The Four Expressions of Redemption (פרשת וארא)

Nehama Leibowitz suggests that “the first exile of the Jewish people” in Egypt, as described in the book of Exodus, is the “archetype” of “the recurrent pattern of exile” that Jews subsequently experienced over many centuries. Studying “the themes of exile and redemption in the book of Exodus” may thus “help us to understand the major role played by Exile in Jewish history.”

What attracted me in this week’s Torah portion, Va’era (וארא, Exodus 6:2–9:35), is the four expressions of redemption (Exodus 6:6–7):

I am the Lord.
And I will free you from the burdens of Egypt,
and deliver you from their bondage,
and redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments,
and take you to be My people.

Following Leibowitz’s premise, perhaps we may see in the four expressions of redemption the archetype of the Messianic redemption. That thought led me to Gershom Scholem’s famous essay “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism.”

Scholem’s essay contains a fascinating discussion of the book Ra'ya Mehemna (“Faithful Shepherd,” referring to Moses the prophet), written by an anonymous kabbalist “in the last years of the thirteenth or the first years of the fourteenth century.” According to Scholem’s summary, the book presents the biblical symbols of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge as “types for the different status of things in the unredeemed world and in the Messianic age.” Scholem explains:

Since the Fall of Adam, the world is no longer ruled by the Tree of Life as it had been in the beginning, but by the Tree of Knowledge. The Tree of Life represents the pure, unbroken power of the holy, the diffusion of the divine life through all worlds and the communication of all living things with their divine source. There is no admixture of evil in it, no ‘shells’ which dam up and choke life, no death, and no restriction. But since the Fall of Adam, since the time when the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was eaten, the world is ruled by the mystery of this second tree in which both good and evil have their place. Hence, under the rule of this Tree, the world contains differentiated spheres: the holy and the profane, the pure and the impure, the permitted and the forbidden, the living and the dead, the divine and the demonic….

The purpose of the law, which as it were constitutes the Torah as it can be read in the light—or shadow!—of the Tree of Knowledge, is to confine [the power of evil, destruction, and death] if not to overcome it entirely. But in the Messianic redemption the full glory of the utopian again breaks forth, although characteristically and in keeping with the idea of the Tree of Life it is conceived as a restoration of the state of things in Paradise. In a world in which the power of evil has been broken, all those differentiations also disappear which had been derived from it. In a world in which only the pure life still reigns, obstructions to the stream of life, which solidify it in externals and in ‘shells,’ no longer have any validity or significance.

 How is this related to the four expressions of redemption?

The first two expressions appear under the aspect of the Tree of Knowledge; they release and deliver the Jewish people from the power of evil. Akin to Émile Durkheim’s negative rites, they separate the Jews from the power of evil in order to protect them from it.

In contrast, the last two expressions appear under the aspect of the Tree of Life. Rather than separate the Jewish people from the power of evil, they bring about their (re-)unification with the holy. The third expression, redemption, as Leibowitz points out, is “an action performed by one member of a family for another,” as in Leviticus 25:25. In this case, the Bridegroom redeems His bride. And the fourth expression—“the most intimate,” says Leibowitz—brings the Jewish people into communion with their God, restoring the “diffusion of the divine life” and the “communication” with the “divine source” that existed in Paradise before the Fall of Adam. (This restorative aspect is also suggested by the envelope structure of God’s address to Moses in Exodus 6:2–8, diagrammed by Leibowitz.) By virtue of the communion they establish, the last two expressions of redemption correspond to Durkheim’s positive rites.

Swarsensky Memorial Weekend Interactive Torah Study: Curses and Blessings: What Can We Learn from Lech L’cha about Responding to the Longest Hatred? (פרשת לֹך־לך)

Presented at Temple Beth El in Madison, Wisconsin, on Saturday, November 9, 2024.

    Nachman Syrkin, the great theoretician and leader of socialist Zionism, wrote in 1898 that “tension has always existed between the Jews and the world around them. In the modern age this tension has assumed the guise of anti-Semitism.” Syrkin’s contemporary, the German sociologist Max Weber, took this idea a step further and suggested that all religions of salvation, including but not limited to Judaism, come into tension with the world. If pushed far enough, these tensions lead to what Weber called religious rejection or abnegation of the world. World rejection can take one of two forms. Believers may flee from the world, or they may work in the world to master it or change it. Let’s explore some of the religious rejections of the world that appear in this week’s portion.

    Get thee out. Our portion begins with Abraham’s flight from the world of his birth—from his social surroundings, his family, and country. “And the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go forth from your land [Get thee out of thy country] and your birthplace [your city] and your father’s house to the land I will show you.’” Drawing on midrashim, Maimonides suggests that Abraham had already rejected this world before he fled from it, and it was precisely his rejection which made the flight necessary. Having “perceived that there was one God,” Maimonides writes, Abraham “began to debate and argue with his neighbors” and smashed their idols. When the king persecuted Abraham and tried to kill him, God instructed Abraham to flee.

    Take and get out! The opening verse sets a pattern for the rest of the portion (and, arguably, for Jewish history: Abraham’s flight from Ur Kasdim prefigures generations of Jews whom persecution has forced to flee their homes). When Abraham is driven by famine to go down to Egypt, he worries that the Egyptians will kill him to take possession of his beautiful wife (Gen. 12:12). So Abraham asks Sarah to pretend that they are not married. A smitten Pharaoh takes Sarah into his house, the Lord afflicts him with plagues, and a now very angry Pharaoh summons Abraham to rebuke him. “Why did you not tell me she was your wife? Now, here is your wife. Take her and get out!” (Gen. 12:18–19). Pharaoh uses the same verb that the Lord used: קַח וָלֵךְ (literally, “Take and go!”). Once again, Abraham takes flight from a hostile and corrupt world.

    Separate yourself. When Abraham returns to Canaan, Abraham asks Lot to part ways with him. This is not exactly a flight from the world, but it is an attempt to avoid conflict by separating himself once again from the world. “And Abram said to Lot, ‘Pray, let there be no contention between you and me, between your herdsmen and mine, for we are kinsmen. Is not all the land before you? Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me’” (Gen. 13:8–9). We might call this Abraham’s partition plan.

What was the source of conflict between Abraham and Lot?
1)    A quarrel over pasturage. Nachmanides explains it this way.
2)    Nehama Leibowitz, Studies in Bereshit: “Our sages of old … did not regard the quarrel between the shepherds … as merely an economic or political one. The Torah devotes space to this quarrel for a deeper reason. Their strife symbolized the opposition between the world of Abraham and between one who wished to be a part of it but did not whole-heartedly share the moral principles and outlook of the Patriarch.” As evidence, she points to a verse in next week’s portion: “he may command his children and his household after him, that they may keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice” (Gen. 18:19). In addition, according to two midrashim, “the shepherds quarreled over the violation of the prohibition against robbery.” Lastly, Leibowitz invokes Rashi’s commentary on the phrase, “And Lot journeyed East (מִקֶּדֶם)” (Gen. 13:11). Rashi writes, “he journeyed away from the Primal Being of the world saying, neither Abraham nor his God!” Rashi reads מִקֶּדֶם as מִקְדַם “from the One who is of old” or “from the One who is first.”

    Circumcision. There is another way in which Abraham separates himself from the world in this week’s portion. The Lord tells him, “This is My covenant, which you shall keep, between Me and you and your seed after you: every male among you must be circumcised” (Gen. 17:10). Abraham follows this instruction to the letter, circumcising himself and every male in his household “on the very day as God had spoken to him” (Gen. 17:23–24). Circumcision, as Sigmund Freud points out, is “among the customs by which the Jews made themselves separate.” Anyone who refused the custom, the Lord tells Abraham, “shall be cut off from his folk” (Gen. 17:14).

    World mastery. Finally, we see a different kind of world-rejection when Lot is taken captive. “When Abram heard that his kinsman had been taken captive, he mustered his retainers, born into his household, numbering three hundred and eighteen, and went in pursuit as far as Dan. At night, he and his servants deployed against them and defeated them; and he pursued them as far as Hobah, which is north of Damascus. He brought back all the possessions; he also brought back his kinsman Lot and his possessions, and the women and the rest of the people” (Gen. 14:14–15, 16). This time, Abraham does not flee or separate himself to avoid conflict, nor does he meekly accept the world’s injustice for granted. Instead, he acts decisively to master and change an unjust world. This kind of struggle is a reaction to the world that Jewish socialists and Zionists also embraced in the modern era.

After Abraham redeems Lot from his captors, the Lord tells Abraham, “Fear not  ... I am your shield” (Gen. 15:1). What did Abraham have to fear at this point? After all, he had just defeated four mighty kings.
1)    Political, realistic considerations. According to one interpretation given in the Talmud, Abraham said: “Perhaps the sons of those kings I slew will gather together an army and make war against me” (Leibowitz, Studies in Bereshit, p. 137). Abraham feared, in other words, that the victory itself might contain the germs of the next war.
2)    Ethical motives. In the Talmud, “R. Levi said: It was because Abram was apprehensive and said: Perhaps there was among the people I killed one righteous or God-fearing man.” According to Rashi, Abraham was concerned over all the lives, both the innocent and the wicked. He was troubled by “war itself which necessitated so much bloodshed.”  
3)    Religious motivation. Leibowitz, Studies in Bereshit: Abraham was “afraid that the abundance of favors he had received at the hand of God” was out of balance; “he had received more than he was due. “His deeds could never hope to catch up with the bounties showered on him from Above.”

