REPRINT FROM RABBI GAIL LABOVITZ 5771
I wrote this drasha three years ago when our daughter was about to leave for college. Now it is our son's turn: two days after Shabbat Shoftim he will board a flight to Israel to spend the school year there as a participant in the Nativ gap-year program. The wishes and thoughts I had about this transition regarding his sister are no less true for him. This week, this drasha is "For Joel".
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One of the dominant metaphors for Moshe's relationship to the Children of Israel is that of a parent or a primary caregiver. He leads them out of the "narrow place" (the literal meaning of the Hebrew name for Egypt, Mitzrayim), and "births" them as a nation; I would not be the first to note that the imagery of crossing of the Red Sea, between the narrow and watery walls, is suggestive of the passage of an infant through the birth canal. With God's intercession, he provides food and sustenance to the people, manna and drinkable water. He sees them through their endless growing pains and rebellions, and administers discipline and instruction. And sometimes, like any parent, he gets thoroughly fed up with his "children." In Num. 11:12, when the people complain about the manna and demand meat, imagining that life was better in Egypt, Moses says to God: "Did I conceive all this people, did I bear them, that You should say to me, 'Carry them in your bosom as a nurse carries an infant,' to the land that you have promised to their fathers?" Or as I (and bet I'm not the only one; you know who you are…) have been known to say to my husband, "You will not believe what your child did…"
And, like any good parent, eventually Moshe must see his children into independent adult life. He cannot go into the Land of Israel with his people. The reasons for this are multiple and complex, and the subject of debate for generations upon generations of commentators. But surely one reason is that for the Israelites to become a fully "adult" nation, both they and Moses must let go of each other, and they must learn to live without his constant presence - guided by his teaching and love always, but able to go forward on their own. Standing on this threshold of this parting and letting go, Moshe's great impulse is to reiterate all his teachings and advice and warnings to his children just one more time - and this is the bulk of what he does in the book of Deuteronomy, known in Hebrew as Devarim, "Words."
I can no more go to college with my daughter than Moshe could enter the Promised Land with the Children of Israel. And so, like Moshe, I have felt over these last few weeks the impulse to advise my daughter, teach her, make sure she knows all the things she will need to know to live and thrive independently. I have wanted to give her whatever little scraps of wisdom I have accumulated about work, learning, relationships, finances, making and reaching goals… Daily, I composed these teachings in my head. I think it was probably a good thing, though, that I was able to mostly keep them in my head.
My aim this week, then, is to instead seek some piece of Moshe's advice from Parashat Shoftim that I could share with her. But I have to admit that this is a bit complicated. As my daughter goes off to an institution of higher learning, Moshe in fact has something to say about learning, but it is not necessarily what I would have most thought to impart to my child at this moment:
"When you enter the land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to imitate the abhorrent practices of those nations." (Deut. 18:9)
Okay, I'm certainly not in favor of "abhorrent practices" - I understand that Moshe would warn the Israelites not only here, but many times throughout the Torah, against adopting practices from the surrounding peoples that are idolatrous and/or immoral. But the mention of learning here in this verse is strange. Is there nothing to be learned from others? The rabbis note the strange wording of the verse. In the midrashic collection Sifrei Devarim (and repeated many times in the Talmud), we find this comment:
"you shall not learn to imitate the abhorrent practices of those nations" - could it be that you are (also) not permitted to learn (about their practices) even to make rulings (about them) and to understand (them)? Therefore it teaches "to imitate" (more literally, "to do") - you may not learn to imitate them, but you may learn in order to make rulings and to understand.
That is, it is not knowledge about the practices of others that is forbidden. There might be circumstances in which understanding about them will be needed - for example, we might need to know what constitutes idolatrous practice, so that if someone in our community has been accused of committing idolatry, we will be able to properly evaluate that person's conduct. What is forbidden is not understanding about those practices, but the kind of learning that would tempt us into engaging in those practices.
Yet even being told that we should not copy the practices of other peoples has some inherent difficulties. As a midrashic comment in the Sifra asks about another, similar verse (Lev. 18:3, "You shall not copy the practices of the land of Egypt where you dwelt, or of the land of Canaan to which I am taking you"), can it be possible that this means we are not allowed to build buildings or plant fields the way they do? Shouldn't we follow whatever are the best practices of engineering and agriculture so that our buildings are useful and safe and our crops successful and abundant, no matter where those techniques come from?
