Back in the early nineties we traveled to Hawaii, a trip I
had been wanting to make for a very long time. On the overnight flight there, flying west across the
Pacific, the sun started to rise behind the plane, lighting both sky and ocean
a bright red. Immediately a couple
of Orthodox Jewish men, probably Chabad by their clothing, went to the rear of
the cabin. Each put on his tallit gadol and tefillin and – facing the tail -- began davening Shachrit. It
was a reminder to me that morning is wherever you are and that Jerusalem can
always be located by the rising sun.
A few days later we were on the Kohala Coast of the Big
Island. We visited Pu’ukohola
Heiau, the temple where Kamehameha sacrificed his rival to gain mana for the conquest of the islands. The heiau
itself is closed to visitors, but Native Hawaiians use it. We could see pebbles and ti leaves left as prayers, but we also
saw people praying while we were there.
In the visitor center a little girl complained that the site was kapu to women as well as haoles.
The juxtaposition of these two events interested me: one
located in a place of power on a rocky coast, the other apparently cut loose
from all geography and even from the ground itself. It reminded me that Judaism has been a religion of exile. How has worship that began in a Temple
in Jerusalem been able to survive all this time in the absence of that Temple
and far from it?
2600 years ago, in 597 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar’s soldiers stormed
into the city, sacked the Temple of Solomon, and took many hundreds of leading
families into captivity in Babylon 600 miles away. They were cut off from their center of worship, which – in
any case – no longer existed! How
could their religion survive? How
could they survive as a distinct people?
I cannot express this problem better than they did themselves in Tehillim 137 (Al Naharot Bavel):
By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat,
sat and wept,
as we thought of Zion.
There on the poplars
we hung up our lyres,
for our captors asked us there for
songs,
our tormentors, for amusement,
“Sing us one of the songs of
Zion.”
How can we sing a song of the Lord
on someone else’s soil?
Looking back from this distance in time the answer appears
to have been… by singing those songs!
That poem is itself a form of worship and a song of the Lord. The roughly sixty-year exile saw a
literary outpouring of new and re-worked material: legends, histories, songs,
prophetic literature, poetry. The
very idea of a Torah and of a Bible is a product of those people, in that place,
at that time. And it was that
literature that enabled them to continue as a people. Stories of a captivity in Egypt and a triumphal return
enabled them to imagine their own return some day. The story of the Law of Moses enabled them to reinvent that
law for their present circumstances.
When the Persians allowed the Judeans to return to
Jerusalem, they immediately restarted the sacrifices that had been interrupted
by the destruction of their Temple.
But they also began the practice of public reading of the Torah
(Nehemiah, Chapter 8.) And that
practice of reading and studying and interpreting developed in parallel with
the renewed Temple worship once a new Temple was built.
The texts that we know as the Bible underwent continued
creation (the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, most obviously) and editing during
this period. The body of scholars
and sages known as Sanhedrin became a parallel institution to the leadership of the Temple priesthood. By the time of King Herod the party of
Pharisees (followers of these scholars) presented themselves as a popular
alternative to the Sadducees, the party of the priests.
When the Romans razed the Second Temple in 70 CE, Temple
worship could no longer continue.
The religious life of the Judeans could only exist in the study and
prayer that had been initiated by the teachers associated with the
Sanhedrin. Later, when the Romans
crushed the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 CE, most Judean Jews were killed, exiled
or sold into slavery. The only way
to retain a religious identity as a people was to embrace the literature and
scholarship of the rabbis. And –
of course – to replace the Temple sacrifices with synagogue worship.
Which raises some very serious questions for me. If our identity as Jewish people was
based on our liturgy and our Torah scholarship, with yearning for Jerusalem
mainly notional, what happened when the political Zionism of the 19th
century succeeded and Jews around the world were able to actually have a State
of Israel? Were we to scrap
twenty-five hundred years of culture and religious thought and replace it with
the Kingdom of David? I meet
people whose entire sense of Jewish identity seems to revolve around the twin
poles of victimhood (the Nazi Holocaust) and invincibility (the myth of the IDF.) These people seem to know nothing
whatever of Jewish thought. And
all they know of our history is the tragedies: the pogroms, the expulsions, the
blood libels. They apparently
think that these past tragedies not only excuse
any horrors the State of Israel commits now, but actually sanctify them!
