Podcast #84: Parashat Ki Tetse

The podcast discusses the Torah portion of Ki Tetzeh, which contains the most mitzvot in the whole Torah. The main theme is how to deal with evil and the commandment not to hate. The speaker explores the idea that everything is divine and connected to God, and evil happens when that connection is severed. The goal is to eradicate evil actions, not hate the people who commit them. The speaker also questions the effectiveness of the criminal justice system in dealing with evil. It is acknowledged that it is not easy to avoid hatred, especially in the face of extreme acts of evil. Good morning everyone or good day, whatever time it is you're listening to this podcast. It is Wednesday morning here in Israel and it's actually a beautiful morning in terms of weather. It's not as hot as it was and fall season is approaching and that's very, very, very exciting and if we switch off everything around us, don't listen to the news, be totally immersed in good things, I don't know, like studying Torah or something, life is not that bad. So we have a great parashah and parashat Ki Tetzeh, when you go out or should you go out to war, three dots. Indeed Elisha, this is a great parashah, they're all great, but this is especially great for reasons I'll explain in a moment. Ki Tetzeh, it's the 49th parashah, we're getting toward the end of the Torah and Sefer B'Avim, the book of Deuteronomy, 1580 words, but Elisha, Ki Tetzeh is distinguished for one thing, it has the most mitzvot in the whole Torah, it has 74 mitzvot, 27 positive and 47 negative and I'm a numbers guy Elisha, so it works out to one mitzvah every 20 words. It's full of mitzvot like fruitcake is full of raisins and they're mostly mitzvot about the 800 pound gorilla in the Torah about evil. What do we do about evil and we are dealing with that every day here in Israel because we are facing it. What do we do about evil? And your Doshai Elisha from 5777, eight years ago, 2016, incredibly relevant, we face this evil attacking us and doing things that we hardly could imagine before that, how do we deal with this? And we face a commandment, the main one out of the 74 I believe in the parashah, we've seen it before in parashat Re'eh which we discussed and the commandment is not to hate, not to hate. And I think Elisha, I'm personally grappling with this one and our whole country is and our leaders, we face hatred in the whole world, it's unjustified. We ourselves harbor hatred because of the terrible things done to our young people, our people, our kids, our young women, our young girls, our soldiers, our female soldiers. How in the world do we deal with evil in a world in which we believe God is the creator and God is the divine person, the divine thing who runs this world? How in the world do we deal with evil and the key question, how do we not hate when we are commanded not to hate, specifically by Moshe, do not hate the Edomites even though they basically did what Hamas did which is to chase behind you and kill you, the weak and the stragglers, do not hate Egyptians because you're their brother, how in the world do we avoid hatred and you have some really, really important ideas and they're practical ideas in terms of how do we deal with this, it's not just Kant or Hegel talking about philosophy, this is how we live, how do we deal with the evil that we see in front of us in our daily lives? Yeah, yeah, what a good question and in 2016 when I looked at the shot, I can't remember what kind of hatred was around, I'm sure there was evil around but you're right, right now it's really tough not to hate and the levels of hate are so high and never mind hating our own enemies, that's one thing, but hating our own brothers and sisters, hating people who think otherwise than we do, it really, really troubles me and in the book of Leviticus and this is where it says, I love the neighbors, it also says, don't hate your brother, your mate, your fellow Israelite in your heart, you may reproach them, you may be angry, it's all okay but you're not to hate them, you're not to hate them and now we even have not to hate the Edomites, not to hate the Egyptians, right, so how do you do that in the face of evil? So I think I would answer it differently than I did in 2016, my answer today in 2024, 5784 years since creation according to our mythological story, I would say that first of all, first of all and it's troubling to say today that everything is God's creation, everything is God's creation and I think that, okay, I'm going to make a theological attempt here and we'll see if it works. We're studying this now extensively in our Beit Midash and our Sunday night classes and the idea here is that everything has been created by the divine, now it doesn't mean that God wanted Hamas to go out on the 7th of October and commit these horrific atrocities, that's not what it means. What I think Jewish theology means by that is that everything at its core is divine and evil happens when we are not connected to the core, when we are for whatever reason disconnected from the core, that's when reality becomes evil, becomes corrupt, and we kind of corrupt the source of