Podcast #80: Parashat Va'etchanan

On Tisha B'Av, the speaker reflects on a recent program where a survivor shared his experience of defending his family against terrorists. The Kibbutz Mir Oz experienced a terrible attack, and many members were killed or kidnapped. The army was slow to respond, and the speaker finds meaning in Tisha B'Av as a day to mourn and reflect on the Jewish people's history. The conversation then shifts to Parshat Vayit Hanan, which contains important teachings and commandments. The speaker discusses the concept of meliorism, the belief that humans can make the world better through their efforts. They also explore the question of whether we have control over our lives or are merely being lived. The speaker suggests that both may be true to some extent. They also discuss the rise of narcissistic leaders and the need for humility and true leadership. The Torah is seen as a self-help book that provides guidance in uncertain times. Good morning, good afternoon or good evening, whenever you're going to be listening to this. We are recording on Tisha B'Av, it is Tisha B'Av today. I can already feel the beginning of the caffeine headache, even though I'm not a big coffee drinker, I'm a tea drinker, and that has caffeine too. So it's Tisha B'Av, it's a very, very strange Tisha B'Av this year. We had a very powerful program last night at our Kihila. We read a Chavzi, we thought that we had someone who was there on the 7th of October on Kibbutz Mir Oz, who fought heroically to protect his family on the Kibbutz. With a pistol. With a pistol. Against grenades and hordes and hordes of Hamas terrorists. Yeah, yeah, it was just shocking and eventually both him and his family were saved, including his daughter, who slept over at her grandmother's house on the other side of the Kibbutz. The grandfather, though, was kidnapped. He was an expert on the Holocaust, which is very, it's not ironic, but it's very sad. He was actually murdered in captivity in Gaza, and there's another uncle who's still a hostage in Gaza. So Mir Oz is a Kibbutz, right midway across from the Great Gaza Strip. It has some 400 members, had 400 members. A quarter of the members were either killed or kidnapped on that terrible day, and it took a very long time for the army to show up. It didn't show up. In fact, it didn't show up until the members of the Kibbutz, the survivors, actually chased the terrorists away. And the terrorists left, and in the afternoon, the army came, and in fairness, they had a lot of places to deal with, but somehow Mir Oz was not responded to. And Elisha, listening to this dispassionate account by Yaron, who told it coldly as it was, as a soldier recounts events, it was chilling, Elisha, it was devastating. I've never been a fan of Tisha B'Av. We're mourning an event that happened 2,500 years ago. So many awful things have happened to the Jewish people since then, but it occurs to me, Tisha B'Av is a day in which we mourn the awful things that happened to the Jewish people, including October 7th, and we draw lessons from it, we search our souls, we think about it, why did this happen to us, what did we do, what should we have done? This is a meaningful day, and it becomes more meaningful, especially after listening to Yaron. We hear news all the time, we see video clips, but Elisha, listening to this young man, this brave young man with a pistol who saved his family, it was absolutely chilling. Yeah, it was really chilling, and I think one more thing, when we read the book of Lamentations of Elisha, I've read it so many times, you've read it so many times, it all of a sudden made sense, it all of a sudden, the words, phrases, descriptions in it, all of a sudden sounded so familiar. So when one of our readers, Aviva, read the part about hostages being taken, Jews have been taken hostages through the ages, she broke down in tears, she had to pause and gather herself, it was, again, extremely moving. So Elisha, we're talking about Parshat Vayit Hanan, which is a perfect Parshat, I think for today, and your Drashah, which you wrote, I think, five or six years ago, Parshat Vayit Hanan is a giant Parshat, it is long, it's the 45th Parshat in the Torah, in the five books of Moses, 1,878 words full of mitzvot, like seeds of pomegranate, 26 mitzvot, and you say that, I quote, one could say it contains the essence of the entire Torah, it has the Ten Commandments, it has the Shema, the Ahavta, and the essence of the Israelite faith and this amazing initial discourse of our Moshe, the greatest prophet, the greatest leader. Yes, yes indeed, and again, the Ahavta, the name of our key lie, is at the core of this Parshat, so it also feels very personal, and it's powerful, so what are we going to talk about today, Shlomo? So a theme that you return to very often in your Drashah is that, I quote, the Parshat suggests that nothing external has power of its own, and therefore there is nothing that governs our lives, ourselves, not money, not health, not the love of someone dear to us, nothing, and Elisha, I want to briefly talk about a wonderful thing written by a friend of mine, Paul Sakin, he's Canadian, lives in Toronto, he's a professor of French literature at the University of Western Ontario, he started a Jewish studies program there, he writes for a Los Angeles Jewish paper, he sends me his writing, and he raises this question, is Judaism a faith of optimism or pessimism? We can be pessimists for sure, given our history, we could be optimists, which is fun, but rather naïve, and he proposes a third way, and I buy it, I try to practice it, I think you do too, and let me explain, he says that Jewish people are, and should be, meliorists, what is a meliorist? Meliorism is a doctrine that suggests that the