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Dance of the Spirit: The Land of Israel and the Jewish Soul
DOV BERKOVITS
Rabbi Dov Berkovits studied at the University of Chicago. He holds degrees in sociology, philosophy, and Jewish history from Yeshiva University and received rabbinic ordination there. He went to Israel in 1970 and lives today with his family in Shilo. He studied in Israel at Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav and at the Shalom Hartman Institute until becoming chairman of the faculty at the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies, a position he held for fifteen years. In 2001, Rabbi Berkovits founded Bet Av-Center for Creativity and Renewal in Torah. He has published three books, most recently The Temple of Life: Family Relationships and the Sanctity of Life. His teaching has inspired thousands of students from all sectors of Israeli society. Rabbi Berkovits has written widely on Judaism and the arts and on Jewish environmental thought. He writes a weekly column for an Israeli newspaper on the Talmud and issues of contemporary concern.
The Mystery of Makom
I grew up in Boston and in the suburbs of Chicago savoring the sweet tastes of America—the then twenty-eight ice cream flavors of Howard Johnson’s, a baseball doubleheader on Sunday afternoon at Fenway Park, bike rides in the forest preserves outside Chicago, the never-ending horizons of the Great Plains, family trips to Jamestown and Washington, and the dream of a life of freedom and opportunity.
My parents were thrown out of Nazi Germany in late 1938. Thank God. As presiding rabbi of a synagogue in Berlin, where he had obtained rabbinic ordination and a PhD in philosophy, my father spoke of the eternal people of Israel. They would outlast the “2,000-year Reich” that, as he taught, would soon be in the refuse heap of history, just like all the other “empires” that attempted to annihilate the Jews.
He escaped from Nazi Germany with a few suitcases, one of which he used to salvage the writings of his teacher rather than save personal belongings. My parents and brothers survived the German bombing, the “blitzkrieg,” in London. My uncle, my mother’s brother, did not.
I was born in Leeds, and soon afterward we immigrated to Australia in order to procure visas for my father’s few remaining relatives left in Europe after the Holocaust. I learned to walk on the ship as it rounded the Cape of Good Hope. This has always seemed to me to be the symbol of being born an Ashkenazic1 Jew in the middle of the twentieth century: learning to walk with no ground under your feet–with no makom to give life to one’s soul.
The Hebrew word makom has a number of meanings. It can denote “place” or “space” and is often used in the Bible as the “place where God’s name dwells,” namely the Temple. In Talmudic literature the word makom came to be a preferred name of God, the “nexus of all creation.” These various connotations suggest a sense of permanence or existence. In that sense every person requires their makom to grow and flourish.
I grew up with one grandfather and no grandmothers. My grandfather and my only surviving uncles and aunts lived thousands of miles away. Before I was six years old, I had lived on three continents. By the time I was fourteen, in seven different homes. All this for no other reason than that I was born a Jew, son of a young rabbi from Hungary, who met a young woman from Poland in Berlin and who, by the grace of God, was miraculously given life by a Gestapo agent, a friend from university days—born in passage to freedom.
On Thanksgiving Day we would dress for a festive meal and read Psalms thanking God for America and celebrating the salvation of being alive as a Jew despite the Holocaust.
Unexpectedly, something deep in the hidden rhythms of my life was altered. Our family had a profound connection to music. Traditional poems sung at the Sabbath table, my brother’s harmonies while doing the dishes, Bach and Beethoven on long-play 33-1⁄3 RPM records. Suddenly, there was something totally different—songs from Israel. Nothing extraordinary, just the music that Israelis were listening to in the late 1950s—“A Caravan in the Desert,” “A Wandering Minstrel,” “Uziyahu, the King Built Towers in Jerusalem,” and others. I had never taken a liking to the pop music of that period in America, or to the new rock and roll that could be heard everywhere. But I felt an uncontrollable welling up of the spirit every time I would listen to the popular Israeli songs.
How old was I? What does it mean to talk of the “welling up of the spirit” of a preteen whose major interest in life seemed to be baseball? I could hardly understand the words. But the music, oh the music, moved me deeply. I felt, without knowing, that I had seen the landscape that had inspired the music. Something deep within was revealed about my personal makom, as if a door had been opened to an unknown chamber. I knew without understanding and yet without a shadow of a doubt: “I am from there, not from here.”
A Meditation on Makom
The spirit is ever evolving, the dynamic source of energy that pushes life itself ever onward, in search of knowledge and wisdom, aspiring for fulfillment, dreaming of the final realization of the good in human society. Philosophers and theologians have spoken of this. From Heraclitus who spoke of the ever-changing river of time to Hegel who wrote of the “spirit of history,” from the shamans of early nature religions to the sophisticated meditations of mystics moved by the various forms of monotheism—the human mind has sensed from within and from without, the pulse of a life-thriving and divine reality that underlies all things.
At the center of Jewish existence stands the Torah, given by God to Moses at Mount Sinai and during the years of wandering in the desert. Traditionally, Jews have accepted the ultimate authority of the Torah as it was given and passed down through the generations as the word of God—eternal and unchanging.
Yet even a superficial encounter with Jewish learning and literature reveals that the word is ever evolving. The book is never closed. Through various forms of interpretation and exegesis, of legal argumentation and creative religious imagination, the five books of Moses have become a rich, ever-deepening discussion of the generations, of communities cast to the ends of the earth.
This library and the creative life experience to which it gives expression is one of the most dramatic and life-affirming human endeavors, a continuous encounter of the eternal and the human.
