Drashot for Shabbat Ki Tetze

The Pursuit of Justice

Friday, 31 August 2012

In America, any Jewish parent of my parents’ generation worth their gefilte fish wanted his or her children to grow up to be a doctor or a lawyer.  If the child was female, it would be good enough to marry a doctor or lawyer.  Things have changed somewhat over the years.  With more young women than men studying medicine and law, it has become more likely that one’s son will marry a doctor or lawyer.  But that’s another story, for another day.  Over the years, the notion that these are the two worthiest professional pursuits has not changed.  And it seems that this bias transcends national borders and continents.

                When I was young I didn’t understand this.  I did know that these are the two professions were where, on average, one earns the highest salaries of any professional.  But was it really all about money?  Don’t get me wrong; it’s important to do well.  Everybody should know financial security.  The ease-of-mind that comes from having the financial means to take care of their needs, and some of their wants as well.  Like many adults, I measure my financial success to some extent by the degree, to which I out-earn my parents.  I pray that my children, in their own professional lives, will far out-earn me.  No, it’s not the most important measure.  Of course happiness and personal fulfilment are more important and are not strictly dependent on wealth.  But I do hope that my children will know financial independence.  I hope that the current and persistent economic downturn will not ultimately make things more difficult for them in that area.

                As I studied Judaism and began to understand the values that are important in a Jewish worldview, I began to better appreciate the Jewish gravitation to these two professions:  medicine and the bar.

                In Jewish law and tradition, everything hinges upon life and good health.  For purposes of ensuring one’s health, most Jewish law is be pushed aside.  The minutiae of Jewish practice take a back seat to maintaining, or restoring, one’s health.  For example, one must not even consider fasting on Yom Kippur if one has any medical contraindications.  If you are taking medications that must be taken with food to be effective.  If you are hypoglycaemic or diabetic.  And so on.  And if beneficial medicine for one’s health condition contains treif ingredients, one must take it even so.  This issue comes up all the time with regard to vaccinations.  Many common vaccinations contain matter from forbidden species.  The bottom line for Jews is that we must take beneficial vaccinations and medications, regardless of the ingredients.  Additionally, all the laws of the Shabbat are pushed aside if one is engaged in the preservation of life.  And while many occupations are so engaged, medicine is probably the most obvious, and revered of these.  It is therefore no mystery – starting salaries and projected lifetime earnings aside – why most Jewish parents’ first choice is for their children to grow up to be doctors.

                I’ll never forget when Eyal was young – perhaps six or seven – and he came home to proclaim “I want to be a police officer!”

                “What a wonderful idea,” I responded. “And such a necessary and honourable profession.  What kind of police officer would you like to become?”

                Eyal looked at me, puzzled. “I mean, what branch of law enforcement would you like to go into?” I asked. “Would you rather be a neurologist, or an anaesthesiologist?”

                Please, no offense to any of my readers who are in law enforcement!  You probably want your kid to grow up to be a doctor, too!  Then there’s the law… 

                The Hebrew word we Jews assign to giving to philanthropic causes, is tzedaka, which means justice.  Not charity, which means love.  This is no accident.  At its root, our tradition prescribes taking care of the needs of the most destitute among us.  In this week’s Torah portion, we shall read about how the farmer cannot order his harvesting crews to go back over the fields, or the trees, or the vines, to get the fruit, veg and grain missed the first time.  The gleanings belong to the poorest and most destitute among us.  The orphan.  The widow.  The outcast in our midst.  Since most of us are not engaged in agricultural pursuits, we draw from this the lesson that we must give generously, in proportion to our means, to help the destitute among us.

                This doesn’t mean that we must open our wallets to panhandlers, for example.  Many of the latter are, after all, drug or alcohol abusers.  Must we reach into our pockets and sacrifice any loose change to enable someone else’s self-destructive way of life?  In a word, no.  But it is important to consider such troubled souls when planning our own systematic, philanthropic giving.  There are a number of excellent programs that reach out to addicts and alcoholics on the street, give them shelter, and offer them rehabilitation.  It may feel good on a certain level, to press a gold or silver coin into the palm of someone who is obviously suffering.  But if you really want to help them, give to the likes of the Salvation Army.  Then steer the street addict to their doors.

                When we think of the law today, we tend not to think immediately of philanthropy, or of giving to causes.  Criminal law does take into account the guilty defendant’s circumstances in sentencing.  To an extent.  But those circumstances do not come into account in deciding guilt.  Also in civil law, in disputes between parties.  What matters most are the facts of the case.  Many courthouses in my country are adorned by the image of ‘Blind Justice’ – a robed female figure holding a scale, and wearing a blindfold.  To many, this is considered the ideal in the administration of law.  But the Torah teaches somewhat differently.

                In Torah, there is an element of law whose purpose is to prevent, or act out against destitution and privation.  That’s why this week’s reading cautions about collecting debts – even though they may be valid debts – from the poor.  The poor are not entitled to an automobile.  Or a large, flat screen TV.  Or the latest smartphone.  If a poor person borrows money for such luxuries and finds himself unable to pay it back, I would not afford him any particular protection against having them repossessed.  Anybody who lends money to a poor person to buy such things is not ultimately doing him a favour.  But the poor are, or should be entitled to a roof over their heads.  Nourishment to sustain life and health.  Basic clothing to wear.  Amongst other things.

                For this reason, we have taken to use the phrase ‘Social Justice.’  It is used to refer to the quest to provide basic sustenance and opportunity to the disadvantaged.  We all benefit when the downtrodden can find ways to overcome their circumstances.  Even more so, when the downtrodden believe in their ability to overcome their circumstances. 

                The great Rambam, the Jewish philosopher of the 12^th century, understood this.  He wrote that the highest level of tzedaka is to teach a poor man an honest trade, to enable him to make a living.  He understood the connection between productive work, self-respect, and elevation of the soul.  That he considered this an essential element in the establishment of justice, is telling.

                Upon Googling ‘lawyer jokes Australia’ I had some 240,000 hits.  Therefore, I’m guessing that the legal profession’s image has suffered as much here as it has in America in recent years.  Lawyers are a species that we come to love to hate.  Doctors too, for that matter.  There were over a million hits for Australian doctor jokes.  This, while we revere both professions.  This probably reflects that we expect those whose calling is to such professions, to be miraculously free to human foibles.  And yetzer hara, the evil inclination.

                I think that, at the end of the day, we revere the professions of medicine and law because of what they stand for.  A life free of unnecessary pain and suffering.  And a life of opportunity and fairness.  To aspire to be the one of the enablers of these lofty goals for other people, is certainly a praiseworthy ambition.  Perhaps this is why even those parents who have made their own fortunes in business and entrepreneurship, would be happiest to see their kids grow up and go into the helping professions.  And especially these two.

