Menachem Mirski
Shoftim 5783
עַל שְׁלשָׁה דְבָרִים הָעוֹלָם עוֹמֵד, עַל הַתּוֹרָה וְעַל הָעֲבוֹדָה וְעַל גְּמִילוּת חֲסָדִים:
The world stands upon three things: the Torah, the Temple service and acts of lovingkindness. (Pirkei Avot 1:2). These are the building blocks of the world, without which everything would collapse. What is built above these three things? The world! With everything it contains, including a lot of junk – things that are not good, precious and worthy. If we then picture the whole world as a big building founded on these building blocks, we will have a lot of non-kosher and not necessarily good things standing above things that are kosher and holy. How is it possible? I don’t know, you tell me, but we all know that people regularly tend to choose what serves them over what is good, or choose what is efficient and expedient over something that has a real, long-lasting value. Also, things that are good are sometimes exploited for nefarious purposes, so this metaphor truly has a cognitive value and it’s valid.
The world has its fundamentals but it’s incomplete. Tzedek, tzedek tirdof… Justice, justice you shall pursue – it is what we read in this week’s parasha. The Hebrew verb lirdof used here means to be behind, follow after, pursue, run after. Exactly, justice is something you shall pursue. Notice, it does not say ‘establish’. Justice is not something that can be decreed from above. It’s a never ending process. Injustice then is not a problem that can be fixed the way we can fix a car or an airplane: by fixing a system that is working improperly. Justice in society, while being no less complex than an airplane, contains another crucial and incalculable element: freedom of human choice. This element cannot be eliminated. Yes, systemic changes make sense and bring positive results, but the mechanistic approach to justice is quite flawed.
Does it mean that we should not look for sustainable, long-term solutions? On the contrary, we absolutely should. Many forms of injustice have been eliminated in the course of history, like slavery for example (although there are still countries in the world where slavery exists). However, we should never expect our solutions to be ultimate and final. In our tradition that’s the job reserved for the Moshiah (Messiah) and that may be also why he has never come. Or perhaps Moshiah is waiting to do the final job once we prepare everything, which is one of the two competing answers about the role of the Messiah in our tradition: the first concept leaves the whole redemptive work for the Messiah, the second one one – the one I’m talking about – leaves most of the work to be done by us and only the “finishing touch” for the Messiah. The second view tells us that we can all participate in the redemption of the world and in my opinion it is a better answer on every level: pragmatic, political, moral, philosophical and spiritual.
No matter what view we choose to believe, they both have something in common: Messiah, if imagined as a person, is someone who would make a substantial and permanent, irreversible change in the human world, leaving a lot of bad stuff, if not all of it, in the dustbin of human history. Therefore, any person, any of us who would make a permanent change for the good would bring us closer to the so-called messianic age. But it’s interesting that the renaissance of messianic ideas typically happens in bad or turbulent times, in which nobody really knows if the world will go forward or completely backward. It’s possible that messianic hopes stem from the fear of a complete reversal or the complete collapse of things. Our tradition has a very sober answer to this. As the famous story of Johannan ben Zakkai says:
If you are holding a sapling in your hand and someone tells you, ‘Come quickly, the Messiah is here!’, first finish planting the tree and then go to greet the Messiah.
Figuratively speaking, our job is then to plant the trees, which can mean respecting the natural processes and at the same time stimulating its growth – participating in its co-creation. Interestingly, our Torah portion for this week talks also about trees:
When in your war against a city you have to besiege it a long time in order to capture it, you must not destroy its trees, wielding the ax against them. You may eat of them, but you must not cut them down. Are trees of the field human to withdraw before you into the besieged city? Only trees that you know do not yield food may be destroyed; you may cut them down for constructing siegeworks against the city that is waging war on you, until it has been reduced. (Deuteronomy 20:19-20)
Let’s think of a tree as something that brings us closer together, something that gives us shade on a hot day and produces the oxygen, under which leaves we can all sit together and connect with another human being. Let’s plant more and more trees, as many as we can, so everyone can enjoy the air and the shade. And let’s not forget to water them. Let’s keep doing the groundwork instead of waiting for the solutions from above.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Menachem Mirski
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