world may be made better by properly directed human effort. That means we are optimists because we can make a difference, we can change things. We are pessimists because we realize, oh boy, there's a lot of stuff to fix. And the bottom line of meliorism is, we collectively are the authors of our own fortune or misfortune. So we believe in God, God is all-powerful, God is everywhere, but we are the authors of our fake, we are the authors of our own fortune, and we can make things better, and that's what we should be doing to become a bracha, to be a blessing to the world. What do you think? Well, first of all, I think it's, I'm really grateful to you for bringing this and framing it in terminology that we can all grasp, and I think it's one of the most interesting conversations, one of the deepest conversations, this big, big question of, who is living here? Are we being lived, or are we living our lives? And it's something that I'm pondering, since I can remember myself, since I can remember myself thinking, I've been thinking about this question, there are days where I feel very strongly that we just have the illusion that we do, that we impact. We certainly impact, but is it we who impact? Sometimes I feel it's a total illusion of the brain, of the mind, that thinks, I can do it, I'm doing it, and that's an illusion, and that in fact, we are totally being lived from beginning to end, including the illusion that we are actually active participants here. And then there are other days, where I wake up in the morning and my mindset is that God helps those who help themselves, and we can sway the tide, the tide, is that the expression? Yes. In either direction, and we have a lot of power, and we have a lot of proof for it, how we did this, and we did that. So one possibility is that both are true, that to an extent we have some say in the matter. We have some, an extent of capacity to impact, and then to an extent, there's a larger drama going on, for example, this period that we're living in, I think we are in the midst of a massive, massive, like a sea change, a massive change in human consciousness, in everything that we knew is like falling apart. This is not our doing. I think we're only trying to somehow stop the change, because it's so frightening, it's so scary. We're trying to stop the process and hold on to what's familiar, while a much greater process, much bigger than us, is leading humanity, the world, the universe, I don't know, in a whole other direction. What I do believe, it's always for the good, that I do believe. And then if it's both, then there is this macro process going on, and on a very micro level, on a very small level, we have some freedom of choice to impact it this way or that way. And in a second, I want to connect it to Vahavda, because I think that's where we can make the biggest difference. But what do you think? Well, Alicia, science can help us here. So when you do science, you begin with a hypothesis, with an idea, with a theory that you want to test. And how do you choose your hypothesis? You choose a hypothesis that can move your understanding and results forward in the best and most efficient way. So I think the best hypothesis is, we do have influence, we can control. Maybe it's not true. Maybe it's super true, but we will act as if it were true, and let's see what's going to happen. I love that. We're in the middle of speaking, I'm sorry I interrupted. Just a word about this radical change that's sweeping over the world, and you're right. But it has some negative impacts, Alicia, and here the Torah can be really helpful for us. So I look around the world and I see the rise of narcissistic autocrats, world leaders who are arrogant and who think about themselves, who lack a scrap of humility. Trump in America, Trudeau in Canada, Orban in Hungary, Xi Jinping in China, Erdogan in Turkey, the list is endless. And the question is, how come people tolerate these narcissistic people who are so self-centered and looking only at themselves and their well-being and their own personal needs, and not at their country and the well-being of their country? Why is this? And the reason seems to be pretty simple. I heard a discussion of this in a podcast called Hidden Brain, which is about applied psychology. When there's uncertainty in the world, Alicia, we don't know what's going on. We look to people who claim they know. They provide us with this false artificial certainty. They know what's going on. Trump knows that he can fix the world and make America great again and cure cancer and you name it. It's not true. It's not true. With chlorine, no? What? Cure cancer with chlorine or something? That was one of the things, cure COVID by swallowing this. Let's not talk about that. Let's look at the Torah. The Torah, the greatest self-help book ever written, 5 billion copies of the Torah, of the Bible sold, one for every adult in the world. And Moshe, this humble man who argues with God, talks about his inability, his failings, and giving true leadership and creating this incredible miracle, which he talks about in the book of Devarim Deuteronomy, in his three discourses. And this first discourse is just amazing. He says to the people, and he asks them a question, in parenthesis, Moshe deals with the why, not just the what. This is crucial because we act on our motivations. Why should we follow the Torah? Why should we be Jews? Why should we continue to read the Bible and study and do what Moshe said, why? And he says, has any other people heard the voice of God speaking out of the fire? Has any God ever tried to take for himself one nation out of another nation by miracle signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, by great and awesome deeds like all the things