                And it’s why we hold up these professions to the highest scrutiny, and lampoon their members when they don’t measure up. 

                The Torah makes it clear that justice is not only about the truth.  The latter is, of course, of supreme importance.  But truth is not the only element to consider, for the purposes of establishing and maintaining a just society.  Tzedaka, complete justice demands that we look beyond whodunit.  That we use the law as an instrument for lifting people up.  Including those of the most destitute circumstances.  Perhaps especially those. 

   

Model Seder at Sinai College

Let’s Use the Resources We Have

Saturday, 01September 2012

We all know the image of the Four Sons of the Passover Seder.  Sometimes I feel like the Fourth Son, the one who doesn’t even know what question to ask.  In short, sometimes I feel completely clueless.  Being a newcomer here in Australia has made me feel that way at times.

                There are the needs of which I’m aware.  For example, I know that I must file an Australian tax return.  So I asked around until I got what I thought was a good answer on how, and when, and where to file a tax return.  Clara and I are beginning to feel very much at home here, and we have the documentation to prove it.  We carry Queensland driving licenses, Australian ATM and credit cards, and our Blue Cards.  We have a tolling account with Queensland Motorways.  When using the Gateway Bridge we hear that comforting ‘beep’ from our transceiver and know that the toll has been paid.

Modern Classroom at Sinai College

But then there are the things which, if I don’t hear you talking about them, I’m left unaware.  So I was surprised this week, to learn that Jewish families here on the Gold Coast have a Jewish day school at their disposal to educate their children from Prep Year to Seventh Year.  And more than that; the school is co-located with a child care centre, run by the Jewish community, which offers an element of Jewish learning and socialisation to its early childhood curriculum.  Because bus service from the Gold Coast is available, Jewish families in our community can use these resources with a minimum of sacrifice.  I have to tell you, I was surprised and pleased.  At the same time, I was a bit dismayed that more members of this congregation do not avail themselves of these resources.

                Many of you know that Clara and I have made – and continue to make – certain sacrifices to send our children to Jewish school.  Eyal recently graduated from, and Ma’ayan is currently a senior in, a very unique and wonderful school in North Carolina, USA.  It’s a boarding school, meaning that our children have been home only for school holidays since the age of 14.  While we were until recently living in Colorado, our children were studying in North Carolina – half a continent away.  But it was worth this price – and the financial sacrifices we had to make – to send them to the American Hebrew Academy.  It’s a small high school with a dual curriculum:  a rigorous general academic experience as well as a complete Jewish studies curriculum.  But beyond the subjects taught, the American Hebrew Academy immerses its students in a Jewish environment that belongs to the children.  They are free to explore Jewish options in an atmosphere where it is normal to be Jewish.  It is hard to put a price on that.  It is well worth the sacrifice of not driving a newer automobile.  Or living in a larger home.  Or enjoying more holiday travel.

                When our children were in primary school, we were fortunate that they attended good schools.  They started in the UK, attending the small county school that was located a short walk from the estate where we lived.  In rural Suffolk, in the village of Beck Row the local school was a safe haven for children to begin to master the intricacies of literacy, numeracy and citizenship.

                After two years in England, we moved to Colorado where we lived on a military base.  The schools for the children of the families living on base were among the best in the state.  It was a well-run school district, and the educators running it were wise to partner with the military to utilise the wonderful human and material resources found on base.

                After three years, we moved to Germany.  There too, our children attended schools on the US base, remaining within the American curriculum model and system.  The schools were well-supported by the military command and especially by the parents of the children.  I was very involved in the schools, as chaplain to the faculty and in other capacities, for example judging for National History Day and for forensics competitions.

                But one aspect that always gave us a bit of consternation was that our children were almost always the only Jewish children in their respective classes.  We didn’t feel it was necessary for them to favour Jewish playmates exclusively.  And we taught them that being Jewish conveyed a certain responsibility to model the ideals of our tradition to their non-Jewish peers and associates.  We would always offer to make presentations in our children’s classes about Jewish holidays.  When a group of Ma’ayan’s non-Jewish schoolmates – and several of her teachers – sat through her bat mitzvah service, I was happy.  We didn’t want our children to be so particularistic that they avoided close friendships except with Jews.  But at the same time, we worried that they would never know the comfort of being surrounded by other children who share a lot of the concerns that, as Jewish parents, are important and unique to us.

                This is why we were excited to learn of the American Hebrew Academy, a co-educational, non-denominational Jewish boarding high school.  And why we were happy that, when we offered our children the opportunity to attend the Academy upon entering ninth year, they each embraced the idea.  Despite our living at the time back in Colorado and a day’s air travel away from the school, we were happy with the choice.  The passage of time has only acquitted us.  Our children have grown to be proud Jews, ready to represent our people in whatever endeavours they might choose.  At the same time, they have developed a certain independence that will only help them in life.

                Had there been a quality Jewish day school in Colorado Springs, we perhaps would not have focused so completely on sending our children out of town for high school.  If the benefits of a full-time Jewish education had been available without the residential aspect, we probably would have made whatever sacrifices required to send them there instead.  But one way or another, as committed Jews we agree that it is important to integrate Jewish and secular learning.  Only in that way can they begin to achieve a certain wholeness and integration of the different aspects of their selves.

                Our neighbours of other religions know and understand this as well.  Those who take their faith seriously, endeavour to send their children to schools that reflect the values that are most important to them.  One of the most difficult aspects of belonging to a minority faith is worrying about finding education for our children that reflects our essential values.

                I do not blame Jewish parents who send their children to Christian schools when Jewish schools are not available.  Often these schools are the best local options for academic rigour.  When our children attended county school in England, they were exposed to a certain amount of Christian religious programming.  Since it wasn’t coercive, it wasn’t problematic.  We didn’t have a problem explaining to our children that the Christian faith is a beautiful way to G-d, a path to goodness, but that the Jewish way is our special path.

                But when there are options that offer an integration of academic excellence and specifically Jewish values, I cannot but endorse those options.  For families on the Gold Coast, with young children up to seventh year, there are such options.  Thank G-d, we have at our disposal the wonderful Sinai College and Burbank Community Day Care.  They are not ultra-orthodox indoctrination centres.  Rather, they are places where Jewish values – free of any particular denominational bias – are part and parcel of the daily programme.  And their fee schedules make them entirely competitive with other resources currently being used by our families.

