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Sunday, May 2, 2010

Insight 5768-14: Pain


For
Parshat Va'era.

Not yet available on the Nishma website.

2 comments:

  1. epistemopathy@yahoo.comMay 2, 2010 at 5:43 PM

    Interesting Insight; it helped to clarify for me one step in the process of how these kinds of religious stories lead to extremism. If the plagues were an act of Justice, rather than an expression of some principle beyond our comprehension, then it brings the plagues into the realm of human understanding. If we understand the plagues as an example of Justice, then we will learn from this that this is how to carry out Justice. Calling it "justice" brings it down from the incomprehensible Divine realm into the human realm, and once this is done, gives us permission to apply this principle, and indeed contributes to the defining of the principle of Justice for us, so that we know how to apply it ourselves. Humans are commanded to do Justice, but how do we learn hat Justice is? By seeing it applied. I'm belabouring the point a bit to make it clear, because the implications are terrifying. The Chumash is telling its readers that if you have the power to commit mass terror on an entire population, and even mass murder, in order to convince its leaders to undertake more benign policies towards a subjugated group, then you should do it because it is Just. In other words, the Chumash is advocating terrorism as an appropriate tactic in this kind of situation. Similarly, if the "ethnic cleansing" of the Canaanites was done as a matter of a comprehensible principle rather than an incomprehensible Divine precept, then we learn from this that genocide is also an appropriate expression of this principle. The problem here is that the interpretations of the text arising from conventional scholarship have created a vector that must inevitably lead to extremism. By contrast, it is much safer for all of us to say that the actions of terror and genocide in the Chumash are not the expressions of understandable principles that humans can learn from, adopt and apply, but rather are entirely beyond our comprehension.

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  2. There is a constant tension within Torah between the recognition that it is impossible for the human being to understand the Divine yet the only way the human being can grow is in the attempt to understand the Divine. We must exist between these two powerful directives. In this way, whatever we can learn from God's actions throughout the Tanach must be approached with dual caution. On one hand, if we ignore the search to understand justice, we cannot learn. Yet, if we ignore the incomprehensibility of the Divine, we can pervert the idea. That is why, whatever was done within Tanach by God or through the direct directive of the God, we must be wary to apply in modern circumstances. That God brought disaster to Egypt or that Yehoshua destroyed the nations of Canaan have limited ability to set a direction for us today in that the principles upon which God acted we can inherently never really know -- therefore we do not have the very methodology of making decisions.

    Rabbi Ben Hecht

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