    Particularism and universalism. As different as these examples of world-rejection are—uprooting himself and fleeing Ur Kasdim and Egypt, separating from his nephew Lot, circumcising his household, and setting out to master and change an unjust and threatening world—there is a common theme that unites them. What characterizes them, in the words of the Israeli Bible scholar Nehama Leibowitz, is “an extreme particularism, placing a barrier between Abraham and the rest of the world.” This is consistent with the Lord setting Abraham and his descendants apart for special blessing, reward, and protection. “I will make you a great nation,” the Lord promises Abraham. “And I will bless those who bless you, and those who damn you I will curse” (Gen. 12:2–3). According to a midrash, God bestowed these special blessings on Abraham and his descendants after the failures of other men.

    But world-rejection, whether in the form of flight from the world or mastery of the world, is not the only theme we find in this week’s portion. The portion also contains the theme of a generous and world-affirming universalism: “and in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). “In other words,” Nehama Leibowitz comments, “Abraham, as he left for the promised land, was to be considered the only glimmer of light wandering through a world of thick darkness, eventually spreading, illuminating the whole of mankind, enveloping the whole world with its glow.” This “theme of all-embracing blessings,” she adds, recurs no less than five times “in the history of the patriarchs.”

Regarding Abraham: “Abraham shall surely become a great and might nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him” (Gen. 18:18).

After the binding of Isaac: “And in your seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 22:18).

To Isaac: “And in your seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 26:4).

To Jacob in his dream: “And in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed” (Gen. 28:14).

    Nachman Syrkin invoked these same two themes, particularism and universalism. “From the very beginning of their encounter,” he wrote, “tension has always existed between the Jews and the world around them. In the modern age this tension has assumed the guise of anti-Semitism…. How did the Jews react to the world?” The Jew, he suggested, “possessed … a weekday and a Sabbath soul.” The Jew’s weekday soul, he wrote, moved him to grit his teeth, curse the enemy, and dream of “the vengeance of heaven and earth.” But the Jew’s Sabbath soul raised him to a “higher and more humane” level. “From his crown of pain, glory emanated to the world which cursed him; out of the sensitivity born of suffering, he prayed to his God for the very mankind which cast him out.”

What is the relationship between these two themes of particularism and universalism? How can they be reconciled?

    Leibowitz: “This [all-embracing blessing] … is looking far ahead into the distant future, to the ultimate goal of human history, the first step toward which we see unfolded in this sidra, with the uprooting and separating of Abraham from all that was near and dear.” Particularism is a precondition for universalism—because without it, the Jewish people have no blessings to share and might not even exist to share them—and universalism completes particularism.
    In an address entitled “The Jew in the World,” delivered in 1934, Martin Buber suggested that Abraham’s Covenant with God “summoned” Abraham and his descendants to “enter world history” as the “first real attempt” at ethical community, as a prototype and model for the nations. For this reason, Buber insisted, Jewry must not “disintegrate into small particles” or lose its reality in the world; it is vitally necessary for Israel to preserve and assert itself in the world as a unique community, a “community sui generis.” But it is equally important to understand that self-preservation and self-assertion are means, “mere prerequisites,” to a higher end. To mistake means for ends, Buber argued, is to make “an idol of the people.” The ultimate end is that in and through the people Israel, “all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.”

Swarsensky Memorial Weekend Shabbat Worship: Recognizing the Sources of Antisemitism in Lech L’cha (פרשת לֹך־לך)

Presented at Temple Beth El in Madison, Wisconsin, on Friday, November 8, 2024.

    Shabbat shalom. I am delighted to join you for this weekend of community learning in honor and memory of Rabbi Manfred Swarsensky, the first rabbi of Temple Beth El. When I learned that I would be expected to offer a d’var Torah on Friday night, I admit it made me nervous. After all, I’m just a sociologist, a secular scholar. What insight can I offer when others in this community are more learned in Torah study than me? Pirkei Avot (5:22) tells us to turn the Torah over and over, “for all is therein.” And indeed, fortunately for me, it seems that this week’s Torah portion anticipates the topic of my Sunday keynote lecture, antisemitism, and points to some key sources of the longest hatred—both its manifest sources and what Sigmund Freud called its “secret sources.” I’ll try to persuade you tonight of that reading.

   Let me begin with the mysterious Covenant Between the Parts. According to the portion, Abraham succeeds in rescuing his nephew Lot (לוֹט) from the four kings who captured him—a redemption from captivity that cannot fail to resonate with us when so many hostages remain captive in Gaza tonight. Afterward, the Lord speaks to Abraham in a vision: “Your reward shall be very great” (Gen. 15:1). A son will be born to him, his descendants will become as numerous as the stars, and they will inherit the Land of Canaan. But Abraham is a doubter: “Lord, how shall I know that I shall inherit?” (Gen. 15:8). The Lord assuages Abraham’s doubt with a formal pact which involves taking five animals—a heifer, a female goat, a ram, a turtledove, and a pigeon—and cleaving the first three animals through the middle. The ritual seems bizarre to us, but the Hebrew professor and Bible translator Robert Alter notes that it was not uncommon in this time and place: “Covenants in which the two parties step between cloven animal parts are attested in various places in the ancient Near East as well as in Greece.” Next, the Torah tells us, “as the sun was about to set, a deep slumber fell upon Abram and now a dread, even a great darkness fell upon him. And [the Lord] said to Abram, ‘Know well that your seed shall be strangers in a land not theirs and they shall be enslaved and afflicted four hundred years’” (Gen. 15:13).

    If we understand the prophecy literally, it might refer to the migration of Jacob and his descendants to Egypt to escape famine in Canaan, and the subsequent enslavement and affliction described in שמות (Exodus). But some Jewish commentators have interpreted the prophecy in a figurative or allegorical way. According to the 13th-century Spanish rabbi Nachmanides, the terms used to describe what happens to Abraham—“dread,” darkness,” “great,” and “fell upon him”—correspond to the four epochs or kingdoms into which the rabbis divided human history: Babylon, Persia (or Medea), Greece (the kingdom of Antiochus), and Edom (Rome). In his view, all the vicissitudes of Jewish history in these four epochs are contained in this vision to Abraham (Nehama Leibowitz, Studies in Bereshit, p. 149). Likewise, the 13th-century French rabbi David Kimḥi (RaDaK) wrote that “in every generation the nations attempt to exterminate us but the Holy One, blessed be He, delivers us from their hands by the merit of Abraham.”

    Why do others oppress and curse the Jewish nation that originates from Abraham? The many answers that scholars have given to this question can be divided into two broad categories. On the one hand, some scholars have traced antisemitism to conflicting group interests, intergroup competition or rivalry over scarce resources, and the threat that equality for Jews has posed to the advantages of dominant groups. The German-born Jewish sociologist Norbert Elias made this kind of argument in 1929, on the eve of the Nazi rise to power. German antisemitism, he wrote, sprang from the “social position of the German Jews” and “the conflicting economic, intellectual and social interests that, in correspondence to this social positioning, arise between the people of the Jewish community and the members of the other social strata of the German people.”  As the German economy contracted and competition increased, he argued, the Christian middle class grew preoccupied with protecting its position in the prevailing order. “Through their anti-Semitism,” Elias argued, “they are conducting a fight against Jewish competitors … whose interests are in conflict with their own…. And they conduct this struggle as a socially and ideologically based conflict of interests in exactly the same sense in which they conduct their struggle against the socially rising stratum of the proletariat.” From this perspective, antisemitism appears as a “rational” phenomenon in the sense that it stems from the rational pursuit of self-interest.

    On the other hand, an alternative approach emphasizes the nonrational foundations of antisemitism. According to this view, antisemitism is independent of actual group interests. For example, in the 1950s, the American sociologist Gordon Allport described antisemitism as a form of prejudice, defined as faulty and inflexible generalizations. Others, like the French-born Jewish sociologist Émile Durkheim and later the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, suggested that antisemites used Jews as scapegoats, displacing frustration and aggression from the real sources of their distress to a more easily identified and punished minority group. Sigmund Freud, the Jewish founder of psychoanalysis, also emphasized the nonrational foundations of antisemitism. Of the reasons for “the popular hatred of Jews,” he observed in 1939 under the growing shadow of Nazi persecution, some “arise from obvious considerations” that “need no interpretation,” but “others lie deeper and spring from secret sources,” which is to say, from unconscious motives. “The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion,” Freud explained; “Christianity became a Son religion.” This results in the unconscious identification of Jews with the father, whom the child simultaneously loves and fears, and the transference of this ambivalent attitude to the Jews. As the father-surrogate, the Jew is unconsciously the one whom the antisemite fears and the one against whom he would like to rebel. At the same time, the Jew unconsciously represents the antisemite’s own sexual and aggressive drives, which the antisemite learns to repress by internalizing the father’s authority and then (unable to acknowledge those drives in himself) projects onto the Jew.

