And so the Torah gets down to work. "These are the judgments"—mishpatim, the word that gives our parashah its name—"these are the judgments" that God tells Moses to set before the people of Israel. No fewer than seventy-five mishpatim are handed down in our parashah, regulating everything from the trivial to the sublime, from business transactions to capital offenses, from dowries to worship. Several of these mishpatim are no longer relevant, including laws on sacrifice, slavery, and cities of refuge. Others contain some of the most distinctive practices of the Jews, including pidyon haben (redemption of the first born), the dietary prohibition on mixing dairy products with meat, and the three major festivals Pesah, Shavuot, and Sukkot. Our parashah includes some of the great ethical commandments—not to carry tales, not to join hands with the guilty, not to subvert the rights of the needy, and especially not to oppress a stranger, which is so important that it is repeated thirty-six times in the Torah. But our parashah also includes a warning not to tolerate sorceresses, which modern feminists have exposed as a sexist device by which powerful men classify and proscribe female power. Most troubling of all, our parashah is, as one recent scholar—no friend to the Jews—puts it, "replete with talk of capital punishment," decreeing the death penalty for eight different varieties of crime.
What are we to make of this bewildering diversity of laws? What do these seventy-five mishpatim have to do with the problems that face a modern Jew? We know what others have said about the Jewish law. "If it had not been for the law," St. Paul says, "I should not have known sin. I should not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ . . . Apart from the law sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died; the very commandment which promised life proved to be death to me" (Rom 7.7-10). Therefore, life is not to be found in the law; there is only life—in Jesus.
Martin Buber |
This of course is St. Paul’s famous condemnation of the Jews for their legalism. But the founder of Christianity is hardly alone in making such a charge. The great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber also asserts that legalism insulates us from the existential uncertainty which is the heart of the religious experience. Addressing the Orthodox, Buber says:
O you secure and safe ones who hide yourselves behind the defense-works of the law so that you will not have to look into God’s abyss! Yes, you have secure ground under your feet while we hang suspended, looking out over the endless depths. But we would not exchange our dizzy insecurity and our poverty for your security and abundance. For to you God is one who has created once and not again; but to us God is he who "renews the work of creation every day." To you God is one who revealed himself once and no more; but to us he speaks out of the burning thornbush of the present . . . in the revelations of our innermost hearts—greater than words.
Here Buber gives compelling statement to the Reform Jewish critique of the law. For the Reform Jew as well as the Christian, religious life is an either/or: either a living revelation in our innermost hearts, or the dead hand of legalism and ritual. To observe the law, on this showing, is to betray the conviction that God spoke at Sinai, perhaps a few times more to the Prophets, and then fell silent forever. Thus an observant Jewish life is something of an anachronism, which is what my students back in Texas imply when they ask in all innocence whether the Jews still burn sacrifices. For more knowledgeable Christians and Jews, there is an even worse danger: the law blinds us to the daily renewal of creation; it prevents us from seeing the evidence of God’s self-revelation, which was not confined to Sinai, but lies all about us—in a blossoming tree, in an unexpected kindness, in the face of our beloved.
Judaism is the Jewish law, but as much as I hate to admit it, there is a certain justice to the Christian and Reformist critique of it. The law prescribes the actions that I should and should not perform to be numbered among the "holy people" of Israel—I should keep the Sabbath and the festivals, I should not eat certain foods, I should not bow down to idols—but can the law tell me what to do in a crisis? Let’s say that I have been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness or that I have been abandoned by someone I love. In my suffering what should I do? How can the laws of Shabbat and kashrut possibly help me to respond to my pain and anguish? I know what to do if I wish to redeem my firstborn son, but what if my son curses me to my face or develops a drug habit or announces that he and his Christian wife have no intention of circumcising their firstborn son? What guidance can I expect then from the Jewish law?
Buber replies that we must listen for God, who speaks to us out of the burning thornbush of the present. And a good many moderns, then, have proposed techniques for recognizing God’s voice. A recent book—an exercise in popular Judaics—argues that coincidence is the modern language of God. It tells the story of a boyfriend and girlfriend who broke up because they wanted different things out of life. The boy undertook a journey of self-exploration that brought him back to Judaism. His rabbi told him it was time to marry; he had just the girl for him; and so he introduced the boy—to his old girlfriend. God speaks to us, the authors conclude, in such coincidences. But we need not wait to hear God’s voice; we can summon it for ourselves. A Christian in her forties, summing up what she has learned to this point in her life, says, "I’ve learned that singing ‘Amazing Grace’ can lift my spirits for hours." I believe her completely. The ecstatic moments in which we overhear God’s voice in song are an antidote to unhappiness, but the trouble is that such moments do not last. God reveals in an astonishing coincidence that this boy and this girl are beshert to each other, but the coincidence—that glorious moment of love’s revelation—cannot last. Now begins the real difficulty of faithful marriage. And in such a difficulty, coincidence is little help
Elie Wiesel |
The problem is to do God’s will, to hear God’s voice; that is why we observe and study His law. But what does God expect of us when we are suffering? The modern Jewish writer who has given perhaps the most thought to this problem is Elie Wiesel. His Holocaust memoir Night is the account of a young Jew who listens intently for God’s voice out of the fire, but does not hear it. Growing up in the Hungarian town of Sighet, young Eliezer was absorbingly devout. "During the day I studied Talmud," he recalls, "and at night I ran to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple."
