Va'etchanan: Love G-d

Dedicated to my father R’Yitzchak Asher ben Yechezkel Shraga zl

The Sheloshim or first thirty days of mourning for my father will be completed on Wednesday.  Since his passing, I’ve had a great deal of time to reflect on his life which spanned nearly a century.

You learn a great deal from your parents and try to emulate their positive attributes in your own life.  My father was a polymath, who was blessed with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Torah in addition to politics, the arts and classical music.  He taught me many lessons, one of which I would like to share with you in his honour.

As Jews, we have a rich treasury of texts which start with the Torah and span the four thousand years of our existence.  For many years, when I attended Synagogue on a Shabbat afternoon during the summer months, I was puzzled as to the texts the congregants recited after the end of the Amida.  Of course, I discovered that they were learning Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers.  As a child, these random mishnayot didn’t make much sense until a few years ago, when I decided to investigate their meaning.

I felt as though I had stumbled upon an Aladdin’s Cave of verbal treasures.  Each Mishna I read spoke to me, both intellectually and emotionally.  I eagerly anticipated their return to my lexicon on an annual basis brightening up nearly every Shabbat afternoon for the six months that bridge Pesach and Rosh Hashanah.

Additionally, Pirkei Avot has proven to be very useful as a mine from which to draw out precious gems of wisdom for many an occasion, both happy and sad.

I adopted Chapter 1, Mishna 14 as my life’s motto:

He (referring to Hillel) used to say:
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? 
And if I am only for myself, what am I?  And if not now, when?”

I could spend a great deal of time explaining why this means so much to me, but today, it is another Mishna that recently occupied my mind because it really encapsulated the man that my father was and appropriately enough, it also relates to this week’s Parasha of Va’etchanan.

My father’s name was Yitzchak Asher, which can be roughly translated as ‘he who laughs is wealthy’.  By nature, he was a very modest man, an architect, blessed with G-d given artistic talent, whose teacher was one of the greatest teachers of the last century, Rabbi Dov Ber Soloveitchik, otherwise known as ‘The Rav’.

His motto from Pirkei Avot can be found in Chapter 4, Mishna 1:

Ben Zoma said:
“Who is wise?  One who learns from everyone, as it is said
From all my teachers I gained wisdom.”
“Who is strong?  One who masters his evil impulse, as it is said
He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty”...
Who is rich?  One who rejoices in what he has.”

In the Hebrew, this last saying is אֵיזֶהוּ עָשִׁיר, הַשָּׂמֵחַ בְּחֶלְקוֹ

As you may have gleaned, my father’s name ‘Asher’ is synonymous with ‘Ashir’ and it is so appropriate, because my dearest father was really very happy with the portion allotted to him.  He asked for very little out of life and gained a great deal pleasure from even the smallest gifts.  Whether it was learning a new piece of Torah, having a slice of lemon meringue pie (his favourite) or seeing his family (especially his granddaughters).

Chazal, our Sages, understand this Mishna to mean that a wealthy man or woman is a person who derives happiness from the portion that G-d has allotted to them, regardless of whether it is good or bad, large or small.  My father was such a person.

His appreciation of everything he had, came from Gd and the way he expressed this, was through a single emotion.  Love.

At this juncture, I am reminded of a humorous conversation I had with some friends a few years ago.

We were invited over to their house for a Shabbat lunch and I noticed that he was wearing a set of cufflinks with a legend bearing the words: ‘Love G-d’ which he had recently purchased.  His wife smiled and said he didn’t understand the intended connotation of the phrase.

I was a little taken aback by the usage of these words together and questioned him about them.  He said that they needed to be read as a verb, not a noun!  He explained that they should be read as ‘(to) Love G-d’ as opposed to ‘Love G-d’.

My father was a man who really loved G-d.  In fact, he simply loved.  On our last Shabbat together, two days before he passed away, Stephnie and I spent the morning by his bedside and I prayed with him.  When it came to the Shema, we said it together and with the strength that he had left, he kissed the Tzitzit on my Tallit as we recited the third paragraph together.  Later, with the use of his hands, he indicated not only that he loved us both but that he wanted us to continue loving each other and on the next afternoon, the last words, he whispered to me were ‘I love you’.  They were also the final words he was able to say to me a few weeks’ previously before his illness robbed him of his voice.

In this week’s Parasha, we read the first paragraph of the Shema, where we are commanded to love G-d with ‘all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might.  These words which I command you today shall be on your heart.’

Until I spent those precious hours with my father, I didn’t fully appreciate what this meant. For this is exactly what he did.  He loved G-d with every fibre of his body and by extension, he loved us in the same way.