The Talmud tells us (Shabbat 31a) that a non-Jew once asked
Rabbi Hillel to teach him the entire Torah while standing on one leg. Hillel told him, “What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbour: that is the whole
Torah. The rest is commentary; go
and learn it.” Am I
seriously supposed to embrace the triumphalist, “might-makes-right” ideology that
justifies the mass murder of Gazans as a viable replacement for the ethics of
Hillel?
This new religion takes as its holy objects Galil assault
rifles, Delilah cruise missiles, Jericho ICBM’s, and Sa’ar warships. It is an apparently secular religion
with no form of worship other than shooting. And you can see the icons of this worship in this country
every time a TV writer insists on including an ass-kicking Mossad agent in some
irrelevant place, like an NCIS office.
You can see it when teenaged American Jewish boys wear their IDF
t-shirts.
But – apparently not to be outdone – the Jewish “religious”
right has now decided it is time to rebuild the Temple! Never mind the fact that this involves
razing the third holiest mosque in Islam: why would we listen to Hillel on this
subject if not on any other? I
think the outrage this bizarre project inspires in Muslims (along with all sane
people) may, in fact, be a large part of the point.
There is more, though. The Temple worship required the sacrifice of large numbers of
animals: cattle, sheep, goats, birds. It must have resembled a slaughter-house, with blood running
through the courtyards and the smell of shit everywhere. Long before the destruction of the
First Temple, around 740 BCE, the prophet Isaiah preached:
“What need have I of all your
sacrifices?”
says the Lord.
“I am sated with burnt offerings
of rams,
and suet of fatlings,
and blood of bulls;
and I have no delight
in lambs and he-goats…”
“Cease to do evil;
Learn to do good.
Devote yourselves to justice;
Aid the wronged.
Uphold the rights of the orphan;
Defend the cause of the widow.” (Isaiah 1:11, 17)
The prophet Hosea, who lived in
the northern kingdom around the same time as Isaiah was even more explicit:
I desire
goodness, not sacrifice;
obedience
to God rather than burnt offerings. (Hosea 6:6)
And the prophet Amos:
If you
offer Me burnt offerings – or your meal offerings –
I will not
accept them;
I will pay
no heed to your gifts of fatlings…
But let
justice well up like water,
Righteousness
like an unfailing stream. (Amos
5:22, 24)
Nevertheless, these modern “Torah
Jews” are fixated on the mitzvot that we cannot perform without a Temple. They are fixated on recreating the
garments that priests must wear to perform sacrifices. I am too personally repelled by the
thinking behind this to repeat it, but you can find their rationales on their website. They are busily engaged in creating the
hardware for all this butchery: altar, knives, curtains, lamps, etc.
I realize as I write this that I
shouldn’t be surprised. A people
who can accept the deaths of two thousand Gazans as not quite sufficient retribution for the unrelated murder of three
Israeli teens is certainly not going to be deterred by the substitution of
animal slaughter for prayer. It is
a death cult already. Why not make
this explicit?
I started writing this by
referring to the Pu’ukohola Heiau on the Big Island of Hawaii, which is still
used by Native Hawaiians today.
They aren’t sacrificing their enemies, there, though. They are offering stones and leaves and
prayers. The Chiricahua Apache –
like the Judeans in the days of Nebuchadnezzar – were taken captive and held
for decades hundreds of miles from their homeland. They managed to preserve their identity with worship, most
importantly the ceremony in which Changing Woman temporarily inhabits the
bodies of teenaged girls. I
mention this as a reminder that the Jewish experience of exile and captivity is
not unique in the history of the world.
Neither is our experience of genocide. They are no excuse for us to become Nebuchadnezzars or
Pharaohs or Hitlers.
In some very important ways I have
no standing to make these observations.
I do not attend synagogue or participate regularly in minyan. I do not bentsch tefillin or wear tzitzit or eat kosher.
I do not believe in a Creator.
But I truly wish somebody with the standing to criticize these people
would do so. We regularly hear
requests from non-Muslims that Muslim leaders denounce the ISILs and al Qaedas
as not representing true Islam. We
regularly hear Muslim leaders making exactly those denunciations, at least
those of us who are listening hear it.
Where then, are the denunciations of the death cult of militaristic Zionism
as “not true Judaism”? Where –
especially – are the rabbinic denunciations of the death cult that wants to
restore animal sacrifice to the har
ha-Bayit as “not true Judaism”?
I am waiting.
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