                I realise that this congregation has a demographic such that few of you have young children who might be served by Burbank Community Day Care and Sinai College.  But I also know that a number of you have grown children – and even grandchildren – who have kids in that age range.  In some cases, they live in this area but do not belong to this community, so I am not personally aware of them.  This is why I believe it is important enough to mention this at a Shabbat morning service.  There are obvious limits to the extent of ‘arm-twisting’ you can successfully carry out.  But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try!  So whether your offspring are married to other Jews or not, if they express an interest for their children to have a viable Jewish identity you can and should talk positively about this Jewish school and child care.  

                I wish it were so that a full Jewish upper school were available to our children here.  Perhaps someday it will be.  For now, we have a wonderful Jewish primary school.  Let’s do what we can to see that it is utilised by our community.   

Drashot for Shoftim - Enjoy!

William Tecumseh Sherman

Friday, 24 August 2012

On Fruit Trees and Captive Cities

We have all heard the expression ‘War is Hell.’  We might not be aware of the origins of the claim.  But we don’t even think of questioning the truth in it.  How could we?

          In this room are not many who have had direct, personal experience in war.  Sadly, the generation that knew the Second World War has largely passed on.  We still have a handful of members who either fought as combatants in that war or who were as civilians displaced from their homes and countries.  But most of us in the room this evening are too young to have first-hand experience.  For us, the stories told us by our parents – in some of our cases, by our grandparents – have had to suffice.

          There have been wars since then.  Of course, there was the Korean War.  We do have one member who is a veteran of that conflict.  And then there was Vietnam.  Before I came to Australia, I was not so aware that Vietnam was an Australian war also.  I had been aware that Australians not much older than me had fought in it.  But I had not realized that Australia’s Vietnam experience paralleled that of the USA so closely.  I did not know that, while you had a draft, it was quite selective and that many young men avoided service through various kinds of deferments.  It was this selectivity that made the lot of those who did go to Vietnam seem so unfair, just like in America.  The length and inconclusive end of the conflict made Australia shy of such entanglements for decades, just as with the USA.

Vietnam created a generational gap between my parents’ generation, and mine.  My father and the young men of his generation fought willingly in World War Two and came home with a sense of having participated in a campaign for a great and just cause.  Members of my generation who went to Vietnam often went under duress and came home traumatized for having participated in a conflict where it was never quite so clear who were the ‘Good Guys’ and who were the bad.  They fought without having a sense of being supported by their countrymen at home.  And they came home traumatised, after all their experiences, for not having brought the conflict to a conclusive end.

So War is Hell.  The first recorded use of the phrase is actually by William Tecumseh Sherman.  Many of you have heard his name.  He was a Union general in the American Civil War, fought between 1861 and 1865.  In the Southern States, those whose succession from the Union formed the Confederacy, Sherman’s name still evokes expressions of disgust.  Sherman, after all sacked Atlanta and led the march to the Atlantic Coast, on which he pursued an unbridled, scorched earth policy.  For Sherman, ‘War is Hell’ was an answer to those who criticised his displacement of a civilian population on hundreds of square miles of rural territory.  Thousands of people left homeless?  Crops destroyed in the fields, which will surely lead to famine?  War is Hell.  With the phrase, he scoffed at the notion that there is any need for taming the injury of war toward civilian populations.

And then there was Carl von Clausewitz, the ‘Mad Prussian.’  Clausewitz is the one who famously informed us that ‘War is the continuation of politics by other means.’ We can see the truth of this notion.  We might recoil from it because we want to see the resort to arms as a major phase shift in the management of a conflict, where Clausewitz seemed to see it as simply another step in the acting out of international conflict.  Less famously, Clausewitz declared: ‘Earlier theorists aimed to equip the conduct of war with principles (or) rules.  All these attempts are objectionable, however, because they aim at fixed values.  In war everything is uncertain and variable, intertwined with psychological forces and effects, and the product of a continuous interaction of opposites.’ Clausewitz viewed any tendency to set rules whose purpose is to abrogate the brutality of war, as absurd.

And then there was the Torah.  In this week’s parashah, we find some of the Torah’s laws concerning the conduct of warfare.  In particular, tomorrow morning we shall read the verse that prohibits uprooting a besieged city’s fruit trees.  The sieging army may make use of them for food, but may not destroy them.  Bal tashchit – Do Not Destroy – has become a body of law concerning constraint in war.  It has also developed into an environmental ethic, but more about that another time.

If Clausewitz had his way, there would be no fetters against the use of force for moral purposes.  His only support of proportionality was for pragmatic reasons.  But in the real world of warfare there are many constraints to the conduct of belligerents.  There are important conventions regarding the treatment of civilians, enemy combatants taken prisoner, and the enemy’s battlefield wounded.  These constraints are not universally followed, but that does not bring them into question.  When a country’s army does not follow the conventions, it produces such loathing in world opinion because the world expects them to be followed.  Somewhat.

Although much of the commonly-accepted constraints can be traced to early Christian thinkers, we find a highly-developed body of laws in the Talmud.  And the Talmud, while its text is esoteric in non-Jewish circles, is based on oral principles which certainly would have been well-known to Christianity’s founders who were, after all, Jews.

 But our reading this week sounds more than a little contradictory.  On one hand it forbids the wanton destruction of fruit trees.  On the other hand it tells us:  When you approach a town to attack it, you shall offer it terms of peace.  If it responds peacefully and lets you in, all the people present there shall serve you as forced labour.  If it does not surrender to you, but would join battle with you, you shall lay siege to it.  When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword.

Why the deep concern over trees, juxtaposed with the license to kill all the town’s men?  Is this some deep mystery to be probed, or is it just an example of the Torah’s brutality?  It’s neither.

This passage is a sermon Moses was delivering to the people Israel, concerning the conduct of the coming war of conquest against the Canaanite nations.  Some historians and archaeologists say that the war never happened; they assert that evidence outside the books of the Prophets suggest that it was more an ‘infiltration’ than a war.  True?  Personally, I’ll leave that for the historians.  The Torah’s purpose is not to teach us history, rather morality.  If that’s so, what is the moral lesson in this?

For Shlomo Goren, the first chief rabbi of the modern Israeli Defence Forces, the lesson is the danger of creeping avodah zarah – paganism.   He pointed to how the proscription of the Canaanite nations included a warning against finding attraction for their practices.  Given our history, one can see that this is a very valid concern.  We – like the rest of humanity – are easily led astray by our eyes.  That which we see, which is attractive to us, we pursue.  Often, with no constraints.  This is the essence of paganism.  It isn’t necessarily about statues.  It’s about worship of things.

