Hey Jesse!! It was so wonderful to see you and your parents this past Shabbat. Here’s the notes for the drasha.
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“Re’eh,” summary:
Re’eh means “See”. The texts says “see!! I place before you today a blessing and a curse — the blessing that will come when we fulfill God’s commandments, and the curse if we abandon them. As the Israelites go into the land, says the text, they should put those blessings on Mount Gerizim and Mount Eval. The list of blessings and curses is given in Ki Tavo, along with the procedure. After that, the portion goes onto centralizing worship in the Temple; warnings regarding false prophets, a repetition of the list of kosher and not kosher species, laws regarding the ma’aser, or 10%, to be given to the temple or to the poor, tzedakah, the laws of the shemitah or sabbatical year, and the description of the three festivals in which we would be supposed to go up to the Temple in Jerusalem – Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot.
== MORNING
[Please find in our reading which part is most upsetting to you.]
In our reading we come across one of the hardest pieces of the Torah – the laws regarding the ir hanidachat, the city that is supposed to be destroyed. In the reading, the entire city, led by men called “benei belial”. The translations are fascinating: base-fellows, scoundrels, wicked persons, unscrupulous men. In plain English we would call them nogoodniks. Those nogoodniks lead the entire city astray, and after a legal process that includes investigation and research, in which it is found that the entire city is given over to idolatry, you must, says the text, destroy all of it. Not just every person, every building but even every article and every animal. Everything. Nothing can remain.
What are we talking about here, rabbi – I can just hear you ask. And you know what – you should be bothered. How can the Torah say such a thing?! And let me tell you what you already know – the Torah has several laws that make us cringe.
The rabbis in the Talmud certainly are bothered by the ir hanidachat, the destroyed city. And that is not only case that bothers the rabbis, but the case of the rebellious son – we’ll come across that case in parashat Ki tetze – also bothers them. The rabbis then say – nah, the rebellious son never happened. What? If look in the simple Torah text, this is a much easier case to happen – the child just needs to have a bad attitude and drink a sizable amount of wine or eat a sizable amount of meat. I know many mouthy teenagers tha could easily fall in that category. And yet – say the rabbi – this never ever existed.
And here is the secret, which many people tend to look with askance when I point that out – there are loopholes. And I am here to show to you that loopholes are good – when the final goal is love, tolerance and light.
The obligation of humans is to aim for higher moral and religious standards – and I believe we all share this idea. Because people are created in the image of God, our tradition believes we carry within ourselves moral notions of the highest order, which are very close to God’s ultimate will. An individual may not be aware of them, because those notions, that moral instinct, can remain subconscious.
Throughout Jewish history we had moments when we, as a collective, had these moral instincts dormant, or undeveloped. But at a later stage and throughout all of history, these moral notions slowly develop and come to the forefront.
If you look into how the rabbis make the rebellious child never happen, you will find that the rabbis themselves create so many conditions for the application of this law that no wonder it never happened. And they do that because they cannot believe that the text is saying what the simple meaning appears to be.
Here’s an example – according to the Torah text, the father and mother have to say to the beit din “this son of ours does not obey our voices.” The rabbis affirm that this means that they have to have the exact same voice – they have to have the same tone. And they add – it follows they need the same height and appearance. So any child born from a short mother and a tall father or vice-versa will not fall into the rebellious child category.
And of course, the fact that it is a son, excludes all daughters. The fact that is a son, but not an adult, makes the window for this law to be applied a mere six months – between 13 and a day and 13 and a half. And so on, down to the parents’ height and build.
For the destroyed city, our reading, the rabbis do something similar: they argued that it was impossible to destroy the entire city. There is no doubt! Since there must have been mezuzot on the doorposts of some of its inhabitants, you can’t destroy the city.
One mezuzah saves the entire town! You can be a Jewish idol worshipper, but what Jew doesn’t have a mezuzah on their doorpost?!
Talk about a loophole: you all know that it is forbidden to destroy the name of God, which is found in the mezuzah, and if everything in the city had to be utterly destroyed, the law of ir hanidachat could not be enforced and was meant to be purely theoretical.
This is a pretty good loophole. Now – I love this loophole, and I bet you love it too.
Now, let’s be clear here: One could, and just hear me on this, one could take down the mezuzahs. And then destroy the city. Right? You could, and just hear me out on this, kill everything you could kill. But those solutions were something the Sages did not want even to contemplate! They must surely have been aware of these possibilities – I mean, if I can think it, anyone can.
But the rabbis have a different idea. They really believed that God could never have meant this law to be applied. God is a merciful God, called Rahamanah, the Merciful One, in the Talmud. It is present all over the place. It is the most common name for God in the Talmud. So they created a loophole. In order to make sure that the laws that the Merciful one would give are merciful laws, the rabbis found an extremely far-fetched loophole and based their whole argument on a minor detail.
This is yet another way of reminding you – you heard me say this about 100 times since you met me – Judaism is not the religion of the Torah. Judaism is the religion of the Torah as interpreted, domesticated, reframed by the rabbis.
The rabbis could easily have found a more cruel and violent solution, but they chose to solve this in a different way. A way that they actually knew made little sense. It was deliberate trickery, but deliberate trickery rooted in an unequalled moral awareness: the awareness that the Torah is supposed to be a moral conduit, and that mitzvot are supposed to make us better people – not worse. The rabbis believed that the Torah was completely divine – but that is is their task, and our task nowadays, to refine it and to bring it to the moral level that God intended.
The rabbis will do the same thing to all sorts of other laws. One that has been on the news recently is the question of Amalek. There is the case of the biblical commandment to destroy the nation of Amalek and the seven nations of ancient Canaan. Joshua seems to have done something like that, but even he did not do a complete job. In the Mishnah and the Talmud, the Sages found ways to nullify this law and declared it inoperative by claiming that these nations no longer exist. So anyone claiming that Amalek still exists, as a physical existence of a people that needs to be destroyed, is doing an anti-rabbinic reading of the text. That is not Judaism, that is the religion of the Torah.
And I think that we should be proud Jews – proud rabbinic Jews. Jews that look to the Torah, just as the rabbis have for the past 2,100 years, and see Torah as the point of departure, the point of collective growth to be partners with God, to made this world a better place. Torah and mitzvot are here to impels us forward. Shabbat shalom.
Image credit: Synonyms for Loopholes. (2016). Retrieved 2024, August 30, from https://thesaurus.plus/synonyms/loopholes