the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes? In other words, holy cow, we are a specialist little band of Jews who somehow the world has tried to wipe out again and again and again. Just recently, October 7th, and we're still here. How come? Why is that? Let's think about that because this is important. Right, right, right. You said so many important things, so many important and deep, deep things, Shlomo. I just want to go back a little bit and then we're going to come back to that and to some other points. I would say the following, that on the issue of to what extent we have an impact, you suggest this beautiful idea that science suggests, you know, you have an hypothesis, you act accordingly and what it implies is when you act accordingly, it has impact. And it proves that this hypothesis is somewhat true because, hey, it had impact. I think the same thing is true for faith. That's what William James, the American philosopher, psychologist, suggested that faith, if we wait to prove whether faith is right or not or wrong, we will never reach, never have faith in our lives. However, if we make it like an hypothesis where we claim that faith does work and we live accordingly, we live as if faith and God, as if God exists and faith has impact, then we will discover in our experience that God exists and faith has impact. So I love this idea and we can also say, though, that this is part of the grand plan, meaning the grand plan is that we're going to let the world be run by your hypotheses, by your thoughts. The world is controlled by our collective thoughts, our personal thoughts, our collective thoughts. So whatever we think on a deep, deep level becomes and that's how the world came into being, religiously speaking. So it's useful to really consider what your hypotheses are and what you choose to believe in because whether they're objectively true or not, it doesn't really matter. Subjectively, they're true and they work and they carry you forward. That's the key. They work, Elisha. Exactly. There's something called cognitive behavioral therapy and it's pretty simple. You do the behavior that you want to achieve and in doing it, you change yourself, change your viewpoint, you help yourself, you have your mental outlook. This is relatively new. It really is effective. The Torah told it to us 2,500 years ago, we will do and then we will understand. Right. Right. And in modern times, I'm the one who's supposed to represent the Torah, but it was William James. I'm a big fan of William James. And it was William James 130 years ago who was speaking about psychology in those terms and it took over 100 years for the rest of the psychological community to catch up. On another note, we're following the same track, following the same idea. So are the Jewish people chosen? Are we, as Moshe suggests here, are we chosen by God and God took us out of, first of all, out of the east, out of Babylonia, took Abraham out and then took the chosen people out of Egypt and chose us to be God's messengers in the world. So the question is not, did that happen or not? Is that true or not? It is a hypothesis that we are basing our lives on. So if we regard as true, if we claim this is true, then we are forming a reality in which this is true. So the Jewish people, the way they perceive themselves, we perceive ourselves as being chosen for a mission, being chosen for a bunch of different things. And therefore, it's true because we chose to believe that and we believe it so strongly, we manifest this in the world and it becomes true. And indeed, I think that's the cause of a lot of anti-Semitism. I'm not suggesting to change it, but it is the cause of anti-Semitism. And now I want to connect to another point that you made earlier in this conversation. The big trends in the world, I think one trend, as you said, is narcissistic leadership. Another trend is the love of victimhood. And what we're seeing in the world, what is called the anti-colonial movement, which I don't think is anti-colonial at all, but that's what it claims to be, is basically the rise of the victims. Rise of grievance, basing everything on the past, on what's been done to you, and we're going to get even. Right, right. And it doesn't bring any blessing to the world whatsoever. It does no good to the world. It doesn't choose life, it chooses victimhood and grievance. And grievance never achieved anything. So we are right now, we're right now in a way the victims of the victims who are trying to get back at us and the rest of the Western world. And it can only work, it can only succeed temporarily. Victimhood can only take you so far at the end of the day. Only those who truly choose life, who choose a positive theology, who choose a positive blessing in the world will make a difference. And yes, we're going through a dark period where stupidity of victimization is sweeping the world. But it won't last. It just won't last. No, it won't last. Elisha, I want to talk about the Olympics because it's relevant to Parshat Vahad Hanan. The Olympics ended on Sunday after two weeks. Little Israel, Israel, nine million people. We came over here with seven Olympic medals. And one of them from my neighborhood, one of them from the Gymnastics, she's in Shechonat Ramez. Amazing. And Sharon Cantor, who won windsurfing, she's from Abihail where my son lived until recently and they had a big celebration for her. So seven medals, Little Israel. And in the medal card, Elisha, we ranked together with Taiwan and Croatia. Those are empires of athleticism, of large populations and we're right up there with them. What's the message from the Olympics? So I watched a fair amount of it and I watched how the athletes celebrate their achievements but even while