A Lone Voice - Lech Lecha
The news train is relentless, zooming ahead as we try to cope with each difficult image we see and story we hear. I feel guilty that I have often reached my limit. Yet, I will not let the news numb me, and can not bear to be an idle TV witness any longer.
What I can do to keep my sense of sanity, is to write about the ways the Torah is speaking to us. Not as an ancient text, but as a living, vibrant code that is relevant to our daily lives. By peering through the lens of our sacred text, I will have a way to comprehend the incomprehensible.
Can I be open to its eternal wisdom?
We are only in the third week of Torah readings that began with the majesty of the world’s creation and descriptions of unimaginable lushness within the pristine beauty of Gan Eden. In the blink of an eye, we experience the exile of two human beings, who must leave their Paradise and forge ahead in the business of life. And then there is murder —-the most heinous kind, jealousy between siblings.
A few verses later, we read about humanity’s urge to reach to the highest heights, where humans1 , and not a Higher Power, decide what is just and right. That signals an inconceivable downfall. Once that kind of evil erupts, it spreads like a cancerous tumor, calling for the decimation of an entire civilization.
The reason given for the total destruction of the earth was because the land was filled with Chamas2 חָמָֽס, yes, Chamas. Defined as lawlessness, physical violence, and harsh treatment. The commentator Onkelos, (born in 35 C.E. and a convert to Judaism) defined it as kidnapping. The Ohr HaChaim (1696 – 1743), defined chamas as the trait of thievery, sexual perversion, idolatry3, and spilling blood.
But there is hope. As amazing as it sounds, the Torah tells us that the future of the world rests on one individual, Noach, and his ability to carry out orders from Hashem to build an ark housing him, his family, and animals. We’re not sure at this point what is more fantastical: that only one person was righteous enough to be saved or that this person built an ark4, immense enough and somehow fully waterproofed to sustain them during the flood.
The building of the ark took place over a period of years and years…and Noach had to sustain what must have been ridicule and derision for his obeying the command of the Unseen. Imagine.
Could any of us have done that? Could we have been the lone voice in a crazed world?
The Torah tells us that it takes just one person going against the raging evil to set things on a different path.
This week, Avraham offers another example of one who is HaIvri5, the Hebrew, one who chooses to be on the other side of idolatry and evil, following the instructions by Hashem to leave all behind as he journeys forward.
The Torah is telling us again that one voice makes a difference.
Avraham offers us a more sophisticated model of loyalty to the Unseen than Noach, who followed God’s commands exactly, without question. Avraham is the one who has been singled out. He is another lone voice, but this time the Torah tells us more clearly what his role is:
For I have singled him out, that he may instruct his children and his posterity to keep the ways of Hashem by doing what is just and right….Genesis 18:19
When God decides to tell Avraham about plans to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because of their intense wickedness, Avraham becomes an activist. He advocates on behalf of righteous others who live in those cities who might be killed as well:
Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty? Genesis 18:23
Seeking the Higher Good is what we have to do. We are not to sit idly by in silence. We each have to become an activist for what is right and good, sometimes even leaving the comfort of friends and family who feel differently.
The Torah tells us that we have to ask difficult questions, even of God.
It is part of our tradition to do so, even though the verdict in the end might be impossible to stomach.
The situation now is even more challenging.
One army is defending its right to exist, while the other seeks to wipe a people off the face of the earth {see my last post, Bitter Knowledge}. The two sides are not equal, and those who speak about the ‘cycle of violence’ tend to equate the two. But we know that there is a perpetrator and a protector.
Why is there such confusion about the just and the right?
The burden is on Hamas for saving its own people, and the Arab countries who are silent share this burden.
Over one million Jews were ousted from Arab lands in the years prior and during 1948. Israel took them in. No questions asked. We were responsible for our own. Muslims will have to answer why there was no unified attempt to rescue the Palestinian people.
But no one will ask the question.
When the world seems to have gone mad, we need to continue to be the lone voice. To cry out and exclaim the injustice. To seek justice for the innocent, but also to raise our voices for the injustices that were committed against our people. We have to be the lone voice for ourselves.
This story has been played out time and time again in our history. Societies that have proclaimed humans as the final judge have not demonstrated what might be the best potential of humanity, but instead, have shown us the worst in horrors and atrocities.
In our times, Hamas is an acronym in Arabic for Harakat al-Muqawima al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Resistance Movement. The similarity is significant.
Later Torah commentators understood idol worship as not only meaning pagan practices but the succumbing to those ideas and practices which are abominable to the sacredness of humanity as the ultimate Good.
The actual word for ark, Teyva, is the same word used for the ‘basket’ that held Moses as a baby in the Nile. Teyva is not found elsewhere in the Torah, and the word itself means “word” allowing commentators to say that the world was sustained with the help of Noach and Moshe by “The Word” meaning Torah.
The literal meaning of Ivri, which is also translated to mean the Hebrew [person].