Deuteronomy Cycle 7 VaEthchanan

 VaEthchanan

This day and age there’s a universal shock.

 For centuries we’ve been used to a buffer zone, a space that can protect us from an outside world.  It is soothing. It keeps us separate from the dangers and differences that frighten us and often (in our minds) become exponential symbols of death.  We’re used to protective parents,  national boundaries, cultures made distinct by the temples we join, the clubs we frequent, and the neighborhoods in which we live no matter our words of political correctness. We use agents for insurance, for property, for protection. Many of us have house cleaners to separate us from our very personal messes. There are grocery stores that carry everything we can imagine so we don’t have to personally visit the fisherman and smell the stench, big department stores so we don’t have to see the starving third world children create our clothing.  There are priests or rabbis who bring us safely to our sacred scriptures so we don’t have to go directly to the holy documents and amazing rabbinic teachings that were never meant to be a buffer zone (as often treated)….rather the holy addendum to God’s word. There are numerous laws in place concerning rights for minorities so that we as humans don’t have to act with ethical and spiritual courtesy all on our own.  There are (these days) all kinds of ideas supporting the compromise of our roots and religion because this seems necessary in order to maintain the buffer zone. Some people call it spiritual to uphold it. Some people call it holy.  The buffer zone has become all important, the only way, the soothing ointment for the universal pain that this zone, ironically, causes.

To be clear,  in this society, we never seem to go directly to the source. We are protected, secure in our safe bubbles. It’s possible that our direct exposure to some of this would kill us. It’s possible that it wouldn't. No doubt though by the way we act, we think it will. In short, without these buffer zones, we are completely lost. We don’t know what to do.  

There wasn’t always a need for a buffer zone.

 As Rabbi Jonathon Sacks points out, back in the days of Aristotle and Plato there was a single culture and therefore an ease of political organization: There wasn’t a need to consider the various and necessary needs of plurality.  Therefore the buffer zone was not as necessary.  Politically, they didn’t have to think about it.  It wasn’t that they didn’t think it would have been necessary in another culture. It wasn’t necessary for them. However, Rabbi Sacks only speaks of the political reality. I believe that Greeks certainly had a buffer zone, but it was vertical rather than horizontal. They had their many gods protecting them from any absolute one truth.

This vertical buffer zone is an important theme in this week’s parashah. Here,  Moses reminds the Israelites that he has personally become their safe go-between, their spiritual grocery store, their holy house cleaner, their agent to the angels, their  painfully misunderstood  human-boundary, their painfully misunderstood God-boundary, their cultural connection to the upper world, their agent to the Promised Land, their buffer zone to the highly altered and phenomenological mind-set that can freak people out but also brings us face to face with God.

In other words, Moses reminds the Israelites that they decided that he would listen to God and get close to the fire and then he would translate and interpret the message to them (Deuteronomy 5:19-25). 

The resulting compassion from God and the enactment and creation of Moses as the spiritual  go-between enables Moses to transmit the mishpatim in their present form.  As the Ramban insists (in response to Rashi) the mishpatim do come right after Revelation and are certainly sub-sets within the Ten Commandments.  The fact though that we don’t turn right or left and that we don’t add or take away from the Ten Commandments  still allows for mishpatim that were added…because they were interpreted by Moses and opened up for that era then. Continuing on, the Sh’ma is the unified and exact example of Moses taking on the charge of  being a God delivery-man. The transmission is as close as we get to complete and direct. Still, we all know that it’s Moses who says this line…and the fact that he does say it has to, by that very fact of the Other (Levinas)…make it a bit indirect. It doesn’t matter though. We say the Sh’ma twice a day because we are reminding ourselves that we can get close to God (without buffer zone, without translator or agent or prophet). It isn't direct. It's as direct as we dare to get.

This is why we are in shock today.  Our horizontal buffer zone is slowly disappearing. We don’t have a choice. We call it globalization.  Our relationship and responsibility one culture to the next is becoming increasingly intertwined.  Their war is our war. Their crash is our crash.  The question we need to consider is this: If our vertical buffer zone was experiencing a parallel rate of disappearance what would we do? Would we reject our very humanity in order to connect to God  or would we become so whole in ourselves that we could…without fear…merge with Hashem and see Him face to face..and therefore know Him (and the resulting mishpatim) even better?

Likewise, today is it best to give up our identities to relate to others…or to embrace these same identities? Globalization is not demanding that we give up who we are. We merely need to replace the buffer zone with a much more secure and whole vision of ourselves. There is something chosen within us..that deep knowledge…and once we embrace that treasure, so too will we embrace all people of all cultures.  It's a holy action, this embracing, as if we were embracing (without buffer zone) our very God.

So, the shock we are experiencing is really a gift. It’s our time to move directly to the world around us, and concurrently to our very soul-home. We must take responsibility for ourselves as Jews.   We are not children anymore.