True Jewish Comfort

By Rabbi Alan Yuter
Posted Tuesday, September 26, 2006

The Psalmist teaches that "the commands of God are straight, making the heart happy. [Ps 19] This is because all are equal before God. The Torah, Authored by God, favors no human elite. The law is public, accessible, and doable. No secret laws, rules or traditions. This message is the comfort given by Deuteronomy. It is the recipe for right living.

In pagan thought, no one but the elite's representative may come to to heavenly Father, only those with the self-proclaimed intuition is authorized to read the mind of God, and only those who are designated as "great ones" are, in their modesty, authorized to divine the Divine. In Deuteronomy, we are taught how to recognize the false prophet. This false prophet contradicts what is recorded in the Torah. The claim "God told me" just does not count, the retort of last resort, "I have a tradition," is contradicted by God, who says that "Torah was commanded to us by Moses, a Tradition for the congregation of Jacob." If the Torah is not public, it is not Torah. A "tradition" is not what your or my father may have done; it is a usage or notion or practice that was approved by the supreme court of Israel, not a synod of sinners who think they "know the knowledge of the Most High" and, on the basis of their "intuiton" regarding the telos, or purpose of God's will, will tell us what to do.

A member of my family heard a 9th of Av speech from a parochial Orthodox rabbi who claimed that the student in the yeshiva who learns helps the Jewish people just like the soldier. A soldier who called the yeshiva student a "traitor" was wrong to do. I concur, but only partially. The yeshiva student is not a "traitor," because he incorrectly thinks that he is acting correctly. He is, however, a parasite, a tappil. The exemptions from military service in a Jewish state apply in a political, or "optional" war called Milhemet Reshut. In a defensive war which is fought to protect the land and people of Israel, everyone is drafted, men and women, brides and grooms. Inasmuch as yeshiva students and businessmen, men and women, and rich and poor, are equally allergic to high speed metal projectiles aimed with lethal intent by enemies who do not distinguish between the piety of this or that Jew, they all must be drafted in a defensive war according to the Oral Torah. [bSota 44b] No synod of rabbis has the power to abrogate this rule unless they are sitting in the hall of hewn stone in the rebuilt Temple complex.

My parochial Orthodox colleague goes with the flow of his culture, but he contradicts the explicit ruling of the Torah. My study partner at the Yeshiva of Hevron, Dani Shereshevsky, left the Yeshiva to join the army, against the ruling of his rebbes. This act took courage and integrity. For Dani, Torah is what God commanded, not what rabbis in our time happen to commend. Torah does not recognize as valid appeals to "the spirit of the law" which only charismatics can appreciate. This doctrine appears in Paul's Epistle to the Romans, which undermines the Torah of Israel. One is not permitted to argue that there are "axiological" rules which are unrecorded in the holy canon but Great rabbis intuit. bBaba Mezia 59b already rejected the claim that one can read the mind of God, and this prohibition applies even, as in that passage, God confirms the intuiton. If the rabbis can demonstrate why their reading is correct, fine. But rabbis are not sacradotal beings, but teachers and expositors of Torah. The late Rabbi Meyer Feldblum of Yeshiva University was wont to say, "you cannot just say it, you must prove it!" The Daat or opinion of the Torah must be demonstrated through reason and citation; it may not be proclaimed without explanation demanding obedience without question. Rabbi Hayyim Berlin of Volozhin taught that sometimes the student is right and the teacher is wrong. And the culture that preaches "modesty" in point of fact is teaching people to submit not to God's law, but to the power of an elite that has the right to refine and define the law, and when necessary decline to obey the law. The claim made by those who argue that yeshiva men and women ought to be excused from military service is a less than modest proposal. When the war being fought is a political, or offensive war, then the yeshiva exemption is applicable. But only to the truly worthy. It is not an excuse to keep one's hands clean and stay within the warm religious environment of the yeshiva.

To be Jewishly religious requires obedience to God. Fervor is expressed in conforming to right, not to community. The authentically religious Jew will deviate from the community when the community, in mass hysteria, deviates from Torah.

When we are Jewish to fit in, we sin. When we have the courage to be different based on God's mandate, we are authentic in our religion. In a book called Collection of Lectures a Rabbi Wasserman argues that we cannot read our holy documents, we are too corrupted by modernity and secularity to make an honest reading. God gave the Torah to us and not just to him. If the false prophet is identified by his deviation from the public Torah, then we must question the orthodoxy of those who would claim that when the Jewish state is at war for its survival, their learning possesses salvific power.

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