Parshas Pinchas (5768)
The period which we are now about to begin is
traditionally known as Bein Hametzarim, "within the
days of distress", and is sometimes referred to
as "The Three Weeks". It starts this coming Sunday on
the Seventeenth day of the Hebrew month of Tamuz,
and it ends on the saddest day in the Jewish
calendar, Tisha B'av, the Ninth day of the Hebrew
month of Av (this year it falls out on August 10th).
This three-week period is a time of national mourning
for the Jewish people, as many terribly tragic events in
our history occurred during this time. Moses broke the
Ten Commandments on the Seventeenth of Tamuz,
the walls of the city of Jerusalem were breached, both
the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem were
destroyed on Tisha B'av (and all that remains of the
Temple today is the Kosel Hama'aravi - the Western
Wall), the wicked king Apustomus burned the Holy
Torah, the Expulsion from Spain was set for this time
in 1492, and the list goes on and on. And, ultimately,
our being exiled and dispersed among the nations
only to be persecuted and tortured for the last 1900
years, is a direct result of the Romans destroying the
Temple and expelling all the Jewish people from the
land of Israel during this period in the year 70 C.E.
One of the recurring themes of this three-week period,
and of Tisha B'av in particular, is the Jewish nation's
glorification of its past, and our desire and longing to
go back to the way things used to be. In one of the last
verses in the Book of Eichah (Lamentations), a book
written by the prophet Jeremiah and read publicly in
the synagogue on Tisha B'av, we beseech G-
d: "Hashiveinu ... chadeish yameinu kikedem - Bring
us back to You, G-d, and we shall return, renew our
days as of old." In this one verse, the Jew in the
Diaspora expresses his heartfelt desire to go back to
the way things were in the old days - even as far back
as 2000 years ago! - when we had our beloved
Temple in Jerusalem, and when life was more
meaningful and more spiritual.
It's almost as though we are saying that the earlier
generations were "ahead" of us, and that we wish we
could go back in time to live life as our ancestors did,
in full view of the Temple and in a spiritually and
morally superior environment. Which is all kind of
ironic, if you think about it. Because it is this type of
thinking which flies directly in the face of the modern
thinking of "post-Enlightenment" man living in the "Age
of Reason".
"ENLIGHTENED MAN" AND HIS PRIMITIVE
ANCESTORS
You see, one of the most popularly held assumptions
in the Western world today is that our generation is
intellectually superior and far more sophisticated than
generations past. As Rabbi Uri Zohar writes in his eye-
opening book, My Friends, We Were Robbed!: "We
moderns have a tendency when we consider the
generations of past ages to view them as one big
unbroken block. This block is made up of people who
were, by and large, fairly primitive, even childlike, in
their handling of the most basic existential questions
of day-to-day life. We view ourselves, by contrast, as
far more sophisticated in our handling of those same
questions. In our thinking, this is due in large part to
our good fortune of having been born during a period
of history where most people are no longer bound by
the stifling shackles of religiosity. We also assume
that all previous generations belonged to the
thankfully-no-longer-extant world of religious wars,
doctrinaire thinking, dogmatism, the suppression of
scientific inquiry, the Middle Ages, priests,
Inquisitions, and celibacy."
This is but one of many "beliefs" that are held by
modern man, some of which are accepted with what
could almost be described as simple faith by our
present age.
It would do us well to drag this particular assumption
out of the serenely unexamined confines of cultural
and historical bias, and to hold it up to the clear light of
logic.
The reason why this is so important, in my opinion, is
because it is precisely this notion that past
generations were intellectually and morally inferior
and less sophisticated than our own generations,
which serves to undermine the very basis and
foundation of Judaism, making it virtually
meaningless and hopelessly outdated to the modern
Jew. Life-impacting questions such as: Does G-d
really exist? Is the Torah true? What does it mean to
be Jewish? Does "being Jewish" obligate anything?
etc. etc. are, for the most part, never asked. And if the
questions should be raised, they are treated with a
skepticism that renders them and the answers given
to them largely irrelevant.
It would certainly seem that the existence of G-d, the
historical validity of Revelation, and other related
subjects should rank high on the agenda of topics that
serious and rational men should consider. Yet, for the
most part, the modern Jew estranged from his faith
continues along in his culturally-induced apathy and
remains ever reluctant to search for the bases of his
mass-crowd "skepticism".
