Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
February 13, 2004
A Profoundly Simple Definition of Judaism
The sedra Yitro, our Torah portion for this week, contains version one of the Ten Commandments. Last Fall, Dr. Paul Finkelman presented an outstanding talk about the Ten Commandments which had been very much in the news in the last year. Paul pointed out that there is not even agreement on what exactly are the Ten Commandments and how they are divided. That is true within Judaism and also true between different denominations of Christianity. For Jews, there is even a hesitancy to speak about "the Ten Commandments" because there are 613 Mitzvot. We might better talk about the Ten Basic Statements or the Ten Fundamental Statements on which all of human civilization depends.
In case you are not sure what I am talking about, let's take a look in our siddur, page 701. The commandment numbered "1" reads: "I am the Eternal, your God, who took you out of Egypt, out the state of slavery." Is that a commandment, implying that we are required to believe in God? Perhaps, but many Jewish commentators consider it a preamble. 'Whereas I took you out of Egypt - now, therefore, listen to how I want you to live and what I want you to do.' Jewish tradition contains disagreements as to whether to count that as the First Commandment or whether to consider it a preamble. And so it is with some of the other statements on this list. Some commentators claim that there are nine commandments; others claim that there are 12 or 13.
This evening I really want to study with you only one part of one commandment, a phrase usually ignored because it is not as clear and as direct as some of the others. "Thou shalt not murder." "Thou shalt not commit adultery." "Thou shalt not steal." These seem very unambiguous, though if we study them carefully, they are not quite so clear and simple as we might think. But tonight I want to focus only on the second part of what is usually considered the Second Commandment.
Our Torah says "you shall have no other gods beside Me" - literally al panai, "in My face." To commit idolatry is like committing adultery; it is a betrayal of God. To do it right in front of God is brazen. And, since God is everywhere, you shall not worship any other god in God's presence. So far, I believe that is pretty clear.
Then the Torah goes on to say. "You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth." Does this mean that all art is forbidden in Judaism? Or that all representational art is forbidden? Some people think so.
I believe that this commandment has to be read in the context of the next line: "You shall not bow down to them or serve them." It is not art per se that it is forbidden; it is art that becomes idolatrous. It is art in which the sculptor or artist worships the work that he or she has made and worships the object that she has drawn a replica of. That is the kind of art which I believe our Torah forbids.
But we are still not quite at what I am interested in tonight. It is the next part of the commandment. You shall not do this, why? "Because I the Eternal your God am a passionate (or demanding) God, poked avon avot al banim, who visits the guilt of the parents upon the children, upon the third and fourth generation of those who reject Me." And then the Torah softens the words we have just read by adding: "but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep My commandments."
Now it is those five Hebrew words - poked avon avot al banim - that I want us to study tonight, so you can put away your siddur and turn to the hand-out sheet. I want to express my appreciation to Rabbi Jack Riemer who developed this lesson so ingeniously. When I read it, I felt I had to share his insights with our congregation.
I hope that you are somewhat uncomfortable with those five words - the idea that if parents sin, their children and grandchildren should have to pay for what they do wrong. Is that not "vicarious guilt," and do Jews believe in vicarious guilt? Here, right toward the beginning of the Ten Commandments, we have a statement which I think we should find troublesome. So what should we do with it?
As an aside, just to be sure that we recognize that this issue of vicarious guilt is not an ancient problem, let me remind you that just around the turn of the 21st century, the government of Germany finally, after more than 50 years of waffling, with great hesitation and ambivalence, chose a site on which it plans to erect a memorial to the Six Million. The German government chose an architect, approved the preliminary model of what the memorial would look like and held a dedication ceremony at the site.
Not every German leader attended. Some purposely boycotted the event because they felt uncomfortable with having a memorial to the Holocaust right in the heart of Berlin. These people want to move on into the future and not be constantly reminded of the past.
On the day of the dedication, Elie Wiesel was invited to address the German Parliament. Wiesel, perhaps more than any other Jewish leader, has opposed the idea of vicarious guilt and has said we cannot and should not hold this generation of Germans responsible for what the last generation of Germans did. Yet, in this address to the German Parliament, he said that the issue of the Holocaust cannot be escaped - not by us and not by them. Wiesel said it stands across German history and German consciousness forever, just as it stands across Jewish history and Jewish consciousness. And so this generation and all future generations must somehow come to terms with the Holocaust.