During the darkest days of the Holocaust, rebuilding his family in England while fully aware of the systematic attempt to wipe out European Jewry, my father, may his memory be a blessing, wrote, perhaps in protest, perhaps as commentary to what he perceived as the link between nazism and the perception of the Jew as a bane in history for many Christians:
Judaism is in love with life, for it knows that life is God’s great question to mankind; and the way a man lives, what he is doing with his life, the meaning he is able to implant in it, is man’s all-important reply. Actual life is the great partner to the spirit, without the one the other is meaningless.
The teachings of the Torah can therefore reveal their real sense only when there is a concrete reality to which they can be applied. On the one hand we have Torah, trying to give shape to that raw lump of life which is so reluctant and evasive; on the other hand, each bit of Torah-shaped life—in social institutions, in economic arrangements, in the relations between man and his neighbors, in the street and in the market as well as in the places of worship—living Torah reacting on the very intentions of Sinai. For just as Torah shapes life, so does Torah-shaped life, in its turn, direct and thus unfold Torah. It is as if Torah was using its own experiences to determine its next new phase. And in each new phase it strives again to re-fashion our lives, which, newly fashioned, will again affect the meaning of the teaching as revealed during its preceding phase in history.
And so on to eternity; Torah leading life, and Torah-led life unfolding Torah. This is the inner meaning of the partnership between Torah and prosaic, every-day existence; and out of this partnership emerges a Judaism capable of unlimited development. It is the spirit developing life, and that new life with its new necessities challenging the spirit to unfold new meanings. The eternity of the Torah lies in being able to accept the challenge and to reveal new meaning from among those latent in the original Sinaitic tradition.
But this is only possible as long as the partnership exists, as long as there is a corporate Jewish existence controlled by a group of people who are prepared to realize Torah in everyday life.
The great spiritual tragedy of the Galut [exile] consists in the breach between Torah and Life, for Galut means the loss of Jewish-controlled environment.2
This passage is not only a profound rabbinic teaching. It is the testimony of life of a Jew, not radically different from the testimony of millions—perhaps more expressive, more elegant and eloquent, but no different. It is the testimony of those who lived among the nations and yet separate from them. Not because of a belief in national or religious supremacy but because of a deeply felt need to preserve spiritual integrity while scattered in exile among the nations. The passage describes a commitment to human life that does not deny body because of spirit, but uses the spirit to sanctify the bodily. Not some hallowed spirit that dwells separate from the exigencies of life, but a spirit that dwells in homes and communities, in the uplifting of commercial activity, and yes, in hallowed sexuality—to become the Temple of Life, a place wherein God himself dwells, by sanctifying life itself.
In life’s ever-changing encounter with Torah, through the unique life experiences of individuals and communities, the word of God is in ever-deepening revelation to the world.
Jewish history, however, all too often saw life’s brutal defilement at the hands of murderous “civilizations.” And so, the living testimony of the Jew was of a dreamer in exile. The exile was not only ghettoization and oppression and suffering and death, but also the exile of Torah from life. Without “the total life of a people in their land” there could not be the fulfillment of the Torah. Without fashioning the ethical norms of a vibrant and fair society, without social services that alleviated pain and suffering, without bearing the burden of questions of life and death in medicine and in the military, without the opportunity to develop an indigenous creative culture: without living with and in a people in their land, the Torah itself was in exile.
We, the Torah-led people of Israel, have recently entered our land for the third time in history. The first time, in approximately 1400 B.C.E., after 210 years of Egyptian enslavement and forty years in the desert, we crossed the Jordan River to fulfill the covenant made with God at Mount Sinai. More than 400 years passed before David and Solomon made Jerusalem the capital of the kingdom and built the Temple of Hashem3 to the God of Israel; God’s presence dwelt above the ark in the inner chamber of the temple. But in the year 586 B.C.E., the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and its temple. They exiled the indigenous population, uprooting home and economic base and denying a sense of place and peoplehood.
But the God of Israel is also named Makom: place. This the rabbis explain: “The creation is not the makom of God; God is the makom of creation.”4 So the Jews in exile understood that the God of Israel is not only in the land itself, but also in every makom.
If God is in every makom, if God is omnipresent, why a land, a temple—a fixed makom? The links between God, the creator of the universe, beyond space and time, and the land, Jerusalem, and the temple, are paradoxical. The book of Samuel 1 says that the elders of Israel brought the Holy Ark to the battlefield because on the one hand, they believed that it embodies the divine presence that will defeat Israel’s enemies.5 In doing so, they turned the ark into nothing but wood and gold: an idol. On the other hand, during that same period, because they believed that Hashem dwells in heaven above and beyond in eternal holiness, they accepted lesser gods, mediators between heaven and earth, as go-betweens. This, as well, involved the worship of idols.
The people of Israel were then exiled to Babylon because they could not see past the idols and perceive how a sanctified bounded space could be a vessel for the unbounded noncorporeal Presence. In exile, separated from their sanctified space, they were “liberated” from their spiritual shackles—the seduction of a fruitful land that had generated the nature religions that surrounded them and the physical symbols of the Temple of God that created a mistaken sense of the corporeality of God’s presence and prideful sense of easy access to its power.
In Babylon they discovered what they were meant to experience while in the Land of Israel: Dwell in physicality, do not deny it. Experience the vitality of life; understand that the source of life is in the unbounded spirit, that spirit sanctifies body, and that body sanctified gives physical vitality to the spirit. Perceive physicality as an image, a projection, a representation, of that which is not physical in both the union of soul and body, and in the seeming impossibility of an unbounded Presence that dwells in Creation.
And so, when the people of Israel reentered the land for the second time during the fifth century B.C.E., they had separated themselves from idols to become the people of the book. In a very real sense, the book had become their makom. They then fashioned a new form of spiritual speech: Talmud.6
Divisiveness and the Redeeming Deed
After graduating high school in 1962, I made my first trip to Israel, by boat. Two weeks in the “ship dormitory” below the engines. When we docked for the night in Marseille and the engines were turned off, none of our group could sleep for lack of the noise we had gotten used to.
