Ekev

This week’s reading sounds just like our worst nightmare of a cheder teacher. "Do this, because if you don't God will punish you and your family and lightening will strike you down as soon as you break the laws of the Torah." I guess many of us were threatened with force or punishment by parents or teachers or both and so we react very negatively when we are threatened. It is the worst possible way of getting us to do something. So why does the Torah try this tactic? Is it just for the poor, simple barbarians who would not understand any other language? Surely we should do things because we want to and because they give us pleasure or meaning or something important to our lives, not because we are scared.

I certainly agree we should serve out of love rather than fear. But fear really should mean respect. In fact "fear" is the wrong word, the wrong translation, and sends the wrong message. But "respect" is an altogether different issue. If I really love someone I should respect him too. It should be automatic. If I know that something is offensive to someone I care for, then I should try to avoid it.

Moses is so profoundly committed to Torah, not just because he has experienced God, but also because he has come from a different world and has experienced other societies and civilizations. He has seen what Egyptian society has done to the Hebrews and to others. Despite its scientific and industrial achievements, it was a morally sick society where human life was disposable.

The more passionately Moses felt about the new religion and the new constitution, the more he felt he needed to stress its importance. It was out of his passionate love that he threatened. It was his way of conveying what he cared about. His words were ways of showing how much he cared, and as a result how much he wanted his people to care too. And if they cared for him or wanted to remain loyal to his memory, what was expected of them. The threats were simply ways of conveying to them how much it all mattered to him.

Va'etchanan

This week’s reading includes the second version of the Ten Principles (misleadingly called the Ten Commandments). If you remember, Moshe came down from Sinai the first time, saw the Golden Calf, smashed the tablets of stone, and eventually went back up and received a second copy. This version differs in several relatively minor ways from the first. The principles are the same but there are interesting variations in the wording.

The most interesting one is that in the first version the instruction to keep Shabbat is phrased as "Remember" the Shabbat because God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. In the second version, read this week, the instruction is to "Keep" the Shabbat because we should remember that we were slaves in the land of Egypt. Why the differences?

One explanation of the two words "Keep" and "Remember" is to suggest that they were identical and meant the same thing. The word "Remember" should involve "keeping" and vice versa--otherwise what is the value of remembering? And indeed what is the value of keeping if not for a greater and Divine purpose?

But in truth there is a similar parallel between Creation and the Exodus. Creation implies that there are two levels to life--the active, working, material six days, which need to be combined with a spiritual dimension. The concept of withdrawal from society, not becoming dependent on the material alone, is essential for a balanced life, being part of the material world but having something more.

Slavery means being entirely at the beck and call of another human. It is another side of a material world, dominated by work and the absence of self-determination. Being free means that we are able to control more of our lives.

Of course we are all determined and controlled to some degree. But the measure of spirituality is the extent to which we can add another dimension and be fuller humans, precisely because we can combine work with spirituality.

So in fact both explanations add up to the same idea. Participate in society and be part of the material world, but try to add something more. Try to express freedom by living a fuller life. For that is what we were created for, the maximum self-expression, not just the physical.

Devarim

The last book of the Torah is a sort of last will and testament by Moshe before he dies. It is a repetition of the essential message of the Torah, its laws and the spiritual content of Jewish life.

Moshe starts by describing the sequence of events that led from Egypt to this moment, when, overlooking the Promised Land and knowing that he will not lead the people into it, he prepares the people for the future.

Why the need go over the events that they had lived through? The last time the people were about to invade, forty years earlier, there had been a major crisis. The people were clearly not ready. Moshe wants to make sure that the same thing doesn't happen this time.

But then why the need to repeat and to add some extra laws that were not mentioned the first time round? One could argue that it was just a matter of emphasis and shifting priorities. In the light of Moshe's experience over forty years, it is natural that he should focus more on matters of kingship, leadership, organization, and administration than he did in Exodus, when there were other priorities.