    This week’s Torah portion, Lech L’cha (Gen. 12:1–17:27), alludes to both kinds of reasons for animosity toward Jews—those that “arise from obvious considerations,” and those that “spring from secret sources.” The implication is that these reasons may not be mutually exclusive. On the one hand, consider how intergroup competition or rivalry over valued persons and goods generates strife for Abraham and his kinsfolk. We see this early in the portion. When Abraham is driven by famine to go down and sojourn in Egypt, he worries that the Egyptians will kill him to take possession of his beautiful wife, Sarah (Gen. 12:12). After Pharaoh drives Abraham out of Egypt, Abraham and his nephew Lot part ways. Just before their separation, the portion declares, “the Canaanite and the Perizzite dwelt then in the land” (Gen. 13:7). “Since both Abraham and Lot were strangers in the country,” Nachmanides comments, “the former was afraid that the Canaanites and the Perizzite, natives of the country, would hear of the large numbers of cattle that were being pastured and would drive them out or smite them with the sword and take away their property and livestock” (Leibowitz, Studies in Bereshit, p. 123). After Abraham redeems Lot from his captors, the Lord tells Abraham, “Fear not  ... I am your shield” (Gen. 15:1). What did Abraham have to fear at this point? After all, he had just defeated four mighty kings. According to one interpretation given in the Talmud, Abraham said: “Perhaps the sons of those kings I slew will gather together an army and make war against me” (Leibowitz, Studies in Bereshit, p. 137). Abraham feared, in other words, that the victory itself might contain the germs of the next war. In all these examples from Lech L’cha, the obvious and manifest source of hostility to Abraham and his family is envy. Animosity arises from group conflict over the possession of valued persons and things: Abraham’s wife, his wealth and possessions, and the Promised Land itself.

    At this point, it might seem that the Torah sides with rationalist, even materialist explanations of antisemitism that trace it to conflicting group interests. But turn the Torah again, and Freud’s deeper, “secret sources” of antisemitism also become apparent. Freud identified three such sources. First, he suggested that people are jealous of the Jews being the chosen people: “I venture to assert,” he writes, “that jealousy of the people which declared itself the first-born, favorite child of God the Father, has not yet been surmounted among other peoples, even today.” The theme of chosenness is, of course, central to this week’s portion. Abraham and his descendants are singled out for divine blessing, reward, and protection from the beginning. Is this unfair favoritism? “Would it not have been better,” asks the king of the Kazars in Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari, “had God given His approval to all men alike?” A midrash on a verse in Jeremiah (51:9) suggests that God tried to do just this and only turned to Abraham after all other peoples had failed God. The midrash explains the necessity for selecting one people, but it doesn’t explain why Abraham was selected. Nachmanides suggests that “the Chaldeans had persecuted Abraham for his faith in God,” and it was Abraham’s iconoclasm and even martyrdom that justified his election (Leibowitz, Studies in Bereshit, pp. 116–119).

    A second unconscious motive for antisemitism, Freud suggests, is castration fear. In this week’s portion, Abraham is commanded to circumcise himself and his descendants as a sign of his covenant with God (Genesis 17:10–11). “Among the customs by which the Jews made themselves separate,” Freud writes, “that of circumcision has made a disagreeable, uncanny impression on others. The explanation probably is that it reminds them of the dreaded castration idea.” Lest we be too skeptical to take Freud’s suggestion seriously, we should recall the words of the historian Norman Cohn, author of Warrant for Genocide: “One has only to look at any medieval picture illustrating a ritual murder story,” he wrote, “to recognize the unconscious content of the fantasy. A small boy—it is, significantly, always a boy, never a girl—is surrounded by a group of elderly men with long beards, who are torturing and castrating him and drawing off and collecting his blood.”

    Third, Freud asserts that because Christianity, which derives from Judaism, was historically often imposed on people against their will, antisemitism is, in reality, hostility toward Christianity—a hostility then displaced onto Jews. “We must not forget,” Freud writes, “that all the peoples who now excel in the practice of anti-Semitism became Christians only in relatively recent times, sometimes forced to it by bloody compulsion…. They have not yet overcome their grudge against the new religion which was forced on them, and they have projected it on to the source from which Christianity came to them.” He concludes that “the hatred for Judaism is at bottom hatred for Christianity.” But what explains this hatred? Judaism is a religion of law that represents the ethical regulation of the instinctual drives—regulation that then spreads to other peoples through Judaism’s religious offshoots, Christianity and Islam. Freud suggests that the repression and sublimation of instinctual drives makes the blessings of civilization possible. As God tells Abraham, “all the families of the earth” are in this way “blessed in you” (Genesis 12:3). But the repression of instinctual drives is also a painful process that necessarily generates discontent. Just ask anyone who has fasted all day during Yom Kippur! We might conclude, then, that the repression which makes the blessings of civilization possible is also what engenders the curses directed at the Jewish people.

    How, you may ask, does the Lord’s grim prophecy of exile, enslavement, and affliction assuage Abraham’s doubt that his descendants shall inherit the Land of Canaan? God tells him it won’t last forever. “Weeping may tarry for the night,” as the Psalmist (30:6) says, “but joy cometh in the morning.” When the Lord instructs Abraham at the beginning of the portion to go forth (לֶךְ־לְךָ֛) from the land of his birth to the Land of Canaan, the instruction comes with a promise: “I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you” (Genesis 12:1–3). In Abraham’s vision during the Covenant Between the Parts, God promises that judgment will be brought upon the oppressors, and Abraham’s descendants will “come forth with great substance” and return to the Promised Land (Gen. 15:14–16). This hope of redemption, for ourselves and all the families of the earth, has sustained the Jewish people for many long centuries. Does the portion give us any guidance for how to respond to the curses of antisemitism in the meantime? For an exploration of that question, I encourage you to come to the Saturday morning Torah study.

Rosh Hashanah 5784

Something I learned this year on Rosh Hashana: The 17th century Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz taught that each group of sounds made by the shofar begins with a tekiah, a whole note and is followed by a shevarim, a broken note, divided into three parts or even to a teru’ah, an entirely fragmented sound. But each broken note is not left in its brokenness; it is followed by another tekiah, a whole sound. Rabbi Horowitz taught that when we hear the shofar, we hear this message: I started off whole, I became broken, even splintered into fragments, but I shall become whole again.”

If, as Stendhal once said, beauty is the promise of happiness, then God is the promise of wholeness, which is to say, redemption.

Why Doesn’t Jacob Reveal the End of Days? (פרשת ויחי)

Some loosely associated thoughts about Parshat Vayechi (פרשת ויחי, Genesis 47:28–50:26), the Torah portion for the week that has just ended.

“Jacob called for his sons and said, ‘Gather and I will tell you what will happen to you at the end of days [באחרית הימים]’” (Gen. 49:1). But in fact, as Rashi points out, while Jacob’s prophecy concerns events in the distant future, it doesn’t actually reach the “end of days.” Why not? Rashi explains: “He attempted to reveal the End [הקץ], but the Shekhinah [divine presence] withdrew from him. So he began to say other things.”

As Rashi would say, another explanation: I couldn't help but think of Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, where he writes: “The Messiah breaks history; the Messiah does not come at the end of an evolution.” I suppose that's why the Talmud says that the Messiah, like a found object or a scorpion, comes unawares (Sanhedrin 97a).

To See or Not to See God’s Face?

In last week’s Shabbat Chol Hamoed (חול המועד) Torah reading (Exodus 33:12–34:26), Moses asks about the guidance God will provide to the Jewish people through the wilderness. “You have not made known to me,” he says, “whom You will send with me” (Ex. 33:12).

God replies: “פני [my face or presence] shall go” (Ex. 33:14).

Next, Moses asks God to show him God’s כבד (glory).

God demurs and replies that instead His טוב (goodness) will pass in front of Moses.

When there is no response from the speechless Moses, God adds: “You shall not be able to see My face [פני], for no human can see me and live…. You will see My back [אחרי], but My face [פני] will not be seen” (Ex. 33:23).

Later, however, God tells Moses that on the three biblical pilgrimage festivals—Pesach, Sukkot, and Shavuot—all the men will see God’s face or appear in God’s presence (Ex. 34:23):

 שָׁלֹשׁ פְּעָמִים, בַּשָּׁנָה--יֵרָאֶה, כָּל-זְכוּרְךָ, אֶת-פְּנֵי הָאָדֹן יְהוָה, אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל

The 1917 and 1962 Jewish Publication Society (JPS) translations of this verse say “appear before the Lord God” or “appear before the Sovereign Lord,” omitting the reference in Hebrew to God’s face or presence. My grandmother’s 1960 Menorah Press translation of the Hebrew Bible similarly omits this reference. But Robert Alter translates the passage more fully and accurately: “Three times in the year all your males shall appear in the presence [פְּנֵי] of the Master, the Lord God of Israel.”

God adds (Ex. 34:24):

וְלֹא-יַחְמֹד אִישׁ, אֶת-אַרְצְךָ, בַּעֲלֹתְךָ לֵרָאוֹת אֶת-פְּנֵי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, שָׁלֹשׁ פְּעָמִים בַּשָּׁנָה.

Again, the JPS translations of this verse omit the reference to God’s face or presence. Robert Alter’s translation: “And no man will covet your land when you go up to appear in the presence [פְּנֵי] of the Lord three times in the year.”

These verses reiterate God’s instructions to Moses in Exodus 23:15 and 17. Robert Alter comments on these verses that “the original form of the Hebrew indicated ‘see My face [or presence],’ but the Masoretes revocalized the verb as a passive, ‘to be seen’ or ‘to appear,’ in order to avoid what looked like excessive anthropomorphism.” The Masoretes were the Jewish scribes and scholars who, from the sixth to the tenth centuries of the Common Era, compiled the recognized text of the Hebrew Bible.

So, we have a puzzle here: God says that Moses cannot see God’s face, because “no human can see me and live.” Yet God also instructs the people (at least the men among them) to see God’s face on the three biblical pilgrimage festivals. How do we explain this seeming inconsistency? And a further question: What is the relationship between God’s face (or presence), goodness, and glory?