Three nights later we didn’t sleep again. Like many Jews before the advent of regular international airline flights, we didn’t want to miss the first sight of Mount Carmel at dawn. Unlike Jews of many generations, two weeks out of high school we kept ourselves awake playing the card game Hearts. What made my real heart miss a beat? Not a loved one or a moment of professional success, but catching a view of a land known for years within my soul, but never seen with my eyes.
Most of the year spent in Israel before returning to study physics at the University of Chicago, I carried irrigation pipes across the cotton fields of a kibbutz in the south. The young Israeli who slogged on with me on many a hot day was Menachem Kahane, who became a close friend. Menachem later left the kibbutz to become a central figure, a prize-winning scholar, in the Talmud department at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Little did we realize then that in our friendship lay the seeds of as yet unknown aspirations.
As Menachem would leave the kibbutz for a life dedicated to the best of academic Talmud scholarship, I would soon give up on following my brothers into science as a profession and, through the study of sociology, philosophy, Jewish history, and Jewish text, seek to discover my own destiny.
However, the chimes of history do not always ring when you are ready. For days everyone at Yeshiva University had been glued to their radios listening to the dramatic events taking place in the Middle East in the early days of June 1967. Threatened by the amassed armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, the possibility of a new Holocaust was very real. Thousands of graves were prepared in Israel for the war that was certain to come. But what could we do in New York? We were at JFK Airport helping load gas masks onto planes headed to Israel, because of reports that Egypt had used mustard gas in Yemen.
During the first few days of the war, reports of stunning Israeli victories seemed as unreal as Arab claims of the destruction of Israeli cities. And then, while I was showering in the university dormitory, a radio hanging on the clothes hook, a report came in that the Israeli Defense Force had removed the Jordanian army from the Old City of Jerusalem—the place where Solomon had built the Temple of Hashem (where it was rebuilt after the Babylonian exile and where it stood in total for 830 years) had been taken back. Journalists both inside and outside Israel were caught up in the tide of the astonishing events and their historic implications. Instead of reporting about the battle that had taken place, they focused on the drama of the return of the Jewish people to their center; they spoke of the powerful and moving experience of the restoration of their place, of their home.
Standing in the shower, unable to control my emotions, I wept and wept. Countless tears were flowing uncontrollably down my face. The tears of my father, shed for the one and a half million Jewish children slaughtered without mercy in the Holocaust. The tears of my grandfather, who suffered a heart attack days before the Nazis entered the town of Oradea, Romania, where he taught Torah. The tears of my grandmother and my aunts and uncles who sang “I believe in the coming of the Messiah” as they were taken to Auschwitz. The tears of generations, dreaming of the land they would never see, who sang at the most hallowed of times: “Next Year in Jerusalem.”
So clear to me at that moment was the profound sense of return, when the encounter of the divine and the human is not only an aspiration or a mere possibility but an actual moment within time and within space—a moment of redemption in history.
How could I not weep uncontrollably, thinking of all those generations at such a moment, even while standing in the shower?
Three years later I returned to Israel, this time for good, to study philosophy at Hebrew University and to pursue advanced Torah study at the seminary founded by the first Chief Rabbi in modern-day Israel, Rabbi Avraham Isaac Kook. I spent many hours wandering the streets of Jerusalem in a dance of the spirit while touching the old and the new in Jerusalem. On one such walk, while soloing my way in the Old City, I came upon the Western Wall. The Wall is part of the imposing rampart that surrounds the Temple Mount, built by King Herod and strengthened by a Turkish sultan. In the years to come, I would pray and dance at the Wall, feeling an intimacy with a Presence unlike anything I had felt before.
Years passed. I married a young Israeli woman whose family had lived in Jerusalem for seven generations, many in the Old city itself. With two young children and nine months pregnant, caught up in the vibrant rhythms of a young and idealistic society, we sought to join other couples to build new life, new communities.
Although we did not share the ideology of building new settlements in Judea and Samaria (in the so-called Occupied Territories), to our surprise we felt at home with the wonderful young couples we met in Shilo, an Israeli community in the hills of Samaria, and we moved there in 1980. In 1989 I was elected to the community council. Three months later the intifada began. Many Shilo residents were injured by stones and Molotov cocktails on the road to and from work and in terrorist attacks in Jerusalem. We visited the local sheik but were told that he had no control over the youth who wanted the throw off the yoke of Israel’s occupation.
When we first arrived at Shilo, there seemed to be real hope of creating a constructive and mutually beneficial relationship between our community and the three Arab villages in the area. Our leadership helped their counterparts in the villages procure electricity and running water—something the Jordanian authorities who controlled the area until 1967 had failed to provide. Our telephone exchange was situated in one of the villages and the Arab operators knew all of us by first name; fruits and vegetables were sold to us by residents of the villages.
As the years passed, my wife and I asked ourselves a series of questions regarding our relationship to the Arabs in the nearby villages. Was our presence legitimate? Was it moral? At what price would we be willing to leave our home for conciliation with the Arabs? Was real peace possible?
The Wall surrounding the Temple Mount has become a symbol for me of both redemption and conflict. Praying at the Western Wall had been a dream of Jews for generations—to touch its weathered stone was redemptive. Yet the powerful urge to pray at the Wall and to touch its stone created a deep inner conflict. I felt the Wall beckoning inward, to the Temple Mount itself. Could the dream of generations be realized without God’s Presence in the Temple of Hashem? A massive stone structure cut me off from worshiping on the Temple Mount itself. Jews prayed at the Wall, I came to understand, because it allowed them to experience the Presence beyond the Wall.
