For the love of Israel

The most pressing issue facing Israel today is not a nuclear Iran. It is not the corruption in government. It’s not even the threat of a September request by the Palestinians for independence at the United Nations. The biggest threat facing Israel is the elimination of constructive public discourse amongst Israelis and Jews everywhere about the nature of the huge and wonderful Jewish enterprise known as the State of Israel.

We Jews believe in censure. Some of us feel commanded to give reproach. In the very middle of our Torah we read, “You shall surely rebuke! (Lev. 19:17)” And yet, the current Israeli government and many in the worldwide Zionist establishment are trying to change the rules of the game. This is unacceptable and does not appear to conform to a Jewish way of thinking.

The rabbi’s argued about this very issue. “Rabbi Tarfon said, ‘I would be very surprised if there is anyone in this generation that can accept criticism.’ Rabbi Elazar ben Azaria responded, ‘I doubt if there is anyone in this generation that knows how to give criticism.’ (TB Arachin 16b).”

Sometimes we forget that tochecha, our command to rebuke, is surrounded by two other important commandments. “Do not hate your brother in your heart,” and  “incur no sin because of this.” Context is everything.

Much of the discourse about Israel is framed in the language of love. What love means and how it is demonstrated are both very unclear. When I say that Israel is among the only places in the world where a Jew cannot exercise freedom of religion, I am referring to my personal experience of being forced to marry outside of my homeland because my Reform rabbi was not authentic Judaism for the Jewish state. I don’t want a theocratic, intolerant state for my people.

When I critique the Israeli educational system, as an insider with a doctorate in education, it is because I want the system to serve my children and my neighbors well. We take 13 years out of our kids lives and spend a good portion of our tax revenues on this project because we care about the future citizenry of the nation. When I oppose the occupation of the Palestinian Territories and advocate for human rights in all of the Land of Israel, I do this, first and foremost, as a Jew who cares about the behavior of his people. How I go about this is a different story. It is essential that I make every effort to incur no sin along the way, but there are no clear borders to what this means.

The rabbis of the Talmud worked in chevruta, learning dyads, to argue out the fine points of the civilization they wanted to leave for us. Sometimes the arguments went too far. Rebbe Yochanan’s obstinacy caused the death of Reish Lakish. Grief and having a “yes man” to replace him led to Yochanan’s demise. Jews don’t benefit from rubber stamps. We need challenges. They make us better as individuals and as a collective. They force us to reflect on our behavior and make choices that advance our purpose of being a holy nation.

We believe that we are commanded not to destroy our beautiful, promised land. “And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you.” How can we prevent the defilement of the land without serious, constructive dialog? It is completely legitimate to argue tactics. It crosses a line when we try to define our fellow’s tactics as traitorous, disloyal or hateful just because we don’t agree with them. Nobody has a monopoly on the love of Israel, but we should reflect on the models of the expression of this love. It would be too simple to say that there are only two models, but for the sake of brevity, I will generalize.

There are those who say that loving Israel means letting her decide what is best for the country and then helping that decision find fruition. The other model says that to love means a different type of support. In this model, loving Israel requires acknowledging the whole and helping to correct the bad while continuing to promote and strengthen the good.

The first model proposes unconditional love. When I was a kid in America, the way we were expected to support Israel was by writing blank checks and letting the decisions happen in Israel. Part of the argument was that the Israeli Jews serve in the army and fight the wars; they suffer the recourse of their decisions. But bombs in Jewish buildings in Argentina, synagogues in Morocco and attacks in community centers in California show the faults of this approach. The world sees Israel as a Jewish project and the targets have no national borders. The unconditional love model has another serious problem. It doesn’t work.

The most unconditional love we humans know is for a new baby. Human babies are the only creatures that are born completely dependent on others. They cannot even turn over by themselves for several months, and it takes about a year before they start to crawl. Still, not all babies are loved by their parents.

As someone who trained and worked as a dairy farmer in Israel, I know that baby calves can walk and find their mothers to suckle immediately after their births. This is the same with every species except humans. Our babies need us for everything and the love we give them is unconditional because they are completely dependent and because they are our progeny.

