this past Thursday are now famous:

[T]he aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied. Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.

I appreciate President Obama’s earlier re-statement of the ‘unbreakable’ bond between the US and Israel, but I must protest this re-writing of the birth of the modern state of Israel.

Israel was not built in Roman brutality. Israel was not manufactured by Muslim massacres at Khaibar and along the Mediterranean. Israel was not created by Christian Crusades or European expulsions or the Catholic Inquisition or the pogroms of the Cossacks, and Israel certainly was not made in Germany.

Israel was made in Israel, thousands of years ago. We have more than our own Torah as evidence; we have the testimony of pottery shards and the Mesha stele and the historical memory of numerous races.

Israel is not a product of our enemies’ venomous anti-Semitism, but a product of our proud Torah and our proud ancestry.


Of course, President Obama’s speechwriters were not the first to view Israel, primarily, as a haven from our enemies.

Moses Hess wrote in 1862, [T]he Jews in exile, at least the majority of them, cannot devote themselves successfully to productive labor: in the first place, because they lack the most necessary condition - an ancestral soil; and, secondly, because they cannot assimilate with the peoples among whom they live without being untrue to their national religion and tradition. The irony, of course, is that Hess fulfilled his own dire prediction by marrying a Catholic woman.

Leo Pinsker wrote, twenty years later, We need nothing but a large piece of land for our poor brothers, a piece of land which shall remain our property, from which no foreign master can expel us. This was the idea behind the Uganda movement, which sought to acquire territory in East Africa for a Jewish land at a time when a return to Israel seemed unlikely.

Certainly, this approach of “Israel as Safe Haven” has an internal logic as well as a legitimate pedigree in modern Jewish and world history – but serious weaknesses undermine its meaning and application today.


First, what are we to make of a Jewish nation which so values its own survival that it will ride roughshod over the survival of other human beings in order to achieve it? If we desire Israel for the sake of our own security, do we not have a responsibility to help Palestinian Arabs find their security? Indeed, that was part of the president’s point of moral equivalence.

Second, in an age when millions of Jews feel comfortable and secure living outside of Israel, do we have the right to demand a homeland for our safety? Even if the world is not entirely safe for the Jew, we don’t see the Jews of North America or Australia expressing concern for their future!

And third, and most crucial for me today: Israel in the Torah was never meant to be a function of our enemies’ hatred; rather, Israel is supposed to be a positive expression of Judaism. It is the place where, as recorded in the Torah, our ancestors walked. It is the place where, according to the gemara, we can achieve purification from our sins. It is the place where, as Ramban noted, our mitzvot are real. It is the place where, as Rav Kook wrote, the Jewish heart can connect to Gd.


Indeed, in our own parshah, this is what the Nazir fails to understand regarding the Torah itself.

The nazir vows to abstain - for a period of time or indefinitely – from drinking intoxicating beverages, from contact with impurity, and from cutting his hair. These abstentions guarantee one thing: The Nazir will withdraw from society. He will drink with no one, he will mix with no one lest they contaminate him, he will grow his hair until it is long and tangled and dirty; he will become a hermit.

The gemara paints nezirut as a safety option taken by a Jew who feels that he is out of control, threatened by his own desires, but the gemara goes on to argue that this is not the purpose of Judaism and its Torah. The Torah labels nezirut a חטא, a sin; the Torah and its mitzvot are not about escaping this world for a spiritual place of our own, they are about developing and growing into model human beings.

And the same is true for Israel. Our homeland is not a mousehole to which the Jew can run and hide from the big bad Nazi. Israel is a place for the Jew to be a Jew.


But there’s a catch. If we really disagree with the President and believe what I just said, if we really believe that Israel is not only about safety but rather about creating a place where a Jew can live and develop as a Jew, if we buy the arguments of Tanach and the gemara and the Kuzari and so on, then we should all be rushing to live there, now.

Were Israel only a mousehole for protection, we could stay out of the mousehole until the cat came along. But if Israel is truly a religious imperative, then why aren’t we there, now? I don’t speak of those who have medical or financial or family reasons and the like for remaining in galut, but for the rest of us, is there any question as to where we belong?