everything and the source of everything is good, 100% good, and the minute the source is severed, and it's not necessarily severed right away, it could be severed over time, that's when reality becomes evil and that too is part of God's creation, that too is part of God's creation and the warning from the Torah, I think what the Torah is telling us throughout the Torah is saying be connected to the source of everything. If we recognize, for example, a person we really don't like, but if we through our own inner meditation realize that person and his or her source is divine, is connected to God, is divine creation, then that immediately changes our perspective towards that person, just like when we see a person who does something really bad and then we hear that he had a really terrible childhood and he was abused and he suffered tremendously and no one cared about him and all of a sudden we become sympathetic towards him and we can have more understanding and sympathy towards him, so in the same way if we can really understand that everything is divine, everything is connected at its core to the divine and evil begins when the divine source is forgotten, neglected, somehow is no longer there. Now everything is still always connected because it can't survive without being connected to the divine source. It can't survive another day, another moment, but it's so remotely connected, so many things get in the way, so many things overshadow the divine connection that mostly what we get to see is evil. So in a way we can say that evil is not a thing in itself, evil is the absence of good. Evil is the absence of the root connection to the ultimate good. So Elisha there is a key point that you make in your Gashah about evil and hatred. You're told in the Gashah and you quote this, you will eradicate evil from your midst. We are told that we have to wipe out the evil, but we're also told not to hate, so we can't hate evil but we have to wipe it out from our midst. What is going on here and you make this obvious point which is so crucial and so misunderstood including by me Elisha, quote from your Gashah, our sages who are very daring in their day claim that an evil person does not exist, there are only evil actions. This is so elementary, so basic and so helpful Elisha. There are things that people do that are really bad, there are no bad people. Elisha, once my little grandson was acting up and misbehaving really badly and I seem to have called him that he is being bad and my daughter-in-law corrected me and insisted there are no bad children, not at our house, there are only bad things that they do. So we have to eradicate the evil things that are done in the world and heaven knows there are a lot of those, but not the people who are evil because as you note people are not inherently evil and you make a really brilliant point and you connect this with prisons Elisha. Our criminal justice system is broken, we grab people and we stuff them in jail for years, does that make them better people, does that eradicate the evil? God puts Sinuara in jail for 20 years, what did he do? He spent 20 years working out a diabolical plot taking advantage of all the weaknesses that he had learned about Israeli society and he learned Hebrew, so he knows us and he watches us like a hawk even now, every single day. Evil actions, not evil people. When your world view is that, that there are really no evil people, there are evil things that are done, they are disconnected from God, they are remote from goodness, I think it changes our world view, it changes the way we behave toward one another. Right, I agree with you and I have to say it's not easy, it's not easy because you just mentioned the word Sinuara and I can feel the hatred rising, you know I'm waiting for the day that he will be eradicated, he will be eliminated, I would be very pleased if he was eventually, if Israel finally got him, just like America got Bin Laden and I'm not a person who really seeks revenge and wants to kill people, but it feels like in his actions, in his ideology, in his religious extremism, he has severed himself from the source and when you sever yourself from the source, and the source is always goodness, the source is divine, the source is good, when you sever yourself, then you're basically so up in the world as if you are your own entity, which is why so many of us believe that God could not have created evil, but Ishael himself, the prophet Ishael said, you know God created both the good and the evil, and created the evil meaning created the freedom to cut yourself off from goodness, and Sinuara made a choice at some point in his life, and not only him, I think the whole ideology behind Sinuara, for whatever reason, and we can find a lot of reasons for it, but they made a conscious choice to work in the dark side, and the dark side is simply, what's the dark side? A place where light hasn't entered, where the light cannot go in. Now it sounds very patronizing like this, that I know where the light is, and they're in the dark, and I'm in the light, and sounds very non-PC and very patronizing, but I think that that's what happens to all of us, and in moments where a