As our children grow, we set borders and expectations. Rarely does the violation of those borders result in a termination of love. When I was an undergrad, my friend, the comedian Steve Allen shared a story about his son who had joined a cult, and he eventually made him choose between the cult and the family. This was an exception to the rule and would be a painful experience for any parent. Unconditional love doesn’t keep us straight and narrow. It doesn’t raise a mirror to our eyes and let us reflect on our behavior. With unconditional love, things go bad and we turn the other cheek. It is no small wonder that this form of love of Israel finds a comfortable bed partner in Christian Zionism.

The model of love of Israel that I subscribe to is holistic. I love so many things about our country. I also desperately want to right the wrongs. I love the dialog and hope to have the humility to assume that my vision for the country is not always right. I celebrate the diversity of citizens and I believe, as Churchill so gracefully put it, that “Democracy is the worst form of government, accept for all the others that have been tried.” I don’t like the tyranny of majorities, but I don’t mind getting dirty and arguing over the direction of my homeland. I am, however, getting pretty fed up with the attack that says that I don’t love Israel because I want to make her the best that she can be. That is simply untrue and hurts the cause. Just as the Torah has seventy faces, there are many ways to love one’s country. Mine is just as valid and may be more helpful.

Do not keep it for yourself: A research plan

If you see your brother's ox or his sheep wandering, do not go by without helping, but take them back to your brother. ‬If their owner is not near, or if you are not certain who he is, then take the beast to your house and keep it till its owner comes in search of it, and then you are to give it back to him. ‬Do the same with his ass or his robe or anything which has gone from your brother's keeping and which you have come across: do not keep it to yourself. (Deut.22:1-3)

לא תראה את שור אחיך או את שיו נדחים והתעלמת מהם השב תשיבם לאחיך׃ ‬
‫ואם לא קרוב אחיך אליך ולא ידעתו ואספתו אל תוך ביתך והיה עמך עד דרש אחיך אתו והשבתו לו׃ וכן תעשה לחמרו וכן תעשה לשמלתו וכן תעשה לכל אבדת אחיך אשר תאבד ממנו ומצאתה לא תוכל להתעלם׃ ‬

I have a research project that I cannot afford to implement, but I’d like to explain it and build my hypothesis. My question is simple and complicated at the same time. Does religion make people better human beings?
Of course this is a relative question because the baseline is illusive. What is a normal human being without religion? This is the first question I ask. Next, I want to know what religion is in the context of my question. But let’s leave the critique for a moment. How can I test this question?
My study would take a fixed number of wallets and disperse them in the public realm in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Whether I should do more cities is a detail for conjecture. In each wallet, I would put personal identification and five, twenty shekel bills.
If you want to really be scientific, you could say that the amount of money has to be greater to make the stakes worthwhile and the ID has to be varied. After all, people might return money to a woman before a man or an elder before a student. Also there is the question of the transgression threshold. When is the transgression worthwhile? Do you keep the money at one hundred shekels or do you wait for one thousand before you mess with the Big Guy?
There are lots of details with my study that will always be refuted, but leave that and join me in forming the hypothesis. What do we think we will learn about our subject? This is an essential question for designing the survey. What information will we gather from people who try to return the wallets? Here are some of my questions. Some answers are quantitative. They will give me statistics like X% of people who returned wallets consider themselves secular. Some questions will have to be qualitative because we need to understand what secular means to someone who defines herself that way. The better the qualitative questions and answers, the more useful the statistics.

a. Do you define yourself as religious?
b. Do you believe in a deity?
c. Are you Jewish?
d. Christian?
e. Moslem?
f. Do you believe in the afterlife?
g. Do you believe in a deity that is involved with the world and human life?
h. Do you believe that you will be judged by your god?
i. Do you believe that there is a concrete instruction manual from which you can understand what your god expects of you?

I try to write my qualitative questions in a way which will leave the answerer feeling comfortable to answer in the way that best represents her opinions and provides the most qualified information.

a. How do you define religious?
b. What do you think happens to human beings after they die?
c. If you believe that your deity is involved with the world, how does that effect the free will of human beings?