The president’s speech should not be a simple opportunity for politicking; rather, it should be a challenge to us, all of us, a chance for us to think. If we don’t accept his narrative, if we do not view Israel as the nazir views Judaism, as an escape hatch, then let us ask ourselves what narrative we do accept, and put it into practice.

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Notes:
1. Before you ask, "What about you, Torczyner?" know that I am in one of the categories mentioned above.

2. You can find the president's remarks here. Pinsker (Auto-Emancipation) and Hess (Rome and Jerusalem) are excerpted in Herzberg's excellent The Zionist Idea.

3. Re: Nazir - I presented the midrashic rationale for nazir, but I wonder about another type of nazir, someone who chooses nezirut as a way to fuel passion and direct intensity, as might arguably be observed in Shimshon, Shemuel and Avshalom.

Daf: Sotah 15-19

Slowly, slowly, I'm getting to post some of my Sotah notes. Of course, there's a lot to say on 20-21, so that will take more time... As always, please read this with a gemara in front of you to get the full effect.

15a
The gemara indicates what I believe to be the technically correct view, that the Nazir’s חטאת “sin-offering” is not for sin, but is simply brought in the same manner as a regular “sin-offering” and so shares the name. (Ditto for the חטאת יולדת, all homiletics to the contrary.) Tosafot סבר expands upon this major issue of whether a Nazir is considered a “sinner” for having vowed to refrain from wine or not. See also Tosafot to Nazir 2b ואמאי.

15b
See Rashi אלא היא, who defines monogamous sexuality as a special human trait.

The word ונוטל in the mishnah should lose its initial ו.

16a
See Tosafot לרבות – this is very important, I think, as he views Rashi’s selection of a Sifri edition over a Talmudic edition as שיבוש הגירסא, corruption of the manuscript.

At the end of Rashi והלכה בכל דבר we find the interesting proposal of a הלכה למשה מסיני for which there is a pasuk – but the pasuk is considered only an אסמכתא support for it.

In that same Rashi, Rashi’s explanation of “uprooting” vs “adding” appears difficult to justify in the context of the כיסוי הדם and גט cases.

See Tosafot תנא ושייר on the significance of apparently exclusive numbers (“3 things are…”, or “These are the three areas…”) when we are presented with a list of cases).

Toward the end of the page, the term דרבנן is used interestingly, apparently to refer to an idea which is biblical, but is not explicit in the biblical text. We find a similar use in the imperative of rebuking a person who violates a biblical law – we include only biblical laws which are explicit in the biblical text.

16b
Our gemara here (regarding the דם of a certain bird) offers an example of experimentation by the sages to determine physical reality.

18a
See the last Rashi on the page, on the source for גלגול שבועה.

18b
See Rashi’s very interesting explanation of the word מערערין towards the bottom of the page.

19a
See Rashi on דדריה, on the proper respect to show to one’s elder. This matches Tosafot’s comment on Bava Batra 113a that Ben Azzai would never have called Rabbi Akiva "הקרח הזה” “this bald one.”

19b
See Tosafot ורבי יהודה explaining why we don’t use the “scarf method” for her.

Toward the bottom of the page we use the term בריותא and it is sometimes rendered as “health” (vs. רתיתא which refers to weakness), but that is problematic and unlikely, both in terms of spelling and in terms of the leading word מחמת. It seems to me that the word here actually is from ברי, meaning “strong” as in ברי ושמא.

Derashah: Naso - Narcissus and the Nazir

Note: This week we are celebrating Graduation Shabbat.

The Greeks told the story of a young man named Narcissus, who was remarkably handsome - so handsome that even one of the gods, Echo, fell in love with him. One day Narcissus was admiring his own reflection in a pond, and he declared to himself, “I love you.” Echo saw him, and repeated, “I love you.” Narcissus thought his reflection had spoken, and he continued to gaze at himself in the water until he died.

