The First Time I
Married My Second Wife: Va'Etchanan (I plead; I implore)
[Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11]
This d’var Torah honors my father-in-law Willie Mazer, who at the age of 92 never forgets or misses a trick when playing cards or fails to do the daily Sudoku puzzle. I am pleading with him to do a “nona-peat” of his Bar Mitzvah on Miketz around his 93rd birthday on December 24th. Please plead with me. I also tip my kippah to that other son of Baltimore, Michael Phelps, for his double-triple at the Olympics. He is, however, a long way from competing with Willie in the mikvah.
[Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11]
This d’var Torah honors my father-in-law Willie Mazer, who at the age of 92 never forgets or misses a trick when playing cards or fails to do the daily Sudoku puzzle. I am pleading with him to do a “nona-peat” of his Bar Mitzvah on Miketz around his 93rd birthday on December 24th. Please plead with me. I also tip my kippah to that other son of Baltimore, Michael Phelps, for his double-triple at the Olympics. He is, however, a long way from competing with Willie in the mikvah.
Let’s begin. The first time I married my second wife, she
vowed to be a good citizen. That
surprised me. Where did that come
from? Girl Scouts? And what about being the
good wife? By the second time I married my second wife on March 18 (chai), 2012,
but for the first time under the laws of Moses, I think I had it figured out, a
bit less than 14 years after we first met.
Was it just good luck that her Hebrew name is Rachael? Or maybe I was rolling sevens?
Maybe today’s parsha
has the key to this puzzle. For the
second time this year, we remember the seminal rock concert and wedding event joining
forever, for better and for worse, Israel and God. The wedding singers were that lapidary group
known as Shema and the Ten Statements; we remember it, like Woodstock and our
own weddings, because we were there, right?
Let me share with you what I remember, see if you remember the same
things and then consider what Moses reminds us that we remembered.
 |
| Marc Chagall's Creation |
 |
We did, of course, as
you remember, get all of the 603 – including the three lucky numbers -- by way
of hearsay; Moses heard them and then said it to us. We learned them at Sinai and then re-learned
them just before entering the Promised Land.
Some scholars argue that today’s text was crafted as part of a third act
of creation, an act by humans blessed by God when the exiles returned from
Babylon to begin building the second Temple and, at the same time, reestablish
Israel, without a king but with an abridged torah. The third act was sparked by the discovery of
the document that we are discussing today, a sort of declaration of
independence and a short form version of the constitutional Torah that goes
with it.
Let’s get to the big
question: What comes from the big idea that a single creative force gives order
to the physical and political realms of our human existence? How does that
singularity make us – individually and collectively -- a junior partner in the
continuing creative process of our ethical traditions and the discovery of the
processes governing the physical world?
 |
| Marc Chagall: Moses receiving the Ten Statements |
Marc Chagall: Moses Receiving the Ten Statements at Sinai
The connection of one of the Hebrew creation stories to the Declaration of Independence cannot be mistaken: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” These truths are derived from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” John Locke, in his first Treatise of Government, started with Genesis, even making a rather modern sounding argument for equal rights of women based on a close reading of the Hebrew text. Locke, as you remember, was high up on the required reading list for the drafters of the Declaration.
It is equally obvious
that modern science, especially particle and astrophysics, is driven by a
monotheistic world-view. Hence, the
search for a unified field theory and the assumption that time and creation
trace back to a single event that may hinge on a single particle. In the absence of Higg’s Boson, all particles
behave like light photons darting around without any mass. Enter the boson and particles begin to spin,
thereby nothing becoming something by gaining weight.
The connection of one of the Hebrew creation stories to the Declaration of Independence cannot be mistaken: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” These truths are derived from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” John Locke, in his first Treatise of Government, started with Genesis, even making a rather modern sounding argument for equal rights of women based on a close reading of the Hebrew text. Locke, as you remember, was high up on the required reading list for the drafters of the Declaration.
 |
| Diagram of the Collision that revealed the Higg's Boson |
 |
| CERN Collider where the "God Particle" was discovered. |
Curiously, the
scientific account of creation follows this sequence: a universe that is void and
without form, then light, then Higg’s spark, and then everything else. Bottom line: this and other science does not
happen without intelligible order in the physical world. Pretty
obvious now, but not so much several thousand years ago.