moment of darkness, it could be depression, could be anger, could be a seeking revenge, it's a moment of darkness, and in those moments of darkness, darkness is not an entity unto itself, just like evil is not an entity unto itself. Evil is the state where the disconnect from the good, where the good can't enter. Darkness is where there's disconnect from the light, where the light simply cannot enter, and we're told that it takes a tiny bit of light to eradicate a lot of evil. That also goes back to one way of eradicating evil is to do good in the world. Yes, there need to be people who go to army and do the dirty work, and at the end of the day, I think we are taught that the best way to eradicate evil is simply bring some light, bring the light of day to that place. Yes, and sometimes though, it's a little harder than that, Alicia, and here's an example. We had a painful example of it this week. Senua has a life view, a mindset where the more of his civilians die, the better it is for his cause, for his cause in the world, and these people are martyrs. They are making blessed sacrifices, and so he places his soldiers amidst civilians, does this continually, knowing full well that many innocent people will die, and we had this case this week. Seniors of Hamas military leaders and Hamas terrorists, we attacked them, and they were right in the midst of civilians, and we do the best we can, really we do, as much as or more than any army, but sometimes many civilians are killed, and then on television the pictures appear of this huge hole and weeping women and injured children, and it's gut-wrenching, Alicia, but this is what we're dealing with. Eradicate evil from your midst. People who believe there's a blessing to sacrifice people and to choose death rather than life. Golda once said she would never forgive the Palestinians because they were forcing us to kill them in battle. We're paying a terrible price for this, Alicia. My son is dealing with this and helping people who are traumatized, not just the army but civilians. We as the Jewish people are being combat. This is not what Jewish people do, but life, we choose life, we choose to survive. To survive, this is what you need to do when you have enemies like this, and the enemies are doing evil. It's not that they are evil, and one last thing, Alicia, I was never a really decent athlete at all. I've tried to be because I always tense up and was overly motivated, and in sports you have to relax and let your body do the work rather than tense up. In wartime, Alicia, if you are driven by hatred and emotion, if you hate the enemy, you're going to do a terrible job out in the field. You absolutely have to be dispassionate. You have to hate what the enemy has done to you. You have to want to fix it, eradicate evil from the world in terms of action, but you cannot hate the enemy because when you do, you'll screw up. Bad things happen to you. Yeah, yeah, well said, well said. Yeah, I agree, and I think that you bring up a lot of issues here in what you just said. It's very painful, I think, for us, for Israelis who are told by the world that we're doing genocide when we know, A, we're not doing genocide. It goes against all of our values. Furthermore, we know that Israel goes to great lengths to make sure that as few civilians as possible are hurt in this war and that our enemy, as you said, thrives on civilians being killed in the war, and therefore they actually place the military in the midst of civilians and fire rockets from hospitals and schools, etc., causing Israel to be perceived in the world as performing genocide. And it's very painful for us that we stand for the exact opposite. We stand for the exact opposite of all that, and we're accused of everything that we try not to do. And, Alisha, this is now widely known. We're fighting a bitter war we have for almost 11 months, for over 11 months, with our enemies. And while this is going on, Alisha, every single day, 200 trucks with food and water and medical supplies, 200 huge trucks, go into Gaza, organized by us. What happens? Mostly the trucks are waylaid by the Hamas. Hamas take over the supplies, the humanitarian supplies, and charge a tax of 18 percent on the value of the goods, and then use the money to hire 3,000 new soldiers. And we, of course, we know this, and these trucks go in every single day, 200 trucks to feed the Hamas, our enemy, that we are trying to fight. Yeah, yes, yes. There's a big dilemma here. What do you do when you're trying to do good and really accused of the opposite, of being evil? And this propaganda is working beautifully in America, really beautifully. The young students on campuses are just devouring this propaganda. And so I think we're at a stage right now where, A, we have to say the truth as it is, be very clear about what the truth is, be very clear about what causes evil. And secondly, there comes a time in life, I think we all know it on a personal level, where we need to do certain things, even though everybody around us doesn't understand why we're doing what we're doing. This woman, a little example, a woman I was talking to, she's from Akiva. She divorced a long time