A postscript on God’s face or presence: As I note elsewhere, it is possible to read the second of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2) literally as “you will not have other gods to my Face” (לא–יהיה לך ... על–פני).

The Golden Calf as the Anti-Tabernacle (פרשת ויקהל-פקודי)

This week’s double Torah portion, Vayakhel-Pekudei (Exodus 35:1–40:38), brings the Book of Exodus to a fulfilling close with the building of the Mishkan (משכן) or Tabernacle, aptly described by Hebrew Bible translator and commentator Robert Alter as a “perfect earthly abode for God in the midst of the Israelites,” the construction of which had been “traumatically disrupted by the story of the Golden Calf and the shattering of the tablets of the Law.”

As Alter points out, the construction of the Mishkan mirrors or parallels the making of the Golden Calf, which was “conceived as the terrestrial throne or platform for the deity …, having precisely the same function as the cherubim over the Ark,” upon which the Divine Presence (שכינה‎) was to rest. “The Golden Calf,” Alter reasons, “is thus a kind of anti-Tabernacle or anti-Ark, meant for the same end of making the divine dwell among the people but doing it in a prohibited fashion.”

As I’ve noted in another blog post, Alter's reading is similar to the interpretation of the 12th-century Jewish philosopher Judah Halevi. Halevi suggests that the Golden Calf was not an idol but simply a material symbol that the people constructed to facilitate their worship of God. For Halevi, the only difference between the creation of the Golden Calf and the creation of the cherubim is that God did not command the calf. "They themselves had no right to determine the mode of worship and make an altar and sacrifices in accordance with it." In other words, it was not the fashioning of material symbols that was problematic--after all, what were the Ark and the throne of the cherubim if not material symbols?--but the fact that the Golden Calf was not made in accordance with God's wishes. In support of this view, Halevi notes that God says "they have quickly turned from the way I commanded them" (Exodus 32:8), not "they have turned aside from Me."

We know that the Mishkan and the Ark are completed in the proper way in this week’s portion because (as Alter notes) their completion “echoes the report of God’s completion of creation, Genesis 2:1-3, with completion of the work at the beginning and blessing at the end” (Exodus 39:43). In addition, when the work is completed, “the glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle” (Exodus 40:34). The proof of the rectitude of the building, we might say, is in the dwelling.

In sum, according to Halevi and Alter, what made the Golden Calf an anti-Tabernacle or anti-Ark is that it was constructed in an unauthorized fashion, which is to say, not according to God’s explicit, specific, and detailed instructions. These instructions are repeated in this week’s portion (Exodus 36:8-38; Exodus 37:1-28), as if to underscore this point. As Alter puts it, the significance of the repetition lies in “the fact that the Tabernacle is now faithfully assembled in all its prescribed splendid details.”

Are there any other meaningful differences between the making of the Golden Calf and the construction of the Mishkan that would help to explain why the former merits wrath and the latter a blessing? At least two such differences stand out to me.

One important difference is the manner in which the Golden Calf and the Mishkan are constructed. The donations for the Mishkan come from “every one whose heart stirred him up, and every one whom his spirit made willing” (Exodus 35:21), every willing-hearted person (Exodus 35:22), every wise-hearted woman (Exodus 35:25), and every man or woman “whose heart made them willing” (Exodus 35:29). None of these qualities are mentioned in the Golden Calf episode. Aaron tells the people to bring him their golden rings, and the Torah states laconically that they did (Exodus 32:2-3). As Nehama Leibowitz writes, “gold alone was given to the calf, but gold and a willing heart was given to the Tabernacle.” Malbim infers from this difference that gifts of gold are “not the chief thing in the eyes of God, since it is the heart that the Almighty demands.”

Reinforcing this point, the people bring “too much for the work of the task that the Lord charged to do” (Exodus 36:5). This detail too is lacking in the Golden Calf episode. There is no mention there that the people give more gold to Aaron than he needs. In short, the people are more generous and enthusiastic in their donations for the Mishkan than in their donations for the Golden Calf.

The different manner in which the Mishkan is constructed is also evident from what the portion says about Bezalel, the man upon whom the Lord calls to manage its construction. Bezalel is provided with detailed instructions, but he doesn’t construct the Mishkan by rote. Rather, God filled Bezalel with wisdom (חכמה), understanding (תבונה), and knowledge (דעת); and God “put in his heart that he may teach, both he and and Oholiab” (Exodus 35:31-35). Alter comments: “God has endowed Bezalel, together with his chief assistant Oholiab, not only with the skill to execute all these sundry crafts but also with the capacity to instruct the crews of ordinary craftsmen how to carry out their work.” To borrow from Christopher Wren’s apt story, Bezalel knows he’s building a cathedral, not just laying bricks, and he helps his workers to understand this too. In contrast, the making of the Golden Calf involves no wisdom, understanding, or knowledge (there is no reference to any of these qualities in the story), nor does the maker of the calf, Aaron, instruct others in how to carry out this work. In fact, Aaron describes the making of the Golden Calf as if he himself doesn’t understand what happened: “I flung [gold] into the fire, and there came out this calf” (Exodus 32:24).

Second, this week’s portion emphasizes how the Mishkan, though composed of many parts, “became one whole” (Exodus 36:13, 18). Alter, commenting on a nearly identical phrase in a previous portion (Exodus 26:6), writes that it “leads Abraham ibn Ezra to muse over how unity in the greater world is constituted by an interlocking of constituent parts that became a transcendent whole.” This is presumably an aspect of the construction of the Mishkan that Bezalel’s wisdom (endowed by God) allows him to understand. In contrast, the Golden Calf is made through the literal melting down of its constituent parts. It represents a very different kind of unity, one without differentiated and specialized components, like the sameness of Hegel’s night in which all cows are black.

To conclude, we see that what made the Golden Calf an anti-Tabernacle or anti-Ark is not only that Aaron failed to make it to specification, but also that it was made without heart, and without wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, including an understanding of that complex unity-in-difference represented by the Mishkan.

Rejoice in Your Going Out (פרשת משפטים)

This week’s Torah portion, Mishpatim (משפטים, meaning “ordinances”), begins pointedly, as the Hebrew Bible translator Robert Alter notes, with “the regulation of slavery, addressed in the narrative situation to an audience of newly freed slaves.” A keyword that appears repeatedly in the first few verses (Exodus 21:2-4) caught my attention. That word is יצא (go out).

כִּי תִקְנֶה עֶבֶד עִבְרִי, שֵׁשׁ שָׁנִים יַעֲבֹד; וּבַשְּׁבִעִת--יֵצֵא לַחָפְשִׁי, חִנָּם
If thou buy a Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve; and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing.

אִם-בְּגַפּוֹ יָבֹא, בְּגַפּוֹ יֵצֵא; אִם-בַּעַל אִשָּׁה הוּא, וְיָצְאָה אִשְׁתּוֹ עִמּוֹ
If he come in by himself, he shall go out by himself; if he be married, then his wife shall go out with him.

 אִם-אֲדֹנָיו יִתֶּן-לוֹ אִשָּׁה, וְיָלְדָה-לוֹ בָנִים אוֹ בָנוֹת--הָאִשָּׁה וִילָדֶיהָ, תִּהְיֶה לַאדֹנֶיהָ, וְהוּא, יֵצֵא בְגַפּוֹ
If his master give him a wife, and she bear him sons or daughters; the wife and her children shall be her master's, and he shall go out by himself.

The word יצא caught my attention because of its appearance in other places. Earlier this week, I led a discussion with my students about Judah Leib Gordon’s 1866 poem הקיצה עמי (“Awake My People”), which includes this famous line:

היה אדם בצאתך ויהודי באהלך
Be a man in the streets [when you go out] and a Jew at home [in your tent]

Translated literally (be a human being when you go out and a Jew in your tent), it alludes to Deuteronomy 33:18, part of the blessing of Moses to the tribes of Israel:

וְלִזְבוּלֻן אָמַר, שְׂמַח זְבוּלֻן בְּצֵאתֶךָ; וְיִשָּׂשכָר, בְּאֹהָלֶיךָ
And of Zebulun he said: Rejoice, Zebulun, in thy going out, and, Issachar, in thy tents.

The great medieval Bible commentator Rashi interpreted the verse this way: “Zebulun and Issachar made a partnership. ‘Zebulun shall dwell by seashores’ [Genesis 49:13] and depart in ships to engage in commerce. He would earn profit, and put into the mouth of [i.e., provide financial support for] Issachar, and [the men of the tribe of Issachar] would sit and engage in [the study of] Torah. That is why [the younger] Zebulun is put ahead of Issachar, for Issachar’s Torah came about through Zebulun.” So Rashi understands the verse to mean “succeed [Zebulun] when you depart for trade,” and “succeed [Issachar] in sitting in your tents for Torah.”

According to Abarim Publications’ Biblical Dictionary:

The verb יצא is one of the most occurring verbs in the Bible. It means to go, and specifically to go out or forth (Genesis 31:33, 2 Samuel 11:8, Micah 4:10). Its opposite is the verb בוא meaning to come. The difference between these two verbs lies not simply in the direction of motion relative to the observer, but rather in a motion relative to either a focal point on one end or a state of dispersal on the other. The verb בוא (to come) is predominantly used to describe a motion away from being all over the place or considering various options, and toward one specific place or one final decision. The verb יצא (to go) is predominantly used to describe a motion away from the focal point (being perhaps a point of origin or pause) and towards the wide blue yonder where everything is possible (Genesis 24:50, 1 Kings 5:13, Isaiah 28:29).