So Rav Goren saw in the brutality that Moses was presumably unleashing through his sermon, a lesson in not making accommodation with the worship of material gods.  And he offered the caution that, in the modern conflict of the Israeli state with the Arab confrontation states, the Jewish fighter must not see the Arabs as an incarnation of the Canaanite nations.  He cautioned that the laws of the Canaanite conquest should be seen as a one-time event, not as guidelines for warfare against Israel’s enemies in any age.  Shlomo Goren, by the way, in his lifetime was considered to be the spiritual leader of the ‘Settler Movement.’  You know, those ‘Evil Settlers’?  The zealots who supposedly want to kill every Arab?  One can agree or disagree with the Settlers’ quest to bring a Jewish presence to every corner of the traditional Land of Israel.  One can consider them heroes, or misguided.  But they are definitely not the bloodthirsty baby killers that the Palestinian Propaganda Machine and its fans in the West, have asserted with much success.

I realize that I have barely scratched the surface of the topic of morality in war.  For that I beg forgiveness.  I guess I don’t need to beg forgiveness for not making you sit through a sermon long enough to touch all the major points of the subject...  It’s a fascinating subject, and an important one.  There is a definite Jewish ethic of warfare, and it should be an important voice among the different traditions of the world in bringing some order to the chaos.  For now, my message is that we should endeavour to know the sources – our sources – better.  I’m going to talk about another aspect of this subject tomorrow morning.  That’s not a promise, but a threat!  Shabbat shalom.

 

Carl von Clausewitz

Saturday, 25 August 2012

Living with Violence

A few weeks ago, I talked about Bal Tashchit, Do Not Destroy.  It forms an overall Jewish ethic on the conduct of warfare, but also on protection of the environment.  This week, Rabbi Gary Robuck, of North Shore Temple Emanuel, wrote an excellent drash on the aspect of protecting the environment.  If you do not subscribe to the weekly e-mailed drashot from the UPJ, you can find his drash posted on the UPJ website.  Rabbi Robuck has very thoroughly and effectively presented the import of Bal Tashchit with regard to an environmental ethic.  Therefore, I wish to continue speaking this morning about the aspect of ethics in warfare, about which I began last night.

          As you all know by now, I spent 26 years serving in the US forces – the first 14 years in cryptologic intelligence, and the final 12 years as a chaplain.  Although I was on active duty for a number of years while my country was fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I was not directly involved in either business.  I did spend some time in Iraq, supporting the troops there as a chaplain.  But the troops I worked with were not themselves front-line combatants.  Their immediate concerns had more to do with loneliness and relationship issues between Iraq and home.  They were not particularly concerned with the ethical aspects of fighting a war.

However, I did participate in Operation Eldorado Canyon, in April of 1986.  You may remember, that was an attack by the US Navy and Air Force on Tripoli, Libya.  President Reagan launched it in response to firm intelligence that agents of Libya’s now-deceased leader Muammar Qaddafi had bombed ‘La Belle’ night club in Berlin, frequented by US soldiers, ten days before.  During the operation, the US precision-bombed several high-value targets in Tripoli, including the compound of Qaddafi himself.  Qaddafi was unhurt, but the Libyans claimed – a claim never substantiated – that Qaddafi’s adopted infant daughter was killed in the bombing. My own role was as an analyst, sifting through reports of changing air order of battle to brief aircrews preparing for intelligence-gathering sorties. 

When damage assessments began coming in, there was a certain glee among the crews and we ground support personnel alike.  Nobody was particularly troubled by the report that we’d hit Qaddafi’s compound.  It is illegal according to the conventions of war, to target senior political leaders for assassination.  However, in the minds of all the guys with whom I worked, the raid on Qaddafi’s compound was ‘just deserts’ for his personally ordering the bombing that killed three Americans and injured 229 in that Berlin disco.  Nobody in my unit would have mourned Qaddafi’s passing then, and none of the guys I worked with then – or the residents of Lockerbie, Scotland for that matter, mourned his lynching by Libyan rebels last year.

So it is widely accepted that there are rules in the conduct of warfare.  But at the same time, the rules are easily set aside if the situation warrants.  In 1986, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Reagan thought the actions of Qaddafi as a terror mastermind, overruled any protection that he may have been afforded under the conventions of war and politics. 

Because the laws can be set aside, people who are decidedly Doves tend to pooh-pooh the very notion that there are laws governing the conduct of war.  They can point to ample situations where leaders simply set them aside, or else troops in the field violate them in the passion of the moment.

Some would argue that having laws to govern something that is essentially ungovernable is a sham.  In the case of war, having such conventions tends to obscure the reality that war is brutal and that cannot be changed.  ‘Pretending’ that war can be regulated, to be made ‘nicer,’ (this argument goes) makes it politically easier for a leader to commit to go to war.  I would argue against the position on every point.  First of all, war is not ungovernable.  Compare the customs of war as practiced in the medieval world, with those practiced by sovereign nations engaged in warfare in our age.  Ask someone who was a prisoner of war.  Barney Barnett, one of our members was a POW of the Germans during World War Two while serving in the British Army.  Although his experience as a captive of the Germans could not be called pleasant, he suffered no particular abuse.  The Wehrmacht treated their Western prisoners far better than they treated POWs from the Red Army, not to mention the Jews and other ‘enemies of the state.’  Why the difference?  Because the Germans were blinded by their racism.  Not only toward Jews; they saw the Slavs as Untermenschen.  So they abused the Soviet prisoners of War, using them as slave labour and even integrating them with other targeted peoples in death camps such as Auschwitz.  But enemies whom they respected – the Americans as well as the British and their Commonwealth partners – they tended to treat according to the conventions.

 The Israeli Defence Forces, coming from the Jewish state have a highly developed sense of battlefield ethics, and infractions of the law by their own soldiers are dealt with most harshly.  What’s interesting – nay, upsetting – is that Israel of all nations is seen as an unbridled aggressor in the world forum.  But the Israelis put themselves in danger time and again, in order to carry out operations with the least possible collateral damage.  I don’t expect the Palestinians to concede that.  But I do expect the BBC and other organs of the Western Press to acknowledge it.

Rabbinic law contains much legislation on when it is permissible to go to war, on the limits of the application of force, who can be conscripted for war, on the treatment of captives and on the treatment of the remains of the enemy’s battlefield dead.  Some readers express a critical view of the Torah’s even allowing the Jews to go to war.  Why not outlaw it?

The answer is the Rabbis’ expression:  The Torah is to live by, not to die by.  If Jewish law required a pacifistic response to all violence against the Jews, there would soon be no Jews left alive to live by the Torah.  The world of 3,500 years ago was no less dangerous than that of today.  Against certain enemies you can lay down your arms.  When Gandhi pursued a policy of non-violence, his ‘enemy’ was Great Britain:  not unimpeachable for sure, but one of the greatest forces for good in the world’s history.    When Martin Luther King, Jr. asked Black America to forswear violence, likewise his ‘enemy’ was one of the most moral nations every known.  When each of these great men suggested that the Jews should have taken a stand of absolute non-violence against Nazi Germany, they both showed themselves to have an incredible blind spot and flawed thinking.

