One Night Shtender

Shofetim
In the contexts of setting up a legal system, Moshe tells us,

צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדֹּף לְמַעַן תִּחְיֶה
Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive. Devarim 16:20

Tzedek can mean justice but also righteousness, from which we derive the word tzedaka, charity. Professor Everet Fox translates it as equity in the context of courts. But tzedek can be elusive. We are meant to pursue it even if we cannot fully attain it. And even if we try to catch up to tzedek, sometimes it is not clear that justice is what we need to singularly pursue. Justice alone can be harsh and our tradition tells us that it needs to be tempered by other attributes. As it says in Tehillim 85:11 "Chesed, lovingkindness, and Emet, truth, met tzedek and shalom, peace, and kissed." In our pursuit of one we cannot forget the others.

Curiously, our pasuk doubles the word tzedek. Much ink has been spilled in trying to understand this because our tradition does not take words for granted and any extras beg to be interpreted. Ibn Ezra understands the double tzedek to teach us that we must pursue it whether we win or lose in court. Sanhedrin 35b says that one tzedek is for judgment and another for compromise, which we should pursue equally and which does not always yield the same result.

The 17th century Rabbi Isaiah HaLevi Horowitz wrote that the first tzedek is when a judge or the Sanhedrin, the ancient Jewish supreme court, would follow the letter of the Torah law only. He says that in the case of an emergency the king could contravene Torah law to respond to the needs of the moment—that’s the second tzedek. Jerusalem was destroyed, he adds, because the rabbis insisted on too narrow a reading of tzedek. The 18th century Hasidic master Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polnoye, wrote that the doubling reminds us that justice must always be coupled with rachamim, compassion, which we emphasize in our Rosh HaShanah prayers. Ramban explains that you should judge yourself in terms of where you have been and where you are going. Reminding us that tzedek is not limited to the courthouse but also applies in all aspects of our lives.

This week the pursuit of tzedek in all of its aspects seems out of reach. We so desperately need chesed, emet and shalom as well. When good people are murdered so viciously it can feel that we will never reach a world of any of these attributes. But just as Rabbi Tarfon said in Pirkei Avot 2:16 “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it”. So we continue to pursue justice with compassion in the midst of mourning.
Shabbat Shalom with love,
Rabba Claudia Marbach

Teen Beit Midrash of Hebrew College has an online cohort of teens from around the country who want to learn Jewish texts and see what they mean for our lives today. Do you know a curious teen?

Va’etchanan/Shabbat Nachamu

This Shabbat is called Shabbat Nachamu, the Shabbat of comfort. Moshe tries to comfort the people by reminding them to stay true to the words of God. He reiterates the Ten Commandments and introduces the words of the Shema, which becomes the iconic prayer of the Jewish people.

In the haftorah the prophet Yishayahu also offers words of comfort. He says that Jerusalem’s punishment is over and that joy will return. We just completed three weeks of preparing for a Tisha B’Av that seemed more immediate than almost any in my memory. A day that Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, in his work Alei Shur, describes as a Moed Shel Richuk—a holiday of distance. And so it seems hard to switch to joy and comfort especially when there is so much pain and suffering.

Moshe tells the people to hold on to both the law and God’s love as their twin pillars. He reassures them that if they are steadfast in their devotion God will be with them. Even if they do stray and are exiled, God will still love them and eventually be reunited with them. For Rabbi Akiva, three centuries later, that was true as well. In one story, told in Yevamot 121a, he is shipwrecked and attributes his survival to holding onto a daf, or plank, from the ship. But daf also refers to a page of Talmud. Rabbi Akiva survived challenging times during the Roman occupation of Israel by holding onto the law.