ago. And at least according to her story, her husband really did some really, really bad things, really, really bad things. But it was really important for her if her children have a good relationship with their father. So she could have just have been honest and tell him, listen, your dad, I mean, I want you to have a good relationship with him, but he did this and he did that. And she chose not to. She chose not to say a single bad word about her, about her ex, about their father, which meant that there are things that they think of her, which are totally not true, because she decided not to spread evil vis-à-vis her ex-husband, their father. And I think that's what's happening to us. We have a really difficult time explaining to the world, no, no, no, no, no, you don't understand. You know, they're the ones who are causing it. They're the ones who caused 7th of October. And for all those who say, yeah, they caused 7th of October, because you oppressed them. You know, for 19 years, we've not been in Gaza. And even before that, it wasn't we who brought oppression to Gaza. On the contrary, we did so much in order to make the place bloom. Misha, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Secretary General told us, he said the following when told about the massacre of October 7th. What did you expect? What did you expect? That's his message to Israel. And he had the UN. Right, right. And because people have a very short historical memory, they can't handle the complexity and they can't handle that. They thought that, yes, there are people there who are performing like evil, evil deeds. So, what's the bottom line here? I mean, how much time do we still have? We're okay. 10 minutes, 7 minutes. So, what do we do about all this? What do we do about all this? And I think that today, what I would say is, first and foremost, have tremendous faith in ourselves. Like, really know who we are. Know what we stand for. Know what our values stand for. And be really clear about who we are. And while the whole world is trying to delegitimize us and cause us to second-guess ourselves, well, maybe we're not that good. Maybe we are as evil as the world is saying. And I call this, it's not my phrase, I didn't invent it, internalized anti-Semitism. When we actually internalize anti-Semitism, and we're convinced that, yeah, we are, we are, we are bad. We are engaging in genocide. And I can see that with a lot of young Jews in the West who have a really difficult time siding with Israel and decided to, it was much easier to just join the masses and blame Israel for the evil. And so the first thing we need to do, I think, is to remind ourselves we know who we are. We know what we stand for. We know who we're facing. We know what we're doing. And the world doesn't see it. The world can't recognize it. Too bad. Too bad. We've talked about that in the past as well. Well, just too bad and just continue doing what we need to do. And it may actually even get worse. There may be universities now in America are boycotting Israel. And it's not just not investing money in companies that do business with Israel. It's also refusing to accept Israeli scholars and do joint research with great Israeli scholars and Israeli universities. Yes, there's a price to pay for that. But to really, really have a sense of presence, have a sense of our own, of what we stand for and be proud of who we are. And, Avishai, you offer another ray of hope in your droshah. It's a brilliant insight. And I really, really love this. You point out that in the Torah, there are no prisons. There are no prisons. And the point you make is that nature is the correcting force. And by nature, I mean God. And how does this work? What do we mean? Avishai, I've been on this planet for quite a long time, for eight decades, almost eight decades. And I've observed that people who do evil do not thrive. They do not thrive, Avishai. And the point here is that, as you note in your droshah, there is biological evolution, which is the survival of the fittest organism, the organism that's best adapted to its environment and the best able to change. But there's social evolution. And that is communities that do not do evil, but do good, who are cohesive, who follow moral principles. When you go out to war, it's not about your strategy, about attacking from behind and using tricks. It's about moral, ethical principles. You have to go out to war. They're going to try to get you. So defend yourself. But while you defend yourself, don't lose who you are as a people, as the Jewish people. So there is social evolution, meaning that people and societies within people, people within societies who do good and who shun evil thrive in the end. Elisha, in Gaza, this tunnel system, 200 miles of tunnel, we've only destroyed a part of them. And the resources that were put into that, instead of what? Building hotels and spas on the beautiful Gaza beaches and building a life for the people and educating the people and building universities and all the things we do as a people. Gaza is not going to thrive. The evil deeds that were done, they will not create thriving Gaza for their people. I think this is almost a