There’s a great deal to love in Judaism. There’s a great deal about love in Judaism. Loving your neighbor as you would like to be loved. Treating the needy among us with kindness. Being kind to the handicapped. Much of this is clear in the writings of my people. And, indeed, all the above are noted in one brief chapter in Leviticus (Lev 19). Oh, true enough, that same chapter shows no kindness to male homosexuals but we cannot be expected to have gotten it all right two thousand years ago.
I love, too, the hermeneutic tradition of accepting that even if commentaries spin different tales, they are all part of the Living Torah … אלו ואלו דברי תורה חיים … ‘These and these, too, are words of a living Torah.’ But there is a different tradition, too. The Rabbis taught אין המקרא יוצא מפשוטו … ‘Scripture never fully leaves its manifest/Pshat meaning.’ So, when I read the Parsha of the week, I feel an obligation to examine the text … as it is written.
I went to a Lunch n’ Learn today sponsored by the Chavurah that I regularly attend. The reading was from Deuteronomy … the Parsha? Eikev. Last week, Moses failed to convince God to allow him to live and cross the Jordan into the Promised Land. This week, Moses is lambasting the people for all their errors. He’s clearly pissed off and taking it out on his flock. He reminds them of how stiff-necked they are and how they rebelled against God too many times. He goes into detail … mercilessly reminding them of the Eigel, the Golden Calf and all their complaining. He tells them that, if not for him, God would have destroyed them time and time, again. He speaks of how Aaron, too, failed to keep the people from sinning while Moses, himself, was going without food or drink for forty days and forty nights. He tells them that they will, indeed, be redeemed someday but not because of their merits but only because of the commitment God made to their ancestors. He often uses the Anochi אנכי form of the word I, the one that God uses. I am the Lord your God … אנכי ה׳ אלוקיך (Anochi ha’Shem Elokechah). He talks of how people who went up against his authority got the schnitz … and not the schnitzel … how the Earth swallowed them up. I never particularly cared for his response when the Army came back saying they killed all the enemy guys (Midianites) and he said: ‘I told’ya to kill ‘em all … Women, Children and Cattle, too. Go back and finish the job.’
In not too many weeks, we’ll read Moses attacking the people again for getting too fat … too pleased with their successes. He’ll tell them … And Yeshurun got fat and kicked their God … just as he says in this week’s Parsha. He’ll call them “a stupid people! and not very smart” ... עם נבל ולא חכם. Moshe? The guy who is touted to be more humble than anyone else does not come across — without a leg-up from Commentary — as humble anywhere in the Saga.
I raised this question and got pushback. I was denying the interpretiove hermeneutics of Torah study. I quipped back that when I read this Parsha each year, I couldn’t help but feel profoundly sad at the failure to take responsibility demonstrated by my childhood hero. … More pushback … I added — going too far, I suppose — that as I thought of Moses the Man … not Moses the Lawgiver but Moses the Man, my associations turned to the perfidious leader of the USA, the elected President, Donald Trump.
I went too far but really … do we need a perfect leader in order to love Yiddishkeit? I think not. Moses couldn’t, apparently, transcend his own need for power and had great difficulty being more than a Not-Good-Enough Parent, even if he left us an ethos that eventually led to the Modern Western Democracies.
Good job, Moses … You had a hard row to hoe, Moe, you didn’t quite get it all right but you did it pretty well … Hope I can do the same in my life and let it come to an end without cursing out my kids or patients.
Isn’t that enough? Lemme answer that: I’m Jewish; it’s enough.