Mattot 2015

Mattot

 

Torah is heart breaking.  The parashah Mattot is a broken heart encapsulated. The question is this: How do we wrap our minds around it? From which family of analysis do we draw? Looking at Judaism we can reach for a number of interpretations. In a narrative where our hero…Moses…orders the killings of thousands of Midianite women and children…well, we need to interpret and interpret well. We need to come up with some kind of connection between a sacred document and war-time murder.

I don’t have any answers. This is going to be a process and first, one of elimination.

So then, let’s begin. One way we can go about this is by loudly showing our disgust at the exact literal interpretation. We can find quotes from great modern rabbis.  We can misinterpret them for our thesis.  We can completely throw the baby out with the bathwater and say that this is not our Torah. This is used up stuff that repels us.

Well then (my response) why even be Jewish? Without Torah, we can be Christian or even Buddhist. Life might be easier that way anyway. The memories of the Holocaust could be eradicated or at least softened and anti-semitism would be focused on the Other. Yes, without Torah we would certainly have an easier ride.  I’ve even heard about an island religion that merges witchcraft with early Christianity. That would be a cool one to explore. There are actually hundreds of paths. God knows, without Torah, we can’t say we are Jewish. And we can’t possibly be so important that we can pick what we like and throw out the rest. Torah is not a pick and choose situation like the online seating grid for an airplane. At least, I personally have not found anything in Torah that over-rides sections in the gifting of that choice. I haven’t found anything in Talmud either. We either take the ride or we don’t.

Moving on, there’s the literal interpretation that applauds the action of Moses. That’s a fun one. We can applaud killing everyone and anyone who might threaten the next plague or the molestation and incest of Peor. We can cling to a life of caution and fear and narrow the boundaries until we too are suffocating, until movement is stasis. We can become the result of our fear. I guess we see that cycle in action sometimes.  Fear leads to attack leads to murder leads to self-destruction leads to fear leads to murder.  This does not feel very Jewish to me.

Next, we can flip the coin and metaphor the whole Midianite escapade.  Those aren’t people, we can tell ourselves. They are the kelipot under which we are buried. They are our Shadows. They are Doubt.  They are Gevurah disguised. Here’s a word of caution though: Mysticism, as beautiful and evocative as it is, depends on the fundamentals. Without one, there is not the other. Ironically, they are ludicrous bed partners engaged in the most ferocious and love-less sex.  In this case, they are born of each other like amoebas or monsters. Please forgive my imagery. But it’s true. Ask scholars of literature. We can’t create a metaphor without the thing itself.  The more solid the foundation, the greater the spiritual catapult.  And though it has been tried, I don’t believe that we can amputate the foundation and simply bless the imagery. That’s a great way to float. It feels good. But it doesn’t point to the subject at hand with any direction whatsoever. It gets lost in itself. Meanwhile, the blood is painful and we are not a people of denial.

For years I personally focused on the purification after the killings. This is one of my favorite lines of Torah: All that comes from fire must be passed through fire. What brings us to this purification though is the exact horror mentioned above. And it can’t be ignored.

Next, we can try to limit both the literal and the mystical. We can attempt to bind them up and to walk a middle road. That seems bland however. And, even worse, we aren’t bothering to expand beyond the (yes) destructive dichotomy of metaphor/subject when it comes to thousands dead.

So then, what do we do?

How do we maintain the sanctity of a document that defines our people while being repelled by the literal meaning?

I’m going to change the subject for a moment. I teach at a community college. Just today the students were reading essays about integrity. The prompt was to write about a moment in which they felt they showed integrity (a sort of Huck Finn moment if you like). Four or five students read their essays out loud. Then one student commented that they all revolved around addiction. There was the alcoholic  pushing away the bottle, the woman divorcing her addicted husband, a girl stealing to support her habit of weed, and a man helping a heroin addict find food.

I believe that the writing of my students is sacred. And I was repelled by the  repeated thesis of addiction. Simply finding the connection…given the comment by my student… caused these essays to become (for the moment) a community Torah.

In Mattot we too can find the connection between the pieces and apply it to our community today.  We need to see that there’s precaution in this parsha, rules so that the Israelites can survive, rules so that the past can be blended into present decisions.  Some of these rules are extremely painful, some non-inclusive, some that seem to take an excessive amount of words. Should Reuben and Gad be able to settle in the land before they arrive in Canaan? How do we handle people who can potentially destroy us? How do we deal with addiction? How do we help each other and purify our community in the face of threat and fear?

Life is not easy. There’s pain, horror, the smell of blood and the yearning for God so huge that many of us go to sleep crying. The way we grow is by seeing connections from person to person and piece to piece. Torah is not a Finishing School for young women nor a Military Document. It also isn’t a Document for Inheritance. It’s the Connecting Force that drives us to reach to each other no matter the era, the worries, the treaties being signed (and the treaties soon to be ignored). It’s this process of connection that makes it sacred. Mysticism and fundamental interpretation have served the Jewish people for centuries.
 
The process of connection though is the key to sanctity.  How we then manifest this process in the here and now is holy. The rest is commentary.