In March 1944 the Nazis take over Hungary, and two months later the Jews of Sighet, including the sixteen-year-old Wiesel and his family, are transported to Auschwitz. Upon his arrival, young Eliezer is force-marched alongside a burning ditch. A dump truck pulls up and delivers its load—little children. Babies! The Jewish youth sees it with his own eyes: children in the flames. Beside him, his father begins to recite Kaddish Yatom: Yitgadal v’yitkadash shemey rabah (may His Name be blessed and magnified). "For the first time," Wiesel writes, "I felt revolt rise up in me. Why should I bless His name? The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank Him for?" Weeks later, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, Wiesel’s anger toward God has not relented. When the imprisoned Jews put off eating their soup until after they have said their prayers, Wiesel demands:
Why, but why should I bless Him? In every fiber I rebelled. Because He had had thousands of children burned in His pits? Because He had kept six crematories working night and day, on Sundays and feast days? Because in His great might He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many factories of death? How could I say to Him: "Blessed art Thou, Eternal, Master of the Universe, Who chose us from among the races to be tortured day and night, to see our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, end in the crematory? Praised be Thy Holy Name, Thou Who hast chosen us to be butchered on Thine altar?
Wiesel defiantly considers the covenant between God and Israel null and void. To be God’s chosen people now means to be tortured and burned. On Yom Kippur, then, Wiesel refuses to fast. "[T]here was no longer any reason why I should fast," he explains. "I no longer accepted God’s silence."
Young Eliezer is not the only one whose faith perishes at Auschwitz. Wiesel tells the story of Akiba Drumer, who in the first days at the Lager had argued that "God is testing us" and therefore "We have no right to despair." But as he begins to lose his faith, Akiba gives up the struggle; his eyes "become blank, nothing but two open wounds, two pits of terror." And very soon he is selected for the gas chamber. Then there is the rabbi from a little town in Poland who prays continually and recites whole pages of the Talmud from memory. One day he approaches young Eliezer and confides:
It’s the end. God is no longer with us. . . . I know. One has no right to say things like that. I know. Man is too small, too humble and inconsiderable to seek to understand the mysterious ways of God. But what can I do? I’m not a sage, one of the elect, nor a saint. I’m just an ordinary creature of flesh and blood. I’ve got eyes, too, and I can see what [the Germans are] doing here. Where is the divine Mercy? Where is God? How can I believe, how could anyone believe, in this merciful God?
Wiesel is not alone in believing that God was murdered at Auschwitz. And if God is dead, as Nietzsche warned, anything is permitted. So it goes in the Lager. Wiesel tells the heartbreaking story of Rabbi Eliyahu, "a very good man" who was so "loved by everyone in the camp" that he was "the only rabbi who was always addressed as ‘Rabbi.’ . . ." For three years, from camp to camp, from Selektion to Selektion, Rabbi Eliyahu and his son manage against all odds to stick together. But on the death march that evacuates Auschwitz, the two get separated. Rabbi Eliyahu asks young Eliezer whether he has seen his son. Eliezer does not have the heart to tell him the truth:
[H]is son had seen him losing ground, limping, staggering back to the rear of the column. He had seen him. And he had continued to run on in front, letting the distance between them grow greater. . . . He had wanted to get rid of his father! He had felt that his father was growing weak, he had believed that the end was near and had sought this separation in order to get rid of the burden, to free himself from an encumbrance which could lessen his own chances of survival.
As Rabbi Eliyahu leaves to go on looking for his son, Eliezer whispers a prayer to the God in whom he no longer believed: "My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi [Eliyahu]’s son has done."
Now, Wiesel’s own father gives him permission to do just that. He teaches Eliezer the code of Auschwitz:
Here, every man has to fight for himself and not think of anyone else. . . . Here, there are no fathers and brothers. Everyone lives and dies for himself alone.
And Eliezer is tempted to do just that. After the chaos of an Allied air raid, he becomes separated from his father and goes to look for him. At that moment, a thought steals into Eliezer's mind: "Don’t let me find him! If only I could get rid of this dead weight, so that I could use all my strength to struggle for my own survival, and only worry about myself." Immediately he feels ashamed of himself—"ashamed forever," he says.
The God in whom he no longer believes answers the young Jew’s prayer. Eliezer never does what Rabbi Eliyahu’s son has done. He cannot live and die for himself alone. He clings to and cares for his dying father, supporting him on the death march, finding him a place to doze but not letting him be overcome by sleep in the snow, protecting him from being thrown out with the dead. Despite his loss of faith, despite the example and precedent of other sons who abandoned their fathers, despite his own father’s urging, young Eliezer stands by the older Wiesel. That becomes his faith. He is haunted by the Polish rabbi’s questions: "Where is the divine Mercy? Where is God?" But he supplies the answer, not in theological argument, not in a lightning strike of revelation that turns him back toward God, but in the daily practice—the steady faithfulness—of clinging to the person closest to him. Where is the divine Mercy? In the human mercy that young Eliezer displays toward his father.
God’s speech, says the post-Holocaust theologian Arthur A. Cohen—God’s speech is really our hearing. To observe the Jewish law is to respond to one kind of speech that God has made to the Jewish people. Thus our daily lives—our smallest acts—testify to whether we hear God’s voice. And in a crisis, in the extremity of suffering, we respond to another kind of speech that God makes to us. It is not God who is revealed in human suffering, but man.
If we did not believe that God had spoken to us—to our people at Sinai—we would act accordingly. We would live by the code of Auschwitz, fighting for ourselves and not thinking of anyone else, living and dying for ourselves alone. Because we suffer, we would make others suffer too. Only then could we truly say that God is silent. God would be silent because we would have reduced him to silence. But if, like the boy Elie Wiesel describes in his memoir Night, we cannot live this way—if our suffering is reversed into concern for others, for the strangers and orphans and widows whom parashat Mishpatim urges us not to oppress—then implicitly we are rejecting the code of Auschwitz and affirming the code of Sinai. God speaks when we care for or cling to one another. And this is the whole meaning of the Jewish law.