There is nothing wrong in shifting emphasis. Consider the phases Judaism has gone through: kings, prophets, and priests. We have worshipped in Tabernacle, Temple, study houses, and synagogues. We have been exiled to the four corners of the earth and lived under different regimes, religions, and cultures. Different aspects of Torah have assumed greater or lesser significance. The crucial issue is that the tradition remains faithful to its essential spiritual and ethical message.

And that is why Moshe keeps on reiterating in his final speeches the importance of the words tzedek (righteousness), tov (good), and yashar (noble), all words which emphasize that, important as the law is, there are moral, ethical values that underpin it, that if we forget them we will have lost our mission and our true soul.

Matot-Masei

The Midianites presented a major threat to the Children of Israel. They had rejected any form of compromise or accommodation. Balak of Moav, an ally, had brought Bilam the magician to try cursing. When the supernatural did not work to stop the advance of the Children of Israel, the Midianites turned to sexual tactics.

Actually, there is a tradition that they did so on the advice of Bilam, which would be another mark against him but doesn't seem to follow the text which has Bilam accepting that what God wants, He should get. Having experienced the special relationship between God and Israel why should he try challenging the clear will of an Almighty power he accepted? Unless you assume that, like Satan in the Book of Job, he had been "given permission" to test the Hebrews.

The Midianites sent in their sexy women. And they were hugely successful, not just sexually but in seducing many of the Hebrews into idolatry and the worship of Baal Peor. "Peor" literally means defecation. The orifices of the body were used as part of religious worship. Defecation and sexuality coming from a similar physical source are then equated within the framework of religious worship. Peor is known for its temple whores and the requirement that every woman be prepared to prostitute herself as an act of religious submission.

Of course, this approach to life fundamentally contrasts with a spiritual one in which the physical is restrained and combined with a different dimension. The fact that chieftains, the most senior level of the Hebrew hierarchy, were seduced to the point of publicly defying Moshe meant that the threat was a very real one. But does this justify the extent to which in this week's reading the Children of Israel were commanded to purge themselves of this evil influence? Even to the point of having to purify the vessels and cutlery of the Midianites?

This indeed is the origin of our custom of kashering and toveling (immersing in a mikvah) vessels and implements used for food. This origin underlines another important dimension of kashrut; we need to combine the physical with the spiritual.

We do not reject physical pleasures, but our tradition requires us to see them as part of wider, deeper, spiritual world.

Pinchas

This sedra includes the approach of Tzelafchad's daughters to Moshe regarding the matter of female inheritance. Their father had died and there were no sons. This meant that when the allocation of land was going to be made in Israel their father's family would lose out, because land was given through the males. (We may argue that this was unfair, but bear in mind that in Britain females were allowed to inherit only in late Victorian times, and in Switzerland they were given the vote barely thirty years ago).

Moshe does not know how to respond, so he consults God. This is interesting in itself because it implies that there were laws that Moshe did not know about even after the Sinai revelation. Moshe returns with a ruling: Where there are no male descendents, then women may inherit.

However, the law was qualified to restrict marriage to someone within the tribe. The reason was that otherwise the land would then follow the tribe of the husband and could create an imbalance in tribal property. This way each tribe would retain the proportion of the original allocation. The Torah does not specify this. What is made clear is that any tribal land that was sold outside of the tribe could be redeemed by a member of that tribe within the Sabbatical or the Jubilee periods. Otherwise, the land would automatically return with the 50 year Jubilee. (It seems originally that everyone was supposed to marry within the tribe. The Mishnaic festival of the 14th of Av is the anniversary of a decree allowing "intermarriage" beyond the tribal boundaries.)

There is an implicit principle in all this that no one should acquire too much of or a monopoly over lands. Of course this applied at a time when tribal land was relevant, which ended with the first exile. Similarly, the function of the Jubilee required conditions--the Sanhedrin, the Temple--that no longer apply, so we are left with the concepts and ideas that can have relevance even though the commercial world has changed.