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“Our nation is no nation except by its Torah.”
Rav Sa’adia
Gaon
Sefer Emunot
V’Dayot
Third Essay
The Covenant of a Nation
Versus
The Covenant at Sinai
Translated from Hebrew by S.
NAthan
l'ilui nishmat Esther bat mordechai
The features that characterize a
human unit, whether that unit is an individual, a couple, a public, a
nation, or a state, cannot account for its uniqueness. Only by
taking a broad view that encompasses the entire matrix of elements that
make up the background to which this unit belongs, can one extract the
unique essence of any human unit. Similarly, a private individual
cannot maximize his unique essence without belonging to a public. It
is difficult to disclose the dynamic processes that unfold within an
individual’s private space if one ignores the circle of public space that
that private space inhabits – because one cannot understand freedom
without belonging.
This basic rule, which binds
opposites into one unified whole, casts light on the complementary
relationships enjoyed by opposites who are involved in mutual acceptance
(the positive scenario) as well as on the conflicting relationships that
plague opposites who are involved in mutual denial (the negative
scenario).
Detaching freedom from belonging
dooms both. Attaching them empowers both. Thus we find fertile
relationships between couples that result from the respect that each side
feels for the other’s uniquely opposite quality, for the other’s
differentness, and for the advantage that this differentness offers: The
quality that is in the other completes the lack that is in
me.
Such a state of complementarity
is neither self-evident nor easily attained, if we recall the obstacles
that egoism sets before any awareness of this kind. Yet every human
bonding is built on an awareness of the relationship between belonging and
freedom. This relationship determines the character of the belonging
bond, based upon freedom’s situational needs, and freedom is influenced as
well by belonging’s needs.
“Educate a youth according to his
own path.” A fundamental educational rule. Yet without
understanding the youth’s unique needs, as they are reflected through the
prism of his social needs, and his interaction with friends and peers,
this rule becomes an empty formula. This rule becomes a meaningful
guide, fully capable of determining the educational path, only when based
on needs that have grown out of an encounter between the youth’s need to
belong and his need for the recognition and self-expression that
characterize his freedom.
A nation is perceived as a unit
unto itself, supported by socio-anthropological definition: An ethnic
group possessing the elements of a shared history, language, lifestyle,
and destiny. Interestingly, the Torah perception does not match this
definition. In the Torah, the label ‘nation’ appears with a negative
connotation, and the reference is to the erev rav, the
asafsuf, the rabble, the marginal groups who are inadequate to
represent, who are incapable of bearing witness to the qualities
that make ahm Yisrael outstanding. In contrast, the label
Yisrael indicates a quality that is unique to the people of
God.
It would appear that the
negativeness of the term ahm (nation, people) derives from a
belonging that has been severed from freedom. It denotes a group whose
quantity and sheer numbers have destroyed its quality, for its quality
exists only in the individual. It is a group in which quantity has
become a force that tramples the individual and ignores his rights.
The individual for his part has no loyalty, sheds his commitments to the
group, and threatens the unity and continuity of the group, just as the
group threatens the very existence of the individual.
Here we can see that one may not
view the needs of the group as legitimate when they stand on their own
right. Values and moral qualities are absent from the needs of the
group. By presenting the needs of the group as a goal, the group
loses its effectiveness. It is the unique qualities and needs of the
individual that to a large extent determine the effectiveness of the
group.
Our Parasha deals with this
problem: A mass of freed slaves who are landless, who lack the most basic
conditions, who are in a state of pre-statehood, suddenly, without prior
warning or preparation, find themselves faced with the political need for
conquest. They are faced with “all beginnings are hard,” with all
the hardships and dangers with which this new beginning is
fraught.
Concern over what the future
holds is accompanied by a profound fear that grips an individual in its
mighty jaws. An individual senses that that he personally may be
forced to pay the price of the group’s political needs.
Fear paralyzes; this is fear’s
nature. Such paralysis cuts the individual off from his own self by
its negative energy. It tears him away from his own qualitative
value, from his own belief in the Creator of the universe. His
values are displaced by fear. Gratitude, for example, that testimony
to eternal love, is removed suddenly from its central position in the
Jews’ experience of symbiotic bonding, where “they believed in God, and in
Moshe His servant.”
The Parasha does not see any
difficulty in this unique and non-natural relationship. Rather the
Parasha comes to warn against a tendency to focus on the political
reality while ignoring the individual private human being.
“Who is the man who fears, and who is weak-hearted? Let him go and
return to his house, and let him not cause the nation’s heart to melt
[with fear] as does his own heart.” A nation with such men is a
nation that has lost its values. “When there is no vision, a nation
goes wild.” It loses its focus and its quality.
Quantity never becomes quality as
the dor haplaga proves. Yet quantity can really
impress. There is a lot of it. It is very big. It
instills its members with self-confidence. It offers a broadening of
the individual’s egocentric circle, which is very small and
vulnerable. It will give him instead a large collective ego.