To apply this analogy to a contemporary conflict, I quote the words of Dennis Prager, which ring true:  If the Palestinians would lay down their arms, tomorrow there would be a Palestinian state.  If the Israelis would lay down their arms, tomorrow there would be no Israel.

The reality that we live with is that our world is a dangerous place.  Nation will continue to lift up sword against nation.  The words of the Prophet Isaiah predicting the contrary have not yet come true.  It is therefore not incumbent upon us to beat our swords into ploughshares.  Yet, as I quoted General William Tecumseh Sherman last night, War is Hell.  We know that we must ameliorate the horrors of war if we are to survive with our humanity intact.  Thus Jewish Law, and its antecedents in younger world faiths, prescribes boundaries.  Sometimes those boundaries will be crossed.  But that does not call into question the ongoing effort to apply laws to the conduct of warfare, and to influence the other nations of the world to accept and abide by those laws.

Prophet Isaiah

May we see peace and security in our lifetime.  May we experience only a world where one can travel freely across borders, reaching out in friendship to the other nations of the world, even when we are in conflict with them.  But may we never let down our guard, our readiness to defend freedom and fight tyranny.  War is Hell, but a world in which tyranny prevails is worse.   

Drashot for Parashat Re'eh - Enjoy!

Do the Right Thing

Friday, 17 August 2012

Over the years, as one of very few rabbis wherever I happened to be living and working, I’ve usually received frequent requests to speak to groups of non-Jewish adults or youth.  Particularly youth of high school age, either in a church or school setting.  I always accept such invitations if I possibly can; I consider it a privilege to represent the Jewish people by conducting a serious conversation about religious issues with those schooled in a different tradition.  And perhaps I am a bit naïve, but I believe that education can be, and often is a powerful weapon against prejudice.  With regard to Jews, there are so few of us in our world that many of our neighbours go through life without knowingly encountering a Jew on a personal level.  Often, as a result they hold negative – and false – stereotypes of Jews all their lives because they don’t have the knowledge to overcome those stereotypes.  So this week, when a religion teacher from The Southport School rang me up to request a couple of appearances before twelfth-year students in his school, I accepted immediately.

                Usually, such requests come carte blanche – open to whatever I might want to prepare and say.  I usually arrive without an agenda, and the students’ questions quickly steer the conversation into interesting ground – or not.  In this case, the teacher had a very specific subject in mind.  He wanted me to address Jewish views on Good and Evil.

                Of course, Jewish ‘views’ on any subject must by necessity be taken as a plural.  We are, after all not an ‘orthodox’ faith but an ‘orthoprax’ one.  This is confusing, because one thing that most people do know about Judaism is that the most traditional form thereof is called, ‘Orthodox Judaism.’ But I tell people that ‘Orthodox’ is something of a misnomer since the main tenet of Orthodox Judaism is conformity of practice, not doctrine.  Yes, there are certain dogmas that are considered essential to Orthodox Judaism.  But in Orthodox – and indeed all – Judaism the key is not doctrinal agreement, the way it is in so much of the Christian world.

                But having made the above disclaimer, Jewish views on Good and Evil are fairly predictable.  We teach that there is both Good and Evil extant in the world.  The human being is neither; in any given situation we have the capacity to act in such a way as to bring a Good result, or in such a way as to bring an Evil result.  Sometimes – actually, quite often – the Evil result is accidental.  As Dennis Prager points out, and accurately I believe, more Evil is brought into the world by those with good intentions, than by those with evil intentions.  He offers as an example Communism, arguably one of the worst experiments of the Twentieth Century.  Nobody who has read anything about the histories of the Soviet Union or the various People’s Republics of the Twentieth Century can deny the amount of suffering brought to so many hundreds of millions of people by proponents of this system, whose ideology sounds noble enough.  The problem is that nobility and the centralised power of the totalitarian state are essentially incompatible.  Where the state has only limited power over people’s lives there is inevitably suffering, but never on such a scale as exists in totalitarian states.  This, completely irrespective of the system’s overall ideology.  Absolute power corrupts…absolutely.

                Often, though we make decisions and act in ways that can be predicted to bring an Evil result.  And that does not make a person Evil by nature, it simply means that they could have chosen better in the specific situation in question.  But confronted with a choice, they chose a specific path.  Instead of looking at the choices available and deliberately choosing the one that could be predicted to bring the more upright result, they followed some other instinct – usually their own selfish desires – even though they knew it was not the best choice.  It was what they wanted at the moment.

                We have an expression:  Mitzvah goreret mitzvah, aveirah goreret aveirah.  One mitzvah brings another, and one transgression brings another.  In other words, when we purposely do the right thing, we in effect train ourselves to do the right thing the next time.  One mitzvah brings another because we get in the habit of doing mitzvoth.  On the other hand, if we decide to do other than the right thing, the danger is not only the specific act but that we are training ourselves not to consider the Good the next time we act.   One transgression trains us to allow ourselves to transgress the next time.

                This is why this week’s Torah portion begins with the charge:  See, this day I set before you blessing and curse:  blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your G-d that I enjoin you this day; and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God.

We’re used to seeing such juxtapositions placed before us in the Torah.  Blessing and curse.  Good and Evil.  Life and death.  And in each case, we’re urged to choose the better path.  And each choice that we make, in each instance where we have such a choice, develops in us the character that will influence our choices afterwards.  Perhaps we chose what we desire at any given moment, knowing that there is something ethically problematic about that choice and there are no obvious negative consequences.  In other words, we ‘get away; with it.  We’ve just conditioned ourselves to make a similarly problematic choice the next time, and we’ve increased the chances that we will.  If we make the Good choice, even though it might now be what our heart desires at the moment, we have conversely conditioned ourselves to make the Right choice, even though it’s the difficult one, the next time.

This is why Judaism’s view of Good and Evil is so predicated on the individual choices that we make, all day long, day after day.  We do not see the human being as inherently evil and in need of some radical act to find redemption.  On the other hand, we do not see man as being inherently good, so he can just relax and enjoy himself.  Rather, we are capable of both Good and Evil.  Influences toward both paths exist within and without.  Those within us, we label yetzer harah and yetzer hatov – the evil urge and the good urge.  Life would be so much easier if we only had the good urge.  But if we’re honest, our experience tells us that both are there, fighting as it were for predominance.