Rabbi Akiva also held onto the love of God, sure as he was of God’s love of the Jewish people even during difficult times. Another story about him comes in Makkot 24b. He and some of his colleagues were walking in Jerusalem after the destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 CE. They saw a fox emerge from where the Holy of Holies had stood. The others cried at the sad state of affairs. But Rabbi Akiva laughed, because he saw that fox as a sign that Yishayahu’s prophecies of destruction had come true and so too he was assured the prophecies of renewal would also. Although we are told in Menachot 29 that he died a horrible death at the hands of the Romans, the Talmud there tells us that he died with the words of the Shema, of his love of God, on his lips.
Let us each find our pillar or our daf that keeps us afloat.
Shabbat Shalom with love,
Rabba Claudia Marbach

Do you know a teen who is curious about Judaism and looking for Jewish community? Teen Beit Midrash of Hebrew College is now accepting new and returning students both online and in person in Newton, MA. For more information come to an info session. For details go to https://linktr.ee/teenbeitmidrash

Devarim and Tisha B'Av
We always read parshat Devarim, the beginning of the last book of the Torah, on the Shabbat nearest Tisha B’Av, which begins this Monday night. Many reasons have been given for this juxtaposition. One is that the word eicha, translated as “how”, is both in Moshe’s plea to God about the burden of leadership and is the refrain of the book of Lamentations, which we read on Tisha B’Av. Both refer to our lack of understanding of the ways of God and the resulting feelings of isolation.

This year these feelings are palpable once again. After more than 300 days since the hostages were taken and the Middle East on tenterhooks amidst a brutal war, the question of eicha, or how, we got here reverberates loudly.

In our parsha Moshe begins his farewell speech by recalling when he asked God,

אֵיכָה אֶשָּׂא לְבַדִּי טׇרְחֲכֶם וּמַשַּׂאֲכֶם וְרִיבְכֶם׃
How can I bear unaided the trouble of you, and the burden, and the bickering! (Devarim 1:12)

In Moshe’s question we feel loneliness, as if he felt isolated and friendless at that moment. In the following pasuk he remembered that his solution was to appoint advisors. God had approved this decision. And yet the experience was significant enough to Moshe that he began his final speech to the people with that memory and not with the highlights of his time as a leader. One might have thought that leading the people from Egypt or receiving the Torah at Sinai would be the most important events, but the Torah teaches us here that it was in fact the loneliness and fear that felt more salient to him.

The eicha of Lamentations is also a cry of loneliness. How could God abandon us in a time of trouble and leave us to the cruelty of our enemies? The stories of the period leading up to the destruction of the Temple are told in the tractate of the Talmud dealing with divorce. By telling these stories there the Rabbis were emphasizing the breakdown that the destruction meant to them, as if God was divorcing them. The accounts told there, in Masechet Gittin, are all about people who are isolated in some way and so suffer, or cause others to suffer. Bar Kamza was disinvited from a party to which he was mistakenly invited, but when none of the others at the party stood up for him, including the rabbis, he betrayed his people to the Roman authorities. Later rabbis, in Gittin 56a, say that the Temple was destroyed because of him. Perhaps it wasn’t his actions but his isolation from the community that led to the destruction.

There is another story related to the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple told in Sanhedrin 104b about a woman who lost her son and would cry over him every night. The great Rabban Gamliel, who lived nearby, cried with her until his eyelashes fell out. His students wanted to remove her from the neighborhood so their teacher could sleep. Liora Eilon, a contemporary Israeli midrash writer and survivor of the October 7th attack on Kfar Aza, reinterprets the students’ impetus to take the woman out. Eilon says that they wanted her crying not to be insolation but to “trumpet it to the world” because, she says, only when we all weep together do we find solace.

I sat shiva for my father 23 years ago this week. Traditionally during the seven days of shiva the mourners do not leave their house and the community come to them to offer consolation. But when Tisha B’Av falls during a shiva, the rule is that the mourners do leave and join the mourning of the community. Years ago the stories of the destruction helped me to cry for my father as well. And being consoled by people who knew my father helped me not feel the isolation as acutely as Moshe who carried with him so many years later. Everyone mourns differently but the Jewish way is to do so together.

Shabbat Shalom with love Rabba Claudia Marbach