Archive for January 2010
Tefilin – Ignorance and Arrogance
1. The boy who caused a security alert by wearing tefilin on an aeroplane clearly had no common sense. Worse than that, he was reflecting a prevalent communal attitude that for non-Jews not to know instinctively all about us is culpable ignorance on their part, an attitude which of course in reality merely reveals monstrous arrogance on our part.
2. I have always wondered why Rashi finds it necessary, when the word “totafot” is used in the Chumash to describe tefilin (Shemos 13:16), to quote a Talmudic opinion that it is a compound word formed from two foreign words including an African one. Why is this thought worth telling us? (One might even wonder why the Rabbis thought able to attribute a word of Loshon Hakodesh to a compound of two pre-existing foreign words; something for another time.)
3. As the Rambam discusses in Moreh Nevuchim, many of our mitzvos have their counterpart in other religions, while some are exclusive to Judaism. And it is important to know which is which: apart from anything else, knowing whether one of our strange rituals is in fact sufficiently common to other religions to be likely to be recognised and understood by others can help to avoid misunderstandings, not to mention security alerts. So perhaps Rashi wants us to know that this particular ritual had a rough equivalent in at least two other cultures of the time. Nowadays, of course, there is no equivalent of tefilin in any of the religions of which most of us have heard (although it would not surprise me to learn that there is an equivalent in some religion somewhere).
4. There is good Biblical precedent for the idea that we should go out of our way to ensure that our religious practices and ideas will be understood by others in their own terms. When Moshe Rabbeinu describes our history to the King of Edom (Bmidbar 20:15) he says that Hashem sent an angel to bring us out of Mitzrayim. We spend half of seder night each year saying that Hashem took us out personally and not by angel – so why does Moshe change the story? Again, perhaps because the King of Edom could reasonably be expected to understand and accept the notion of an angel intervening, that being within the sphere of his own religous ideas, but would not be able to understand the notion of a single, infinite God.
5. Common sense is always useful, and never common. It behoves us to remember that we are a tiny minority of the people of the world, and that we should have the humility to remember that if we want our strange practices to be tolerated and even appreciated we should be prepared to take a few moments to explain them in terms that other people can understand and accept.
Haiti – Giving tzedokoh funds to disaster relief
1. Amidst the appalling disaster and devastation of the Haiti earthquake, it is at least good to know that the reaction of so many people around the world has been “what can we do to help?”.
2. And it is also good to know that the Jewish community is not backward in coming forward. Israel had its team of medics standing by ready to join the relief efforts within hours of the news hitting the media. And Jews around the world are joining others in contributing funds to the relief campaigns.
3. The issue of using tzedokoh funds for humanitarian disaster relief is really rather simple, but I discuss it here because I have received reports of at least one person who should know better – being responsible for children’s spiritual development – talking nonsense.
4. There are two main talmudic principles involved.
5. First, the allocation of limited resources is that “the poor of your city come before the poor of other places”. That applies at all levels, so my family come first, my local community comes next, and so on outwards.
6. The rabbis record that we give to non-Jewish charities as well as to Jewish charities because of “darchei sholom” – the ways of peace – and there is considerable discussion as to what precisely this means.
7. Commonsense makes it clear that the first principle does not and could not mean “do not give a penny to another city until your city has everything it could possibly wish for”, because on that basis nobody would ever get beyond their own immediate family in giving tzedokoh. What it does mean is that in deciding how to divide whatever I am giving to charitable purposes overall, I give relatively more to those for whom I am more responsible by virtue of proximity and expectation, and less to those for whom I am less responsible.
8. As to the second principle, what is required by darchei sholom has changed in the last few decades in a number of ways. When we lived in small isolated villages in Poland, our responsibilities were limited by our knowledge. Famines in Africa were thought of, if at all, as remote events affecting people of whom we knew little or nothing. Nowadays, almost every Jew in this country sees the world news in a newspaper of some kind or on the television or hears it on the radio. Almost every Jew will at some point last week have seen the faces of people wounded by the earthquake, and most will have heard their cries.
9. Whether one sees the principle of darchei sholom as being primarily about our community’s international reputation or about our own self-respect and spiritual direction, it is simply impossible that the descendants of our father Abraham could see the faces of the injured and hear the cries of the suffering and not be moved to wish – almost to need – to be associated in some small way in the efforts to relieve their suffering.
10. And we can rest assured that when we give money to the disaster relief funds we are following the example of sensitivity set by the gedolei Torah over the years – the “Tzaddik in Our Time” Reb Aryeh Levine, for example, gave money to African famine relief: although immersed in the Old City with very limited opportunity for finding out about events in the wider world, the cries of the famine-stricken somehow found their way to his ears with the inevitable result.
11. Put another way, the application of the principles of “your city first” and “darchei sholom” has been affected by the shrinking of the world: my brother in Africa is no longer a remote concept, it is an actual face that I have seen. Individuals will make their own decisions about the allocation of their own resources. Some may prefer not to give their basic ma’aser tithes to humanitarian disasters of this kind, but to add to their ma’aser money for this purpose. Whatever each person’s individual decision, we can feel closest to our father Abraham at moments like this when we are following his lead in serving God by caring for mankind.
The Sceptic Blog 