they're pole vaulting or long jumping or sprinting, they're doing it with great joy, with great joy. And it seems to me on the saddest day of our calendar, on Tisha B'Av, when we remember terrible things including those that happened ten months ago, it's a day to recall that Judaism is a religion of joy. As the song goes, celebrate God, serve God with joy. That's the key message of the Hasidim. It's a beautiful message that they've brought to us. Achievement comes with joy. Politics, in America we're seeing a shift now from the politics of fear to the politics of joy brought by the new democratic candidate and it seems to be touching the chord. It's resonating. The politics of joy and the religion of joy will overcome the politics of fear, hatred, vengeance and grievance and the Torah says this very, very clearly. Yeah, that's really well said. I love that. And that's why I think, you know, Haftar, which we've already discussed, I think we talked about it last week or the week before, where love plays a role, so we're pointing out joy and I think we have the notion of We talked about it last week and this week it actually appears black on, with black ink on parchment. Indeed, indeed. There's a deep ethical issue here. I don't know if we have time to really explore it. I'd like to raise it, at least. Moshe tells the people in his discourse, this is chapter 6, in Vayit Hanan. What does that mean? How did Moshe act? Well, let's translate this first. I acted according to ethical principles, yashar, straight, I was straight. And according to compassion, according to goodness, in my eyes, as I saw it. And this turned out to be best. So here we have a very deep principle, I think. There are ethical principles, the Ten Commandments in Vayit Hanan, but frankly, Alisha, those aren't super helpful. In Oklahoma, by the way, the state government has commanded in school, everybody will learn the Ten Commandments. It has to be taught. And there's a big fuss about that, religious freedom and so on. I think that's a great idea. It's a religious document, it's a cultural document. What can be bad about learning the Ten Commandments? Give me a break. But they're not that helpful, Alisha. In very difficult, complex situations, you've encountered these all the time as a rabbi. If you only have ethical principles, you can have an ethical encyclopedia. It's not going to help you when you face really complex decisions. You have to temper it with compassion. It's like when we make steel, you add a little bit of impurity and carbon to make it a little harder. You don't have just pure steel, pure ethics. You need to have this compassion, and Moshe had that. I think sometimes I find this missing in some very religious people who are very punctilious in observing the mitzvot. What about the milk of human kindness? Where is that compassion? Yeah, yeah. Shlomo, that's a great question. I think it's a rhetorical question, and maybe the answer is also, again, in V'ahavda. If you don't bring love in the deepest sense of the word, then it's just mechanical mitzvot. But the mitzvot are in the service of love and compassion and goodness. I think Judaism, throughout its branches of thinking and philosophies and mysticism, talks about this balance between din and chesed, between laws and judgment and boundaries and limitations. It has to be balanced with chesed, with compassion, with love, with grace, etc. One without the other, the structure won't stand. It really needs both. It's probably one of the hardest things for us humans to do, and it goes back to what you said at the very beginning, with the kind of leadership we have in the world today that's both narcissistic and full of demagogues, when we're looking at times of upheaval, we're looking for people who know, who bring us clear answers. Clear answers are always either-or, this is the way. It is never the case that this is the way. There's always both, and the mixture might change, the balance might tilt back and forth, but nevertheless, if it's only one way, one path, one viewpoint, one component in creating the steel, then it just won't stand. It won't stand. It will eventually collapse. Being able to find the balance is the most difficult thing, I think, in the human pursuit. Indeed. Alicia, I find confirmation in baseball. I always wanted to be an athlete, and I was terrible, because at the time, I always was very tense that I have to perform well, and that's the exact opposite of the way you want to perform in athletics. Seeing these young ladies in gymnastics and others, and the joy and the relaxation. In baseball, you're playing the outfield, someone hits a fly ball, you have to catch it. My hand used to get so tense, fearing that I would drop the ball, which I did. How do you catch a ball in baseball? You have soft hands. You relax your hands, and you cushion the ball. You welcome the ball into your glove. I think that's the same principle in ethics and religion. You have clear ideas, clear abilities, and you have soft hands, and you welcome the principle, taking into account everything surrounding it, with great compassion, with great joy, with fun, with relaxation, with soft hands. Beautiful. What a beautiful note to end on. It's really beautiful. So here on Tisha B'Av, by the time you listen to this podcast, it's going to be after Tisha B'Av. God willing, things are going to look a little bit better, and who knows, we're all waiting for the bomb to drop, the bombs to be launched, the missiles, the drones, and let's hope by the time we hear this, this reality will look a little bit softer, just as you said, with more compassion, and that we'll be able to catch the ball in a soft and beautiful way. Amen. Leetot, everyone. Goodbye, everybody. Thank you for listening.