Pinchas 5776/2016: To whom will we offer a cup of water?

I was waiting for the flight home from Israel, waiting in the departures area at Ben Gurion airport.  There were hundreds of people there:  Americans, Israelis, people who looked to be religious, others, like me, with just a kippah.  A man with a bright smile, dressed in a fairly religious looking fashion, was making eye contact across the row of seats where I was sitting, and saying something to everyone in the seats.  He made eye contact with me and said, “Yehudi, atah rotzeh kos mayim?”  This translates to, “Fellow Jew!  Would you like a cup of water?”  I said, “Lo todah”, no thank you.

I don’t recall anyone ever offering me anything, checking in on me, or otherwise paying attention to me at an airport.  As in many places, people there tend to keep to themselves, checking phones, typing on the computer, snoozing, or talking to the folks sitting to their right or left.

I was thinking about this story after studying the part of parshat Pinchas we read today, the part that lays out the sacrifices our ancient brothers and sisters brought to the Temple in Jerusalem during the 7 days of Sukkot, a total of 70 sacrifices over the course of the week long festival.

And ringing in my head at the same time are the words of the prophet Hoshea (6:6), “Chesed chafatz’ti ve’lo zavach,” “For I desire loving-kindness and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.”

Aren’t the sacrifices meant to train us to live with self-awareness and responsibility?  We must take the initiative to acquire and participate in the offerings.  As a people we must choose to hear and respond to God’s words, and if we love God with these gifts then we will be more likely to also love God by treating other people with the respect and dignity they deserve, and also hopefully reaching out to others as the kind gentleman reached out to me.

Time and again, though, the prophets warn us our sacrifices are in vain since they noticed disrespect and injustice around them.  They say, in effect, focus on the moral principles in the Torah first, and let the ritual aspects enrich our Jewish lives through both the discipline they demand and the beauty and insight they can help us achieve.

The Torah, to be clear, does not distinguish between ritual and moral mitzvoth.  There is no scale in the Torah itself that suggests love your neighbor as yourself is any greater a value than the nation’s responsibility to furnish the 70 offerings for Sukkot.

But later authorities, prophets and Rabbis, especially after the destruction of the Temple, an event we will remember on Tisha B’av in 3 weeks; they will argue that after the destruction of the Temples, which happened despite adherence to the rituals, perhaps the mitzvoth ben adam la’chavero, the ways people should relate to one another, are in fact more important, and in fact causeless hatred – disrespect, lack of empathy – that animosity between people toppled the 2^nd Temple and not the military might of the 10^th Roman legion.

We can synthesize these reflections by first making an assumption, an assumption I hope we can all agree upon, the assumption that God gives the Torah to the people for the better – that they, that we, will benefit.  We will grow in holiness, and in taking responsibility for our behavior, for being good stewards of the world that surrounds and nourishes us, for being teachers and leaders in the tradition of our ancestors. 

And we find this assumption grows not only toward ourselves, as the people of the covenant, but to others as well.  Rashi brings down a Midrash on the opening words of the verses laying out the 70 offerings, “The [offerings] of the [Sukkot] holiday are 70 with respect to the 70 nations of the world…[in the days of the Holy Temple] they offer them protection from adversity.”(Rashi to 29:18) 

But tragically, while studying the Torah and internalizing its teachings can give us a sense of identity and purpose, neither the Torah nor its teachings can protect us from harm, from the evils the world and its people carry out.  While we participate in Jewish life, in prayer, in education, in any way we express our Judaism, and as we strive to grow as thoughtful, caring, and active in creating this world in God’s image, we operate knowing that the unknown is so much greater, and often scarier, than the known, that the shalom we seek – the peace, the wholeness, the blessing – is elusive. 

Our tradition points out and emphasizes just how elusive this peace can be in the opening verses of this week’s parsha when God promises Pinchas, the title character, a brit shalom, a covenant of peace – the ‘vav’ in that word Shalom is cut in two, there is a break in the vav showing to us how zealotry in acting for God can in fact lead to suffering rather than salvation.

We’ve seen this too often this summer, and most recently in the violent way terrorists entered the church in St. Etienne de Rouvray, in northern France, and murdered Father Jacques Hamel and left other parishioners critically injured.  The perverted zealousness of the Islamic State terrorists appears to have no boundaries and although Muslim communities in France and elsewhere denounce these attacks, they sadly continue as do protests against the State of Israel a place where its Arab citizens fare well in comparison to other countries in the region.  And we must demand during this election season that  both sides of the political spectrum here must make the campaign about real plans for thoughtful leadership.

In this three weeks period, let’s follow the example of the generous gentleman who made the offer of a glass of water.  In place of causeless hate, let us offer ahavat chinam, loving-kindness without expectation of reward or return.  While we must stand strong and take the fight to our enemies, we ourselves are not the soldiers to do this and violence in speech and action tends to only breed more of the same.  As MLK taught us, we will meet brute force with soul force.  And like the protestors of the 1960s, we will prepare and be thoughtful in our approach – like our ancient brothers and sisters we will make the sacrifice of our time and energy to reach out, to branch out, and extend our message to the community before Tisha B’av and long before we gather to usher in a New Year.

