Torah Study 5
Right to repair and Amalek apologia
See previous torah studies here.
1.
This week’s parsha is called Tetzaveh—which is yet another ancient Hebrew word for “command.”
I don’t know why this one gets to be called “command,” given that the parsha where the Ten Commandments were handed down was just named after some dude. But God is commanding various things this week, so I guess it’s alright.
All the commands have to do with how we should be worshipping Him in the tabernacle. There’s an extremely lengthy section that goes into excruciating detail about creating the proper priestly vestments for Aaron. Apparently, his ephod (fancy vest, basically) would be made “of gold, of blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and of fine twisted linen, worked into designs.”
This seems like a fairly tall order! A totally destitute, very recently emancipated people in the middle of the desert in ~1200 BC are meant to get together various rare dyes and precious metals, then intricately work them into a fancy patterns—just so Aaron can look his best for God.
It gets more ridiculous. Aaron will get a breastplate too—woven from the same blue, purple, and crimson yarns, with golden designs on top, and also twelve precious stones embedded in it to represent the twelve tribes of Israel.
And we’re nowhere close to done!
Inside the breastpiece of decision you shall place the Urim and Thummim, [Meaning of these two words uncertain. They designate a kind of oracle; cf. Num. 27.21.] so that they are over Aaron’s heart when he comes before God. Thus Aaron shall carry the instrument of decision for the Israelites over his heart before God at all times.
Rashi thinks “Urim and Thummim” refers to “an inscription of the Proper Name of God.” And that only so long as Aaron kept the name of God close to his heart would he be able to properly judge the Israelites.
There’s more longwinded discussion of Aaron’s clothes and the sacrifices he’s supposed to do. I’m sure someone’s done good commentary about it all, but it’s just so boring.
In case you don’t believe me:
You shall offer the one lamb in the morning, and you shall offer the other lamb at twilight.
There shall be a tenth of a measure of choice flour with a quarter of a hin of beaten oil mixed in, and a libation of a quarter hin of wine for one lamb;
and you shall offer the other lamb at twilight, repeating with it the meal offering of the morning with its libation—an offering by fire for a pleasing odor to God,
Wow, thank goodness we got that description! How else could we have known how to make a nice smell for God??
2.
I should mention very quickly that my rabbi managed to give a really great d’var torah on this parsha despite its total mind-numbingness.
He detailed all the ways the tabernacle differed from the eventual temple we’d construct in Jerusalem. How its walls were made of tents and posts, not stone. How its decorations were hand-made of stone and wood, not cast out of metal.
And he asked why we would make our place of worship so fragile, so weak. A strong enough wind could blow the whole complex down—why would God command us to build such a weak temporary temple?
Then the rabbi started talking about some TV show he likes but I’ve never seen—Shogun?—but the idea was this: in places where earthquakes often happened, traditional architecture was much softer and weaker. Japanese homes had walls made of paper, while Dutch homes were stone or brick.
Why? Because when an earthquake came, paper and brick houses would crumble just the same. But it’d be much easier and faster and cheaper to repair and rebuild a paper house than a brick one. They were simpler and weaker—but more adaptable and renewable.
The tabernacle was designed similarly—in the wilderness, a fancy temple was infeasible to build and, more importantly, impossible to fix. A wall that crumbles must be rebuilt—a fence post that falls can simply be put upright again. A casted decoration that cracked would have to be completely recast from its mold—a woodworking that was damaged could simply be woodworked back to normal by any carpenter around.
If the Israelites encountered danger or attack, there would be some damage to the tabernacle, sure. But even if it was ransacked and burned, they could rebuild it quickly and continue worshipping. Once they built the real thing in Jerusalem, this was no longer true. Their worship became more fragile when they built it a stronger structure.
And so the rabbi went on to defend right to repair laws. There was a time that we could keep our devices functioning through sheer will and ingenuity—we could rework wood in the wilderness. But now, when your laptop craps out, you have to buy a new one, or you have to live without it. When your temple is burned, you have to totally rebuild it, or you have to find some way to be content with just the Western Wall.
Seemingly, the tabernacle system is preferable. The “open it up and pop in a new battery” system is preferable. Wouldn’t it be nice to have laws mandating it remain an option?
Ah, and before I move on, I should add: my rabbi looks a lot like Benedict Cumberbatch. Especially yesterday, when he had a fresh haircut. He also had his prayer shawl pinned to his shoulders in a remarkably flowy way.
That is to say: I watched Dr. Strange give a 10 minute, extremely Jewishly-inflected defense of the right to repair yesterday morning.
3.
Ok, time to get to the action already.
Purim is this Thursday! For the uninitiated, it’s one of our best holidays: there was this bad-guy advisor (Haman, booooooo) to the clueless Persian king (Achashverosh, usually pronunced “ah-HAH-ver-sauce-SHUH-kha”) who tried to kill all the Jews, but one of us slept her way to the top (Esther, or Hadassah in Hebrew) on the advice of her uncle (Mordecai) and told the king to actually not kill us and instead kill Haman (booooooo).