This source adds that יצא is associated with the rising sun, which goes out in Hebrew (as in Psalm 19:6); the east (as in Psalm 75:6), the spatial point of origin from whence the sun goes out; and the past, the temporal point of origin from which one goes forth to the future. I’m reminded here of Werner Sombart’s line about Jewish migration: “Wie die Sonne geht Israel über Europa: wo es hinkommt, spriesst neues Leben empor.” (Israel passes over Europe like the sun: at its coming new life bursts forth.) In the Biblical Creation story, new life is brought forth (תּוֹצֵ֨א), a causative form of the word to go forth (יצא).

So what are we to make of all this? Gordon is clearly urging his readers to do more than go out into the world to earn a living through commerce (Rashi’s interpretation of Zebulun). Gordon’s line is typically understood to mean that Jews should abandon public expressions of Jewishness and instead privatize Judaism in the home. As Karl Marx had put it two decades earlier in his essay “Zur Judenfrage”: “Man emancipates himself politically from religion by expelling it from the sphere of public law to that of private law.” And as Marx went on to argue, this kind of bifurcation divides man against himself. But perhaps the appearance of יצא in this week’s portion, where it is linked to emancipation and freedom, lends the word another meaning in Gordon’s poem. It’s noteworthy that in our portion the Hebrew servant goes out after six years of service—a clear parallel to the seventh day of Creation on which God rested (Genesis 2:2), the seventh year in which the land rested (Leviticus 25:2-4), and the cancellation of debts every seven years (Deuteronomy 15). When Gordon urges the reader to be a human being when he goes out, maybe he is calling on Jews to emancipate themselves from servitude and embrace the wide open possibilities of freedom that he saw (however mistakenly in his time and place) bursting forth like the rising sun.

Pharaoh’s Willing Executioners (פרשת שמות)

In Parshat Shemot (פרשת שמות), we read that after the death of Joseph and his generation, “the sons of Israel were fruitful and swarmed and multiplied and grew very vast, and the land was filled with them” (Exodus 1:7). As Bible translator Robert Alter notes, these terms (including the Hebrew word for land, ארץ, which also means earth) allude to the Creation story. In a fulfillment of God’s covenantal promise that Abraham will become “a great and mighty nation” (Genesis 18:18), Alter writes, “the Hebrews now exhibit the teeming fecundity of the natural world.”

It is precisely this teeming fecundity that so alarms Pharaoh:

And a new king arose over Egypt who knew not Joseph. And he said to his people, “Look, the people of the sons of Israel is more numerous and vaster than we. Come, let us be shrewd with them lest they multiply and then, should war occur, they will actually join our enemies and fight against us and go up from the land.”
(Exodus 1:8-10)

There is some debate about whether the words רַב וְעָצוּם מִמֶּנּוּ should be translated as more numerous and stronger than us, as Alter does, or too many and too strong for us, as Moses Mendelssohn, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, the 1917 JPS translation of the Bible, and Nehama Leibowitz do. The difference, it seems to me, is immaterial. Regardless of how we understand this phrase, Pharaoh’s antagonism toward the Jews clearly stems from a perceived demographic threat and from a perception of Jewish power.

Pharaoh’s paranoid fears find contemporary echoes in the slogan “Jews Will Not Replace Us” that far-right extremists chanted in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. As the Anti-Defamation League explains: “The slogan is a reference to the popular white supremacist belief that the white race is in danger of extinction by a rising tide of non-whites who are controlled and manipulated by Jews.” This extremist “replacement theory” has fueled murderous acts of hatred around the world, including mass shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 and the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand in 2019.

Motivated by a similar conspiratorial belief, Pharaoh implemented a three-stage policy: first, he imposed a special tax on the Jews in the form of a corvée (forced labor); second, he directed the Jewish midwives Shifrah and Puah to kill all Jewish boys at birth; and third, when the midwives courageously foil his plan, “Pharaoh charged his whole people, saying, ‘Every boy that is born you shall fling into the Nile, and every girl you shall let live’” (Exodus 1:22).

Why does Pharaoh need to “be shrewd”? He was the most powerful ruler in the ancient world. Why not declare open war on the Jews from the outset and destroy them immediately? Summarizing Nachmanides, Leibowitz suggests three reasons: first, Pharaoh needed a pretext to ruthlessly exterminate an entire people, especially one that came to Egypt at the bidding of his predecessor; second, his own subjects would not agree; and third, it would have meant risking an unnecessary confrontation with a strong people. For these reasons, Nachmanides argued, Pharaoh shrewdly formulated his three-stage policy.

Leibowitz writes: “The originality of Ramban’s interpretation lies in his explanation of this command [to kill every male Jewish child]. The text states that Pharaoh commanded ‘all his people’ rather than ‘his princes and servants.’ This was not therefore an official royal edict, but behind-the-scenes provocation. The government gave no order but merely closed its eyes whilst the Egyptian masses ‘spontaneously’ vented their indignation on the foreigners.” Today, too, powerful leaders close their eyes to nativism and xenophobia. But there is a problem with Leibowitz’s interpretation. How do we square it with her earlier suggestion that Pharaoh’s own subjects would not agree to genocide? “He could not suddenly order the indiscriminate slaughter of persons,” she writes, “who had been good neighbors for so long.” (Leibowitz is probably thinking here of Exodus 3:22.)

So what was the provocation that induced Pharaoh’s people to become his willing executioners—so willing that (according to Nachmanides) they searched Jewish homes to take children from there, and things eventually got so out of hand that Pharaoh had to suspend the decree? Perhaps it was Pharaoh’s propaganda depicting them as lazy idlers (Exodus 5:17), but that hardly seems sufficient. Nor can it be the resistance of Shifrah and Puah because Pharaoh arranges things so that he cannot be implicated in the actions he commands them to do. (“Who,” Leibowitz asks, “would be able or dare to point an accusing finger at Pharaoh?”) The answer, I suspect, lies in Joseph’s actions in Parshat Vayigash (Genesis 44:18 - 47:27). In that portion, Egypt’s peasants offered their land and themselves for some of the grain that Joseph had the foresight to stockpile. Joseph accepts, and they consequently become a class of landless, enslaved sharecroppers for Pharaoh. The peasants, we read there, are grateful to be kept alive. But, as I have written elsewhere, it seems likely that their gratitude would eventually turn to resentment, directed not at Pharaoh but at Joseph and his people. A new king in Egypt could easily exploit such resentment.

The Figure of Shiloh: Reading Vayechi with Thomas Mann (פרשת ויחי)

This week’s Torah portion, Parshat Vayechi (פרשת ויחי, Genesis 47:28–50:26), includes Jacob’s deathbed blessings for his twelve sons (and his two grandsons, Manasseh and Ephraim, whom Jacob raises to the status of his own sons).

Translator Robert Alter notes that Jacob’s blessings, which take the form of a long poem, comprise “one of the oldest extended texts in the Bible.” He points out that “the antiquity of the poem, as well as the fact that it may be a collage of fragments, means that there are words, phrases, and occasionally whole clauses that are not very well understood. Sometimes this is because of the use of a rare, presumably archaic, term, though there are also at least a few points where the received text looks defective.”

This may be frustrating for the translator, who (says Alter) “can do no more than make an educated guess,” but it provides a splendid opportunity for imaginative and poignant retellings of the scene like that in Thomas Mann’s novel Joseph und seine Brüder. Among other embellishments, Mann suggests that “astronomical meanings and allusions were repeatedly mixed in with Jacob’s message to his sons.” He identifies Jacob’s twelve sons with the twelve signs of the zodiac. Reuben (“unsteady as water,” Genesis 49:4) is associated with Aquarius, Shimeon and Levi with Gemini (the twins), Judah with Leo, etc.

Furthermore, Mann places a significant figure from Judah’s past—one whom this Torah portion does not mention—at the deathbed scene. That person is Judah’s daughter-in-law Tamar. In Parshat Vayeshev (פרשת וישב, Genesis 37:1–40:23), Tamar’s husband dies, and she is therefore given in levirate marriage to Judah’s second son Onan (Genesis 38:7–8). Onan refuses to impregnate her (he instead “waste[s] his seed on the ground”) and also dies (Genesis 38:9–10). Perhaps understandably given this string of misfortunes, Judah does not marry Tamar off to his third son. But Tamar, determined to have a child from Judah’s family, disguises herself as a prostitute and sleeps with her father-in-law, Judah himself (Genesis 38:12–23). When Judah learns that she is pregnant, he initially orders her to be executed for whoring but then changes his mind when she confronts him with evidence that he is the father. Tamar then gives birth to twin sons, Peretz (identified in Ruth 4:18–22 as an ancestor of King David) and Zerach (Genesis 38:27–30). Parshat Vayeshev is the last that we hear about Tamar in the Torah. But in Mann’s retelling, Tamar is present with the crowd that gathers outside of Jacob’s tent:

The setting sun outlined figures in the crowd outside against the orange hues of an evening sky, making shadows of them, so that it was not easy to discern individual faces. But the opposing light from the two oil lamps flickering on high stands at the foot and head of the deathbed allows us to distinguish very clearly one arresting figure out there: a gaunt matron in black, standing between two strikingly broad-shouldered men, her gray hair covered by a veil. Without a doubt it was Tamar, that resolute woman, with her manly sons.