The Gemara in Yoma 86a tells us something incredible:

Abaye cited a baraita (a mishna which was not incorporated within its six orders): “You shall love the Lord your G-d” (Devarim 6.4) means that because of you the Name of Heaven will become beloved.”
[This means] that when a person studies Scripture and Mishnah and serves scholars of the Torah and speaks softly with other people and his dealings in the market place are proper and business is conducted honestly – what do people say about him?  [They say:] Happy is so-and-so who studied Torah; happy is his father who taught him Torah; happy is his teacher who taught him Torah…

(translation taken from ‘The Shema: Spirituality and Law in Judaism, Rabbi Norman Lamm zl, The Jewish Publication Society, 1998)

Such was my father.  His love of G-d and of people (except the Belgians, but that’s another story) were one.  They, the Torah and by extension, us, his family brought him sheer, unadulterated happiness.  How did he express this?  Through telling us how much he loved us.  Through reciting the Shema together.  This is how he left this world.

Who is wealthy?  A person who is happy with whatever he has.  Whatever G-d has provided him with.  Be it his family, home or job.  It often takes a crisis to make us stop and appreciate how ‘wealthy’ we all happen to be.  Just think back to what became important during those Covid lockdown months a couple of years ago…the simple things that money can’t buy such as a hug from a parent or child.  That was the lesson I learned from my father. 

In his blessed memory, I will treasure this for the rest of my life.

Shavuah Tov.

Parashat Devarim: Where they burn books…

 His identity is shrouded in mystery as no-one is really sure who he was.

We do know that, according to the Talmud, he did something terrible which has left a long-lasting legacy.  His actions cast a shadow that chillingly re-appeared in the news last week.  Let me explain.

The Mishna in Taanit (4.6) states:

Five calamitous matters occurred to our forefathers on the seventeenth of Tammuz, and five other disasters happened on the Ninth of Av.

On the seventeenth of Tammuz:

·         the tablets were broken by Moses when he saw that the Jews had made the golden calf;

·         the daily offering was nullified by the Roman authorities and was never sacrificed again;

·         the city walls of Jerusalem were breached;

·         the general Apostomos publicly burned a Torah scroll;

·         and Manasseh placed an idol in the Sanctuary.

This is the one and only mention of a person called Apostomus (or alternatively Postemus) in the entire Talmud and accordingly, it is assumed that he was either Greek or Roman, with the probability being the former.  According to some sources, He may even have been the infamous Antiochus IV from the Chanukah story.

Whoever he was, his malicious act had reverberations that lasted throughout the centuries with the public burning of Holy texts being repeated again and again throughout Europe.  As we know, from recent history, The Nazis (yimach shemom -may their names be wiped out forever) revelled in such horrific activities.

On Kristallnacht, they removed the Torah Scrolls from the Fasanen Street Shul and carried them to the nearby Wittenberg Square where they were subsequently burned.  In Düsseldorf, German men who had dressed themselves in Rabbinical and Cantorial Robes burned the Sifrei Torah and danced around the bonfire.

The famed German Jewish author, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) wrote presciently in his 1821 play 'Almansor', "Where books are burned in the end people will burn."

His books were also amongst those burned by the Nazis, less than a century after his death.

All of which brings us to the present day.

A few weeks ago, over the Muslim holiday of Eid-El Adha, two men standing outside a mosque in Stockholm tore out pages from the Koran and set them on fire.  If that wasn’t horrific enough, they had been granted a permit from the police to do so!  As you can appreciate, there was understandable outrage from the global Muslim population and in fact, the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad was stormed by a mob of angry adherents.

Faith leaders across Sweden issued condemnations, including officials of the Jewish Community as well as Israel's President Herzog.

Freedom of expression, in its many forms, for example the freedom to demonstrate, assemble, acquire information etc, is a central tenet of Sweden’s constitution.  Notably, this also includes the freedom to practice one's religion and the country has one of the world's most advanced records of human rights.  It is also noted as being possibly, the world's most ethical country discusses this question.

However, this has proven to be a double-edged sword because this means that is open to abuse.  As per what happened next.

Following the burning, numerous requests were made by individuals to the police to receive permits to burn other holy texts, including another Koran, a New Testament and a Torah Scroll.  The Swedish Authorities granted permission for the three to be set alight last Shabbat, 15th July in front of the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm.  Understandably, the respective communities were shocked and the Jewish Central Council (the umbrella group for Swedish Jewry) issued a statement which said:

“As a people of the book, the Torah is our most sacred treasure of moral codes and ethics that have changed the world we live in.  Our tragic European history links the burning of Jewish books with pogroms, expulsions, inquisitions, and the Holocaust...

Burning holy books, be it the Quran, the Torah, or the New Testament, are hateful acts that we perceive as direct threats to the societies that value them.”

President Herzog added:

“I unequivocally condemn the permission granted in Sweden to burn holy books.

As the President of the State of Israel, I condemned the burning of the Quran, sacred to Muslims the world over, and I am now heartbroken that the same fate awaits a Jewish Bible, the eternal book of the Jewish people.  Permitting the defacement of sacred texts is not an exercise in freedom of expression, it is blatant incitement and an act of pure hate.  The whole world must join together in clearly condemning this repulsive act.”