Yet for generations the Wall has also been a symbol of redemption, of the realization of Torah in the world. But if “the Torah’s ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace,”7 how could the Wall incite divisiveness and conflict? The Temple Mount was given by the government of Israel to Muslim religious authorities to control as an important place of Muslim worship. Should Israel remove them because of our vision of redemption? I think not. Although Jews had waited generations to return to Israel, we will have to wait still longer to return to the place we turn to three times daily to pray.
Not only is the specter of conflict and violence with the Arabs reflected in the struggle for Jerusalem, but also these hallowed places are points of divisiveness within Israel itself. What is Israel’s ultimate vision: peace or land, prosperity for all in the Middle East or never-ending conflict, humanistic values of democracy and freedom or the aspirations of generations of Jews for the realization of national redemption at the expense of the basic rights of the “stranger”?
I never believed that these polarities would be helpful in clarifying the national debate and in moving us forward or that they even reflected the reality in Israel. The Temple Mount, the Wall, and Jerusalem are at the center of the present standoff between Israel and the Palestinians. My perspective on the issue of land, place, and peace as a moral dilemma in the political context had become very simple.
If the Arabs put down arms, recognized Israel, and sued for peace, what would happen? There would be real peace and the vast majority of Israelis, myself included, would be willing to make concessions regarding the most hallowed of our national possessions for the sake of reducing bloodshed and celebrating the sanctity of life.
And what would happen if Israel put down its arms in pursuit of peace? It would, very likely, be destroyed by Arabs. Israel faces a coalition of powerful Arab interests, including Palestinians of most stripes that refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist as the homeland of the people of Israel.
And when will the Temple of Hashem be rebuilt on the Temple Mount? No one knows. But certainly not by conquest! Taking the Temple Mount by force would counter the fundamental universal message of the Third Temple of Hashem: to be a light to all nations. Perhaps the Temple of Hashem will be rebuilt only when the world’s spiritual cultures turn to the people of Israel and say: “We need the Torah, the Word of God, as taught in Israel through Talmud, for our lives. Build the Temple of Hashem so that God’s word can be revealed to all.”8
While waiting—and hoping—for a shift in the winds that blow across the Middle East, there is a fundamental moral commandment to defend ourselves and to protect our families.
A fundamental tenet in the biblical and Talmudic concept of moral behavior is that greater power obligates greater kindness; accumulation of power requires greater commitment to use that power to fulfill God’s will. The state of Israel today is a significant power in the Middle East and on the international scene. That position obligates Israel to create the conditions for all people of the Middle East to live in peace with the blessings of life. And Israel must go as far as possible to allow Palestinians to achieve those goals under their own autonomous rule.
However, the gift of power does not on its own make the powerful guilty. Unfortunately, in the Middle East today the gift of power is a basic condition for our survival. Israel faces threats to its existence from Arab states such as Syria and Iran who speak of our destruction and support the Hezbollah on our northern border and the Hamas on our southern border. Many Palestinians identify with these forces and with their clearly stated vision of the disappearance of the Jewish state.
So the moral commandment to protect ourselves is clear. Until Palestinian leadership offers a plainly stated recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, we must maintain communities in Judea and Samaria for self-protection. Right now such communities prevent the creation of a Palestinian state that would in all likelihood join those forces seeking the destruction of the Israel. Since peace requires reciprocity, denying the right of the Jewish people to their makom in Israel means denying the right to makom for those alongside.
And of the Temple Mount we continue to pray and dream, as Jews have done for many centuries while allowing Muslims and Christians freedom of worship everywhere within our jurisdiction.
Beyond Prophecy
Rabbi Kook, who founded the Torah seminary in which I studied, saw the third entry of the Jewish people into Israel as a providential redemptive event. His vision of the renewal of the national life of the people of Israel as the fulfillment of the words of the prophets inspired many in Israel and in the Diaspora. He saw the return to Israel as the fulfillment of the universal aspiration for the moral good in human society, which he understood in mystical terms to be embedded in the very dynamics of Creation.
One of those attracted to the poetry and pathos of Rabbi Kook’s writings was Rabbi David Cohen. When, as a student, he heard that the famous Jerusalem rabbi would be visiting Switzerland, he traveled to meet him and spent an evening with him discussing philosophy and theology. Lying in bed the following morning, he heard Rabbi Kook devoutly praying. So moved by the power of his prayer, he exclaimed: “I have found myself my spiritual mentor!”9 Years later, a few months after arriving in Israel in the early autumn of 1922 to become a disciple of Rabbi Kook, Rabbi Cohen wrote in his diary:
I went for a walk around the holy city to awaken my spirit in the holy mountains that surround me, and lo, my spirit lives. With great bitterness I sat opposite Avshalom’s monument, took out my pocket Bible and read of Avshalom’s rebellion against his father David as described in Samuel II. Everything I read came alive before my eyes. There, in the Valley of the Kings my spirit lives, and my soul was elevated by the amazing view that lay before me where the holy prophets once walked. And my spirit filled with hope and anticipation that prophecy would be revealed. And my heart filled with anticipation regarding the “Great Yeshiva” (seminary) and study hall that would be built there. The Yeshiva for which I fashioned a curriculum and which I showed to our teacher the Rabbi, may he live many days, and in which the first words were: “the revival of the spirit of prophecy.”10
Rabbi Cohen believed that the time was spiritually and intellectually ripe for the renewal of prophecy. The vision of the prophets walking those paths made this far-reaching aspiration—the integration of the spiritual imagination with Talmudic legalism—seem attainable.