Tamar is waiting to hear if “Jacob’s dying words might also happen to mention Judah’s sin with her.” Do they? Jacob first elevates Judah over his brothers—including, pointedly, the firstborn Reuben, who, by sleeping with his father’s concubine, made claim to the patriarch’s authority many years earlier (Genesis 35:22)—and compares Judah to a lion. The next part of the blessing (Genesis 49:10) is a bit cryptic. Below is the original Hebrew followed by Robert Alter’s translation and then a different translation given in the Artscroll Sapirstein edition of the Torah with Rashi’s commentary:

 לֹא-יָסוּר שֵׁבֶט מִיהוּדָה, וּמְחֹקֵק מִבֵּין רַגְלָיו, עַד כִּי-יָבֹא שִׁילֹה, וְלוֹ יִקְּהַת עַמִּים

The scepter shall not pass from Judah,
nor the mace from between his legs,
that tribute to him may come
and to him the submission of peoples.

The rod shall not depart from Judah nor a lawgiver from between his feet until Shiloh arrives and his will be an assemblage of nations.

What’s going on here? Alter explains that the italicized words can be interpreted in different ways: “The Masoretic Text [the authoritative Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible] seems to read ‘until he comes to Shiloh,’ a dark phrase that has inspired much messianic interpretation.” Rashi, citing the authority of Targum Onkelos (a Jewish translation of the Torah into Aramaic from the early second century of the Common Era), explains that Shiloh does not refer here to the biblical city but is instead a title or name for the moshiach (messiah). But Alter’s translation follows an alternative exegetical tradition that “goes back to the Middle Ages, which breaks up the word ‘Shiloh’ [שילה] and vocalizes it differently as shai lo [tribute to him, שי לו].”

Mann clearly opts for Rashi’s interpretation. Jacob “heaped blame on those [Shimeon and Levi] he chose not to bless for their attachment to instruments of violence” (cf. Genesis 49:5–7). How peculiar then that he would praise Judah as a lion, a bloodthirsty beast of prey. “And yet in blessing Judah,” Mann insists, “Jacob intended no such brutal heroics.” Mann suggests that Shiloh, not Judah, is the real “hero” at whom Jacob’s blessing is aimed. In Mann’s retelling, this “name of promise” was “something totally new” to Judah and came as a “surprise to the entire assembly.” “Only one person among them all already knew of it and had been waiting eagerly to hear it. We cannot help casting a glance outside [Jacob’s tent] to the outline of her shadow—there she stood very erect, in darkling pride, as Jacob proclaimed this woman’s seed.” This woman is, of course, Tamar. Christians see Shiloh as a reference to Jesus, and Mann hints at this interpretation. From Judah, he writes, “would come the one to whom all peoples would be obedient, the bringer of peace, the man of the star.”

Jacob’s blessing for Judah continues. Here again is Robert Alter’s translation of the biblical text:

He binds to the vine his ass,
to the grape-bough his ass’s foal.
He washes in wine his garment,
in the blood of the grape his cloak.
O eyes that are darker than wine,
and teeth that are whiter than milk!
(Genesis 49:11)

Abraham ibn Ezra explains that the yield of Judah’s vineyards will be “so abundant that his ass can turn aside to the vine and he won’t care if it eats the grapes.” Alter adds: “This explanation jibes nicely with the next image of washing garments in wine—the wine will be so plentiful that it can be treated as water.” Mann picks up on this imagery and does something clever and surprising with it. Judah, or rather his tribe, was so “blended and merged” in Jacob’s blessing with “the figure of Shiloh” that “when it came to the vision of the fullness of blessing and grace to which Jacob now devoted himself, no one could say whether his words concerned Judah or this man of promise.”

It all swam in wine—sparkling wine turned everything red before the listeners’ eyes. It was a land, this king’s kingdom, a land where someone bound his animal to the vine and his ass’s colt to the choice vine. Were these vineyards of Hebron, the wine-clad hills of Engedi? Into his city “he” rode on an ass and upon the foal of a she-ass, a beast of burden. There was nothing but the drunken delight of red wine at the sight of him, and he himself was like a drunken god of wine stomping in the winepress, holding skirts high in exultation—the blood of the wine drenched his apron and the red juice of the grape his garments. How beautiful he was wading there, dancing the dance of the winepress—more beautiful and than any other man, white as snow, red as blood, black as ebony…

Mann’s reference to the “someone” who rides an ass into his city may bring to mind Jesus entering Jerusalem, but he instead identifies Judah/Shiloh with Dionysius, the “drunken god of wine.” So, if Mann gives Jacob’s blessing for Judah a Christian interpretation, it is not exclusively Christian. In addition to Mann’s identification of Judah with the astrological sign Leo, the last part of Jacob’s blessing allows Mann to invoke another element of pagan mythology. In Mann’s retelling, Judah and his messianic seed appear as a confused amalgam, all swimming in wine, of Christian and pagan mythology alike.

The Revolutionary Usurpation of the Firstborn (פרשת תולדת)

The biblical motif of the revolutionary usurpation of the firstborn begins in the first Torah portion, Bereshit, when God favors the offering made by Abel and not that of his older brother Cain (Gen. 4:4-5). The motif reappears in Vayera when Sarah insists that the younger Isaac, and not Ishmael, will receive Abraham’s inheritance. And now the motif continues in this week’s Torah portion Toldot (“generations”) with Jacob and Esau. After they clash together in their mother's womb, Jacob emerges second grasping the heel of his firstborn brother Esau (Genesis 25:22, 26).

שני גיים בבטנך
ושני לאמים, ממעיך יפרדו
ולאם מלאם יאמץ
ורב יעבד צעיר

Two nations—in your womb,
two peoples from your loins shall issue.
People over people shall prevail,
the elder, the younger’s slave.

Genesis 25:23

Robert Alter points out the ambiguity of this verse. Which nation shall prevail over which? “The Hebrew syntax leaves unclear which noun is subject and which is object—‘the elder shall serve the younger,’ or, ‘the elder, the younger shall serve.’”

Jacob (also called Israel) is, of course, the progenitor of the Jewish nation, while his brother Esau is identified as the ancestor of the Edomites. Notwithstanding Jacob and Esau’s eventual reconciliation (Genesis 33), the Hebrew Bible relates that the Jewish nation under David’s leadership later conquered Edom (II Samuel 8:13, I Chronicles 18:12). The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that the Hebrew Bible describes Edom as “the eternal enemy of Israel (and Judah, Amos 1:11; Ezek. 35:5) who not only always oppressed Israel, but at the time of the destruction of the First Temple took advantage of the situation and seized control of parts of Judah (Ezek. 25:12; 35:5, 10, 2; Obad. 11–16), and it is hinted that Edom also took part in the destruction of Jerusalem (Ps. 137:7; Obad. 11) and even in that of the Temple itself (Obad. 16).” Much later, around the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Roman Empire, Edom was identified with Rome (ostensibly founded by the children of Esau and included among the cities of the chiefs of Esau mentioned at the end of Genesis 36).

Another interesting feature of this portion concerns Abimelech’s words to Isaac in Genesis 26:10: כמעט שכב אחד העם, את–אשתך (“one of the people might well have lain with your wife”). This is apparently the only place in the Hebrew Bible where the phrase אחד העם appears. According to Rashi, “one of the people” refers here to “the special one of the people, namely the king.” Of course, אחד העם was also the pen name of the great theoretician of cultural Zionism, Asher Ginzberg. As Ginzberg's biographer Steven Zipperstein points out with Rashi's commentary in mind, this pen name may have been a “bid for leadership” as much as a sign of anonymity, modesty, and humility. Asher, though, was no Jacob--he had no older brother, only two younger sisters.

A Vision of Unity (פרשת ראה)

The Shema--perhaps the most important prayer in Judaism--stresses divine unity. "Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One" (Deuteronomy 6:4). The Hebrew word for unity, we should bear in mind, is אחדות, which is related to the word אחד (one). This week's Torah portion, Parshat Re'eh (פרשת ראה, Deuteronomy 11:26–16:17), articulates a manifold unity: one vision or one right perspective, one good, one God, one place of worship, and one people.

The portion begins with the imperative to see: "See [ראה], I set before you today blessing and curse: the blessing, when you heed the instruction [מצות] of the Lord your God with which I instruct (מצוה) you today; the curse, if you heed not the instruction of the Lord your God" (Deuteronomy 11:26-28). The imperative is addressed not to the individual (לפניך), but collectively to the people as a whole (לפניכם).

The people are admonished, "You shall not do after all that we do here this day, every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes" (Deuteronomy 12:8). Instead, Moses repeatedly directs the people's gaze to "what is right [הישר]" or "what is good and right [הטוב והישר] in the eyes of the Lord" (Deuteronomy 21:25, 21:28, 13:19). Following the initial imperative to look, the intent is to align the vision of the people with the vision of their God, so that it is a single vision.

Moreover, it is a vision of one good. In the Midrash (Devarim Rabbah 4:3), R. Eliezer links the opening verse of this week's portion ("See, I set before you today blessing and curse") to Lamentations 3:38: "out of the mouth of the most High proceedeth not evil and good?" The Bible scholar and commentator Nehama Leibowitz, following previous commentators, points out that the Hebrew word for evil in Lamentations 3:38 occurs in the plural form (רעות = evils), but the word for good (טוב) is in the singular.

The portion stresses the oneness of God throughout, warning the people to choose their God (it is always "your God") over "other gods" (the gods of other peoples) that they have not known.