These words fell on deaf ears and so, last Shabbat morning, the man who had submitted the permit, a young Syrian called Ahmad Alush came to the Embassy holding a single lighter (but no books) threw it onto the ground and told the media assembled there:

“It is against the Koran to burn and I will not burn.  No one should do that,” This is a response to the people who burn the Quran.  I want to show that freedom of expression has limits that must be taken into account.  I want to show that we have to respect each other,” said Alush.  “We live in the same society.  If I burn the Torah, another the Bible, another the Koran, there will be war here.  What I wanted to show is that it’s not right to do it.”

It took a young Muslim to warn the Authorities of what can happen when 'freedoms' get out of hand.  Whether or not he planned the action as a 'publicity stunt' is not yet clear but on Thursday, two men (including the same individual who had originally burned the pages last month) jumped upon and kicked a Quran outside the Iraqi Embassy in Stockholm. The police did nothing to stop them.

Sweden's 'freedoms' are bringing out the worst human character traits in some people, as we have seen, that the disregard for one religion's holy books naturally impacts those of others'.  As Paster Martin Niemöller wrote in his poem "First They Came" (1946):

First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out -

because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out -

because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out -

because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out -

because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me –

and there was no one left to speak out for me

If we substitute 'Muslims' for 'Jews', it is not difficult to imagine the outcome as per the quote: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

What is it about the Torah (as well as the Koran and Christian Bible) that brings people to commit such destructive acts?

Alon Confino is the Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies, and Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts.  In a 2014 article on the Commentary website (https://www.commentary.org/articles/onfino-alon/why-the-nazis-burned-the-hebrew-bible/) he writes:

 

"The burning was part of a larger story Germans told themselves during the Third Reich about who they were, where they came from, how they had arrived there, and where they were headed.  The burning of the Bible was about covenants: old, new, and newer still...burning the Bible, and by extension Kristallnacht, was part of the Nazi tale about the Jews as inheritors of a tradition that threatened the Third Reich…burning the Bible was not an assault on Jews as individuals supposedly staining daily life in Nazi Germany, but on Judaism as a whole.  It was not about fixing the present, but about fixing the past.  It was not primarily about pushing the Jews to emigrate from Germany or a reflection of uncontrollable hatred, but about building a racial civilization by extinguishing the authority of the Jews over a moral past embedded in the Bible."

Devarim, the fifth and final book of the Torah is without a doubt one of the finest and most sublime texts ever written down.  It is Moshe's legacy to the Jewish people and the rest of humanity.  In its eleven Parshiot, it records his final three orations and constitutes the very definition of the Covenantal relationship between Gd and the Jewish people.  It is not for naught that it is also called the 'Mishneh Torah' (the repetition of the Torah) as it replicates much of what has appeared previously.

In doing so, it underscores precisely what the Nazis and their predecessors tried to destroy, namely the foundations of what constitutes a moral, ethical and just society where individual human rights are paramount.  Not the 'freedoms' suggested in the Swedish Constitution, which, as I have described, allow people to attack religions and beliefs that they disagree with, but the kind of rights enshrined in the American Constitution (which was strongly based on the Torah) as it states in its preamble:

"'We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Without Devarim, without the emphasis on setting up a just society, where every person is treated in a humane fashion (even slaves and prisoners of war), where commandments such as sending the mother bird away to spare it the pain of seeing her eggs removed from the nest, are proscribed.  Without these laws and many, many more, the societies in which we live would be akin to those proposed by the Nazis.  Where human rights were abolished.  Where the value of life was negligible.  Where a person, who did not 'fit into the Aryan mould' was eliminated.  This is what a Devarim-free world would look like.

Sweden may have the best of intentions in wishing to grant freedoms to all and sundry, but sadly, its naive approach has led to the scenes we are witnessing and where books are burned.  We dread what this could, Gd forbid, lead to, if left unchecked.  For, it is not that great a descent from burning books to, Gd forbid, setting light to Mosques, Churches and/ or Synagogues.

We are rapidly approaching the Fast of Tisha B'Av which recalls what happened when human cruelty was allowed free reign.  Our long history has shown us that what begins with one act of destruction almost inevitably leads to many others, far worse in their destructive force.

Let Sefer Devarim remind us of the paths we should follow to guarantee the continued stability and growth of both the Jewish people and our Gentile neighbours.  We cannot let those who see merit in burning the texts, that we value so much, succeed in their malicious acts.  We must stand up in unison against them.

"These are the words that Moshe addressed to all of Israel on the other side of the Jordan."

It is these words that will fortify us in our endeavours to fight the forces of evil, wherever they may arise.  We owe it to ourselves and future generations to 'fight that fight'.  It is a battle that no-one who values maintaining a just and moral society, can afford to lose.

Shavuah Tov.