What, then, are some of the factors contributing to the
now widely held assumption that we are far greater
than the ancients, and that any doctrine which comes
from the "primitive" Middle Ages or earlier - and even
something as potentially significant as a Divine
Revelation and the Receiving of the Torah - is of
necessity philosophically backward and is not to be
taken too seriously?
WHERE DO OUR "ASSUMPTIONS" COME FROM?
To be sure, there are many obvious things one can
point to which seem to place those living in the Middle
Ages or earlier at an intellectual and moral
disadvantage when compared with twentieth-century
man. We live longer and healthier lives, due to our
progressive medicine and other technological and
social advances which serve to increase the quality of
our lives. We seem to be far more tolerant and peace-
loving than our ancestors were. We also seem to be
far more rational and open-minded than our
superstitious, close-minded ancestors living in
Prague or Warsaw in the 1500's. And there are other
arguments as well.
But I am willing to bet that a large part of this prevailing
way of thinking is based on ignorance and on the
desire to, as Ortega y Gasset once put it, "march
through life together, along the collective path,
shoulder to shoulder, wool rubbing wool, and head
down". In other words, many of us are caught up in a
way of thinking that we inherited from the previous
generation, who in turn inherited it from their parents,
without giving much thought to the origin or truth of
those assumptions.
It would be nice and neat for us to discredit the Jews
of earlier generations, who believed in the Existence
of G-d and in the Revelation, as being backward and
primitive and philosophically unsophisticated. That is
exactly what the French philosophes did in the salons
of Paris in the early 1800's when they set about
dismantling the foundation of religion, declaring the
dawn of a new "Age of Reason and Truth", in which
humanity alone would solve the world's problems,
freed from the shackles of G-d and religion.
But even a peripheral study of the events of the past
century will show just how wrong these misguided
intellectuals were. More human beings were
butchered in the name of nonreligious, secular,
humanistic movements - just think of Hitler, Stalin,
Mao Tse Tung, etc. - than ever before in the history of
mankind.
And with even a slight knowledge of Jewish history,
one can easily realize how philosophically and
intellectually advanced our ancestors were. Rare
indeed is the twentieth-century Jew who has carefully
examined the Torah-based philosophy of, for
example, Rabbi Moses Maimonides. Much rarer still
would be the modern Jew who has even heard of
such significant and powerful Torah advocates as
Rabbi Yehudah Halevi or Rabbi Bachya ibn Pakuda,
much less considered the persuasiveness of their
major works. So it is no wonder that we moderns think
the way that we do.
THE APPARENT CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND
RELIGION
One important factor which definitely contributes to the
modern notion that we are far superior to generations
past is the apparent conflict between traditional
religion and progressive science. And, in all fairness,
it should be pointed out that religion itself (at least the
Christian religion, that is) is somewhat responsible
for this. It is well documented that the Church of the
Middle Ages excommunicated Galileo for expressing
his scientifically-proven contention that the earth
revolves around the sun.
Now, to be sure, the Torah does not oppose science
and nature, and, if anything, embraces the study of
nature and the sciences as a way of appreciating all
that G-d has created for us here on earth. (Much has
been written on the topic of the Torah and its
relationship to science and nature, and it is a subject
which I can't do justice to in the limited format of the z-
mail.) But it is true that in the Talmud - the repository of
the Divinely-communicated Oral Tradition - there are
to be found statements made by Talmudic scholars
which seem to run counter to what modern man
knows to be true today through the process of
scientific inquiry.
This apparent conflict was indeed addressed by no
less than the great Mahara"l, the great philosopher
and Bible commentator of sixteenth-century Prague, in
his major work titled Be'er Hagolah. (This work has
recently been translated into English and expounded
upon brilliantly by Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein in a book
titled Be'er Hagolah: The Classic Defense of Rabbinic
Judaism Through the Profundity of the Aggadah,
published by Artscroll Mesorah.)