I could go on, but I think my point is clear. No research is free of the inherent biases of human language, in general, and of researchers, specifically. When we read research, we are not reading truth. There is no world to be discovered. It is framed. Our research defines the answers we get and the world we discover.
The common term for putting too much credibility in scientific methodology and conclusions is called scientism. I would claim that for much of the western world, scientism has replaced or joined religion as the answer to questions which might be better served by addressing them with doubt. For example, my wife is an acupuncturist. Her profession is built on thousands of years of practice. Some people swear by it. Others wouldn’t take a needle if their life depended on it. Western medical science, as we know it, is a baby in comparison to Chinese medicine. It has only been around for about two hundred years, and it constantly changes and contradicts itself. When I was an infant, my mother was told to bottle feed me because science knows exactly what nutrition I need better than my creator’s body. My mom put her faith in science (which may explain my many deficiencies.) Which medicine do you turn to? Why?

I have some hypotheses about my research and some prior assumptions. Almost everyone reading this assumes that Jerusalem has more religious people. We could turn to statistics to answer this question, but what good would it be without qualitative research? Religious people don’t all define themselves the same way. Having a Commander in chief is a form of religiosity, but some commanded people believe they will be judged in this world and others in a world to come. What does it mean to say that 60% of the wallets returned to their owner came from self-defined religious people? Would it mean something different if we learned that half of those wallets came with some or all of the money missing?

Living in Tel Aviv, as I do, I cheer for the home team. I want my city on Spring Hill to be the home of good human beings because I am one of them. I have a logic I have built to support it. Jerusalem is on top of a mountain. It has its head in the clouds. It is disconnected. Tel Aviv is fresh. It is renewed with every wave that hits our beautiful shoreline. Even our religious in Tel Aviv are better than in Jerusalem. They live pluralistic lives among the secular masses. Just walk down Rothschild Boulevard on a Shabbat morning and you will see what I mean.
In the Talmud, when Rabbi Eliezer tries to convince the rest of the rabbis of his righteousness, he brings the Bat Kol to speak for God. It speaks and proclaims his righteousness, but the rabbis will have nothing to do with it. They make two claims; the Torah is no longer in heaven and it (the Torah) instructs us to lean toward the majority. How can we listen to God when He has created the circumstances by which we are to be in charge of our own destiny?
I’m sorry that I don’t have the money to do my research study. Research is a fun and interesting job. It helps me pay the bills with dignity. But maybe I’m better off not participating in a system that has all but replaced faith for so many people. Six of one, half a dozen of another is such a brilliant algorithm because it explains exactly what I mean. At the end of the day, it is not science or religion that proves anything. Both are systems that demystify the mysterious, and both are matters of faith. At the end of the day, we have to make choices, and the important thing is that we are willing to be critical of ourselves and the systems within which we make them. This is my Torah and if you give me enough money, I’ll give you a study that proves that I’m right.

Education Israel style

The headlines made it nearly impossible for me to pass the opportunity to address my feelings about the school system in Israel. “Netanyahu, officials launch highly anticipated education system reform.” Wow! You’d think they adopted New Math, but whatever you might have thought, you would probably be mistaken. Here’s the tag line; “New program, coming after years of deliberations, would see teachers' pay increase by 51% in exchange for additional working hours.” And the worst part, it’s a bad deal for teachers. They increase their work hours from 24 to 40 per week, 16 hours or 66%, and they only get compensated for 51%. The net effect is a lower hourly wage. But this change doesn’t even get close to deserving the word reform.

There is a lot to fear when reform is used in education in general, and in Israel specifically. I’m not referring to the difference between revolution and reform, between which Israel needs the former. I am talking about the long history of educational reforms that Israel suffers from because of the unfortunate tie of the ministry of education to the political system. These reforms make our kids schizophrenic. For example, under Yuli Tamir, the students learned about the Green Line and Naqba Day. Now, under the Likud’s Gidon Saar, the state of Israel and the land of Israel are virtually synonyms, saying Naqba is punishable by law and schools will be doing field trips to Hebron. But this is not the subject of this tome.