This is a seductive substitute; holding out to him the great power of
quantity. The individual exults over his great find. He
renounces – fool that he is – his own uniqueness and quality.
Individuals thus merge into a mob, and in the mob, quality is entirely
absent.
The mob is then doomed to be
ruled by a shrewd dictator who is to be the expression of the collective
ego, and who manifests all the features of ego: Quantity devoid of
creative thinking, the absence of values, and the shameless and ruthless
exploitation of the mob by the dictator.
Moshe sees this danger, yet
nevertheless grants the nation their wish to send spies – a wish that
testifies to technical-quantitative thinking: Who is stronger, who
is bigger? Who possesses greater resources and a greater
organization of military force? Such thinking empty of quality,
empty of faith in the supreme promise, made to their forefathers and
reaffirmed in the covenant at Sinai.
Between the ancestral covenant and the covenant at
Sinai:
“Avraham who loves Me” – a
covenant of hesed. For those who tend to divide things
into categories, to seek out the differences, to look for substantive
contradictions at the conceptual level – the covenant with our forefathers
became a covenant with the nation, and the covenant at Sinai became a
religious covenant.
The Other – the
Stranger.
A covenant with a nation binds
man within a social reality, and strengthens the existential element of
belonging to a social/political group. This tendency toward
belonging, when it disconnects from recognizing the existence of the
private individual as a human being, results in a denial of the human
components of society, and of the human needs that derive from human
quality. It denies the vitality of the dimension of values, and it
denies the existential-spiritual needs. It sets up – in place of the
individual’s vital need for creative self-expression – the ego, honorable
ambassador of the survival mechanisms. Now conflict is born between
the extremes: The spiritual element that bears an individual’s uniquely
creative quality versus the system of self-preservation, that is comprised
of an empty egoism hostile to value and to quality.
Ignoring “I” while directing
one’s view toward ego – bearer of the existential expression – transforms
man from a Godly quality into a stranger, victim of an alienation that
ignores self-knowledge, that ignores another human being; he is a stranger
rather than a partner in quality and a bearer of values. All are
equal partners in the mechanical system. All are equally cogs in a
great blind machine of survival devoid of human
sensitivity.
Thus a devoted employee with a
family to support can be out on the street at a moment’s notice, because
the system at this moment is capable of managing without him. The
relationship to the other has become the relationship to the
stranger. Such a relationship is free of personal identification;
one does not identify with the human values that the other
possesses. Such a relationship is compassion-free, respect-free, and
appreciation-free. In their place comes a functional
relationship, painted with the hypocritical colors of good manners, of
fixed rules in the social game of what is “politically correct.”
How one relates to the other is
regulated by the changing winds of fashion. Since “I” is not rooted
in one’s relations with one’s environment, all environmental factors –
animals, cars, technical achievements – become absolutely equal, deserving
an equal level of regard; commitments dictated by fashion place all
connections on an equal footing in importance and quality.
Thus an individual holding fast
to a freedom devoid of belonging (holding fast to his own egoism, made of
survival’s components – kina, ta’ava, v’kavod)
grants the same attention to his dog as to his neighbor or his car.
His pants, his shoes, his food all deserve the possessive adjective “mine”
in the identical sense that they are applied to his children or his
spouse. My shoe, my sandwich, my husband or wife, my
son.
This fashion expects – or demands
– that one neutralize one’s personal attitude toward opinions and
views. It is not nice and not proper to identify personally
with ideas, and certainly not with values. All such expressions must
be accompanied by an introductory mitigating phrase, such as it
appears to me, it may be, etc. One’s words must express skepticism
toward – and a total absence of personal involvement with what one is
expressing.
On the windshield of a
dust-covered, mud-caked car that had traveled long on a rainy day,
someone’s finger drew these words: “Wash me. I am sad and
humiliated.” It is this precisely that the prophet mourns:
“Slaughtering human beings, they kiss calves.”
We see that attributing a label
of ‘other-stranger’ to a fellow human being comes from an ego that has
been emptied of its human quality. From here to viewing mass
slaughter as a statistical-political phenomenon, the road is short and
terrifying.
It is no coincidence that
perceptions alien to human values have made their appearance
simultaneously with the appearance of a technological society that has
turned morality into a categorical value (Kant) severed from subjective
human beings, severed from any personal relationship to morality, severed
from the ability to identify emotionally with a fellow human being, to
feel compassion for a fellow human being.
Hesed for Avraham
Hazal count the stages of God’s
friend’s development. Avraham – yedid Hashem – won this label
by virtue of his complete detachment from ego’s enslaving forms of
belonging. “All the world over on this side, and Avraham over on
that side.” Avraham created, through an initiative of his own free
choice, his own state of belonging – to the Creator of the
universe.
The expression he created for
this belonging was focused in the direction of human beings,
specifically. Thus the mida of hesed entered the
world. Within this mida, the talent for identifying with
another human being at the personal level was expressed: Hesed is
the ability to feel another’s needs with a sensitivity and awareness that
surpasseone’s own self-awareness, one’s own sensitivity to oneself, one’s
own ability to know one’s own existence’s needs.