In contrast, our sages also reported a story about a young man staring at himself in water, but with a very different ending:
A young man of beautiful eyes, a handsome appearance and long, braided hair came to the sage Shimon haTzaddik and told him that he had just completed a term as a Nazir, and was now going to shave off all of the hair on his head, following the laws of nezirut outlined in our parshah.
Shimon haTzaddik asked him, “What made you decide to take this vow and destroy this beautiful hair?”
The anonymous young man replied, “I worked for my father as a shepherd, and I went to draw water from a spring. I began to gaze at my [beautiful] reflection, and my evil inclination asserted itself and urged me to abandon the laws of the Torah. I rebuked myself, saying, ‘Empty one, you arrogantly claim the pleasures of this world, which is not yours - you will end up rotting in the grave! Instead, I will shave off all of your hair for the sake of heaven!’” And so he became a Nazir, and earned the praise of Shimon haTzaddik.


Narcissus and the Nazir, two stories with very different endings. This story of a Nazir portrays him as a spiritual superhero, an UberJew wresting control of himself, burying his earthly urges in pursuit of a higher righteousness.

But the gemara didn’t admire the Nazir, in general. Instead, the gemara noted that a Nazir brings a חטאת, a sin-offering, upon completing his nezirut - and the sage R’ Elazar haKappar explained that the Nazir sinned in swearing off wine, denying himself a permitted pleasure!

Indeed, the gemara and its commentaries come down heavily on the side of R’ Elazar haKappar. Even though, from a technical perspective, the Nazir’s offering is not really atonement for sin, numerous commentators echo the words of R’ Elazar haKappar, writing that a Jew is not supposed to add chumrot/stringencies indiscriminately, that mitzvot are not intended to cause deprivation!


The answer, it seems to me, is to distinguish between two types of deprivation: There is suffered pain, and there is chosen sacrifice.

Much pain is simply an experience of suffering. There is neither clear meaning nor explicit higher purpose; it is an experience of bereavement, of loss, of paying a high price without goods to show for it. Pain is a hurricane, an earthquake, a tsunami, a buffeting by great and impersonal and devastating forces. There is no nobility in suffering pain.

Sacrifice, on the other hand, is part of a goal-oriented, constructive, act of human self-engineering. Sacrifice is a statement of our capacity to stimulate and direct our own growth, to paint a picture of the person we wish to become and then to chart a path toward that goal. There is a meaning, a plan, a purpose.

This is our anonymous Nazir’s initiative, the anti-Narcissus, forsaking an obsession with personal beauty and thereby fortifying his own righteousness. He knew the person he wished to become, and single-handedly transformed himself into that person.


Shimshon, the most famous Nazir, did the same: HaShem told Hatzlelponit that she was going to have a son, and that her son should become a Nazir. As we said a few weeks ago, Shimshon needed to develop self-control, so that he might lead the Jewish people - and so he was taught to sacrifice, abandoning pleasure for the sake of discipline.

There is little dignity in suffering unbidden pain, but there is awesome nobility in choosing to sacrifice, to build.

But construction requires a plan, schematics, architectural design; sacrifice is not a carte blanche ideal, in which we abandon randomly selected pleasures in order to emerge as better people on the other side. The Torah condemns the practice of freely taking vows; this self-engineering requires careful consideration.

To do this properly requires cheshbon hanefesh, self-accounting, in which we analyze our lives and find our weaknesses, and determine what will lead us in a better direction.

Again, our Nazir is a perfect example; according to the gemara, the Nazir decides that wine has led him to immorality, and so he shuns wine. He determines that he is too caught up in his own beauty, and so he temporarily ruins that beauty.

In our own day, Sacrifice might be a person identifying a weakness for lashon hara, harmful speech, and deciding to abandon all speech for a day, or a period of days, to get himself under control.

In our own day, Sacrifice might be a frugal person recognizing his unwillingness to give, and contributing extra cash to tzedakah in order to defy his wallet-tightening impulses.

Sacrifice is not impulsive; it is calculated, rational, dedicated to developing a better self. We strip away some diseased or destructive or dysfunctional part of our lives in order to build up what remains.


In Graduation Weeks past, I’ve spoken about Vision, Gratitude, Growth, Relationships, about daring to be different, about trusting Gd. All of these are good themes to think about, when leaving one lifestage and embarking upon another.