Another feature of the portion is the abolition of religious sacrifice at local shrines and its centralization in Jerusalem ("the place that the Lord your God will choose," Deuteronomy 12:5), which occurred historically between the late eighth century BCE (Hezekiah's reform) and the late seventh century (Josiah's reform). This centralization has a number of consequences, including the innovation of what the rabbis called secular slaughter (שחיטת חולין) outside of Jerusalem (Deuteronomy 12:15). More to the point of this drash, centralization of the Israelite cult is another expression of unity. As the first-century CE Jewish priest, scholar, and historian Flavius Josephus argued, centralization of worship teaches that just as there is only one God, there should only be one Temple, and the Temple should be "common to all men because He is the common God of all men" (Against Apion, book II, paragraph 24).

The argument that Josephus makes concerning the centralization of worship brings to mind a similar argument that the French historian and political writer Alexis de Tocqueville would make centuries later. In the second volume (chap. 5) of Democracy in America, first published in 1840, Tocqueville wrote: "Men living in a similar and equal condition in the world readily conceive the idea of the one God, governing every man by the same laws, and granting to every man future happiness on the same conditions. The idea of the unity of mankind constantly leads them back to the idea of the unity of the Creator; while, on the contrary in a state of society, where men are broken up into very unequal ranks, they are apt to devise as many deities as there are nations, castes, classes, or families, and to trace a thousand private roads to Heaven."

Along these lines, we can see that in addition to emphasizing one vision or right perspective, one good, one God, and one place of worship, this week's portion also underscores the oneness of the people. This is evident in the solidaristic provisions for the Levite, who has "no portion or inheritance" (i.e., they did not receive a portion of the land like the other tribes, Deuteronomy 12:12), and the social obligations stipulated in Deuteronomy 15 to one's "fellow man and brother," including the debtor and the pauper. Remission at the end of every seven years is a leveling practice that restores equality between the erstwhile debtor and his creditor. The instruction to "open your hand to your brother, to your poor, and to your pauper, in your land" (Deuteronomy 15:11), may not place the pauper on an equal footing, but at least it ensures that he will not be treated as an outsider to whom one owes nothing. To be sure, these provisions are in one sense inconsistent with Tocqueville's thesis because they presuppose inequality that must then be compensated. Nevertheless, they express an egalitarian ethos and aspiration, and in this sense they are consistent with Tocqueville's point. As the Bible translator and professor of Hebrew Robert Alter puts it, "whatever the social and economic differences, all Israelites should regard each other as brothers." The social ethic of Deuteronomy thus aims to prevent inequalities from deepening and hardening into caste divisions that would break up the nation.

The ideal of אחדות (unity or oneness) runs against the grain of the individualism that prevails today. Taken to an extreme, this ideal surely has its dangers. But this week's portion reminds us that the ideal of אחדות is also closely connected to the Biblical social ethic and may be needed in some measure today to counterbalance individualism and reinvigorate our sense of mutual social obligations.

Nature and Culture (פרשת אחרי מות־קדשים)

In a previous blog post, I wrote that Judaism is all about distinction, and no book of the Torah exemplifies this concern more than ויקרא (Leviticus in Latin). As Robert Alter points out, the same process of division we find in בראשית (Genesis) is also “manifested in the ritual, sexual, and dietary laws of Leviticus…. Just as one has to set apart permissible sexual partners from forbidden ones” (the incest taboo), “one must set apart what may be eaten in the great pullulation of living creatures from what may not be eaten” (the laws of kashrut); and the Jewish people, through its acceptance of these categorical divisions, “sets itself apart from other peoples and becomes holy, like God.” This week’s double portion, Acharei-Kedoshim (Leviticus 16:1–20:27), continues to develop this theme.

The double portion includes the famous scapegoat ritual, in which the high priest Aaron sacrifices one goat to the Lord at the entrance to the Mishkan (Tabernacle) and sends off the other “to Azazel in the wilderness” (Lev. 16:10). By means of the latter act, the people’s transgressions are carried off by the goat. This ritual continued to be performed in the Second Temple until the Romans destroyed it in 70 CE. The ritual is similar to one used to purify persons afflicted with skin blanch, which is described in Parshat Metzora. In that ritual, the priest slaughters one bird and sends out another bird “over the open field” (Lev. 14:4–7).

According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, “the exact meaning of Azazel was a point of dispute already in the times of the talmudic sages: some held that it is the name of the place to which the goat was sent, while others believed that it was the name of some ‘power.’” In Alter’s view, “the most plausible understanding—it is a very old one—is that it is the name of a goatish demon or deity [the name incorporates the Hebrew word for goat] associated with the remote wilderness.” Alter adds: “the ritual depends upon a polarity between YHWH/the pale of human civilization and Azazel/the remote wilderness, the realm of disorder and raw formlessness…. It is as though the goat piled with impurities were being sent back to the primordial realm of ‘welter and waste’ [תהו ובהו, Genesis 1:2] before the delineated world came into being, but that realm here is given an animal-or-demon tag.”
 
In a subsequent passage that seems to support Alter’s interpretation, the Lord tells Moses to instruct the people that “they shall no longer sacrifice their sacrifices to the שעירם after which they go whoring” (Lev. 17:7). Who or what are the שעירם? Alter and the Jewish Publication Society translate the word as “goat-demons.” My Sapirstein edition of the Torah with Rashi’s commentary translates the word simply as “demons.” They follow the Greek Septuagint in this respect, which used the Greek word demon to translate the Hebrew word that the Encyclopaedia Judaica says means “hairy satyrs.” And indeed Chabad.org and my grandmother’s old Menorah Press Jewish Family Bible translate the word as “satyrs.” (In modern Hebrew, a שָׂעִיר is a satyr or billygoat.) These creatures are “surely to be associated with Azazel,” notes Alter. “Though our knowledge of their precise nature is limited, they are clearly archaic nature gods of the wild realm ‘beyond the camp,’ outside the pale of monotheistic civilization that the sundry Priestly writers are laboring to create.”

All of this brings to mind to Nietzsche’s famous contrast in The Birth of Tragedy between Apollo and Dionysius. While it may be unseemly to explicate the Torah with a pagan distinction, this week’s double portion seems to lend itself to the analogy. The Mishkan (Tabernacle) of the Lord, who creates clear categorical distinctions and enjoins the people to keep them clear, would correspond in this reading to the Apollonian spirit that gives form and creates harmony. In contrast, the wilderness inhabited by Azazel and the goat-demons recalls the Dionysian frenzy that (in Walter Kaufman’s words) “defies all limitations” and “threatens to destroy all forms and codes.” Like Dionysius, the creatures of the wilderness signify (in the words of Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large) “formless flux,” “excess,” and loss of individuation—in a phrase, welter and waste (תהו ובהו).

This week’s double portion also brings to mind an influential thesis once put forward by the Jewish anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. “For Lévi-Strauss,” as his biographer Patrick Wilcken writes, “the incest taboo was the social rule, from which all kin systems flowed. It distinguished humanity’s rule-bound existence from nature’s promiscuity; it marked the passage from nature to culture.” As Thomas Meaney put it in a review of Wilcken’s book, “Lévi-Strauss interpreted [the incest taboo] as humanity’s most basic attempt to rein in the randomness of nature.” Perhaps not coincidentally, this week’s double portion, which shows such deep concern for keeping the disorder and formlessness of the wilderness at bay, also includes the Torah’s prohibition of incest (Lev. 18).

Peace-Offering in a Time of Pandemic (פרשת צו)

Reading Parshat Tzav (Leviticus 6:1–8:36) in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, the overriding concern of ויקרא (Leviticus) with purification seems all too fitting. There seems no better time for Rashi’s invitation: “Let the pure ones come and study laws of purity.”

Accordingly, it’s hard not to be preoccupied in this week’s portion with the elements of contagion (of holiness, 6:11) and the seven-day quarantine of Aaron and his sons: “And from the entrance of the Tent of Meeting you shall not go out seven days…. [Y]ou shall keep the Lord’s watch and shall not die” (8:33-35). There you have it: a biblical warrant for sheltering in place.

Moreover, the sacrifice of the peace-offering (זבח השלמים), which is described in Leviticus 7:11-16, is also obliquely tied to the theme of illness. Robert Alter translates זבח השלמים as “communion sacrifice,” presumably because it culminates in a communal meal, and the Jewish Publication Society translates it as the “sacrifice of well-being,” but peace-offering seems the best translation because the Hebrew name זבח השלמים is related to the word שלום (peace). The Torah portion tell us this particular type of offering may be brought forward in or for thanksgiving (7:12). Thanksgiving for what? Rashi (following the Talmud, which bases the interpretation on Psalm 107) explains that one should give thanks for recovering from an illness, among other things. And indeed among the great national events that called forth the peace-offering in biblical times was the cessation of pestilence: after David made peace-offerings, a “plague against Israel was checked” (II Samuel 24:25).

With the destruction of the Temple, we can’t follow David’s example, but maybe there is nevertheless still a lesson we can take away from the portion. Why is this particular type of sacrifice called a peace-offering? Some commentators in the Jewish tradition point out that a portion of the offering is burnt on the altar, a portion is given to the כהנים (priests), and the remainder is eaten by the person who brings the offering and his family—in short, everyone gets a part. Thus, as Nehama Leibowitz, paraphrasing Rabbi Yehuda in the Talmud, says: “It harbors ‘peace’ for all parties”: the altar, the priests, and the owners. She cites a commentator named Hoffman who suggests that the peace-offering thereby “reflects the harmony between the offerer, the Lord and His servants.”

Scientific efforts to find a cure for the deadly coronavirus reportedly reflect this spirit of sharing. “While political leaders have locked their borders,” the New York Times reported, “scientists have been shattering theirs, creating a global collaboration unlike any in history.” “What is important,” said the French doctor Yazdan Yazdanpanah, “is to come up with a solution for everyone. The way to achieve that is to collaborate.” Let’s remember that lesson after the crisis.