Will there soon be a renewal of the prophetic vision in the Land of Israel, on the holy mountains that surround Jerusalem? Rabbi Kook saw the renewal of prophecy in the renewed encounter between the eternal and the human in the rebuilding of the Land of Israel. For him the encounter between the eternal word of God and evolving human consciousness is reflected in the three periods during which the people of Israel dwelt in their land: the biblical (or prophetic), the Talmudic, and the modern (the unification of the prophetic and Talmudic). The word of God is manifest in human life in radically different modes in each of these periods.
Rabbi Kook developed a model of history in which Divine revelation itself is described as an ever-evolving phenomenon moving human consciousness in the people of Israel forward—in a manner that has dramatic universal implications:
Prophecy saw the great evil of idolatry in ancient Israel, and protested against it with all its might; it envisioned the majesty and delight associated with the belief in one God, and portrayed it in all its radiance. It saw the corruption in moral depravity, the oppression of the poor, murder, adultery and robbery, and it was infused with the spirit of God to offer help and to rectify these conditions through lofty and holy exhortations.11
Rabbi Kook perceived the “radiance” of the belief in one God as reflected in the ongoing struggle to remove violence and moral corruption from human society. The prophets exhorted Israel and the nations to change their ways and to fashion civilization in justice and loving kindness.
In a similar vein, Maimonides, one of the central figures in medieval Jewish history, wrote of the impact of the prophetic protest against idolatry and barbarism. Maimonides describes how the early civilization of Israel, through the power of the prophets and the five books of Moses, became the foundation of the two great religions that fashioned Western civilization, Christianity and Islam. In a sweeping vision of the history of civilization, Maimonides describes the defeat of idolatry as part of the development of a human moral consciousness based on the belief in the one God that would lead to the Messiah. He believed that the prophecy of Israel entered the bloodstream of human culture as an expression of the grace of God embedded in human history.12
Prophecy was the hallmark of Israel’s first entry into the land to build the Temple of Hashem. But the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. However, the paths of God’s grace are gradual; the evolution of the spirit in history requires human vessels to indwell in the physical world. It would take another 600 years for the vision of the prophets to begin to assume a role in fashioning civilization on a broad scale outside Israel.
During this period Israel entered the land again to rebuild the Temple of Hashem. The word of God remained the ultimate authority, but the mode of its revelation changed, evolved, deepened. Prophets were no more, replaced by the sages and by the development of the Talmud.
Though Rabbi Kook longed for the renewal of prophecy, he focused on a well-known aphorism in the Talmud, “The sage is more important than the prophet”:
But the little lapses out of which was forged the gross body of sin—these remained hidden from the eye of every prophet and seer. Similarly it was not within the sphere of prophecy to grasp how the habituated performance and the study of commandments will, after a span of time, release their hidden inner graces, and a wholly divine influence will decisively vanquish the darkness of idolatry. Nor could it grasp how the slow negligence, which disparages the performance of the commandments, with their inferences and elaborations, will start a process of erosion, destroying the vessels in which is stored the exalted spirit.…
It was, therefore, necessary to assign the enunciation of general principles to the prophets and of the particulars to the sages; and, as the Talmud declares, “the sage is more important than the prophet.”13 And what prophecy with its impassioned and fiery exhortations could not accomplish in purging the Jewish people of idolatry and in uprooting the basic causes of the most degrading forms of oppression and violence, of burden, sexual perversity and bribery, was accomplished by the sages through the expanded development of the Torah, by raising many disciples and by the assiduous study of the particular laws and their derivative applications.14
One of the most basic Jewish claims regarding the human endeavor to fashion the redemptive deed is the sanctification of the particular. In that regard Talmudic discussion in all its complexity is not religious obscurantism, as Christendom often characterized it; rather it is the wellspring of life.
It is not enough to know the essence of the good and the right, or even to recognize it as the word of God. The human dilemma is how to induce people to act effectively in accord with their obligations. Judaism assumes that there is an “appetite for goodness” in everyone. However, mind and good faith alone are not enough to bring about ethical action. In order to achieve ethical conduct, our emotional forces, often uncontrolled by faith and mind alone, must submit to a discipline that is required for moral action.15
This was the goal of Talmud as a tool for the formation of character and, by virtue of that, the dedication of human creativity to the moral good in the fashioning of culture. “The assiduous study of the particular laws and their derivative applications,” as Rabbi Kook describes the language of Talmud, has been going on in every Jewish community across the globe for 2,500 years. Its goal is not sainthood, but hallowed “humanhood”—the fulfillment of the hope of being created “in the image of God,” living fully in the vitality of the physical yet sanctified by the words of God in the Torah.
Rabbi Kook believed that in the revelation of God’s word during the third entry of Israel into the land, the law of the Torah will be infused with the vitality and vision of the prophets; the light of prophecy will begin to have its revival as we are promised: “I shall pour out My spirit on all flesh” (Joel 3:1). The radiance of prophecy will reemerge from hiding and reveal itself as the first fruits full of vitality and life. At that time we will embrace the vision of unity expressed by the psalmist: “Mercy and truth have met, justice and peace have kissed, truth will rise out of the earth and mercy will show itself from heaven; the Lord will also bestow what is good and our earth will bring forth its bounty” (Ps. 85:11).16
Talmud for the Whole World
As a student of Rabbi Kook’s writing, I too yearn for a radical union of prophetic pathos and Talmudic rigor. And, like every good student in the tradition of the Talmudic study hall, I want to add a thought of my own.
Just as prophecy, the language of the spirit during the period of the First Temple of Hashem, became the source of inspiration for many nations and cultures, the third entry of Israel into the land marks the beginning of the epoch of Talmud for all of human civilization. A blessed wind of renewed life has swept across many nations in modern times, an aspiration for a redeemed human existence—less corruption, less war, less depravity. Freedom and democracy are key in the renewal of the human spirit. Yet they are insufficient. There is need for a fundamental transformation so that the word of God can pass from spirit to daily deed, from faith to ethical obligation—for every human in daily life.