Tonight we enter Shabbat which is also Rosh Chodesh Elul.  We enjoy our customary Shabbat repose, and take our regular opportunity to use this leisure to contemplate our lives.  This is also the beginning of the month which serves as the ‘countdown’ to Rosh Hashanah and is, traditionally a time of stock-taking, a time when we examine the inner man and begin to ask ourselves what kind of person we would like to grow to become in the next year.

As we enter this all-important month, then, I urge you to consider the nature of Good and Evil.  We can roll our eyes at yet another advice to make every choice count.  Or, we can resolve to make every choice count.  That is the choice that is before us today.  May we have the clarity of vision, and the resolve to make the best choice.

Don’t be a Tightwad with your Family

Saturday, August 18 2012

Back in my home country, in the United States, the signs of the times are clear.  In virtually every state, in virtually every city, one sees adults standing at motorway off-ramps and other key highway intersections, holding up signs that read:

                Unemployed (so many) months.  Need work.

                In neighbourhoods both prosperous and modest, there is an almost constant flow of people looking for work – any work, and usually unskilled – around other people’s homes.  On main thoroughfares, one sees middle-aged men dressed up in silly costumes to attract attention, waving signs advertising this or that business.  It is praiseworthy to do any work that is not legally or ethically problematic, in order to meet one’s financial obligations.  Still, it is hard not to feel sad at the spectacle of grown men wearing chicken suits, or dressed as the Statue of Liberty.

                America the mighty has been brought down to a level of national penury unknown since the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  A worldwide economic meltdown due to the rising costs of fossil fuels, hit my country hard starting in 2007.  Paired with that was a bursting of the bubble into which housing prices had risen.  Government policies both fuelled and burst the bubble.  Since then, uncertainty and jitters by the business community and consumers, over government policy to come have stymied recovery.  The result is the creation of seemingly-permanent unemployment of well into the double digits.

                It is human nature to indulge in a little schadenfreude – either secretly or openly – when a perennial winner becomes a loser.  But right now, most of the world is not cheering America’s economic woes.  Most of the developed world is suffering right along with the USA, and many of our friends in Europe and elsewhere are doing even worse.  Australia seems to have avoided the worst of the downturn, but here too there’s enough suffering to go around.

                Amidst all this woe, we read this morning from Parashat Re’eh:

                If, however there is a needy person among you, one of your kinsmen in any of your settlements in the land that the Lord your G-d is giving you, do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kinsman.  Rather, you must open your hand and lend him sufficient for whatever he needs.  Beware lest you harbour the base thought, “The seventh year, the year of remission is approaching,” so that you are mean with your needy kinsman and give him nothing.  He will cry out to the Lord against you, and you will incur guilt.  Give to him readily and have no regrets when you do so, for in return the Lord your G-d will bless you in all your efforts and in all your undertakings.  For there will never cease to be needy ones in your land, which is why I command you:  open your hand to the poor and needy kinsman in your land.

                Taken literally, this means that one should not curtail one’s lending of money to one’s disadvantaged kinsmen because the Sabbatical Year – when debts are erased – is approaching.  Even as the seventh year approaches, there are still poor and needy out there who need assistance.  As our text asserts, and quite accurately: “There will never cease to be needy ones.”

                The challenge is to apply this instruction, since the law of the Sabbatical year – which only applies in the Land of Israel, and some would say only while the Temple was standing – is not something we practice.  I propose that we apply Rabbi Ishmael’s Fifth Principle, of his Thirteen Principles for the Explanation of the Torah.  He elucidates them in his Baraita that has come to be used as an introduction to the Sifra.  That principle is U’frat u’khlal – drawing a general principle from a situation-specific instruction.

                The Prat then, is the specific instruction to not curtail one’s lending to the poor as the Sabbatical Year approaches.  The Klal is the general principle of not refusing to lend to a poor kinsman because of a general fear that they won’t ultimately be able to pay you back.  When approached by a needy kinsman for a loan of a modest sum which will with reasonable certainty be used by the recipient for basic needs, one should lend without hesitation.  This, even though you’re sure he’ll never be able to pay you back.  Who knows; he may surprise you and actually pay you back.  But just because you’re sure he won’t, doesn’t mean you should give and specify that it’s a gift.  A gift was not requested.  To ask for a loan is not the same as to ask for a gift.  Many are those who can work their way past the embarrassment of asking for help if that help is understood to be a loan, but who would have a more difficult time conceding that they will never repay it.  In this case, it is good to apply the principle:  let it be understood as a loan, even if you absolutely sure it will never be repaid.  And if in fact it turns out that the recipient cannot repay the loan in a reasonable time, be willing to ‘write off’ the loan in consideration for any alternate repayment he may offer – for example, to work it off, even though you need no particular work done by this relative.

                I’m sure that these words resonate with many of you this morning.  Many parents are asked by their grown children at various times for help in the form of a loan.  Of course, we want to help our children while they establish themselves in their own right.  Unspoken is that, if we refuse them something they’ve had the courage to ask for, they will distance themselves from us and we will not enjoy the society of our children and grandchildren as we age.  Many of you have been ‘hit up’ by your children, and many of you have given to them, even if you weren’t sure it was what you wanted to do.

                I talk specifically about our children, because financial duress is so much a generational phenomenon.  Even those of us who have not been spectacularly successful find ourselves enjoying more financial independence as we grow older, earn more, and learn to better manage our finances.  It is easy to accuse younger generations of sloth and excess.  There may be some truth to such accusations.  But some degree of financial instability is a function of young adulthood.  It is easier to waste, when one has most of one’s working life ahead to correct one’s mistakes.

                But I don’t think we can draw any inference from our text, that we should feel compelled to enable close relatives to invest unwisely, or to buy luxury goods, or to avoid having to develop their own sense of thrift.  Surely, many requests for cash from children or close relatives fall into these categories.  Many of us have felt, at one time or another, that in acceding to requests for cash we were thereby helping the requestor to avoid learning an important economic lesson that would serve him well in life.  I’m not talking about those kinds of requests here.

                Clara and I have not been spectacular earners.  We do okay.  But our thriftiness and self-control regarding consumer spending has given us the freedom to save for the inevitable rainy day.  We have also loaned considerable money to relatives.  The asker always needed it critically, for basic living expenses or to keep a business out of bankruptcy.  Sometimes the loan was paid back, and sometimes it was not.  If not, we never hounded the relative for repayment. When agreeing to make the loan, we had already conceded in our minds that we would probably never see repayment.  So if we were repaid we took that as an unexpected gift.