In this book, the Mahara"l explains that those who
criticize the Talmudic sages arrived at their
conclusions because they noted many places where
the Rabbis provided reasons for natural phenomena
that are simply unbelievable. The essence of their
mistake, however, is that they assumed that the
sages were providing the natural causes for these
phenomena. The Talmudic sages, however, were not
so interested in the immediate, natural cause for
different phenomena. They left this inquiry to empirical
scientists. Their concern was the cause behind the
expression of natural law. They knew that for every
explanation, for every rationale, there is a reason
behind the reason. (See the above mentioned book
pages 208-240 for a lengthy treatment of this idea.)
Additionally, the sages of the Talmud often used
allegories when explaining the causes behind the
rational world that we experience with our five senses.
So that the statements that they sometimes make,
even when their surface meaning seems to run
counter to modern science, always have to be
understood on a deeper level.
Let me share with you one example of a strange
Talmudic statement which seems to run counter to
our scientific knowledge, yet which masks incredible
depth and insight into the inner workings of the world
in which we live.
WHAT THE EARTH RESTS UPON
The Talmud in Chagigah 12b makes the following
statement:
Rabbi Yosi says: "Woe to those people who see but
do not realize what they are seeing, who stand but do
not realize upon what they are standing. What does
the earth rest upon? Upon the pillars, as it says: 'Who
shakes the earth from its place, and its pillars
tremble.'(Job 9:6) The pillars stand upon the waters,
as it says: 'To Him Who spreads out the earth upon
the waters.'(Psalms 136:6) The waters stand upon the
mountains, as it says: 'The waters stood above the
mountains.'(Ibid. 104:6) The mountains on the wind,
as it says: 'For behold, He forms mountains, and
creates wind.'(Amos 4:13) The wind stands upon the
storm, as it says: 'The wind, the storm does its
bidding.'(Psalms 148:8) The storm is suspended
from the Arm of the Holy One, Blessed is He, as it
says: 'And from beneath are the Arms of the
world.'(Deuteronomy 33:27).
Clearly, anyone with any knowledge of science knows
that the world does not rest upon any of the things that
the Talmudic sages claim it does. So what's really
going on? The great Talmudic commentator, the
Maharsh"a, explains this strange passage in the
following manner:
People see a vast and populous world, full of
movement and interaction, but they don't realize what
actually maintains the world. They are not aware of the
spiritual elements that enable the world and
everything in it to exist.
The earth rests upon the pillars - that is the three
pillars enumerated in Pirkei Avos 1:2 - upon Torah
study, upon the service of G-d, and upon kind deeds. If
people stop doing these three things, they topple the
earth's pillars and bring the world to collapse.
The pillars stand upon water - meaning the Torah,
which is often symbolized by water in the writings of
the Prophets. This means that the proper
performance of study, Divine service and kindness
depends upon the definitions and frameworks
established for them by the Torah. A misguided act of
kindness can do much harm, and the Torah's
guidelines give a certain stability to our daily actions
and endeavors.
The "mountains" upon which the waters stand are the
spiritual giants of each generation. These Torah
luminaries are entrusted with the all-important task of
interpreting the Torah and its guidelines for each
generation.
The "wind" or "spirit" (ruach in Hebrew) upon which
the mountains stand refers to the human spirit,
meaning specifically man's capacity for free choice
between good and evil. The stability of the spiritual
giants depends upon their constant battle to choose
good over evil. Should these "mountains" falter, they
will fall and bring down with them everything standing
above.
The "storm" upon which the wind stands, refers to the
yetzer hara, or Evil Inclination. Free will is possible
only because G-d's Infinite Light is concealed in
a "storm", and the truth is not obvious to all. In this
darkened environment, evil can seem to be a
reasonable option.
And finally, even man's battle with the Evil Inclination is
dependant in part on G-d's "arm", i.e. His assistance.
If G-d did not come to the aid of a person against the
assaults of the yetzer hara, that person would never
be able to withstand its enticements.
This is but one example of the strangely worded, yet
deeply enlightening, passages that one can find in the
Talmud. And it is from the likes of these Talmudic
sages and other great Jewish thinkers and
philosophers of the Middle Ages and earlier, who
possessed great wisdom and an intellectually
superior understanding, that all of us "moderns" have
inherited such a wonderful and glorious tradition and
way of life, which should make us all very proud.
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