The tool for human consciousness to effect such a transformation is God’s law as understood and formulated by human Talmud. This is a gift that God has given to all humans through the experience of the Jew in exile across the globe.
One of central formulations of Talmudic logic is, “these and those are the words of the Living God.”17 This aphorism makes an astonishing theological claim: that the word of God has many facets and that those facets are revealed through different committed and believing human souls. The Talmudic study hall at the time that this aphorism was formulated consisted of the students and scholars of the Houses of Shammai and Hillel, the main schools that formulated Jewish law and belief in the Mishnaic period. They differed on many issues of law and belief. In the spirit of the diverse search for truth in open debate and argumentation, we affirm the vision of committed and believing human souls from many nations and cultures all “talking Talmud.”
One of the greatest sages of the Talmud, Rabbi Elazar ben Azaria, who presided for a time as president of the Sanhedrin just after the destruction of the Second Temple of Hashem, phrased this principle in a Midrash based on the image of young and vital saplings grouped together as described in chapter twelve of the book of Ecclesiastes. He taught that the image represents
the students of Talmud who sit together in groups studying the Torah. Some decide in favor of defilement, some in favor of purity. Some are stringent and prohibit, some are lenient and permit. Some disallow and some decide in favor of “Kosher.” Lest the student exclaim: “And how can I study the Torah now (faced with such diversity within the understanding of God’s word)?” Thus teaches the words of the Torah itself—all the opinions were given by one shepherd, one leader proclaimed them from the mouth of the ruler of all creation, may he be blessed, as it is written: “And God commanded these words” (Exodus 20:1, introducing the Ten Commandments). You too (continues Rabbi Elazar ben Azaria as if turning to the questioning student), open your ear like a funnel, acquire a heart that perceives and penetrates, and listen carefully to the words of those who decide in favor of defilement.18
Dissension, conflict, even excommunication were not unknown in the halls in which Rabbi Elazar presided and taught. Well aware of the dangers inherent in disagreement and dissent, he reaffirmed the will of God to create the people of Israel as twelve separate tribes—each with its unique spiritual character and vitality.
One can formulate these teachings in the following way. Every human soul was created by God and yearns for the good. God spoke through the prophets of Israel in order to offer humankind the tools that would effectively fashion civilization committed to moral conduct. In that spirit the sages of the generations created the language of Talmudic debate to transform the human ego and its creative capacities for the preservation of life.
In more philosophical terms this intuition can be formulated in terms of truth. For most of Western civilization, “truth” has been considered absolute. This often led differing cultural and spiritual groups to claim: “My truth denies your truth”; and with no less vehemence: “Your truth denies my truth.” Talmudic logic, by contrast, posits the nature of truth in a radically different mode. Truth in Jewish law and in the speech of Talmud is multiple—“these and those are the words of the Living God.” Truth also emerges from differing views regarding even the most basic laws and beliefs as long as participants in truth accept the authority of the Torah.19
Can this Talmudic concept of truth become a universal principle of discussion and debate among cultures and religions that have differing assumptions about the most basic issues of human life and belief? A world of tolerance, liberty, and peace is a dream common to most of humankind. Yet despite many an aspiration and countless attempts to turn utopian visions into reality, we have been unable to achieve this goal. Belief and ideology create divides that invite both misunderstanding and conflict.
Can we overcome those divides? The encounter of the Torah as the word of God combined with Talmud as human speech fashioning the Torah, in an ever-changing and evolving reality, can be the Jewish gift to civilization. Herein lies the dimension of universal meaning in the third entry of Israel to the land. Imagine the light of life redeemed, that of the wisdom inherent in the word of God as revealed by myriad souls talking Talmud. Every human soul can discern and penetrate the language of Talmud and learn to speak it and by doing so can become a vessel for the revelation of God’s word in life.
Returning Home
An evening on a hot midsummer’s day. A cool breeze from the Mediterranean ruffles the pages of prayer books and small paper booklets. Spread across the bare ground are many of the families of Shilo, from grandparents to babies cradled in their mother’s arms, sitting together in the dark.
It is the eve of the ninth day of the month of Av, the day on which, for countless generations, Jews in every community across the earth mourn the exile and the destruction of the Temple of Hashem built by Solomon as well as the destruction of the Second Temple of Hashem. Amazingly, the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. and of the Second Temple by the Romans more than 650 years later took place on exactly the same day as marked on the Jewish calendar, seemingly a providential act of God.
To commemorate these tragic events, the community reads the book of Lamentations, written by the prophet Jeremiah, who prophesied and witnessed the destruction of the First Temple. The usual custom—for hundreds, maybe thousands of years—was to do the reading by candlelight while seated on the floor, like mourners, in the synagogue. Yet many of the residents of Shilo, young and old, Israeli born or not, come together to read Lamentations at the base of Tel Shilo.
The biblical city of Shilo became the religious capital of Israel when the people of Israel entered the land for the first time. According to the Bible, Joshua set up the Tabernacle, the Tent of Meeting that the people of Israel carried with them through the desert, in Shilo.20 The Tent of Meeting stood at Shilo for 369 years, serving as the Temple of Hashem before David and Solomon built the temple in Jerusalem. Many Christian and Jewish groups come to visit and pray at the Tel.
The Talmud remarks that the Tent of Meeting was placed on a stone foundation, symbolizing that the Promised Land was a reality. The desert was now the past, the stone represented the new, solid reality. However, the Temple of Hashem remained in a tent, symbol of the nomadic life. Only when the Holy Ark came to rest in Jerusalem would the Torah be revealed in its fullest.