Sacrifice, too, is a critical theme - a critical skill, really - as you enter high school or college or yeshiva in Israel or graduate school or (shudder!) a world beyond grades and papers and classroom instruction. With each new phase of life we need to declare a Vision, to evaluate our selves, our talents, our accomplishments and our weaknesses, and then have the strength to tear down that which needs tearing down in order to bolster ourselves for the challenges ahead.

Mazal Tov on your Graduation, and may you, like the Nazir rather than Narcissus, have the greatest success in tearing down that which needs tearing down and building up that which needs building up, and so go מחיל אל חיל, from strength to strength to strength.


You know, one of the main reasons people don’t work on themselves is that it’s very easy to decide that the rest of the world is wrong, and we’re perfect:

They tell the story of a Swiss man who was in London and needed directions, so he stopped two kids and asked them, “Koennen sie Deutsch sprechen?” The kids just stared at him.
He tried again, “Excusez-moi, parlez vous Francais?” Again, they just stared.
“Parlare Italiano?” Nothing.
“Hablas Espanol?” No reaction.
Finally, the Swiss man walks away, disgusted.
One of the kids turns to the other and says, “You know, maybe we should learn a foreign language!”
To which the other replies, “Why? That guy knew four languages, and it didn’t do him any good!”

But all kidding aside, we will be much better off when we do look at ourselves, when we do understand and take seriously the importance of self-engineering, and - through learning and sacrifice - grow into our better selves.

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A few notes here:
1. The story of the anonymous Nazir appears on Nazir 4b. One gemara that states the Nazir's sin offering is not really for sin - but also cites R' Elazar haKappar's view - is on Sotah 15a. See Tosafot there as well.

2. On the theme of constructive sacrifice, see also the gemara's sentiment, "סתירת זקנים בנין היא," that the construction wrought by youth is often destructive, and the destruction wrought by elders is often constructive.

3. My esteemed Rebbetzin noted the similarity to this derashah, but I still think this one adds something. And besides, what's a little review between friends?

4. For another example of sacrifice, see our rabbinically decreed fast days. There is a biblical source for mourning the destruction of the Beis haMikdash (ציון היא דורש אין לה - מכלל דבעי דרישה), but we have other fasts on the calendar, like the 20th of Sivan, days when we spurn food in the name of donating our food budget to tzedakah and motivating ourselves in repentance.

Derashah: Behar - Iron Man, Shimshon and Us

[This dvar torah doubles as the introduction to our Daf Yomi siyyum on Nazir.]

Iron Man. A Batman sequel. An Incredible Hulk sequel. Hancock. Narnia. Indiana Jones. Is it just me, or has heroic testosterone hijacked Hollywood?

During the past seventy years, American entertainment has actually gone through three periods of focussing on larger-than-life heroes, and, interestingly, each period has come at a time of grave crisis:
• The first was during the 1940’s and World War II;
• The second was during the 1960’s, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War;
• And now we’re in the third, at a time when America’s future, and even its present, seems more fragile than it has in a generation.

The focus on heroics and saviors is understandable: When we feel uncertain, when we sense that our world is dangerously out of control, we seek a hero to save us.


Judaism actually encourages us to feel that the world is out of our control, and to look specifically to a Hero with a capital H - HaShem - to save us. הכל בידי שמים, the Gemara says - all is in the hands of Heaven - and the corollary is that it’s not בידי אדם, not in our hands.

In fact, our parshah reminds us of that message, with the mitzvah of Shemitah. Under the laws of Shemitah, which apply specifically in Israel, we go for a year without planting our fields, and we abandon any wild growth for anyone and everyone to take.

As Rav Shimshon Raphael Hirsch explained it, this Shemitah mitzvah acknowledges our lack of control. He wrote, “In order that Israel’s land, intended for the realization of Israel’s task, should not, through the sin of pride of possession become the cause of Israel’s downfall, Gd ordained shemittah” and other land-oriented mitzvot. We surrender our power and turn to Gd to orchestrate our future.

Taking it a step further, the Torah’s description of Shemitah explicitly demands our surrender, predicting that as the Shemitah year approaches and we contemplate surviving without the produce of our fields, we will ask, “But how are we supposed to survive? הן לא נזרע ולא נאסוף את תבואתנו!” And the Divine Hero replies, “וצויתי את ברכתי לכם, I will provide blessing for you.” That’s it - just rely on the ultimate Hero, HaShem.