This worked and we survived and Haman got hung and now we eat cookies modeled after his ears (or pockets, or hat, depending on who you ask). Hooray!
To some degree, this is the plot of every single Jewish holiday: they tried to kill us, they didn’t, let’s eat! But Purim is a prime example of the near-extermination story, so on the shabbat preceding it (yesterday!), we read a special Haftarah from the prophet Samuel that’s all about people trying to kill us.
In Jewish scripture, Amalek is an oft-recurring character. You might remember our first introduction to them, only a few weeks ago:
Amalek came and fought with Israel at Rephidim.
…
And Joshua overwhelmed the people of Amalek with the sword.
Then God said to Moses, “Inscribe this in a document as a reminder, and read it aloud to Joshua: I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven!”
In short, they were the first ones who tried to kill us all as Jews. Up until this point, all the Jews in the world were shepherds (Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and so on) or slaves in Egypt (everyone else). We weren’t really a people that could be destroyed as one.
But now the Jews have become the Israelites. They have a shared national identity, and an enemy seeking to totally destroy them as a people—Amalek.
The Israelites fight off Amalek successfully! And what does God say about it? He says to remember Amalek—remember to blot out its memory.
Much ink has been spilled interpreting this instruction, but I think the most natural reading is this: God is telling us that we’ll see lots more Amaleks in the future, and that we should deal with them ruthlessly. Each new enemy that seeks to destroy us is a “memory of Amalek”—and must be blotted out.
This week’s Haftarah bears this interpretation out in grotesque detail.
4.
We’re reading chapter 15 of the Book of Samuel. Saul is the king of Israel, and he’s really a good one.
After Saul had secured his kingship over Israel, he waged war on every side against all his enemies: against the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, the Philistines, and the kings of Zobah; and wherever he turned he worsted [meaning “bested,” strangely—other translations have “routed” or “overwhelmed”] [them].
God tells Saul, through the prophet Samuel, to turn his sights to Amalek, who are still around, but seemingly haven’t been doing much instigating recently. God says:
I am exacting the penalty for what Amalek did to Israel, for the assault he made upon them on the road, on their way up from Egypt.
Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!
The only proper reaction to a passage like this must be: “holy shit!”
Killing “men and women, infants and sucklings” is very not cool. But God says do it, so Saul sets off to do it. He fights Amalek, and good at fighting as he is, kicks their asses. He kills their men, women, and children, their oxen and sheep, and so on—but not every single one.
Saul and the troops spared Agag [the king of Amalek] and the best of the sheep, the oxen, the second-born, the lambs, and all else that was of value. They would not proscribe them; they proscribed only what was cheap and worthless.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call this humane treatment of an enemy population—but it’s clearly marginally less awful than what God had commanded. Good for Saul, right? God must’ve been testing him, like Abraham with the akeidah, and now he’ll be rewarded for following basic morality.
Nope! God is fucking pissed!
The word of the LORD then came to Samuel:
“I regret that I made Saul king, for he has turned away from Me and has not carried out My commands.” Samuel was distressed and he entreated the LORD all night long.
Samuel confronts Saul and tells him off for deserting God’s commands. Saul apologizes profusely and claims that he only kept the animals so he could sacrifice them to God. Samuel isn’t buying it—“surely, obedience is better than sacrifice, compliance than the fat of rams”—so Saul shifts to blaming his soldiers for wanting to keep the valuable spoils of war, and lets Samuel execute King Agag in an attempt to prove his allegiance.
The spineless ass-kissing accomplishes nothing. The chapter concludes:
Samuel never saw Saul again to the day of his death. But Samuel grieved over Saul, because the LORD regretted that He had made Saul king over Israel.
What do we do with this? What do we do when scripture portrays a brutal, vengeful, immoral God?
5.
There are two easy answers. Depending on how much you like the rest of your faith, you can:
Run away! God is obviously awful, and so is religion, so what’s even the point?
Ignore it! There’s lots of other beautiful stories to read and lessons to learn—why don’t we just focus on those instead?
The usual Jewish strategy, though, is to try to find a third path. Some interpretation that salvages the beauty and deemphasizes the horror. So let’s see what can be done with I Samuel 15.
First, Rashi clarifies that this isn’t necessarily an act of animal cruelty:
Oxen and sheep. They were sorcerers, and they would change themselves to appear as animals.
Oh, okay! Well, at least we only need to explain the apparent command to genocide an enemy people—not the animal-killing too.