rule of life, as I've noticed. People who do evil do not thrive. Societies that do evil do not thrive. Russia is not thriving. Iran is not thriving. Gaza is not thriving. The Muslim world in general is not thriving. Not thriving. Four Muslims won the Nobel Prize, Elisha. Four. And there are two billion Muslims in the world. Do they get it? Don't they understand? To thrive, you have to be a moral people who shuns evil and who shuns war. They don't get it. Right, right. So another key here then is to recognize that there's the short term and the long term. In the short term, we're getting all the flack. In the short term, the world is turning against us and all those stupid people, and they really are stupid, sorry, they really, really are stupid, are buying into all this propaganda and they're accusing us of the evil. That's the short run. In the long run, in the long run, and we've been around for many, many, many, many, many years, the Jewish people, so we know in the long run, we're going to be the ones who will thrive and we're going to be the ones that succeed. And it's not a coincidence that Israel is a successful country. And it's, I think, very profound what you said, that a society that is not ethical, a society that is not doing a lot of evil cannot, cannot thrive. And it's important for us to remember, but it's really having patience and seeing the results of it all in the long run. And that means, I met with our dog trainer yesterday. Yesterday evening, we took our dog for her. And he doesn't really train her, he trains us. And he's a great trainer. He's really great. He's in that in Sosaba. And we have a Belgian Shepherd. So that's quite a wild beast. Malinois. Wonderful. They're used by the Okhotsk unit in the army, because they're smart and tough and strong and loyal. Right. And we love her dearly, even though it's sometimes a nightmare. But we love her dearly. So when I just asked him, I asked him in passing, we came into his yard where he does the training. And how are you? And he says, I'm doing great. Oh, wonderful. Good. I like that answer. And then he went on on a whole tirade on a tirade is always negative, or it could also be positive, can be positive. Okay, so it was a very positive tirade. And I really resonated, because my theology is very similar to what he was talking about. And he talked about all the good that's happening right now. And he said, exactly, it was beautiful to hear, because he was saying exactly things that I really believe in, but he said it in his dog training language. He really believes that we are going through a process because more goodness needs to happen. And it's painful when it happens. And, and, and in the long run, we're going to be transformed for the better. We're going to become even better than what we were. And I'm, I'm sad and grieving as you lost family members in, in the war. And it's very sad. And I am grieving. But I certainly know in the long run, not only we're going to be okay, we're going to thrive, we're going to become that much better, because we will have, we've become complacent, and we've become spoiled. And we've atrophied on so many levels. And this is all waking us up. And it's very, very painful. It's a shame that we have to go through such painful, growing pain. That didn't make sense, that sentence. Painful, growing situations. But nevertheless, good is going to come out of it. So, yeah, let's, let's, A, really have faith in our path, in ourselves, in our values, in what we stand for. And know that in the short run, they're tested and tested, and they're going to be, they're going to be, they're going to be battered. And, and we're going to be accused of all kinds of things, which are the exact opposite of what we stand for. But in the long run, as you said, those who, who do have an ethical foundation, they're the ones who will eventually thrive. And thriving doesn't mean only making a lot of money. It's great if you can make a lot of money. Thriving means that you're going to have a vibrant, happy, loving, and ethical society. Absolutely, Alicia. It's so important that we, the Jewish people, and the country of the Jewish people, Israel, it's so important for us to believe in ourselves and not allow the world to pollute our belief in ourselves as a great people that's made great contributions to this world. And we are defending ourselves now. And we will endure, because the Jewish people have always endured, no matter what. Not only will we endure, we will prevail, Alicia. We will prevail. Yes, yes, yes. So we'll wish everyone a great week, or rather, Shabbat Shalom, it depends when you're going to be listening to this. And let's restore faith in ourselves and our path. And let's also restore faith in the idea of the long run, and that we've been here now for thousands of years. We're the people of the future, we're the people of the past, and we are the people of the future. Believe in yourself, in your religion, in your faith, in your people, in your country, and maybe even believe in the Patriots winning the Super Bowl someday soon. Maybe. In the long run. In the long run. In the long run, right. Bye, everybody. Thanks for listening.