                One of the casualties of the modern Welfare State has been the breakdown of the extended family.  With the government’s social safety net, the family do not need one another for basic, mutual support as in the past.  For those without extended family able to help one another, the Welfare State has undeniably been a godsend.  At the same time, the weakening of extended family structures has been an unfortunate by-product.

                It is undoubtedly a pain to be ‘hit up’ for loans from grown children, siblings, or other relatives.  Most of us, even if we have been financially successful, have earmarked most of our cash assets for specific purposes.  Those purposes are all valid purposes, and we should after all get to enjoy the wealth – whether great of modest – that we’ve been able to amass.  But we must never forget that blood runs thicker than water.  Even though the Nanny State has desensitized us to our sense of mutual responsibility in our families, we should consider it a gift when we are privileged to help our kinsman.  Finding a balance between helping people to meet basic needs, and financing frivolous spending, can be difficult.  So can finding the balance between helping and hindering through largess.

                The Torah does not take into account the Nanny State.  Instead it presupposes extended families serving as mutual support systems, as the first defence against poverty and penury.  Even the Torah understands that sometimes these family systems will break down; it prescribes fixes for such cases.  But when we allow the mindset of mutual support to break down to the point of being unwilling to help our kinsman, we all suffer.  May we be infused with wisdom as we navigate the balance between mutual assistance, and dependence. 

This Week's Drashot - Enjoy!

To Be Stiff-necked

Friday, 10 August 2012

          We idealise childhood as a time of innocence.  But if we’re honest, we acknowledge that children can be exceptionally cruel toward one another.  Every parent in this room has, at one time or another consoled a child who came home from school and told you that he had been bullied or taunted with hurtful names.  Most of us, no matter how far past the age of 50 we are, can remember such incidents from our own childhood.  In the deep recesses of our memories, we remember being called names.  And we probably still remember how our parents taught us to respond.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me.

          We would say it in a mocking chant, as if to belittle the one tormenting us.  Remember?

          Hey, you’re a little pipsqueak!  I’ll bet your mommy has to tuck you into bed every night with a warm glass of milk!  You’ll never be a real man!

          Sticks and stones may break me bones, buts words will never harm me!

          There’s only one problem with this response.  It is patently false.

          The truth is that hurtful words or names can be very harmful.  If you remember what names they called you, 40 or 50 or even more years on, then you know what I mean.  What’s more, the Sho’ah taught us that hurtful words are a first step toward physical harm. 

If you can say things that denigrate an entire class of people, and are not seriously challenged, then eventually you can bring great bodily harm to them with little protest from anybody else.  This is why the Nazis, while being most assuredly an anti-Christian movement, drew upon centuries of the Christian church’s teaching about the Jews’ ‘loathsomeness’ to immunize the European peoples to their anti-Jewish programme.

But it isn’t necessary to try to create a Final Solution to hurt someone else.  We know that names, even if they do not lead the name-caller to do us bodily harm, sting and hurt.

In this week’s Parashah, we read of G-d’s calling us a very familiar name:

“The Lord further said to me, ‘I see that this is am k’shei oref, a stiff-necked people.’” (Deuteronomy 9.13)

So G-d thinks we’re stiff-necked.  We’ve been called worse.  What does it mean, though to be stiff-necked?

In one of my favourite movies, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Tula complains about her father’s unyielding attitude.  I’m the man, the head of the house! Tula, mocking her father, complains to her mother, Maria.  Maria, in turn, informs her daughter:  The man may be the head, but the woman is the neck!  And she can turn the head any way she wants!  But when the neck won’t turn, then the head remains pointed resolutely in one direction.

Isn’t stiff-necked a condition from which we may suffer, for example if we sleep in a cold room and wake up unable to flex our neck?  It can be a painful affliction, because to turn one’s neck to and fro is a natural movement and, if it resist, it will hurt.  But to be stiff-necked in this way is not a wilful affliction.  So what does it mean?

Stiff-necked, in the context of the verse I cited means ‘stubborn.’  It means being unwilling to change, unwilling to yield to authority.

Every parent has struggled with a stubborn child, a child who had a strong will and was difficult, if not impossible to move in a different direction.  That child frustrated the parent to no end.  Especially if the stiff-necked child is a teenager or even over the age of majority, there are few sanctions a parent can apply to modify the child’s behaviour.  The parent may be forced to stand back and watch the child hurt himself or, G-d forbid, ultimately self-destruct.

This is the characteristic that Moses is talking about when he asserts that G-d has told him that the people he leads is stiff-necked.  It is meant to be taken as a negative trait.  It means they are individualistic, and resist authority – even that of G-d, who has freed them from Egyptian bondage and performed many signs and wonders for them.

While it is most certainly a sign of a difficult character to be completely stubborn, the opposite is also quite undesirable.  Have you ever known someone with no backbone?  Someone who yielded to every wind that blew no matter from which direction?  Someone who always acted on circumstances, never on principles?  If you’ve met such a person, he was probably a politician!  The very word politician is almost universally considered a negative.  It means someone who will say or do anything to get what he wants.  You’ll never know what he really stands for.  In reality, he stands only for himself.

So some stubbornness is a good trait, and we need a little stiff-neckedness to live a meaningful and moral life.  If we’re honest, we want our children to display some stiff-neckedness at times.  By resisting using illegal drugs, even though everybody is doing it.  By resisting binge drinking, even though everybody is doing it.  By resisting promiscuous sex, even though everybody is doing it.  By not stealing, for example pirating software or music media, even though everybody is doing it.  We want that everybody to not include our child.

As you know, our Torah is considered a holy book by our Christian neighbours also.  This is a good thing; we know that the Torah’s moral message is universally applicable.  We don’t care much if our Christian neighbours eat prawns or not, but we do care that they agree with us about the great ethical principles taught in the Torah.  Sometimes they use the Torah only as an historical context for the appearance of their Messiah, but that’s another issue.  They will read the account of the stiff-necked Jews and see themselves as comparing favourably.  They often call us stiff-necked because we don’t see Jesus of Nazareth as the saviour of humanity, and therefore don’t join them in their quest to spread the Good News.  That we don’t abandon our Jewish heritage to join them.

There’s an example of being stiff-necked as a good thing.  If we weren’t stiff-necked in this way, there would be no more Jews.  Since you’re here in shul tonight, I think I can safely assume that you agree that would not be good.

So being stiff-necked is a two-edged sword.  It can be an impediment to the Good Life if it causes us to be unteachable, if it makes us so rebellious that we refuse to consider the wise words of others.  But some degree of stiff-neckedness is a good thing.  It makes us steadfast against the winds that buffet us from all sides  The winds that conspire to overturn our values or get us to turn away from our heritage.

