Friday, August 24, 2007
Friday, August 17, 2007
The Dark Side - Parashat Shoftim, Deuteronomy 16:18-21:9
by Rabbi Darren Kleinberg
"Lo techayei kol neshama" - "You shall not let a soul remain alive" (Deut. 20:16).
These four Hebrew words present what may be the greatest moral challenge to be found in the Torah: what appears to be a divine command to commit an act of genocide.
While this particular verse refers to the six nations living within the land of Canaan, from other verses we know that the command extends to a seventh nation - that of Amalek.
Reading these words in the decades after the attempted genocide of the Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany, the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 and the current crisis taking place in Darfur, we can only acknowledge that, as Rabbi Eugene Korn has put is, "The Bible's brutal commands shock our moral sensibilities."
How can it be that the same book that teaches us to "love our neighbor as ourselves" and to "protect the stranger, the orphan and the widow" can also teach us to commit an act of genocide?
I would like to consider two approaches to confronting this challenge.
The first is that of Maimonides. In Deuteronomy, Chapter 20, verse 10, the Torah reads, "When you approach a city to attack it, you shall offer it terms of peace..." It then goes on to say, in verse 16, in relation to the Canaanite nations: "In the towns of the latter people, however, which the Lord your God gives you as a heritage, you shall not let a soul remain alive."
Prior to Maimonides, the normative halachic tradition understood the call for peace to apply only to wars against peoples outside of the land of Israel. However, Maimonides re-interpreted the requirement of calling for peace to apply to all wars that Jews fight - including the wars against the Canaanite and Amalekite peoples.
For Maimonides, war was never a first option or a divine preference.
According to Maimonides, should a Canaanite or Amalekite nation accept peace and the laws of social order, one is forbidden to kill them.
What is possibly more intriguing is that he goes even further and states that, in fact, this is how it always was - that the Torah never commanded Jews to kill Amalek or the nations of the land of Canaan outright, that they were always obliged to offer them a peace deal.
This approach removes the command to commit an outright act of genocide but, at the same time, denies the command ever existed in the first place.
The second approach is one defined by Eugene Korn as that which "acknowledges the irresolvable contradiction and conclude(s) that the moral standard overrules the religious imperative."
Here the thinking goes that if we are going to engage in creative and sometimes radical reinterpretations of our biblical text, then we must do so while still holding on to, and embracing, the truth of the problematic text in its own right.
The command in the Torah to destroy Amalek and the Canaanite nations is a blot on our tradition - but at the same time, our ability to say that we are going to take the Torah into our own hands and infuse it with our own evolved moral sensibilities is the aspect of Judaism that we can be most proud of.
If Judaism is going to have something meaningful to say about the Holocaust, or Rwanda, or the crisis in Darfur, then it must be able to also acknowledge its own tradition of genocide.
"Lo techayei kol neshama" - "You shall not let a soul remain alive" (Deut. 20:16).
These four Hebrew words present what may be the greatest moral challenge to be found in the Torah: what appears to be a divine command to commit an act of genocide.
While this particular verse refers to the six nations living within the land of Canaan, from other verses we know that the command extends to a seventh nation - that of Amalek.
Reading these words in the decades after the attempted genocide of the Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany, the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 and the current crisis taking place in Darfur, we can only acknowledge that, as Rabbi Eugene Korn has put is, "The Bible's brutal commands shock our moral sensibilities."
How can it be that the same book that teaches us to "love our neighbor as ourselves" and to "protect the stranger, the orphan and the widow" can also teach us to commit an act of genocide?
I would like to consider two approaches to confronting this challenge.
The first is that of Maimonides. In Deuteronomy, Chapter 20, verse 10, the Torah reads, "When you approach a city to attack it, you shall offer it terms of peace..." It then goes on to say, in verse 16, in relation to the Canaanite nations: "In the towns of the latter people, however, which the Lord your God gives you as a heritage, you shall not let a soul remain alive."
Prior to Maimonides, the normative halachic tradition understood the call for peace to apply only to wars against peoples outside of the land of Israel. However, Maimonides re-interpreted the requirement of calling for peace to apply to all wars that Jews fight - including the wars against the Canaanite and Amalekite peoples.