The revolution I call for is directed at high schools and matriculations. I firmly believe that the existing system of training kids in grades 10-12, to remember materials and take tests, is at the core of many of Israel’s problems. We cannot have a dynamic society of individuals who know how to creatively solve problems and imagine the kind of country they want to live in if we feed them answers and ask them to regurgitate them in tests. Maybe this is what the country needed 63 years ago when we had to draft as many resources as possible to the cause of defending the homeland, but today the challenges are different and the anachronistic approaches are doing much more harm than good.

I believe that personal anecdotes help vivify important social questions. Here are a few. I taught Israeli high school civics and Bible. I did things like ask my students to try to understand the Israeli Declaration of Independence via comparison to the American Declaration. I thought it would be helpful for them to see that Israel leaves out God and democracy while America includes both. In Bible, my class of all immigrant students wrote about their immigration in comparison to Abraham’s calling to “Leave your country, and your homeland, and your father's house, and go to the land that I will show you.” My principal responded by telling me that I was too philosophical and creative. She handed me the matriculation tests and the answers and told me that, “this is all that matters.”

My daughter Maya recently saw her Solomon Schechter eighth grade teachers who were here on a day school trip with their students from Chicago. Her English teacher asked if she was still doing the great writing she had done in middle school. Maya told me that the question made her upset because it reminded her that she is never asked to be creative. “They ask me to write answers to questions in a very narrow way that gives their understandings. They don’t care what I think, only what I know.”

The irony of the situation is that the Jewish state has primary Jewish sources that complicate the idea of what education should look like, and we don’t look to them. In Pirkei Avot, Moses receives the Torah and passes it to the elders who pass it forward as if education is concrete and reified. This is the Education ministry model. But we also have the story of Moses sitting in Rabbi Akiva’s classroom dumbfounded because he doesn’t understand his own Torah. In this model, knowledge is made by the individual through engagement with ideas. It is not something that can be remembered and repeated for standardized tests. Moses doesn’t recognize his Torah because it is not the a solid, unchanging thing. Knowledge making is a skill of the individual and it is fluid. In our Talmud, both of these ideas exist side by side, but in the Israeli education system, we only want to pass a tangible, specific Torah, and it changes with every government.

The other Jewish example is also found in Pirkei Avot. We read of Yochanan ben Zakai’s five students. I will recount two. “Rabbi Eliezer the son of Hurkenus is a cemented cistern that loses not a drop; Rabbi Elazar ben Arach is as an ever-increasing wellspring. [Rabbi Yochanan] used to say: If all the sages of Israel were to be in one cup of a balance-scale, and Eliezer the son of Hurkenus were in the other, he would outweigh them all. Abba Shaul said in his name: If all the sages of Israel were to be in one cup of a balance-scale, Eliezer the son of Hurkenus included, and Elazar the son of Arach were in the other, he would outweigh them all.” The Talmud never decides for us what is better to be a vessel of knowledge or to produce a vital necessity. It leaves us with two models that contradict each other. Both have their time and place. Why in Israel do we have to stick with just one?
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My daughter is in the middle of her high school experience and I feel like I am doing her wrong by not choosing the best education system I can find for her. Nothing is perfect, but I think America is better, at least my America. I hate having to face this choice, but those are my cards. Now the question is whether to stay and fight to improve things while my daughter finishes school here or move to where I can do the best for my kids. It seems like a simple choice, but not when you live in a wonderful city like Tel Aviv. Right now I’m feeling the old Yiddish saying, it’s hard to be a Jew, but I’m feeling it about Israel.