Now, thousands of years later, the men and women of Shilo reading the words of Jeremiah seated physically close to the place of the Tent of Meeting feel, even more deeply, the loss of the temple. But our mourning mingles with hope: the experience of loss and incompleteness is sweetened by expectation. The earth itself on which we lie, the breeze that comes across the hills, the stones that mark the gate to the biblical town of Shilo turn the chant of Lamentations into living testimony to the third entry into the Land of Israel.
Redemption? Not yet. Exile? No more. The families assembled at the reading include a family whose four living generations live in Shilo and families from all continents except Antarctica. The eve of the Ninth of Av, at the base of Tel Shilo, is a moment when the glimmering flashlights and gas lamps used to follow the reading are the sparks of countless communities and generations gathered here to witness the meeting of Jeremiah and the new community of Shilo.
For 369 years, the Tent of Meeting stood at Shilo, until it was destroyed by the Philistines. The period was one of divisiveness and conflict. The tribes of Israel vied with each other for power. Neighboring rulers made war with Israel for control of the land and sources of water, for booty, and for taxation. It was a period when many in Israel were enticed by foreign cultures. The hope of an indigenous and unique spiritual creativity binding the word of God to the new experience in the Land of Israel was left unheeded. All this is told in the book of Judges.
Israel, once again, seems to be in a period of transition from exile to redeemed national existence. We lack a common spiritual language, and self-interest has replaced the national cohesion of the early years of the state of Israel. Foreign cultures, especially the most superficial and showy aspects of modern America, once again entice us.
Yet the third entry of Israel into the land is creating its own language of revelation of God’s word. Once there was God’s word in prophecy; then there was God’s word in the Talmudic discussions of the sages based on the words of Moses and the prophets. Today there is a spiritual adventure taking place. Young Israelis have created a broad-based movement for a more just and compassionate society. Creative artists are exploring new forms of expression in music, poetry, theater, and the visual arts that give expression to the spirit. The study of Talmud itself is undergoing reevaluation to give age-old discussions personal meaning for young people born in a dynamic and creative modern society. Continually, in a myriad of schools, homes, and communities, in aspects of private and public endeavor, many groups are studying and discussing the Torah, dealing with questions and concerns that were never part of the living reality of previous generations.
How will Torah fashion life in modern Israel? How will it be a vessel for the renewed revelation of Torah? How will life fashion Torah? We are working at it, and when it happens, the Temple of Hashem will be the beacon for a new face of God in the world.
Wholly Other?
Jacob was named “Israel” by an unnamed angel of God—in struggle. Who was the divine figure who refused to reveal his name to Jacob?21 Early Jewish tradition claims that the angel with whom Jacob struggled in the darkness was the spirit of Esau, Jacob’s twin brother. Although close brothers can share compassion and understanding, there is no hatred and cruelty like that between brothers whose jealousy has turned to uncontrollable rage. If brothers can wrestle so mightily for the love of a human father, how much more intense will the fighting be if the struggle is for the love of Father in heaven? Who are the chosen people? And how much blood has been shed, mostly Jewish blood, over that question?
Secular thinkers claim that the only solution is the denial of religion. But is the notion of a “chosen people” really the source of all evil in human civilization?
Jacob’s identity as Israel was made known to him during his struggle with the Godly as revealed in his brother, Esau; ever since he has been seeking to find the key to reconciliation with him. Can we recognize the Godly in others and, in so doing, find the key to reconciliation with them?
There have always been two faces to the Jewish encounter with the “other”—on the one hand, a deep sense of common humanity and of shared responsibility, and on the other hand, a profound sense of fear of a brother’s animosity.
When Jews have felt secure in their home and in the synagogue, secure from marauding Mongols and crusading Christians, from Ukrainian nationalist zeal and from the venomous pogroms of neighbors and friends, Jewish communities—while diligently preserving their own identity—have consistently sought reconciliation with their brothers, Esau and Yishmael (the ancestor of Islam). Returning to Israel for the third time provides renewed opportunity for the people of Israel to pursue their destiny among nations, perhaps to be understood for the first time. Central to the realization of Israel’s identity and destiny is the manner in which the state of Israel treats the “other,” which must include two foundational ideas:
Axiom #1: There is no wholly other, there are only the children of Esau and Yishmael, our brothers.
The commitment to strengthen the state of Israel as an expression of our uniqueness among the nations must not become a tool for the demeaning and mistreatment of others. The destiny of Israel can only be realized in the betterment of the condition of all those who dwell amongst us and those who are our neighbors.
Axiom #2: Those who do not recognize our basic right to exist and to build our life in this land are our enemies.
And if the state of Israel means anything, it means the end of “the curse of the Jew,” which says that Jews are the Satan of history who can be persecuted and murdered at will.
But there are others who lived here when the third return began. What needs to be done to ensure that they do not become “wholly others” in our eyes?
Who are the Palestinians? When did they enter Israel? Have they been here for 2,000 years as they claim or are they immigrants who came from Syria in the nineteenth century as many in Israel see them? In the end, what does it matter? We are both here—sharing this beautiful, but impossibly small piece of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. We are like Jacob and the angel, intertwined and inseparable. Each of our names is being shaped in this struggle. What are we to do?
If a solution can be found, it will emerge only from mutual trust. Only mutual trust can turn a “wholly other” into a “holy brother.” But can mutual trust be created in the Middle East? It can happen only when each side is willing to recognize the violence that comes from within, to admit that there is a festering of spirit gone bad somewhere in one’s own culture and society, in one’s own religion.