For Maimonides, war was never a first option or a divine preference.
According to Maimonides, should a Canaanite or Amalekite nation accept peace and the laws of social order, one is forbidden to kill them.
What is possibly more intriguing is that he goes even further and states that, in fact, this is how it always was - that the Torah never commanded Jews to kill Amalek or the nations of the land of Canaan outright, that they were always obliged to offer them a peace deal.
This approach removes the command to commit an outright act of genocide but, at the same time, denies the command ever existed in the first place.
The second approach is one defined by Eugene Korn as that which "acknowledges the irresolvable contradiction and conclude(s) that the moral standard overrules the religious imperative."
Here the thinking goes that if we are going to engage in creative and sometimes radical reinterpretations of our biblical text, then we must do so while still holding on to, and embracing, the truth of the problematic text in its own right.
The command in the Torah to destroy Amalek and the Canaanite nations is a blot on our tradition - but at the same time, our ability to say that we are going to take the Torah into our own hands and infuse it with our own evolved moral sensibilities is the aspect of Judaism that we can be most proud of.
If Judaism is going to have something meaningful to say about the Holocaust, or Rwanda, or the crisis in Darfur, then it must be able to also acknowledge its own tradition of genocide.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Noah Feldman? Not the Whole Picture
by Rabbi Darren Kleinberg
In Noah Feldman's already infamous - at least in the blogosphere - New York Times Magazine article "Orthodox Paradox" (July 22), he describes, for reasons that are still inexplicable to this writer, the experience of having his and his then-girlfriend's (now wife) photos cropped out of a school-reunion picture.
Why? Because, he maintains, she is not Jewish and the reunion was for a well-known Modern Orthodox day school he attended in Massachusetts.
I imagine that there is no therapist in the world with a couch quite as comfortable as the pages of the New York Times, and, in the course of his piece, we manage to get a clearer glimpse of what might really be going on inside his head.
Feldman is a professor of law at Harvard University, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and, of course, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. For a person of such importance it is easy to understand the pain that must come with the realization that one has been cut out of a picture with the stroke of a mouse. After all, wouldn't his high school want to show off their illustrious graduate?
In response to this feeling of rejection, Feldman compensates by suggesting that he would rather have been treated like Baruch Spinoza, with all the ceremony and attention that goes with a public excommunication. And he doesn't settle only for self-aggrandizement. He also manages to imply that the Modern Orthodox community that he grew up in is not only guilty of airbrushing "intermarrieds" out of pictures, but also Baruch Goldstein-esque massacres and Yigal Amir-style assassinations, implying that he himself had been (character?) assassinated in some fashion.
And why all this pain? Because he mistakenly assumed that "the individual human beings who make up the institution and community where I spent so many years of my life (would) put our longstanding friendships ahead of the imperative to define boundaries." There is no doubt that it takes a certain type of person, with a certain sense of self, to assume that he or she should or could override or undermine the defining values of a specific religious community.
It is also noteworthy that, although his then-girlfriend was ostensibly the reason for the ill-fated cropping, she is never again mentioned after the second paragraph of this lengthy piece. Nothing about her relationship to Judaism or her feelings about being cut out.
Although Feldman's piece purports to be about intermarriage, exclusion and the boundaries between the religious and secular in the Modern Orthodox community, the fact is that it is about only one thing: Noah Feldman.
And in writing only about himself, he missed an opportunity to ask some real questions.
One question he could have posed is whether or not Orthodoxy (Modern or otherwise) will be able to maintain its strident position when it comes to intermarriage. It may be that, with the Orthodox community growing in numbers and feeling a heightened sense of security that it will be able to continue to take a hard line.
At the same time, with a growing interest in conversion, Orthodoxy may be moving toward a more nuanced view of the issue. Maybe there is room to take a position that states that the issue is not as much whether someone marries a person who is Jewish but rather a person who wants to be Jewish. The desire to be Jewish is not a given for born-Jews and is sometimes to be found in greater measure in those who choose to be Jews.
Another question Feldman could have posed relates to Jewish peoplehood. What does intermarriage and the way we respond to it say for our commitment to ahavat Yisrael - loving all Jews?