Lag B’Omer 5771 and the doomsday prophecies

Lag B’Omer 5771 is a gleeful irony of history. Why? Because the same holiday celebrating the Jewish romance with mysticism and secrets behind the revelatory texts paradoxically coincides with the prediction of the end of the world.
For Jews, Lag B’Omer is the celebration of the life and teaching of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, on the anniversary of his death over 1800 years ago. According to legend, upon dying he instructed his disciples that the day of his passing is “the day of [his] joy.” This year, the 33rd day of the counting of the Omer, the barley harvest, coincides with a prophecy of the end of days.
Rashby, as bar Yochai is known, was the author of the foundational work of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar. Tonight and tomorrow, half a million Jews will descend upon Mount Miron in the Galilee, where he is buried, to pay homage to their mystical leader by lighting bonfires and slaughtering sheep. To my sensibility, this is avodah zara, idolatry, in the fullest sense of the word.
According to tradition, God, not humans, buries Moses to avoid the site of his grave becoming a shrine. Jews don’t mark the location of the Sinai revelation because they don’t want to make idols out of land. Why does God ask Moses to build a Mishkan for Him “to dwell in it”? Because holiness exists outside of geography. The only thing close to being holy in the Bible is the land of Israel, and even it is made holy by our actions.
The celebration of Rashby and his mysticism shows how much the idea of hidden meaning has found a place in Judaism. Rashby’s teacher, Rabbi Akiva, gave us the term, “the language of God,” in opposition to Rabbi Yeshmael’s “language of man,” to avoid fundamentalism and strict adherence to the letter of the law in exegesis, but the anti-literalism of the Akiva school can be a pandora’s box. The minute we open the door to mysticism, anything goes and we often end up with radical predictions.
Fox News recently reported, “The [recent] prediction [of the end of the world] originates with Harold Camping, an 89-year-old retired civil engineer from Oakland, Calif., who founded Family Radio Worldwide, an independent ministry that has broadcast his prediction around the world ” Here is the basis of this forecast according to The Telegraph, “The number five, says Camping, represents atonement. 10 represents completeness. 17 represents heaven…Using the three numbers, if you multiply atonement, completeness and heaven, and then, multiply the sum by itself again, you end up with 722,500 i.e. (5 x 10 x 17) x (5 x 10 x 17) = 722,500. If you add the number of days on from the crucifixion, you arrive at, at least in Camping's view, May 21, 2011, the day of the end of the world. ” Some of you may now want to stop reading and start getting ready.
These predictions sound crazy in the hands of an 89 year old radio network owner from California, but they are common place in mystical traditions and go back to the origins of Lag B’Omer. Rabbi Akiva read the verse in Numbers 24:17, “There shall come a star out of Jacob,” and renamed the Jewish warrior, Shimon bar Kosiba, bar Kochva. He then declared that he is the messiah. In the seventeenth century, Nathan of Gaza made a similar claim about Shabtai Zvi, and in recent history many in the Chabad movement have said that the Lubovitcher rabbi was the messiah.
There is something very liberating about mysticism. It creates space for a power in the world that exists but cannot be fully understood. My favorite mysticism is in the texts which use metaphor to explain science of the world. Some claim, for instance, that the Hebrew letters are the DNA or atomic building blocks of all things.
Metaphors are wonderful as long as we acknowledge the fact that we tend to live by them, as Lakoff and Johnson remind us.
The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities.
A hidden system of an all-powerful God’s will, discoverable in texts and complicated calculations, is a dangerous metaphor to live by. By what criterion ought we say that the prophet in California is less qualified to determine hidden meaning from the texts than Rabbi Akiva or Nathan of Gaza. In the time of Shabtai Zvi, half of all world Jewry believed that the messiah was about to reveal himself. Some sold all their worldly possessions, some even moved to Israel. The pilgrims to Mount Miron will account for 4 percent of all Jews worldwide. How many more are pilgrim wannabes? How many believe but are hedging their bets to see what happens to the early-adopters?
Actually, the glee I take from the Lag B’Omer celebrations this year comes from a completely different train of thought. Forget the end of days for a moment and focus on the celebrations themselves. Lag B’Omer starts at the end of Shabbat. The main event of the celebrations is the lighting of bonfires. This year, as last, controversy has arisen from the concern that if Lag B’Omer is celebrated on Saturday night, thousands of secular Israelis will defile the Shabbat by building and lighting their bonfires before the end of the day. I despise religious coercion in Israel, but I love the fact that the religious are so concerned with us fellow Jews that they would even consider changing the date of this minor holiday. That is what Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef wanted to do.
Yosef, the spiritual leader of Shas was successful at getting a compromise from his anti-Zionist, Haredi colleagues who moved the lighting of the first fire to midnight tonight. Wow! This may seem like a small feat, but I assure you it is reason for celebration. First of all, it is an expression of Jewish concern for one another. Moving the time of the bonfires symbolically expresses an attempt to prevent fellow Jews from sinning in their efforts to participate in this national celebration. Second of all, this is a victory for internal, civil dialog among Jews in Israel. A Sepharadi, Zionist rabbi was heard by an anti-Zionist, Ashkenazi rabbi and his words were considered. In light of these events and the speech of President Obama this past week, instead of dwelling on doomsday scenarios, I suggest we choose a different metaphor to live in, at least for today. “Yes we can!”