The Talmud says that Saul argued briefly with God (through Samuel, presumably) before he carried out His orders:
If the men have sinned, in what way have the animals sinned? Why, then, should the Amalekites’ livestock be destroyed? And if the adults have sinned, in what way have the children sinned? A Divine Voice then came forth and said to him: “Do not be overly righteous” (Ecclesiastes 7:16). That is to say: Do not be more merciful than the Creator Himself, Who has commanded you to do this, for to do so would not be an indication of righteousness but of weakness. [emphasis mine]
There’s some extremely blatant divine commanding going on here… but I think we can read between the lines and recognize that the broad point is about humility. Saul is a good king, but he’s not the King of Kings. Mercy is a virtue in men, usually—but if God is ultimately good, you can’t really expect to be better than Him. Probably He has a good explanation for any seemingly-awful commands, and you should just go along with them.
This is unsatisfying, though! We can probably take solace in the idea that God doesn’t really give us commands anymore, so there’s no way to know that we’re ever overdoing mercy. Then we can just err on the side of caution—be extremely righteous and merciful, assuming that God would go further, if anything.
But do we really have to accept that if God came down and commanded a massacre, we’d be obligated to carry it out?
The Talmud offers an alternative by comparing Saul with King David:
Saul failed with one single sin and it was counted against him, costing him the throne. David, however, failed with two sins and they were not counted against him, as he retained his position. The Gemara asks: What was Saul’s one sin? The incident with Agag, king of Amalek, whom Saul spared in defiance of God’s command.
When David sinned—acted against God’s commands—he was forgiven, and eventually held up as the model for the Messiah. But Saul was immediately punished—God immediately regretted his appointment as king. Why the difference in treatment?
The Talmud points to Saul’s treatment of Agag, specifically—his sparing the king out of pride. Really, if anyone deserved the treatment God commanded for Amalek, it was Agag, who was notorious for killing the women and children of his enemies en masse.
But Saul spared him! To God, this probably seemed analogous to bombing Dresden but sparing Nazi leadership from execution. Sure, He wanted to bomb Dresden too, for whatever reason—but clearly, killing the Nazis is more important!
It follows that if Saul hadn’t totally slaughtered every Amalekite, this might have been a survivable sin. But his failure to dole out his excess mercy properly was unforgivable.
6.
Can you live with that lesson?
When God was speaking to the kings and the prophets, there were lots of divinely-commanded constraints on their actions. And some of those constraints seemed a lot more moral than others.
Yeah, it’s a little strange that God would impose immoral constraints at all.
But this isn’t so foreign to our lives. Bosses and teachers and governments impose poorly-thought-out constraints on us all the time. And, sure, you could disobey them whenever it felt right to—but you’d quickly find yourself out of a job, expelled, in prison.
Instead, it seems much wiser to pick your battles. Skirt only the most truly awful commands, and otherwise, build up goodwill. Go along with the killing of Agag even if it’s against your instincts—because you might be able to spare some children and some animals in return.
This is the best lesson I can think to take from I Samuel 15, and from the Purim story too—disobey strategically. Resist with the understanding that unlimited resistance is untenable. Find a way to survive, to keep being king, and save up your excess righteousness until it’s really necessary.
Lukethoughts
(Lucas is back to his normal peppy self today!)
“Shabbat Shalom everyone!!!” (Ed. note: I think he knows that I post these the next morning… so he must still not understand what “Shabbat” is. Even though I have explained it SO MANY TIMES. It’s just “Saturday,” I mean, Christ…)
“These online instagram influencers who flex having money and that we can also have money through learning how to start our own online coaching business makes me want to die and take them with me in my grave.” (Ed. note: Yeah, successful people should honestly just shut the fuck up and let the rest of us be blissfully, unsuccessfully ignorant. Also, relevant Calvin and Hobbes.)
“Does post shave balm actually do anything.” (Ed. note: Don’t know what that even is! I use an alum block very happily. The dog also happens to love the taste of it, so I get lots of kisses in the mornings…)
>>> Yeah, it’s a little strange that God would impose immoral constraints at all.
>>> But this isn’t so foreign to our lives. Bosses and teachers and governments impose poorly-thought-out constraints on us all the time. And, sure, you could disobey them whenever it felt right to—but you’d quickly find yourself out of a job, expelled, in prison.
But surely we expect more from God than an incompetent middle manager. And surely we should treat divine commands differently than a silly constraint we face at work: say, Elon Musk demanding we send him an email summarizing everything we've done at work recently.
One wonders how much heredity was believed to be involved in various kinds of behaviors. The scriptures are full of insinuations along those lines, including “bad trees not yielding good fruit,” etc. So maybe the command to exterminate ALL of Amalek was about the belief that there should be no chance left for the heinous callousness of the Amalek to survive. (Take for example the Sinwar character, who despite being cured of cancer by the Jewish doctors chose to plot and carry out a terrible massacre.)
The other layer mentioned was about the army not being allowed to benefit financially from its missions on top of their salary & obligations of duty, hence not leaving even the animals alive. That is, the army ought to be in the service of the civilians, not itself, because it’s a slippery slope…
On the repairability… I have to agree. There’s something very heartless and inhumane about favoring factory production and replacement over employing people locally to repair.