There are several stories of witty exchanges between western journalists and eastern political leaders. My favorite example is when Gandhi was asked what his opinion was of western civilization, “Mr. Gandhi, what is your opinion of Western Civilization?” and Gandhi replied, “that would be a good idea.”
But my second favorite example of the genre is when Zhou Enal was asked what he thought the long term implications were of the French Revolution and he responded, “it’s too soon to tell.” Centuries can go by. Empires can rise and fall, and events of human history remain indeterminate. Their long term impact remains in our hands to decide what they will mean and how they will shape the future. The very best questions tend to work that way.
Rabbi Yehuda HaLevy’s medieval masterpiece of Jewish philosophy, The Kuzari is written as an imagined dialogue between a Jewish scholar and the King of the Khazars who is contemplating conversion to Judaism. The dialogue provides a literary framework for Rabbi Yehudah Halevy to present his philosophy of Judaism but in two instances he gives the king of the Khazar the last word by having him pose questions that the Jewish scholar cannot answer. The first question is, “if you love the Land of Israel so much, why don’t you live there?’ Rabbi Yehudah Halevy answered that question in his own life when he left behind a rich and successful life in Spain to journey alone to Eretz Yisrael under dangerous conditions where he faded out of history and into legend.
The second challenge that the king of the Khazars poses and that Rabbi Yehuda Halevy left unanswered was the king’s sharp retort to the Jewish sage’s praise of Jewish humility and our superior ethics:
כֶּן־הוּא אִלּוּ הָיְתָה כְנִיעַתְכֶם בְּרָצוֹן. אֲבָל הִיא בְהֶכְרֵחַ, וְכַאֲשֶׁר תִּמְצָא יֶדְכֶם תַּהַרְגוּ.
This might be so, if your humility were voluntary; but it is involuntary, and if you had power you would slay.
Centuries later Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik echoed that question in a 1959 lecture where he said:
… Now, with the State of Israel, we are facing the test. Will we behave like any other state, ethically? I believe that statehood itself implies an intrinsic contradiction to ethics; [even] the best one. Will we act differently or will we yield to temptation? The problem is, here we have an opportunity – the Jews are the rulers, they legislate the laws, they are the masters, so to say. We have never been masters, obviously. We have always been the subordinates. Always. Since the destruction of the Second Temple 1900 years ago. Will we act like masters or will we understand that Judaism does not know the concept of master and slave, victor and vanquished, powerful and weak? This is my problem with regard to the State of Israel…The whole of Jewish history will be interpreted in terms of what the State of Israel will do in the next fifty years. If the State of Israel will not live up to the great hopes and challenges of Judaic ethics… then the whole of Jewish history will appear in a different light.
The fifty years that Rabbi Soloveitchik contemplated in 1959 has already elapsed but I feel his question hanging over us. The very best questions work that way. And, not for the first time, I found a semblance of guidance in remarks delivered this week by Rabbi Chaim Brovender, my first rosh yeshiva and a student of Rabbi Soloveitchik who made aliyah just a few years after Rabbi Soloveitchik posed his question. I always find it moving to listen to Rabbi Brovender on Yom Ha’Atzma’ut as he reflects on his life in Israel and the achievements and challenges he has seen over the decades. This year he quoted and elaborated upon a Gemara in Sanhedin in which Rabbi Yohanan teaches that “Ben David” – Mashiach – will only come to redeem us in a generation that is entirely guilty or entirely innocent.
אֵין בֶּן דָּוִד בָּא אֶלָּא בְּדוֹר שֶׁכּוּלּוֹ זַכַּאי, אוֹ כּוּלּוֹ חַיָּיב.
What could Rabbi Yohanan, who lived in Eretz Yisrael in the very heart of the Talmudic period – as a second generation Amora, have meant by setting such extreme limits on the timing of redemption?
Rabbi Brovender suggested that were a generation to arise that was entirely righteous, then God could bring history to an end because there would be nothing else for humanity to learn. And if there were a generation that was entirely wicked, then God must bring history to an end because an entirely guilty generation would have indicated our own utter failure to accomplish anything on earth.
But here in the messy middle, where some of us are guilty and some of us are righteous and all of us are a little bit righteous and a little bit guilty and where – according to Rabbi Yohanan, Mashiach is not going to come and solve our problems for us, we are left to muddle through and try to make the best that we can of what has been given to us, to express gratitude for what we have, and to leave the world a bit better than we found it.
The Torah’s laws of tzara’at – impure skin rashes display this same dynamic. A growing mark on the skin is a sign of tzara’at and initiates a complicated process of quarantine and purification and rehabilitation. The preponderance of evidence suggests that tzara’at is an outward manifestation of an internal dynamic. A private sin manifests on our bodies and leads the individual so afflicted to a path of purification and repentance and return to the community.
But a skin rash which has spread so far as to cover the entire body, ironically, and surprisingly, is tahor – that individual has no status change whatsoever.
