Torah Study Blog

Our session today started with a brief civics lessons: Jeff Sessions, Attorney General of the United States, cited a passage from Romans 13 of the Christian Bible to address the separation of parents from their children at the border between America and Mexico. Romans 13 says, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.”

Rabbi Jaech hastened to remind us that everything that happened to Jews in World War II was actually “legal.” And NPR ran a program pointing out that Rosa Parks was legally required to sit in the back of the bus, but we are a grateful nation that she broke that law. Martin Luther King Jr. in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” wrote:

One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

Our Torah Study session today focused on where our faith is rooted. It is easy to imagine a person during the illness of a loved one who bargains with God something like, “God, if you let this person live I will worship you.” But, if the loved one does not survive, that person may say, “I am done with religion.”

In the Torah, God performed countless miracles for the Israelites, but it was never quite enough. For the deliverance from Egypt the people witness God bring down plagues upon their enemies. But when the Israelites got to the Red Sea they immediately doubted God and said, “it is better for us to serve the Egyptians” than to die like this. (Exodus 14:12)

God delivered the Israelites from Egypt specifically so that they could stop serving the Egyptians and start serving him – “him” meaning God. But over and over again the Israelites lament their harsh life in the wilderness and say, “It would be better for us to go back to Egypt!” (Numbers 14:3) God might have just wanted some gratitude for all that he had done, but the people still wanted more. This is human nature. People want to know, “What have you done for me lately?”

God has to reassert his status because he is trying to save his reputation. Save it from what? Competition! The older portions of the Torah were written at a time when monotheism had not yet taken hold. Perhaps the people would choose to follow a different god. Also, scholars believe that the Israelite people emerged in Canaan organically. They were truly a “mixed multitude” (Exodus 12:38) of loosely aligned groups that had not yet formed one “kingdom.” So they may have had many different customs and beliefs that had to be contended with as they become one people.

The Book of Ezekiel tells about an exchange between the elders of Israel and God. The elders tell God that the people are grumbling again. God responds by saying, although He wanted to “pour out My fury upon them, to vent all My anger upon them… I acted for the sake of My name, that it might not be profaned in the sight of the nations among whom they were.” (Ezekiel 20:8-9)

God does not want the foreign people, who follow other gods, to think God is a bad god. God has to prove he is the “best’ god! God has the ultimate patience for his people.

In our Yom Kippur liturgy we recite that God has the ability to forgive “transgression, iniquity, and sin.” This is a lovely quote taken from Exodus 34:7. However, the rest of the passage, which is not read in our liturgy, is noteworthy because it says,

“yet He does not remit all punishment, but visits the iniquity of fathers upon children and children’s children, upon the third and fourth generations.”

Like Jeff Sessions who took one line out of the Bible to state his case, the Rabbis of old took part of a line in creating our liturgy. This is a practice that has been done for thousands of years.

misquotes or misunderstandings in what Rabbi Jaech taught us are the responsibility of Tara Keiter