But we don’t always look to HaShem to save us.
There is a second half to the Hebrew phrase I quoted before about Divine control. I said הכל בידי שמים, that everything is in the hands of Gd, but the end of that phrase is חוץ מיראת שמים - not everything is in Gd’s Hands, Gd left our awe of Gd, our self-control and self-discipline, our choice to observe mitzvot and live Torah lives, in our own possession. We will never be forced to discipline ourselves, we will never be forced to keep mitzvot. Control of the world may be in Gd’s hands, but control of ourselves is in our own. We are the heroes.

This heroism is not the Hollywood definition, the gamma ray-irradiated, ninja-trained, technologically amped-up muscleman. Instead, it’s the message of Pirkei Avot: איזהו גבור? הכובש את יצרו Who is mighty? One who controls himself. It’s the message of Mishlei: ומושל ברוחו מלוכד עיר, One who controls himself is mightier than the conqueror of a city.

When a Jew realizes that he is out of control - that he’s spiritually erratic, that she’s losing her temper, that he’s making bad decisions, that she’s getting so caught up in various pursuits that she has no time to work on internal growth - then it’s time for the Jew to become a גבור, and to get himself under control.


Perhaps the best example of this comes from the gemara just completed by our Daf Yomi: the gemara of Nazir.

A Nazir vows not to drink wine so that he won’t become intoxicated; not to cut his hair so that he will be repellent to others; and not to become tamei from dead bodies so that he will have to separate from human society.

The Gemara asks, “Why does someone become a Nazir?” And it answers its own question, saying, “He sees the results of sexual immorality, and decides to swear off wine.” The Nazir feels that he is losing control of himself, and decides to become the hero. The Nazir asserts control of his life.


The best example of this is the most famous Nazir in Jewish history: Shimshon.

As Rav Tzaddok haKohen of Lublin explained, Shimshon was destined to be a great Jewish leader, he had the potential to move mountains both physically and spiritually, but his sole weakness was a congenital lack of control. He had a natural wild side. And so HaShem told Shimshon’s mother to raise him as a Nazir, to have him stay away from intoxication, and from society, in order to keep himself under control.

For many years this nezirut worked and Shimshon served as a righteous judge, but ultimately, tragically, the nezirut did not keep Shimshon in line forever. He became involved with Philistine women, went to parties, brawled, and ended up squandering his significant talent.

Shimshon’s life warns us of what happens when we don’t keep close watch on ourselves. We leave the world up to HaShem, as the uber-Hero, but when we see that we are making mistakes, when we realize that we’ve lost focus, it’s time for us to step up and be our own heroes.


We generally don’t take on nezirut today, for the simple reason that without a Beit haMikdash, we cannot bring offerings to end the nezirut period. However, the concept of Nazir is still very relevant.

The Nazir takes control by imposing self-discipline in his eating, in his grooming, and in his assocations. The applications for our own day are obvious. A Jew can impose a limit on his gastric indulgence, can determine to stop dressing to impress, can retreat from society’s constant embrace. Not indefinitely, but for a period of time, in order to take charge of her existence.


To a certain extent, the members of our Daf Yomi have already taken the Nazir step. No, we aren’t teetotaling, long-haired, hermitish Nezirim, but dedicating an hour a day - the same hour every day - is a powerful statement of self-discipline.

I applaud the members of our Daf Yomi for their commitment to this sort of control. They are, in their own right, heroes.

But this is a heroism which anyone can take on. We don’t need gamma rays or a bullwhip; all it takes is the determination to direct our lives in the way we wish to go.

(And here I will do the siyyum on masechet Nazir...)

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Note: For more on Shimshon and his Nezirut as self-control, see R' Yosef Gavriel Bechhofer's Bigdei Shesh to Shoftim 15, elaborating on the writings of the Tzidkat haTzaddik.

Note 2: Of course, the gemara is ambivalent regarding nezirut, despite the fact that HaShem included it as an option in the Torah. It seems to me that this is a matter of "In case of emergency, break glass."