The Laundry Lines

B"H

In shul this morning, R' Schachar and I came across this piece on the tsunami from R' Shmuley Boteach in the JPost two weeks ago. Now that most of us in comfier parts of the world are satisfied that (a) a tsunami won't hit us, and (b) we have donated our fair share to S. Asia, this tragedy's challenge to our theology is older news than the Great Flood. But the R' Boteach piece raises two big questions for me, which I haven't seen much discussion of.

First, there is R' Boteach's repeated complaint against "Islamic and Christian clerics." Why not rabbis as well? Surely not because the complaint itself, that religious leadership is adopting the tsunami as advertising for their own pet perfidies, does not apply to our own leaders. The Chofetz Chaim Heritage Foundation literally made the tsunami into their poster calamity; and none less than the Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel, R' Shlomo Amar, pronounced the tsunami a Divine reaction to the same litany of sins specified by the "Islamic and Christian clerics" who so frustrate R' Boteach (see also here).

In a media-driven age, hilchot lashon hara could hardly be more needed, and at a deeper level of consideration than has ever been achieved in past times. In general, this is a topic too large for the current discussion, but, for now, I just have to ask: If we hesitate (rightly or wrongly) to air our own leadership's dirty laundry, should we not hesitate in kind to air the dirty laundry of our neighbors'? I see no good whatsoever that could come from the apparent hypocrisy, and R' Boteach and/or the JPost should amend his statements accordingly.

Second, there is R' Boteach's own thesis: "it takes tsunami-sized chutzpa ... to claim to know the mind of G-d." I was delighted to read this, because there was such a clamor so recently for personalized explications of the tsunami -- betraying the fact that what really upsets folks is not mass death, disease, and suffering in the third world as a matter of course (which, outrageously, it is and has been for generations), but the impersonal randomness that distinguishes this one event -- and the very calling of Torah is to smash such smallmindedness, in submission to a greater, unknowable G-d. The best responses to the tragedy from religious leadership, including many voices from the rabbinate, called for a suspension of, "why, G-d, why?," in preference to making a greater human response, either in personal awakening or in contribution to the relief cause or, preferably, both.

Such responses have a strong basis in Judaism: G-d's reasons are radically obscure, but our responsibilites are not. I think few rabbis would dispute this claim. However, behind the truism there is a long-standing tension between the theological precepts of Divine inscrutability and Divine reward and punishment. Both precepts are fundamental and widely held, but there is an extent to which they are mutually exclusive in praxis -- because how is it meaningful to talk about reward and punishment, if in G-d's works we cannot comprehend any causality?

This is part of an even deeper tension within Jewish cosmology, and one that is not politically benign. There is a maggidic (exegetical) principle, often built upon in classical midrashim, that eyn mukdam umeuchar baTorah, "there is no 'before' or 'after' in Torah." At some level, this principle is beyond dispute, but it can be applied in strikingly different ways. Applied lightly, it means that chronology in Torah does not necessarily constitute a simple, straight, one-dimensional timeline. That is, I should not presume, that G-d's Revelation can be represented most completely within a perception of Time so simple (read: limited) as my own. Applied more bluntly, this principle can actually effect the obliteration of teleology itself. In other words, narrative context does not exist; one thing following another is not meaningful.

As R' Mordechai has astutely observed, the pendulum swings between these poles in response to Jewish community's political situation. When Jews are mainly empowered to self-determination, we tend to look for meaning in narrative teleologies -- our self-narratives first, and then eventually in all of Torah and the world in general. When we have little power to progress from one thing to another, we stop looking for meaning in the "before" and "after." We are standing today just inches beyond one of the most dramatic turning points along this axis in all of Jewish history, and if the tsunami is to have Revealed one fault line especially for us, this is it.

R' Amar was born in the year Israel declared state sovereignty. The psyche of his generation knows only Jewish self-determination, and in this way it is the first in centuries. Now, imagine his readiness to draw causal moral conclusions from the tsunami event, compared with a survivor's best explanation of the Sho'a. The survivor knows, viscerally, the grave psychospiritual liability of assuming that suffering is punishment, that this tragedy must follow from that sin. The survivor knows that such theological mitzrayim can crush the soul if something terrible enough comes along and co-opts your agency, your dreams, your life. Therefore, he is more likely to take the view of the opposite extreme -- that German culture is simply, unchangeably hateful, and that there is no deep meaning to be found in before and after. (Generations of pogroms and dispersions would have prepared him well for this view.)

Ultimately, Mishkaneering will require a balance in this area as in others. Meanwhile, the survivors, and their memories, are gradually disappearing from our world. We live in a time of nearly unprecedented Jewish diversity and self-determination, and also an earnest desire to put the emasculation of the past behind us. The great b'rakhah of this freedom brings a menacing new liability: that we could gradually forget eyn mukdam umeuchar baTorah altogether. (I would argue that this is already evident in developments such as Aish's self-censorship of Dr. Schroeder's "Age of the Universe" article.) It is much easier, and more potent, to construct an ideology of manifest destiny upon a simple national narrative that marches, inexorably, straight forward from Day One to the Third Temple. But this willful memory loss will only dull our maggidic faculties, and ultimately occlude our vision.