Since whatever position is
adopted by “I” – which directs the path of human emotion – is drawn
from the dimension of height, it is height’s objective judgement that
determines which one of the two, whether “I” or the fellow human being,
deserves the right of way. God’s love embraces such a “friend of
God,” such a creant formed by His Own Hands. This yedid
Hashem supports the presence of the Creator.
Hesed is the capacity to identify
personally with another. Identifying precludes the other’s taking on
the appearance of the stranger, for the stranger never wins “I”’s
attention but only hostile ego’s, which rejects the other, thrusting him
far outside of its own egocentric circle. The other deserves no
attention from the heart, but must only be dealt with from external
technological sources, from the law, from the rules of the social
game. The other is only one detail in an enormous belonging
inhabited by no one at all. Within this belonging, massive quantity
runs mad. Its rules are subject to no moral judgement, and
recognize no self-examination. Its judgement is born of the
pressures and impressions that chance metes out, or of strange moods that
come and go.
The meraglim who were
kulam anashim, all people of stature, were a chance collection of
people of high quality, whose gathering together to undertake an
assignment turned them all – kulam – into a group, in which
individual identity was blurred. As a group they became subject to
the pressures of survival exclusively, because until this assignment they
had never been subject to any collective political
assignment.
They had been tribal
chieftains; individuals, each of whom governed a familiar tribe of private
individuals close to their own hearts. Suddenly they are entrusted
with a global political role, an area in which they have never acquired
expertise. They are disconnected from themselves, from their
self-judgment, from “I”’s sources of value. They are severed from
their trust in God, from the Divine promise to their ancestors which is
constantly developing in the direction of height: From the ancestral
covenant to the covenant at Sinai.
From a social reality in which a
nation is consolidated through the miracle of redemption from the house of
bondage, from the splitting of the Reed Sea to the giving of Torah at
Sinai, they have been gradually and increasingly consolidating as the
nation of God – to arrive at the covenant at Sinai, which deals with the
belonging born of freedom, the belonging that derives not from the
pressure of quantity’s external weight, but from the pull of the private
inner space toward the dimension of height, toward its own supreme
source.
This covenant of Torah includes
“I”, who embraces “I”’s essence with love – as in “love your friend as
yourself” – whether that essence is the “I” found in oneself or, and to
the same extent, the “I” found in one’s fellow, in the other who has
becomes one’s fellow human being, one’s comrade, one’s friend after one’s
own heart.
Among the meraglim, this
hesed – in whose lap they had been raised and edycated – was turned
into hesed le’umim hatat, “the hesed of the nations –
sin.” Suddenly they discovered the fear of quantity: They are
giants and we are as grasshoppers. Quantity and size: “And
they lifted it [a single cluster of grapes] on a pole, by two men.”
A quantity that appeared powerful on the outside, but soft and weak on the
inside instilled terror in their hearts. Suddenly forgotten were
both covenants – which were in truth one covenant: The ancestral
covenant and the covenant at Sinai.
Only Calev and Yehoshua guarded
their belonging to freedom. Only these two succeeded in holding
their own against the strange winds that were blowing through the kulam
anashim. Yehoshua held his own in merit of Moshe’s
blessing/instruction, which pointed him toward the dimension of height,
“God will save you from the counsel of the spies,” and Calev who went to
prostrate himself upon the graves of his ancestors in order to reinforce
his personal sense of identification with them, held his own as
well.
As to the question of how Moshe
could have known that the counsel of the spies would be evil, it could
have been Moshe’s knowledge of the danger of quantitative merging, of
merging for a collective mission when this places each individual’s
qualitative uniqueness at risk.
Parashat Shlah deals with this
danger: Being that this danger is constant and ever-present, in that it
derives from a natural tendency rooted in the survival instinct, man must
be ever-vigilant, must persist and persevere in protecting his own
personal freedom, must stand guard over his own uniqueness and
originality that are uniquely precious to him. He must invest his
efforts in making his freedom belong and attach to the dimension of
height, and he must exercise unremitting caution against his tendency to
detach freedom from belonging.
This is why a continuously
educational punishment was determined upon, “a weeping for generations,”
for as long as the danger of detaching freedom from belonging still
lurks.
The same danger applies to
detaching the value of ahm Yisrael from Torat Yisrael.
The same applies to viewing nationality as its own value, a notion
determined by society, rather than the result of an attachment to the
supreme source of authority.
The same applies to the authority
of the king. It is rendered null and void the moment the king does
not consider himself subject to Divine authority, because “I” – source of
the Divine quality in man – is incapable of subjecting itself to any other
source of authority. A regime that does not consider itself subject
to an individual who draws his authority from on high is a fascist
regime. It is a regime of the group, which attempts by its
quantitative power and by its arrogant foot to trample the individual’s
freedom – the freedom that attaches/belongs to the source of quality on
high.
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