Members of the Tribe
Posted by Rabbi Avi Heller on June 11, 2010 | Tags: Korach
As I was walking off a brisk run in Central Park last Sunday - wishing I had some kosher Gatorade[1] -- I noticed an old man behind a table polishing awards. The attractive glass plates were for the top finishers by gender in various age categories. The guy polishing them and placing them neatly on the table was friendly and I struck up a conversation with him. I asked him how many 4-mile finishers there were in the 70-79 year old category. He shrugged and said "Maybe 6 or 7", which is pretty impressive, in my opinion. I hope I can whip out a 4-mile run 40 years from now, but I am not confident that I will be able to do it without a lot of help from above. Then he pointed out the 80-99 year old category and said: "I know there are no finishers in this category, but if I hadn't had my hip replaced a few years back, I'd be out there myself. I ran my last 4 mile race when I was 85." (!) I was duly respectful of this feat and shook the man's hand. He told me his name was Al Goldstein and, when I reciprocated and told him I was a Rabbi, he enthusiastically said "Lahntsman!!", which is Yiddish for something like "a member of the tribe!" We wished each other a zei gezunt and I went my merry way.
Now, it's more unusual to meet an 85 year old that can run a 4-mile race that to run into an old Jewish guy in New York City, to be sure. Plus, there are Jewish people who try to get my attention all the time by intimating that they too are Jewish.(I've written about this phenomenon - called bageling - before.) But I couldn't get Al's smile at meeting a fellow Jew out of my mind that whole day. He was happy to be out in the park on a Sunday morning, but he had a genuine warmth and happiness about sharing a moment with a lahntsman.
It reminded me of the Jewish value of "achdut", the unity of the Jewish people. We mock ourselves for honoring this more in the breach than in truth, (like the Jew on the remote desert island who built 2 synagogues, one he attended and one he never set foot in) but it is an important Jewish survival secret. When we came out of Egypt, we left no Israelites behind. When we got the Torah, the revelation was experienced by everyone, not just a privileged few. The rabbis note that when the Jews arrived at Sinai, the Torah stops using the plural form of "and they traveled" and uses instead the singular form "and it camped", meaning that they camped "as one person with one heart", "k'ish eachad b'lev echad." (Rashi on Exodus 19:2)[2]. When a Jewish army goes to battle, they do not leave their soldiers, their captives or even their corpses behind. We will not rest until Gilad Shalit comes home[3].
The Midrash says this in another way: "kol yisrael" "every person in the people of Israel" "areivim" "is responsible" "zeh lazeh", "for each other." We are personally responsible for each other, because we are all family. Perhaps we are even like one body.
It does not matter whether it is Jew-haters who want to kill us, divisions within our ranks over Jewish practice and policy, or the apathy and indifference that is leading so many Jews to opt out of their heritage. We know that what divides us weakens us and threatens to kill us. What brings us together strengthens and purifies us.
The villain in this week's Torah portion (Bemidbar 16) is named Korach. He is Moshe's cousin and a respected member of the community. But his legacy is one of division. He led a polyglot mutiny against Moshe to increase his own power and he failed only when God punished him by opening the ground beneath his feet and letting it swallow him and his supporters whole. Though he preached democratic values and styled himself as a believer and a true leader, in the end he was not interested in the unity of the Jewish people. He exploited the divisions between them as a way of achieving his own goals.
The very first words of the sidra are "vayikach Korach", "and Korach took" and the commentators struggle mightly over what or who it was that Korach took, because the verse never tells us. The famous translation of Onkelos is "v'itpaleg", that he broke (or took) himself off from the rest of the community. But it wasn't even so much that he broke HIMSELF off from the rest of the community as that, by doing so, he broke the community itself into warring factions. He took away the unity of the Jewish people.Grave consequences could have ensued as a result of this division and weakness, including the destruction of the entire Jewish people. For this reason, Korach and his followers were expunged by God from the Jewish people.
The unity of the Jewish people is based on a sense that we Jews have a common fate (past), a common mission (present) and a common destiny (future). It also stems from the idea that there is something very special - exceptional - about the Jewish people. This is not an entitlement (as if Jews are inherently superior to others, which I do not believe) but out of a responsibility to be a holy nation. We have been singled out - like a secret society - to be the carriers of an incredibly potent and and important message from God to the world. Jewish exceptionalism is also not something that leads to special privileges most of the time. The history of the Jews is replete with sordid and bloody episodes where we have been singled out for special hatred and discrimination. Even today, it should be obvious that the unhealthy fascination of the world with Israel and her policies is out of all keeping with what one would rationally expect. When a conversion candidate appears before a Jewish court to become a 'member of the tribe', one of the things we ask them is "don't you know that you are asking to join a people that is almost always persecuted and killed for being Jewish?" The convert has to want to be Jewish even against their own self-interest. They have to deeply want to be part of the Jewish people and its message to the world, even when the world wants to kill the messenger.