My Alternative Memorial Day Commemoration

It would have been much easier to put on my black shirt and wrap myself in blue and white and head over to Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, where I live, or the Kotel, the Western Wall, in Jerusalem, where I study. But tonight I chose to commemorate the fallen with members of my species and not my collective self. Sometimes we think that we can get closer to our individual corpus when we incorporate and draw lines that separate us from the others. That is not how I experienced the eve of Memorial Day in Israel this year.

This evening, I waited in line outside of the concert hall, Reading 3, at the Tel Aviv Port, with nearly a thousand human beings, as the sirens sounded to mark the battles of Israel, but the crowd I stood with was unlike any other. Tonight, at Reading 3, for the sixth straight year, the members of Combatants for Peace brought together human beings to mourn their losses, and the absence of flags and anthems and generals and otherness was astounding.

Tonight, Moti Fogel mourned the loss of his brother and his brother’s family, to a savage terror attack, beside Palestinians who also lost their loved ones to violence. And Yair Dalal sang his prayer for peace in Hebrew and Arabic with the accompaniment of a children’s choir. And a bereaved, Palestinian, Israeli, Druze sister mourned the loss of her brother, who served in the Israeli Defense Forces, and shared with us the story of being asked, “How could your brother have pointed his gun at his Arab brothers?” Whoever wrote that schoolyard verse, “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” must have been deaf.

I knew I was in the right place this evening when Yoni Richter took the stage and put music to the words of Yehudah Amichai’s The Place Where We Are Right.

From the place where we are right, flowers will never grow in the spring. The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard. But doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plow. And a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood.

Tonight, surrounded by a thousand members of my species, in a place where everyone mourned, and we all recognized the humanity of the person sitting beside us, flowers grew and the possibility of peace felt like more than a whisper.

An important message from my 10 year old son Itamar

My name is Itamar Steiner. I am writing to you to seek help for two friends of mine who walked to Israel from Sudan where they were born.

Poogy and Deng left their country to escape the war. Their dog was killed by a robber in Sudan before they came to Israel. It was too dangerous to live there.

My new city, Tel Aviv, really tries taking care of refugees. They send about 20 kids from the poor neighborhoods of South Tel Aviv to get an education at my school. One of the problems is that my class mates are not used to having African kids at school. Some kids were picking on Poogy and Deng. I decided to invite them to my birthday party so they could show off what good athletes they are.

One weekend when they came to sleep over, they came to baseball practice with me. They loved it and my dad spoke to the head of the league about getting them full scholarships. Now they come home with me twice a week and then we go to baseball practice.

They come to school on a bus the city provides for them, but when they come to baseball we need to get them a ride home. On Fridays my dad and I drive them home and we see how they live. Poogy and Deng each have many siblings. Poogy’s family lives in 1 and a half rooms for 8 people.
Deng’s family is pretty much the same. Their older brother’s have to work many hours as well as their parents. People take advantage of the fact that they don’t have solid legal status and they are paid very low wages. Their landlords take advantage of them. For one and a half rooms, they pay over $600, and the rent is going up.

As their good friend, I have decided to raise money to support their families. As generous people, I turn to you for support. My dad taught me that in the Midrash and Koran it says, “If you save one life, it is as if you saved the world.” Imagine how much good you would do if you helped save two families.