Outside of Israel, the letters on
the four sides of the driedel are: נ (Nun), ג (Gimmel), ה (Hay) and ש (Shin), which stand for the Hebrew phrase "Nes Gadol Haya
Sham." -- "A great miracle
happened there [in Israel]." The
miracle, as you may recall, was the oil that kept the light burning in the
Temple. The Torah also lights our way.
After the State of Israel was
founded in 1948 the Hebrew letters were changed for dreidels used in Israel.
They became: נ (Nun), ג (Gimmel), ה (Hay) and פ (Pey), which stand for the Hebrew phrase "Nes Gadol Haya
Po." -- "A great miracle happened here."
But the letters also have Yiddish
equivalents, two of which stand for something and nothing.
Nun stands for "nichts," which means
"nothing" in Yiddish. If the dreidel lands with a nun facing up the
spinner gets nothing.
Gimmel stands for "ganz," which is Yiddish for
"everything." If the dreidel lands with the gimmel facing up the
spinner gets everything in the pot. Why
not also think of the dreidel as a symbol for two acts of creation?
How did we get from Va’
Etchanah to July 4, 2012? The twin
remembrances for Shabbat celebrate the same fundamental concepts of law and
order for the ethical and the physical worlds and remind us of the same
principles of inquiry and reasoning that lead to an ethical life and good
citizenship as well as scientific discovery.
For the most part, the concept of an ordered and good creation means
that magic and mysticism fade from significance in both universes. For that reason and by the process of reasoning,
mainstream rabbinic Judaism has cultivated a culture of questioning and
learning that builds from one generation to the next.
It did take awhile
before this uniquely Jewish view of the world and way of living in that world came
to have a significant influence on science and ethics outside of its own
culture. To see how it spread and what
it came to mean for ethics brings us back to lucky numbers 11, 17 and 18.
11: To teach the wisdom of Torah and to study it,
or, as it is called, “Talmud Torah.”
This implies learning how to learn as well as learning and following the
principles of the Torah.
17: To have every king (ruler) who reigns over us
write a Torah scroll for himself and not depart from it.
This implies that all men are equal and subject to the Torah, a
government of laws and not of men.
18: To have—everyone among us – a Torah scroll of
one’s own, and writing it oneself is extremely commendable and preferred. This implies the duty of each citizen of
Israel to know and follow Torah.
Each mitzvah derives
from the Kriat Shema: learning the Torah
and teaching the Torah, one generation to the next and all Jews being subject
equally to the Torah regardless of their station. They embody an active and creative stance toward
the ethical world in contrast to the passive and contemplative characteristics
of other philosophies and religions. The ideal is a
nation of priests, meaning a learned citizenship. In practice, pursuit of the ideal over the ages
created a Jewish culture with the highest rate of literacy, and also achievements
in many walks of life far out of proportion to their numbers, but this only
after the Jewish emancipation in Europe.
During the period from the destruction of the second temple (70
C.E.) until the turn of the seventeenth century, the unique world view of
Judaism was repressed and marginalized. Through a culture of learning and
literacy the Hebrew world view endured, was preserved in Torah and Talmud. Eventually that world view resurfaced 16
centuries later as Europe emerged from the middle ages.
Natural law, a concept of law based primarily on the Judaic world view, emerged in the 17th Century, most notably in the writings of Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, John Locke in the First Treatise, and then Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and in our day John Rawls. The social contract theorists, drawing heavily on covenental concepts, provided the intellectual underpinnings for the Declaration of Independence, less explicitly the Constitution and more explicitly the social consciousness that sparked the Civil War and, in the last century, the civil rights movement and the universal declaration of human rights.
We also, customarily, light two candles at a Jewish wedding. I asked a rabbi in Baltimore if the same rationale applied. “No,” he said, “We have two in case one blows out. The custom started in Eastern Europe where many weddings took place at night and in drafty places.” We need richer symbolism for this custom.
It seems to me that Torah,
tradition and custom do not preclude us from seeing another layer of meaning in
the candles we light to remember and keep the Sabbath, to celebrate two acts of
creation, to celebrate our weddings and do our best to understand the powerful
works of creation embedded in our physical and moral universe. We also need to educate future Einsteins on
the powerful symbolism of the driedel.
I am delighted with the
surprising vows from our first wedding, and more delighted with the
reaffirmation of those vows in our second wedding. As the caterer advised us before the second
wedding: “You want to get it right
because you only get married twice for the first time once.” And so it was also for the marriage of Israel
and God the first, second and third times.
SELECTED SOURCES
