Bamidbar-Shabbat Kallah (Haftarot)

“And the Children of Israel shall be as numerous as the sand by the sea”

The first three chapters of the Book of Hosea, from which this week’s haftarah is taken (Hosea 2:1-22), revolve around the metaphor of Israel as an unfaithful wife. In a certain sense, one might call this a kind of inversion of Song of Songs. In the classical midrashic reading of the Song, God and Israel are seen as the pair of lovers, whose romance is portrayed in lyric, idyllic terms, in the midst of a natural, rustic setting. The same analogy is used here, by the text itself, but rather than an idyllic romance, we have infidelity and betrayal, jealousy, and finally—because the lover is somehow attached to his beloved no matter what—forgiveness, reconciliation and a (hopefully long-lasting) “happy” ending. In the opening chapter of the book, which is not read as part of the haftarah, the prophet is asked, as a symbolic act, to take “a wife of harlotry.” (Incidentally, the various terms usually translated into English “harlot,” “harlotry,” “whoring,” etc.—zonah, zenunim, tizneh—do not refer to prostitution in the modern sense of a woman who sells her sexual favors for money, but to any promiscuous woman, especially an unfaithful wife.) Both she and the children she bears him are given various symbolic names, indicative of the alienation of the people from its God (his son is called lo ami–“not my people”; the daughter, lo ruhama, “not pitied”).

The second chapter opens with the verse quoted above, referring to the multitudes of the Jewish people. It is this single verse that serves as the basis for the connection of the haftarah to the Torah portion, which focuses upon the census of the Israelite people in the desert. In any event, this verse marks a turning point away from the negative tidings of the previous chapter; from his point on, the prophet heralds the beginning of Israel’s redemption, its reacceptance as “my people,” as “the sons of the living God” and “she who is an object of compassion.” Nevertheless, God still has a quarrel with “their mother” (although, in terms of the interpretation of the metaphor, the identity of the children and of the mother is not entirely clear). She is neither a real wife, nor a real mother, being not only unfaithful, but also ungrateful. She mistakenly believes that all she has—“bread and water, wool and flax… grain, wine and oil”—come from her various lovers, i.e., the Be’alim, the pagan gods who she has worshipped; yet in truth everything she has comes from God (v. 10-11). It is only when the others turn their backs on her that she decides to return to her first husband.

God’s reaction is two-fold. He first gives vent to his jealousy, punishing her, shaming her, “ceasing her festivals and new moons and sabbaths,” displaying her shame and lewdness in the eyes of her lovers (vv. 12-15). But afterwards, because of his own inner connection to her, He has no choice but to take her back: “I will seduce her, and take her to the wilderness, and speak to her heart… and she will respond as in the days of her youth” (vv. 16-17).

This portrayal of a “second honeymoon” concludes with two interesting verses. 2:18 is a complicated double entendre: “In those days you shall call me ishi (“my husband” or simply “my man”) and no longer call me ba’ali (“my husband” or “my Ba’al”). Thus, on the simplest level, we have here a reference to the religious infidelity implied by the worship of Ba’al, a word also meaning “husband.”

But some contemporary Israeli feminists would like to see this verse as suggestive of a more egalitarian relationship between the sexes; even in everyday Hebrew discourse, the term ishi is seen as vastly preferable to ba’ali, with its connotations of ownership, of acquisition. The latter, through its derivation from the verb bo’el, also relates to the sexual act, seen as one in which the man is the actor, making the woman “his,” while the woman, in the very grammatical usage, is seen as passive, niv’elet. The use of ishi, by contrast, is more or less a counterpart to ishti. (This usage also has vaguely Edenic overtones; back in the Garden Eve was initially called Woman [ishah] “because this one was taken from man [ish]” (2:23).

The haftarah concludes with two verses “I shall betroth you to me forever… with righteousness and justice, loving-kindness and mercy…. I shall betroth you to me with faith, and you shall know the Lord” (vv. 21-22). These verses, which convey both an ideal relation between man and woman, as between human and God, serve liturgically as a kind of “motto” for the mitzvah of tefillin. After weekday, after reciting the blessing(s) and donning the tefillin, the phylacteries worn by traditional Jews during morning prayer, these verses are recited while winding the straps around ones middle finger. The tefillin straps thus become a kind of wedding ring, symbolizing ones nuptial-like attachment to God.

Shabbat Kallah: Some Thoughts on Faith

Several weeks ago, in my discussion of various approaches to messianism in connection with the haftarot for the closing days of Passover, I concluded: “However, there is also an option that translates emunah not so much as ‘faith’ or ‘belief,’ but rather as ‘faithfulness’ or even as ‘commitment’…” At that time, my loyal reader and friend, Mark Kirschbaum, complained that I left my readers more or less hanging. Mark wrote rather archly: “Nu, so shall we faithfully wait for the answer?” As promised then, I now return to the issue of faith—a suitable preparation for Shavuot.

Martin Buber, in Two Types of Faith, draws a distinction between what he calls emunah and pistis—the use of the Hebrew and Greek terms suggesting that there is something in this distinction that lies at the very heart of the difference between Judaism and Christianity, and the linguistic weaves in which they are rooted. Emunah is defined as “the fact that I trust somebody, without being able to offer sufficient reasons for my trust in him,” whereas pistis is “the fact that… I acknowledge a thing to be true.”