If you are interested in helping, please respond by email and I will tell you how you can help. Write me via my dad at David@steinerproperties.com and please pass this on to your friends.

Thank you,

Itamar Steiner

Parashat Vayeira

Parashat Vayeira has a lot of great stories. Stories in the Torah are there to teach us something about human behavior and values. I really object to the idea that they are there to tell us about our distant past, but that is an important subject for a different discourse. What is unique to Judaism is not the values we learn from the stories, it is that we learn our values by repeatedly returning to the stories and deriving our rituals from them.
Vayeira starts with God, according to Rabbi Chama the son of Chanina in the Babylonian Talmud, visiting Abraham on the third day after his circumcision. Loyalty has its rewards, and God knows that Abraham needs to see him while he is recuperating.
Then we have the infamous story of the three visitors whom Abraham greets with great hospitality. Jews don't have a monopoly on hospitality. Visit a Bedouin family and you will see how the masters fulfill this value. Still, hospitality is a Jewish value and it is learned through narrative.
In my favorite story of this parasha, Abraham has the chutzpah to argue with God about Sodom. Here, we learn two important lessons. Negotiation is an art and God, the author, wants us to know that we have individual, internal, moral compasses.
Negotiation as an art is a critical lesson. When Abraham asks, "Will You even destroy the righteous with the wicked?" He is appealing to one sensibility of his negotiating partner, justice. When he says, "Perhaps there are fifty righteous men in the midst of the city; will You even destroy and not forgive the place for the sake of the fifty righteous men who are in its midst?" Abraham tries to give his partner a chance to make a compromise.
Abraham is masterful when he implores judgment, especially when he knows the possible outcome. "Far be it from You to do a thing such as this, to put to death the righteous with the wicked so that the righteous should be like the wicked. Far be it from You! Will the Judge of the entire earth not perform justice?"
And then there is the trick. After engaging God in a negotiation and making himself appear humble by acknowledging his human, created, status, Abraham employs a language trick. "Perhaps the fifty righteous men will be missing five. Will You destroy the entire city because of five?" Of course, God is onto him and says, "I will not destroy if I find there forty-five."
Through all of this, God teaches us that we have dignity as humans. He listens to Abraham's rational thought. He doesn't take the upper hand. Both God and Abraham are also flawed here. Abraham uses tricks. To some degree, he disrespects the hierarchy of power. On the other hand, he teaches us that sometimes the hierarchy is flawed and deserves challenges.
In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. writes,
One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."
The problem with this for our story is that Abraham's negotiation is with God, presumably the source of just law. Even Martin Luther King would be confounded in Abraham's position because his position is that God is the source of justice. King asks, "How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law."
The problem is that in this instance, God is acting in a way that seems unjust. What can we do with this? We can, as many do, and the Rambam implores of us,
1. accept that we cannot understand God and continue to cling to Her despite our moral compass.
2. We can judge God poorly, as the Gnostic religion did some two thousand years ago, and cling to hedonism while we are free in this world,
3. or we can follow Abraham's lead and challenge any form of justice that doesn't conform to our moral compass.
The important thing to remember is that there is an author to the text. Whether that is God or a redactor or a singular human voice, the message is that Abraham acted according to his moral compass. He challenged God, the character in the story, and spoke out despite the possible consequences.
I am thrilled that my tradition grapples with this issue. We are not Gnostics. We don't think that God is an indifferent creator. We also have room for negotiating what a good god would expect of us. Abraham's God is willing to conduct the negotiation. The author gives us this story to instruct us that this is our option, and anyone can still fit into the tradition whether she believes or not that there exists a higher power that commands. The behavior of the characters is separate from the author, and the message of the text is also independent.
In this small segment of Parashat Vayeira, we have a text that illuminates the pluralism of our tradition and leaves room for everyone at the table while making it clear that morals are negotiated between ourselves and what we think is collectively good. We may not all agree that that collective good originates with a benevolent deity, but we are all empowered to and commanded by the text to participate in the dialog.