As we celebrate Shabbat together, may be resolve to be stiff-necked enough to stand up for what we believe, and may we pray that our children will do likewise.  May we pray that our stiff necks will help us to live lives consistent with the values we hold dear.  May we pray that we will not, however, be so stiff-necked as to be unable to accept correction and instruction.

To Every Action there is a Reaction

Saturday, 11 August 2012

Many of us have, at one time or another read the cute essay by Robert Fulghum, entitled All I Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten.  It was published in a book of essays by the author, under the same title, in 1988.  There certainly is a lot of truth to the author’s assertion.  Most of what is important in life came to us under the rubric of ‘basic rules for living’ that we learned already in kindergarten.  Sharing, being kind to one another, cleaning up after themselves, and living "a balanced life" of work, play, and learning.  If only we adults would keep these basic rules in mind and follow them, life would be so much better.  Of course, those are all important rules, and we do well to follow them all our lives.  But there are other important rules in life that, if we’d stopped our education after kindergarten, we never would have learned.  The rule that I’d like to highlight this evening, comes from Newtonian physics.

          Now, Newtonian physics doesn’t quite have the simple elegance of the rules we learned in kindergarten.  But Newton’s Third Law is so elegant and applicable to everyday life that many of us can reach into the deep, dark recesses of our memory and quote it.  To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  In the ensuing years we have learned to apply this lesson from physics to other areas of life.  The lesson, in its broadest sense, is this:  Every act has consequences.  Internalising this principle, and applying it to everyday life, is one of the important chores associated with becoming an adult.  We can understand the stories of our lives to be a series of “if – then” statements in action.  We understand non-acceptance of this principle to be a mark of childhood.  If we’re honest, many of us must admit that this was not the easiest of life’s lessons to learn.

My brother once told me a cute story about his first daughter, my niece, Anne.  They had taken her out for ice cream for the first time.  Previously, they had only eaten ice cream at home.  Little Annie was a big fan of ice cream – no surprise!

          So the little girl wolfed down her cup full of ice cream, down to the very bottom.  And when there was none left, she registered surprise on her little face.  How could it possibly run out??!  And then her face screwed up into a mask of outrage, and she began crying!

          Obviously, my niece had not until that point learned the important law of cause and effect.  If you finish your ice cream, then there isn’t any more.  And that was apparently a painful lesson for a one-year-old to learn!

          This week’s Torah portion presents a big “if – then” statement, found in chapter 11 of Deuteronomy:

          “If you obey the commandments that I enjoin upon you this day, loving the Lord your God and serving Him with all your heart and soul, then I will grant the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the late.  You shall gather in your grain and wine and oil.  I will also provide grain in the field for your cattle, and thus you shall eat your fill.  Take care not to be lured away to serve other gods and to bow to them.  For then the Lord’s anger will flare up against you, and He will shut up the skies so that there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its produce and you will soon perish from the good land that the Lord is assigning to you.”

          Those of us who were raised in the more traditional sectors of Judaism, or who visit more traditional shuls on occasion, recognise the passage; it is the second of the three paragraphs of the traditional Shema, excised in earlier Reform prayer books, but included in the latest iteration, Mishkan T’filla-World Union Edition.  I didn’t know that the paragraph was in there until just the other day, when it was pointed out to me that it appears on page 66, in the weekday morning service.

When in rabbinical school I asked one of my teachers why the passage had been cut out from Reform liturgy, he minced no words:  It presents a worldview that is unacceptable to modern Jews.  The idea that agricultural abundance is a sign that a nation is obeying G-d, and that drought is a sign of disobedience, is anathema.  It opens the door for looking upon any and every people suffering the misfortunes of drought, and thinking:  they brought it on themselves by disobeying G-d.  This is not, the teacher asserted, a healthy view to reinforce.

          Perhaps not.  When nations are beset by natural disasters, we should be charitable and find within us sympathy and want to help.  To dismiss, for example the chronic droughts of sub-Saharan Africa as a consequence of poor stewardship over the land is unhelpful on a certain level.  If we focused on fault, we would not be inclined to help.  But at the same time, if we deny man’s role then we are not telling the truth.

So for the sake of the meta-message – that our actions bring consequences – not getting lost, we should not gloss over the facts.  And that our actions bring consequences is undeniably an important life lesson.  It’s something we must master if we’re ever going to “grow up.”  It is true on the personal level.  The decisions we make, the actions we take largely determine our own ultimate destiny.  Oh, it’s true that luck plays a hand.  But our actions can easily overpower the forces of luck.  Good decisions can negate bad luck, and of course bad decisions can negate good luck.  But what’s true of our personal destinies is also true, in spades, of our national destinies.

And stating the lesson in terms of the land’s health provides an important lesson in in the physical realities of life on our fragile planet.  The things we do today, the lifestyle decisions we make, can and will impact on the earth tomorrow.  Droughts don’t just “happen”; they and other climactic irregularities are the result of a nexus of influences, including the way we live, the way we waste or husband our natural resources.

If you haven’t already figured it out, I’m not among of the Global Warming Panic crowd.  The earth’s climate has a way of cooling and warming in periodic but irregular cycles, regardless of what we do or don’t do.  Remember how Greenland got its name – it was land of verdant greenness, where now it is a land of ice and snow and chilling winds.  The level of man-made carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere did not cause that!  So I’m not here to tell you that, if we don’t reduce our carbon footprint and fast, we’re toast.  But having said that, there’s no denying that, over time, we do influence climate and are partly responsible for the way things change.  One need not be a “tree hugger” to recognise this.

          And guess what?  The law of preserving the earth is already considered to be one of the 613 commandments in the Torah.  Bal tashchit (Do not destroy) is found in Deuteronomy 20, in Parashat Mishpatim which we shall read in several weeks’ time.  Bal Tashchit is overtly a prohibition against uprooting and destroying the fruit trees of a besieged city.  But from this simple passage, the Rabbis derive a few broad principles.  One of them is that one does not waste resources needlessly.  It forms the basis of a Jewish environmental ethic.  It doesn’t inform us that we need to maintain, or return to a primitive lifestyle.  It does inform us that we should never waste resources needlessly, that we should temper our enjoyment of the environment with an impetus to preserve it.

          Do we recognise Bal Tashchit as not only a good principle but a Divine imperative to conserve and preserve that which G-d has generously given us?  If so, then Deuteronomy 11 becomes an important passage to remember and consider.  Disobedience of G-d’s law concerning the preservation of the earth does bring consequences. If we wish to live and flourish and prosper, we and all peoples would be well-advised to take care of our environment.  If we do not, if we serve and bow down to the god of unbridled consumption, then the consequence may very well be as predicted in this week’s parashah.

broken, can lead to environmental desolation.