“Faith,” for the Hebrew, is essentially how one lives, an attitude to life, a sense of being in relationship, rather than intellectual assent to a set of cognitive propositions about God. (Unlike scientific or other forms of “objective” knowledge, based upon logically demonstrated proof, observable facts, etc., such religious faith is based upon an inner, existential faith decision.) Thus, when Genesis 15:6 says of Abraham, “vehe’emin ba-Shem vayahsheveha lo tzedaka,” this does not mean that he accepted the axiom of God’s existence, but rather that Abraham ”trusted in (or: was steadfast with) God, and this was considered a righteous stance on his part.” Abraham had a living relationship with God. Moreover, Buber adds, whereas Christian faith is essentially based upon an individual conversion or an inner decision (this is phenomenologically true, one might say: that is, this is so even if the majority of Christians are in fact “born into the faith”), Judaic faith is rooted in the fact of belonging to a faith community, in the ongoing sense of walking with God, of living ones life in God’s presence.

Of course, over the course of history there have been various hybrids of this neat schema. The earliest Christian faith, that of Jesus and the disciples, was à la Buber more of the Hebraic type; it was only with Paul, and his mission to the Greek-speaking world, that Christianity turned forever into the mode of pistis; that Jesus himself was transformed from a teacher, a simple, straightforward man of flesh and blood who taught a certain path and no doubt enjoyed the deep love of those who knew him, to a concept, an apotheosis of the Godhead. Likewise, where the “classical” Judaism of the Bible and the Rabbinic Sages was rooted in the model of emunah, already in the ancient world there were Jewish communities, such as the Diasporas in Alexandria and Asia Minor, that were more ”Hellenistic” than “Hebraic.”

It is a truism that Jewish philosophy originated, not out of any innate inner need, but from the necessity to explain Judaism to those on the outside, whether these were Gentiles or Jews who lived in a culture permeated with foreign patterns of thought. Hence, Jewish philosophy blossomed in the Hellenistic Diaspora; again in the medieval world of Arabic neo-Greek philosophy; and a third time in Central and Western Europe, first in the nexus of nineteenth century German idealism, and later on in all of the highways and byways of modernity.

The same holds true for the formulation of ikkarei emunah (“fundaments of the faith”). The formulation of principles of faith as such entered Judaism from Greek philosophy; it was not indigenous to classical biblical or Rabbinic thought. Although he had forerunners, notably Rabbenu Saadya Gaon, this enterprise is associated first and foremost with Maimonides, the neo-Aristotelian and systematizer of both halakhah and emunah, who was the classical formulator of such fundaments.

But paradoxically—or perhaps not so—Maimonides took a minimalistic position on many cardinal issues of Jewish folk belief: on such issues as miracles, individual providence, in the famous controversy on the resurrection of the dead, and of course in his naturalistic interpretation of Messiah. His explanation of ta’amei hamitzvot, of the reasons for the commandments, is similarly outspokenly non- and even anti-theurgic. In many places he lambasts anthropomorphic understandings of God as close to idolatrous, and in any event as seriously harming the pristine purity of the God concept.

I hold that this essentially rationalistic and minimalist approach to many areas of belief can be extended in principle to various issues that concern us today, such as the nature of Torah, the role played by historical factors in the creation of the biblical text, etc.—but we will have to wait for a fuller discussion of this subject. How then can we, as modern Jews, come full circle to an intelligent faith affirmation without becoming caught up in a kind of dogmatism, a rigid kind of mentality that reads people out of the fold as apikorsim (“heretics”)? One option is a reliance on masoret, on the inherited tradition of a living faith community of which one is a part. Interestingly, Rav Soloveitchik never engaged in apologetics, in rational proof of the tenets of Judaism (see especially his comments in the opening pages of The Lonely Man of Faith). He spoke eloquently of the source of his faith as ultimately stemming from a kind of organic belonging to the “Masorah community,” and from certain intensely felt personal experiences, even from early childhood (such as that described at the end of “Uvikashta misham”). While he would not have made the comparison, one finds here certain shades of Buber and of the “walking with God,” faithfulness to a living relationship with God, experienced through a living community, and filtered through the tradition.

Or perhaps one may discover in one's soul a certain type of “Second Naivete,” in the poignant phrase of Paul Ricoeur, attained after going through all the complexities of philosophical speculation and apparent refutations and what not. There are times when I find myself wishing to return to the uncomplicated {?} Judaism of my grandfather’s circle, when he was still in Rhadzhanowa at the home of his grandfather, the hassid of Simhah Bunim, or studying in Zakrozcym or Plotsk with Reb Yonah Mordecai. I imagine this as a Judaism that was not fanatical, that even had its own kind of sophistication, but that was all-in-all a kind of natural, self-evident, un-self-conscious Jewish piety and religious life style. (Some may object that there is a certain pretense and artificiality, even intellectual dishonesty, in this kind of turning to the past. No; I am not talking about a sentimental, romanticized, ”kitschy” version of the shteitl as a kind of pious Jewish Disneyland. I have read enough to know that that period was filled with its own tensions and polemics and nasty conflicts. But with all that, it may still serve as a certain model for the integrity of a living masoret.)

To conclude, a few specific remarks about the subject with which this discussion opened weeks ago: the interpretation of Isaiah 11 (see HY II: 7th Day of Pesah). Perhaps my objections to the implied change in the very laws of nature was based on too narrow and literal a reading. The same passage about the “lion lying down with the lamb” can also be read symbolically. What really concerned Isaiah was not the diet of felines, but the human propensity for violence and warfare (see the even more famous quote from 2:4), particularly given that this chapter appears immediately after the thwarting of the Assyrian attack on Jerusalem. These sentiments can certainly speak to us, living these past eight months in a state of undeclared war.