It is worth knowing that while we offered our daughter the opportunity to take a "gap year," and participate in a program such as a year in Israel on a program like United Synagogue's Nativ, she was not interested. She has spent all her school years in Jewish day school, and her summers at Camp Ramah, and as she herself has put it, she is ready to "get out of the bubble." She is eager to meet and learn from people outside of her Jewish world, and we are in no way discouraging her in this. But our tradition, both biblical and rabbinic, gives her (and all of us) complicated guidance for how to handle our exposure to the learning and practice that takes place once we leave the "bubble." Some things we may take from the world around us, some things are better observed and understood at a distance but not put into practice in our own lives. How are we to discern the difference and make smart and moral choices of what to learn and what to do?
Again, there a number of passages in the Torah which can give us guidance, but I want to focus on one that appears in this parashah and indeed as part of the very passage I have already been discussing, Deut. 18:13:
You must be wholehearted with the Lord your God.
The key here in this verse is the word translated as "whole-hearted," tamim. In context, it has the primary sense of loyalty, a steadfast commitment to the one God of the universe to the exclusion of any other form of worship; many of the classical commentators take this approach when addressing this verse. But the significance of the word goes deeper, a point that can be demonstrated by its many appearances throughout biblical literature, where it is used to describe an important personal quality and element of one's stance in relationship to God and other people.
Thus, in thinking about the questions I have raised above, I would like to highlight just a few additional examples of the word, and some commentary related to those verses.
1) The use of this word in Deut. is certainly meant to echo God's speech to our forefather Abraham in Gen. 17:1:
Walk in My ways [literally, "before Me"] and be blameless [tamim].
Etz Hayim makes these comments to this verse from Gen. (p. 89):
"In the Bible, to 'walk before God' means to condition one's entire range of experience by the awareness of God's presence." And: "In the King James translation, the word translated here as 'blameless' (tamim) is rendered 'be perfect,' an unrealistic demand. We might understand it to mean 'be whole,' 'come before Me with your whole self: the parts of yourself you are proud of, and the parts you are ashamed of and wish were different.'"
2) From Psalm 15:1-2:
Lord, who may sojourn in Your tent, who may dwell on Your Holy mountain? The one who lives without blame (tamim), who does what is right, and in his heart acknowledges the truth.
The great Bible commentator, Nehama Leibowitz begins her discussion of the Deut. verse (Deuteronomy, pp. 181-2) by noting that the medieval ethicist Bahya ibn Pakuda used both of these verses to introduce his work "Hovot ha-Levavot" ("Duties of the Heart"). As he writes:
"the precepts of the heart imply a complete harmony between our inner and outward actions, as regards the service of the Lord, till the heart and tongue and other limbs will be at one with each other…neither contradicting nor belying the other. This is what Holy Writ refers to in the term "whole-hearted"…
As Leibowitz summarizes, "The opposite of 'whole-hearted' is disharmony between the inner and outer man, between words and deeds."
3. Psalm 119:1 opens as follows:
Happy are those whose way is blameless (tamim), who follow the teachings of the Lord.
Midrash Tehillim, the anthology of comments on the Psalms, connects this verse to a number of other usages of tamim, including our verse from Deut., about which it says: "'Before the Lord your God' is not written here, but 'with the Lord your God.'" If you are whole(-hearted), you will be with the Lord your God, for God too is 'whole,' as it is said of God, 'The Rock, Whose deeds are perfect (tamim)' (Deut. 32:4). And Israel are whole(-hearted) and the Torah is whole, as it is said, 'The teaching of the Lord is perfect t'mima), [renewing life]' (Psalm 19:8).
To be tamim, then, is to have a sense of identity and self-knowledge. It demands introspection and integrity. And finally, to be tamim is to engage in imitatio dei, the attempt to emulate the ways of God, and to be tamim is to embody Torah and its teachings.
Our daughter cannot stay in the bubble forever, and the Children of Israel cannot stay in the wilderness. Many people go off to a new stage of life and think that what they want to do, or are supposed to do, is reinvent themselves. The desire to be something entirely different than you were, though, it seems to me, cannot come from a place in which one is tamim. The person who is tamim is not perfect, because perfection is not a human possibility. The person who is tamim still has room to grow. But the person who strives to be tamim begins from a place of self-knowledge and self-acceptance and a desire to grow and develop rather than be changed whole cloth.
This is what we hope we have given our daughter through all those years of day school and Ramah and USY and so on: a strong sense of herself and her Jewish identity. Integrity. Commitment of her whole self to what she cares about and the goals that she sets for herself. A sense that through her choices and actions, she can bring the ideals of Torah into the world and make it a more Godly place. It is not easy, and it may not even be fully humanly possible to be always tamim. She has much growing and learning still to do and is not yet the adult person she will become. But this is the goal, and my wish for her in this new stage in her life. I can't wait to see the ever more whole person she will be.
Shabbat shalom.