The Bible commands:
If one be found slain in the land which the Lord thy God gives thee to possess it, lying in the open field, and it be not known who has slain him: then the elders and judges shall come out, and they shall measure to the cities which are round him that is slain; and it shall be that the elders of the city which is nearest to the slain man shall … wash their hands on the sacrifice that is brought and they shall say in responsive declaration. “Our hands have not shed this blood, nor have our eyes seen it done. Be merciful O Lord to thy people Yisrael, whom thou hast redeemed, and lay not the spilling of innocent blood to the charge of thy people Yisrael.” And the blood shall be forgiven them. So shalt thou put away the spilling of innocent blood from among you, when thou shalt do what is right in the sight of the Lord.22
The Talmud asks: Is it possible that the “elders” are guilty of murder? No—but was the slain man given food and lodging in the city? Why was he sent off alone, not accompanied by someone?23 The Talmud means to say that when there is violence and the innocent are murdered, the elders must step forward and bear responsibility for the social norms that allow it to happen. And so:
Axiom #3: The leaders of each society must be self-critical and assume responsibility for acts of violence stemming from its society.
The Jewish penchant to be self-critical often reaches the point of self-hatred. Some claim that we Jews are responsible for all of the Arab-Israeli violence. We must take responsibility where appropriate. But we are not responsible for all of the problems in the Middle East. Muslim leaders contribute to the conditions of violence when they fail to speak out against the traditions within their religion that justify violence. And few Arab voices publicly reject the exhortations of those who encourage violence and terrorism. And when will a Palestinian openly criticize the way Israelis are portrayed in their textbooks?
There can be mutual trust only when the spiritual and communal leadership of both sides are willing to publicly question themselves and their society and then to proclaim in truth, “Our hands have not shed this blood and our eyes have not seen what was done.” (Deut. 21:7). Only then will we begin to see ourselves as brothers; only then can there be a chance for peace in the Middle East.
Notes
1. In Hebrew the literal meaning of the word Ashkenazi is “Germanic.” However, since the beginning of the Middle Ages, following the great divide of Jewish communities and their traditions across Europe and North Africa, the word has come to mean all Jews who lived in communities in eastern and northern Europe. Jews from southern Europe and North Africa were called “sephardim” after the Hebrew word for Spain, Sepharad.
2. Eliezer Berkovits, Towards Historic Judaism (Oxford: The East and West Library, 1943), 32–33. The term “the Torah” refers to the written text of the Bible, specifically to the five books of Moses accepted by Jewish tradition to be the authoritative text revealed to Moses by God. The more general term “Torah” refers to God’s living word which infuses the written Torah with wisdom and imperative relevant to all generations. For a similar use of these terms, see “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism” by Gershom Scolem in The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1971). I use similar terminology to distinguish between Talmud as a rhetoric that shapes cultural consciousness and the Talmud which refers to specific texts. See note 7.
3. Hashem, which means “The Name,” is a term used by Jews to refer to God in common parlance.
4. Midrash Rabba, Genesis, 68, 9.
5. Samuel 1, 4:3–4.
6. I use the term “Talmud” throughout this essay as it is used in the classic texts of Torah to refer to a form of human speech, a finely tuned rhetoric developed to discuss the fundamental values that shape society and culture. Talmud in its original and constitutive form is an oral project, in principle. I use the term “the Talmud” to refer to a specific text—for instance, the Babylonian or Jerusalem Talmud. The Talmud as text is an example of edited protocol of Talmud as oral culture, composed in response to the growing need for centralization of authority and community coherence in times of calamity and dispersal in exile. Talmud as a culture of the written word expanded over time, but never replaced the original sense of Talmud as the nexus of spiritual and intellectual activity for scholars and for laypeople in the community at large.
7. Proverbs 3:17.
8. Is this formulation simply sublimated religious nationalism? I think not. Is it a sincere, but unrealistic aspiration? A messianic dream? Probably. But remember this: the return of the people of Israel seemed for many generations to be just that—a messianic and improbable dream.
9. David Cohen, Introduction to the Lights of Holiness by Rabbi Avraham Isaac Kook: Mossad Harav Kook (Jerusalem: 1969), 17–18.
10. David Cohen, Nazir Echav (The Nazirite of his Brothers) (Jerusalem: Committee for the Publication of Rabbi David Cohen’s Writings, 1977), 281.
11. Rabbi Avraham Isaac Kook, The Classics of Western Spirituality, translated by Ben Zion Bokser (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 253.
12. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of the Kings, chapter 12:1.
13. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Bava Batra, folio page 12a.
14. Kook, Classics of Western Spirituality, 253–254.
15. Based on Eliezer Berkovits, God, Man, and History (New York: Jonathan David Publishers, 1959), 108–109.
16. Rabbi Kook is clearly responding to important spiritual movements in modern Jewry, one of which was the socialist, secular idealism he knew well and deeply respected that moved the early pioneers in Israel who wished to leave the “particulars” behind in their vision of a redeemed Jew in Israel.
17. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Eruvin, folio page 13b.
18. Ibid., Tractate Hagigah, folio page 3b.
19. My good friend and hevruta Rabbi Tzuriel Wiener formulated this idea. I add this to his thought. The postmodern attempt to neutralize the seeds of conflict embedded in the position that there exists “one absolute truth” was to formulate the popular disclaimer: “There is no Truth; there are only differing narratives.” This, of course, has not helped anyone “open their ears like a funnel and acquire a heart that perceives and penetrates and listens carefully.” At most it has allowed for a certain tolerance, but not an ability to appreciate, understand, and identify with the “truth” that underlies value assumptions that differ from our own.
20. Joshua 18:1.
21. Genesis 32:30.
22. Deuteronomy 21:1–3, 6–9.
23. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sotah, folio page 48b.