(פרשת ויקרא) Division and Communion

Judaism is all about distinction, and no book of the Torah exemplifies Judaism’s concern with distinction more than ויקרא (Leviticus in Latin). As the Hebrew and comparative literature expert Robert Alter puts it:

There is a single verb that focuses the major themes of Leviticus—“divide” (Hebrew, hivdil). That verb, of course, stands at the beginning of the Priestly story of creation: “And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness…. And God made the vault and it divided the water beneath the vault from the water above the vault, and so it was.” In this vision of cosmogony, the condition before the world was called into being was a chaotic interfusion of disparate elements, “welter and waste” [תהו ובהו]. What enables existence and provides a framework for the development of human nature, conceived in God’s image, and of human civilization is a process of division and insulation—light from darkness, day from night, the upper waters from the lower waters, and dry land from the latter.

Deconstruction may be the invention of a Jewish philosopher, but nothing could be less Jewish than destabilizing hierarchical oppositions.

Alter argues persuasively that the same process of division we find in בראשית (Genesis) is also “manifested in the ritual, sexual, and dietary laws of Leviticus…. Just as one has to set apart permissible sexual partners from forbidden ones” (the incest taboo), “one must set apart what may be eaten in the great pullulation of living creatures from what may not be eaten” (the laws of kashrut); and the Jewish people, through its acceptance of these categorical divisions, “sets itself apart from other peoples and becomes holy, like God.” Alter adds: “This last element of imitatio dei suggests that God’s holiness, whatever else it may involve and however ultimately unfathomable the idea may be, implies an ontological division or chasm between the Creator and the created world.”

The first portion of ויקרא (Leviticus 1:1–5:26) concerns the laws of the קרבות (korbanot), the animal and grain offerings brought to the משכן (Mishkan or Tabernacle). These laws raise the question that the rabbis Maimonides and Nachmanides famously debated in the twelfth century, namely, what is the meaning and purpose of the sacrifices? And to this question we may add another: What do the sacrifices have to do with the process of division that Alter highlights?

Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed contends that God did not instruct the Jews to make sacrifices for their own sake but only as a means to wean the Jews away from idolatry and instead to God’s service. He reasons that the Jews were accustomed to the Egyptian practice of sacrificing animals to idols. Because human beings cannot suddenly discontinue everything to which they are accustomed, God permitted the sacrifices to continue while transferring them to His service.

Nachmanides challenged this interpretation, pointing out that Abel and Noah made sacrifices to God in the absence of idolatry. He argued that the “sin” or offense offering described in this week’s portion was a means (as Nehama Leibowitz puts it) to “express man’s readiness to sacrifice himself for his God.” From this perspective, the sacrificial animal is substituted for the person who has committed a transgression.

I’m no rabbinical scholar, but I don’t see a great divide between the views of Maimonides and Nachmanides. Leibowitz suggests that Nachmanides, in contrast to Maimonides, attributed “intrinsic value” to the sacrifices, but that can’t be right. As she later notes, the prophets expressly denied that the sacrifices had instrinsic value, insisting that they were only a means of drawing nearer to God and were only valuable when they served this purpose. So everyone—Maimonides, Nachmanides, and the prophets—characterizes the sacrifices as a means to an end. Maimonides and Nachmanides appear to disagree about the precise nature of that end, but even on this point the difference between them is not great. Maimonides emphasizes not just the rejection of idolatry but also devotion to God’s service. A readiness to sacrifice oneself for one’s God is arguably the most extreme form of service.

Still, what do the sacrifices have to do with the process of division? One answer, as Alter points out, is that the laws of sacrifice carefully regulate access to the sacred space of the sanctuary, preventing the unsanctioned mixture of the sacred and the profane. The two brief stories contained in the book of ויקרא (though not in this week’s portion) illustrate the dangers of such unsanctioned mixture: Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu are divinely punished for bringing “alien fire before the Lord” (Leviticus 10), and an Egyptian who profanes God’s sacred name is stoned to death (Leviticus 24). According to the anthropologist Mary Douglas, the entire book of Leviticus is structured by a system of correspondences between the divisions of the Mishkan (holy of holies, sanctuary, outer court), Mount Sinai (summit, perimeter, foot of the mountain), and the body of the sacrificed animal. For example, she argues, this week’s portion prohibits consumption of the suet (Leviticus 3:17) because it “divides the body at the diaphragm below the lower ribs” and thus “corresponds in the body to the boundary of a forbidden sacred space on the mountain.”

But the sacrifices do not only divide; they also connect. As Leibowitz says, the sacrifice “allows us to draw closer to the Almighty.” This is evident from the fact that the word קרבן (sacrifice) is derived from the root ק–ר–ב, from which we also get the word קרוב (close). This interpretation also finds support in the work of Jewish sociologist Émile Durkheim. In Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, first published in 1912, Durkheim argued that sacrifice is not a “tribute or homage” to the deity. Rather, he argued, sacrifice should be seen as an “act of alimentary communion,” a “meal of which the faithful who offer it partake at the same time as the god to whom it is offered.” While some parts of the sacrificial victim are “reserved for the deity,” others are consumed by the celebrants, and in this way sacredness is “communicated to the faithful.” This interpretation casts a new light not only upon the sacrifices themselves but also upon the divisions of the cosmos. If the sacrifices bring us closer to God, then perhaps the ontological chasm that Alter infers between the Creator and the created world is not as unbridgeable as it may at first appear.

Who Built It 3 (פרשת כי תשא)

Some time ago, I wrote a drash about Parshat Eikev (פרשת עקב) entitled, “Who Built It?” I drew attention to this verse: “And you will say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand made me this wealth.’ And you will remember the Lord your God, for He it is Who gives you power to make wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:17-18). While the wealthy person is inclined to believe that he is singularly responsible for his own success in life (“I built that”) this portion teaches us otherwise.

Parshat Ki Tisa (פרשת כי תשא) extends this point from economic capital to what sociologists call cultural capital. It’s not just the wealthy person who is inclined to commit the aveirah (עבירה) of believing he built his good fortune on his own. Learned and brilliant people often fall into an analogous error, believing that their intelligence and wisdom made them successful. They too forget the Source of their power—in this case, the power to understand. 

Parshat Ki Tisa makes this point through Bezalel, the man upon whom the Lord calls to manage the construction of the Mishkan (משכן or Tabernacle). Bezalel is chosen for this role because of his wisdom (חכמה), understanding (תבונה), and knowledge (דעת) (Exodus 31:3). But notice what the portion teaches about these qualities. Just as it is the Lord “Who gives you power to make wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:18), so it is the Lord who imbues Bezalel with wisdom, understanding, and knowledge (Exodus 31:3). For good measure, the Torah makes clear that the point does not apply to Bezalel alone, for “in the hearts of all that are wise-hearted I have put wisdom that they may make all that I have commanded” (Ex. 31:6). The verse reminds us of the Source of these qualities and how we are instructed to use them: to build a sanctuary (more figuratively to sanctify the world) so that we may foster the divine presence among us.

Who Built It 2 (פרשת תרומה)

Some time ago, I wrote a drash about Parshat Eikev (פרשת עקב) entitled, “Who Built It?” I drew attention to this verse: “And you will say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand made me this wealth.’ And you will remember the Lord your God, for He it is Who gives you power to make wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:17-18). While the wealthy person is inclined to believe that he is singularly responsible for his own success in life (“I built that”) this portion teaches us otherwise. “Wealth,” I wrote in that drash, “is a social product of many people working together.”


Getting from the Lord “gives you power to make wealth” to “wealth is a social product of many people working together” required some admittedly convoluted reasoning. Parshat Terumah (פרשת תרומה) makes this point more simply and directly. The portion begins with this instruction:
 

וְעָשׂוּ לִי, מִקְדָּשׁ; וְשָׁכַנְתִּי, בְּתוֹכָם

Let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them (Exodus 25:8)

A few verses later a further instruction is given concerning the making of the ark (ארון), the primary article of furniture in the Mishkan (משכן or Tabernacle):

וְעָשׂוּ אֲרוֹן

And they shall make an ark… (Exodus 25:10)

Nehama Leibowitz draws attention to the mode of address used here. She quotes the eighteenth-century rabbi Or Ha-hayyim:

The change in the wording from the second person singular [you shall make] to the third person plural [they shall make] is to illustrate that the essence of the Torah can only be fulfilled by Israel as a whole. For instance, a priest cannot fulfill the bestowing of the 24 priestly gifts, the redemption of the firstborn etc., whilst an Israelite cannot fulfil the positive commands of the sacrifices and the same applies to the Levite. But, taken as a whole, the Israelite people can keep the entire gamut of Jewish observances. For this reason the Torah states: “they shall make the ark.”

Nehama Leibowitz also quotes Midrash Tanhuma, which makes a similar point:

We find that when the Holy One Blessed be He instructed Moses to build the Tabernacle He used the expression ועשיתה “thou shalt make” but with regard to the Tabernacle He said: ועָשׂוּ “they shall make.” Why? The Holy One Blessed be He wished to stress that the command applied to each and every Israelite alike. No one should have the excuse to say to his fellow: I contributed more to the ark. Therefore I study more and have a greater stake in it than you! You contributed hardly anything therefore you have no share in the Torah…. That is why it is written (Deut. 33, 4): “An inheritance of the congregation of Jacob.”

If the ark is the product of many people working together, how much more so does this point apply to lesser achievements!