A third question: Is there a way for intermarried Jews like Feldman to find a place in a Modern Orthodox community that he so obviously craves?
A fourth: How does a community that, as Feldman writes, "seeks to preserve its traditional structure (by) maintain(ing) its boundaries using whatever independent means it can muster," find a way to relate to those that have stepped outside of those boundaries?
These are some of the questions that might be asked of the Modern Orthodox community by someone who has found him- or herself on the outside looking in.Unfortunately, the only question Feldman posed was, "Isn't everyone's life a mass of contradictions?" It sounds like he may need some more time on the couch but, please, keep it out of the New York Times.
In Noah Feldman's already infamous - at least in the blogosphere - New York Times Magazine article "Orthodox Paradox" (July 22), he describes, for reasons that are still inexplicable to this writer, the experience of having his and his then-girlfriend's (now wife) photos cropped out of a school-reunion picture.
Why? Because, he maintains, she is not Jewish and the reunion was for a well-known Modern Orthodox day school he attended in Massachusetts.
I imagine that there is no therapist in the world with a couch quite as comfortable as the pages of the New York Times, and, in the course of his piece, we manage to get a clearer glimpse of what might really be going on inside his head.
Feldman is a professor of law at Harvard University, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and, of course, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. For a person of such importance it is easy to understand the pain that must come with the realization that one has been cut out of a picture with the stroke of a mouse. After all, wouldn't his high school want to show off their illustrious graduate?
In response to this feeling of rejection, Feldman compensates by suggesting that he would rather have been treated like Baruch Spinoza, with all the ceremony and attention that goes with a public excommunication. And he doesn't settle only for self-aggrandizement. He also manages to imply that the Modern Orthodox community that he grew up in is not only guilty of airbrushing "intermarrieds" out of pictures, but also Baruch Goldstein-esque massacres and Yigal Amir-style assassinations, implying that he himself had been (character?) assassinated in some fashion.
And why all this pain? Because he mistakenly assumed that "the individual human beings who make up the institution and community where I spent so many years of my life (would) put our longstanding friendships ahead of the imperative to define boundaries." There is no doubt that it takes a certain type of person, with a certain sense of self, to assume that he or she should or could override or undermine the defining values of a specific religious community.
It is also noteworthy that, although his then-girlfriend was ostensibly the reason for the ill-fated cropping, she is never again mentioned after the second paragraph of this lengthy piece. Nothing about her relationship to Judaism or her feelings about being cut out.
Although Feldman's piece purports to be about intermarriage, exclusion and the boundaries between the religious and secular in the Modern Orthodox community, the fact is that it is about only one thing: Noah Feldman.
And in writing only about himself, he missed an opportunity to ask some real questions.
One question he could have posed is whether or not Orthodoxy (Modern or otherwise) will be able to maintain its strident position when it comes to intermarriage. It may be that, with the Orthodox community growing in numbers and feeling a heightened sense of security that it will be able to continue to take a hard line.
At the same time, with a growing interest in conversion, Orthodoxy may be moving toward a more nuanced view of the issue. Maybe there is room to take a position that states that the issue is not as much whether someone marries a person who is Jewish but rather a person who wants to be Jewish. The desire to be Jewish is not a given for born-Jews and is sometimes to be found in greater measure in those who choose to be Jews.
Another question Feldman could have posed relates to Jewish peoplehood. What does intermarriage and the way we respond to it say for our commitment to ahavat Yisrael - loving all Jews?
A third question: Is there a way for intermarried Jews like Feldman to find a place in a Modern Orthodox community that he so obviously craves?
A fourth: How does a community that, as Feldman writes, "seeks to preserve its traditional structure (by) maintain(ing) its boundaries using whatever independent means it can muster," find a way to relate to those that have stepped outside of those boundaries?
These are some of the questions that might be asked of the Modern Orthodox community by someone who has found him- or herself on the outside looking in.Unfortunately, the only question Feldman posed was, "Isn't everyone's life a mass of contradictions?" It sounds like he may need some more time on the couch but, please, keep it out of the New York Times.
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