וְאִם־פָּר֨וֹחַ תִּפְרַ֤ח הַצָּרַ֙עַת֙ בָּע֔וֹר וְכִסְּתָ֣ה הַצָּרַ֗עַת אֵ֚ת כׇּל־ע֣וֹר הַנֶּ֔גַע מֵרֹאשׁ֖וֹ וְעַד־רַגְלָ֑יו לְכׇל־מַרְאֵ֖ה עֵינֵ֥י הַכֹּהֵֽן׃
וְרָאָ֣ה הַכֹּהֵ֗ן וְהִנֵּ֨ה כִסְּתָ֤ה הַצָּרַ֙עַת֙ אֶת־כׇּל־בְּשָׂר֔וֹ וְטִהַ֖ר אֶת־הַנָּ֑גַע כֻּלּ֛וֹ הָפַ֥ךְ לָבָ֖ן טָה֥וֹר הֽוּא׃
If the eruption spreads out over the skin so that it covers all the skin of the affected person from head to foot, wherever the priest can see—if the priest sees that the eruption has covered the whole body—he shall pronounce the affected person clean; he is clean, for he has turned all white.
If the affliction covers the entire body, from head to foot – then there is no point in the kohen declaring him tameh because such a person is no longer subject to the cycle of tumah and taharah, impurity and purity, quarantine and reintegration. The entire system is predicated on a little piece of a person remaining unafflicted.. That person – someone very much like me and you and the people we live among and the people we struggle against – are somewhat pure and somewhat impure. The Torah has a system for people like us. The Torah has nothing to offer someone who is entirely afflicted.
The world which is not fully innocent or fully guilty -the world in which Mashiach will not bring history to an end, is a world in which purity and impurity can struggle against one another. It’s a world where it remains too soon to tell the long term impact of big historical events.
We find ourselves in the messy middle and so we take stock of where we are in the middle and give thanks
Last Shabbat afternoon, in the shadow of Yom HaShoah we learned together a teshuvah, a halakhic responsum, written by Rav Ephraim Oshry who was asked in 1941 if a survivor of a “selection” in the Kovno Ghetto was obligated to recite Birkat Hagomel, a thanksgiving blessing, despite remaining in mortal danger as a prisoner in the ghetto. One of you responded with a real sense of outrage that the very concept of “obligation” could even be invoked under such impossibly tragic and traumatic circumstances.
That too is a question that cannot be answered, but I do think that gratitude is a fundamentally empowering and ennobling character trait which can itself be healing.
Rav Yitzhak Hutner explains that the Hebrew root Heh, Daled, Heh means both to thank and to concede. He teaches that fundamentally, the two meanings are one. To express gratitude is to concede that one has received a benefit that one did not deserve or to which one had no right or expectation. The concession that one has received a gift and the gratitude for receiving that gift are the same internal spiritual characteristics. And cultivating that awareness about the events of our personal lives and about our national lives – coming to see ourselves as having received a gift can lead to a greater sense of agency and a more hopeful outlook.
Today is the 5th of Iyyar. This is the actual anniversary of Israeli independence. In most years the commemorations are early in order to avoid conflicts with Shabbat – just as the actual Israeli declaration of independence took place several hours before the expiration of the British mandate to avoid conflicting with Shabbat. But the 5th of Iyyar retains a piece of its identity and the spiritual work of Yom Ha’atzma’ut can extend into today as well. And that spiritual work, I believe, is primarily one of gratitude.
We find ourselves in the middle of the story, in a generation that is neither fully guilty nor fully innocent. We find ourselves facing the never answered questions of the Kuzari and of Rav Soloveitchik: if we love Eretz Yisrael so much, why don’t we live there? Can we only look with pride on the Jewish ethical tradition because it went untested for most of Jewish history? With gratitude for the opportunities given to us to take agency over our collective lives as Jews, what direction do we wish to pursue?
Zionism, for Rav Shagar, the great post-modern Jewish thinker, is not about being, but about becoming. It is not a celebration of what we have but a cultivation of yearning for that which is not yet. Writing about Hatikvah, Israel’s anthem, Rav Shagar noted:
Hatikvah was not written by a citizen of the state in order to commemorate its victories, because it was written before the state existed, before the state could be anything more than a hope…It’s all about not having a home, but hoping to have a home one day… Most other anthems…celebrate victories, and they have proud, bombastic tunes. They’re meant to inspire confident, patriotic national identities. Hatikvah inspires a national identity of meek hope, confident in the future but not in the present.
Can we be grateful for the blessings of modern Jewish life, while still yearning for something better? Can we be proud of what Jews have accomplished in our ancient homeland without being complacent about all the work that remains? Can the awareness that our generation – and we ourselves are neither fully innocent nor fully guilty – lead us, not to cynicism, but to a process of purification and renewal?
It’s too soon to tell.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 