In contrast to the view that we are a holy nation with an impressive history and an important responsibility to the world comes Michael Chabon, who shares his own dis-ease with being Jewish for the whole world to see:
The presence of Jews among the not-yet-extinct peoples of the world can no more be credited to any kind of special trait or behavior than the Tasmanians or the Taino ought to be blamed for their own eradication. In the end human survival is a matter of luck - or destiny, if you prefer - of decisions taken in distant capitals in vanished eras that bore unforeseeable fruit 200 years on, of chaotically intersecting systems of weather, metaphysics and pandemic, of the failures and weaknesses and limitations of our would-be destroyers. (NYT 6/4/10)
It is not only that we are not holy to Chabon, but we are even not exceptional. He argues further that we are neither more or less stupid than anyone else (well, at LEAST as stupid as everyone else) and everyone should get off our backs. We should stop claiming that we are special in any way because we aren't. In fact, the root of all this Israel-bashing is the fact that we have claimed such superiority for ourselves and we don't like it when others hold us accountable to that standard. The solution? Accept defeat. Accept and convince others to accept that we are not special and - having sacrificed ourselves upon the altar of our own Jewish ambivalence - maybe the world will then leave us alone. As if.
Fortunately, many millions of Jews DO believe that there is so much meaning and value in our tiny people. When they see a successful Jew or meet another Jew in the street, they are drawn together as lahntsmen. It makes them proud. When they see an Israeli flag or hear ha-Tikvah, they are proud. Despite the the pressure from the culture around us, from the media, from the anti-semites, to NOT feel special about being Jewish, they feel somewhere deep in their guts that they are special.
This attachment is wonderful and I support it. It is certainly no worse than supporting your local basketball team. Noone tries to make you feel guilty, say, for being a Boston Celtics fan[4]. After all, are the Celtics REALLY better than the Lakers, or vice-versa[5]? Would your support waver for your team if one of the players gets arrested? Do you have to make legal or rational arguments for why you support your team (even if you don't live in that city) over some other team? Well, the Jews are our team and Israel is our team and the notion that we should somehow root for someone else at the expense of our own team (even if they are winless and hapless and come from a depressed and disaster-stricken city) is kind of ludicrous.
At the same time, I recognize that this 'fluffy' attachment to Judaism is not really enough. For many Jewishly uneducated, uninspired, and unconnected Jews trudging through their Jewish lives, that's all is it is. Jewish connection might mean nothing more than bagels and lox, a few Yiddish phrases, a vague nostalgic attachment to something forgotten. Sometimes, when someone reveals themselves to be Jewish to me in that conspiratorial bageling way, I wonder whether they even know what we have --- or if in fact we do have anything -- in common. Are they happy to see me because we share something real, or is it kind of like getting excited when we meet someone else with the same birthday as we do? Pleasant, but meaningless.
So, I do not advocate rooting for Judaism or Israel like a sports team as a final step, but as a first step. Because it is no small thing to feel connected - to feel achdut - with so many other people. When I went to France and Italy, Jews there welcomed me into their homes for no other reason than that I was a fellow Jew who needed a palce to stay for Shabbat. Belonging to the "I'm Jewish" Facebook group may not be a substitute for a more robust Jewish life, but it is still cosmic and important, because of the power of that statement: "This is where I belong."
Seeing Jews riding in the anti-Israel Gaza flotilla, or cozying up to Hamas and Hizbulla leaders to show how enlightened or liberal they are in their choices chills my blood. It's not just that they support terrorism over democracy (which is pretty bad) or that I think they are tragically and dangerously wrong, but also that they are so profoundly alienated from being Jewish that they play for the other team. Aside from biological accident[6] -- and the tiny pilot light that I believe burns in every Jewish soul -- what umbilical cord connects them to the rest of us?
So, I aspire to be an ohev yisrael, a person who can love every Jew. You are my peeps. I will be irrationally happy when a Jewish actress becomes famous and be illogically thrilled to meet my fellow Hebrews in the park. And I'll be proud of it. I'll be singing the praises of the Jewish genius whether or not I can prove it. I'll welcome Jews into my home just because they are Jews. I will be strangely pleased to drink HeBrew, the beer of the chosen people. I will give tzedaka to Jewish causes first, just because they are Jewish causes. I will stand up for Israel and her rights to freedom and security without making a list of pros and cons and whether or not someone else doesn't like it. Because we are one people and the only one we've got[7].
I believe in the project of the Jewish people, in our Torah and our mission. But even for all the Jews who don't quite know what they think yet about God and Torah and our mission, we are all still one family. We are - and God-willing will always be - lahntsmen. Let us pray that that yearning for achdut will lead many Jews to seek for more and to discover the other hidden treasures of our tradition. Shabbat shalom!
Footnotes
[1] The OU has just started certifying it within the last few weeks, which is exciting to all of us who have run panting past free Gatorade stations in the past.
[2] It means more than that they were all physically there; it connotes unity of purpose as well.
[3] Some have argued that the Arab world does not really understand how important Shalit is to Israelis and Jews. They are simply unable to understand that he is like everyone's son and brother and that, in our value system, he is supposed to come home, not be a shaheed, l'havdil.
[4] I'm still a Denver Nuggets fan!
[5] I expect to be hearing from Lakers and Celtics fans on this one. What to do about the terrible break in Jewish unity caused by Jews rooting for different basketball teams?
[6] Well, I suppose God made them Jewish for a reason, whatever it may be.
[7] I root for the American team too, but in a less spiritual and cosmic way.
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Rabbi Avi HellerJoined: July 27, 2007 Originally from Denver CO, Rav Avi received a BA from BU and Rabbinic ordination and an MA in Bible from YU. Before joining MJE, he was Director of Jewish Education at BU Hillel, co-directed the BU Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus and was an Associate University Chaplain. He has been the... Divrei Torah (67) |