Let’s take a moment to think now, to whom will we offer the glass of water this week?

Shabbat Shalom.

Dvar Torah: Balak 5776/2016: Great Expectations

Our expectations help to define our experiences, and in the big picture, our lives.

I want to share a story that reinforces this idea -- the story of a man, who will remain nameless, a man who was living down in Florida and noticed a store front that advertised ‘$100 cruise vacation’.  What a great deal.  He walked in and asked if the offer on the storefront was real.  The clerk behind the desk said it surely was real.  The man handed over the one hundred dollars and asked when the cruise vacation would depart – the clerk said, right now if you’re ready, please step through this way.  He crossed through the main desk and as he did the clerk took a baseball bat and knocked him on the head.  When he regained consciousness, he found himself floating on the ocean, in an inner tube, floating out there in the middle of the wide ocean.  He looked around and noticed someone else floating in an inner tube – he paddled over there and called out to the other, “Hey over there, do they serve a dinner on this trip?”  The other called out, “They didn’t last year.”

This story reminds us to be wary of our assumptions and of our expectations.  What seems like a good deal at first can quickly turn out to be anything but a good deal.  It is of course ridiculous to think that a full-fledged cruise vacation could ever cost $100, but we also know from recent history that even full-priced cruises are subject to Noro Virus, engine failure, and, in the case of the Costa Concordia and others, can be even worse tragedies. 

And expectations at full-price set the stage this week when King Balak, King of Mo’av, brings out Bil’am the magician to curse the people of Israel.  Mo’av fears the Israelites will rout them as they did to the Amorites, and Balak supposes Bil’am may be able to prevent the disaster.  In our reading today, we chanted the third and final oracle Bil’am speaks regarding the Israelites, and it includes the familiar words Ma tovu ohalecha Yakov mishkenotecha Yisrael – How beautiful are your tents O, Jacob, your dwelling places O Israel. 

While later Jewish tradition paints Bilam as an evil sorcerer (kind of like Aladdin’s Jafar), and later Jewish tradition demonstrates that his words, however they sound, show evil intent, it’s pretty clear here that he’s offered now, for the third time, abundant blessings to Israel rather than curses.

The Or Ha’chayim, Rabbi Chaim ben Moshe Attar, tries to explain that Bilam’s blessings really are curses but Balak simply cannot hear the curses in the nicely phrased poetic words.  With due respect to the Sages, the point of the story here is to show the divergence between what Balak expected and what Bilam actually did.

Balak says to him, “I called you to curse my enemies and instead you have blessed them three times over!” (Numbers 24:10)

Bil’am frustrated Balak’s expectations, not once, nor twice, but three times over.

Think about a time when each of us has faced a similar dilemma.  We take a car to get repaired, and then either the repair itself fails or something else breaks down soon after compelling us to return to the body shop.  Or more poignant for us, when we receive news about a health test or diagnosis – what do we hope to hear?  Can we ever be prepared for bad news?   Why is it that people may even struggle with hearing good news when fully expecting the opposite?

I recently heard from a hopeful parent – she and her husband had been for many years seeking to adopt a child, and were prepared and ready to adopt this summer when they learned just yesterday that the birth mother decided to keep the child instead of giving the child up for adoption.

During this election season we are subject to candidates and parties who raise our expectations.  We often hear, “On my first day in office I will…” and fill in the blank.  We all know that legislative priorities are important but that creating and guiding legislation through the democratic process often takes longer and involves compromise. 

Still, we must always strive to meet high expectations with the best of ourselves.  God asks us in the wilderness to take upon ourselves laws and practices that are neither easy nor convenient, especially for people on the move.  God does this knowing that once we settle in the Holy Land we will likely get too settled, too comfortable and the urgency of nation-building and the first exciting part of the journey, the honeymoon period, will end and we will regress. 

In fact, in the same parsha we read today the people regressed the moment after Bilam praised the people and showed how we would triumph over our enemies.  It turns out the “enemy” is within – we might one day overcome Amalek and Kenites, but the danger of falling back on old patterns, of looking to other gods to worship, statues, local deities, idols – all these easily accessible divinities are easy and less demanding than the invisible God of the universe who not only asks for our faith and trust, but also for us to live a life of justice and compassion.  As we’ve seen in bloody reality lately, this demand is tragically flouted by many religious extremists.

But to ask a significant amount from the people then and now is the only way to encourage us to strive, to stretch and to grow. 

And what better time to re-emphasize this message than as the 3 weeks leading to Tisha B’Av get started this Sunday with our observance Sunday of the Shivah Asar B’Tamuz fast, the fast that recalls the sieges of Jerusalem that led to the destruction of both Temples, destructions that our tradition remembers not as the result of overwhelming enemy force but as the result of our people not striving earnestly enough to live up to one of the most significant and central expectations God sets for us – Ve’ahavta li’re’acha kamocha, you shall care for your fellow human being as yourself.

And, of course, we should never purchase a $100 cruise vacation.

Shabbat Shalom.