And then Elie Wiesel made a proposal. He proposed that the German Parliament issue a statement asking the Jewish People for forgiveness. (Personally, I am not sure that is such a good idea, because I do not know what body is authorized to speak for the Jewish People and could issue a statement accepting such a request for forgiveness, even if it were made. But that is a different story.) What interests me tonight was the reaction to Wiesel's proposal. The reporters who were present said there was a grim silence in the room. It is clear that the German Parliament was in no mood to consider such a bill. So the issue of whether the sins of the fathers should be paid for by their children is a real issue, friends, one which we still struggle with today.
Therefore, let's see how previous generations of Jews reacted to those five troubling words - poked avon avot al banim - who imposes the guilt of the fathers on their children. We begin with two great prophets, who were troubled by these words - Jeremiah and Ezekiel.
The prophet, Jeremiah says in Chapter 31, "In those days, they shall no longer say, 'the parents have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are blunted.'"
And the prophet, Ezekiel, says in Chapter 18, "As I live, declares the Lord God, this proverb shall no longer be current. Instead, the person who sins, only he shall die."
Do you realize the full impact of these two statement? Here are two of the prophets challenging and denying what Moses said in the Ten Commandments. When Ezekiel says, "This proverb shall no longer be current," to which proverb is he referring? Is he referring to the Second Commandment? Where did he, and where did Jeremiah, get the courage, the chutzpah, to deny what Moses reports God instructed in the Second Commandment? How could they dare to say such a thing? And how could they get away with it? Why weren't they drummed out of the Bible for daring to deny one of the Ten Commandments?
The Talmud is even more surprising. The Sages side with Jeremiah and with Ezekiel - not with Moses, or with God! They say, (in Makkot 24A) "Moses pronounced an adverse sentence on Israel, the visiting of the sins of the fathers upon the children and it was revoked by Ezekiel." It was revoked by Ezekiel? Where did the Sages of the Talmud get the courage to say such a thing? How could they have dared to side with Jeremiah and with Ezekiel against Moses, and against God? Did they have the authority to abrogate one of the statements in the Ten Commandments?
Now let me move to the Middle Ages, and let me show you how three of the great commentators deal with this verse. First, Abraham Ibn Ezra, then the Ramban, Nachmonides, and then Maimonides.
Ibn Ezra says that the word Pokad doesn't necessarily mean "to punish." In the Torah reading for Rosh Hashanah, it says, "hashem pakad et Sarah." There, it clearly means God remembered Sarah, or God remembers His promise to Sarah. And when Joseph, while on his deathbed, says that someday God will "pakad you," it means, "someday God will remember you and redeem you." So here, says Ibn Ezra, all it means is that God will remember the sins of the parents when He comes to judge their descendants. Perhaps God will say, "This one is bad, but his father was good, and so God will be kind to him." Or perhaps God will say: "This one is bad, but after all, it is only because his father was bad, and so God will be kind to him." But either way, pakad only means to remember, to take notice, to take into account; it doesn't mean, to punish.
The Ramban says to Ibn Ezra, "Nice try, but no banana!. It is true that pakad can and often does mean to remember, not to punish. But that is only when the word, pakad is used by itself. But here it say, 'poked avon' and that can only mean to punish."
So how then does the Ramban deal with the moral issue, the question of how and why should children be punished for the sins of their fathers? His answer is very simple. He says, "This phrase only appears here. Therefore, it applies only here. Only in connection with idolatry is the sin of the fathers visited upon the children; nowhere else, because only here, only in connection with this commandment is this rule found."
Maimonides has another insight into the text. He asks, "Why does the Torah warn that if you do something sinful, your children and your grandchildren down to the fourth generation will pay for it?" Because the fourth generation is the furthest into the future that anyone would expect to see. Many people live long enough to see grandchildren. Very, very few live long enough to see great-grandchildren. Hardly anyone sees beyond that generation. And it is known that people care very much for their grandchildren. People love grandchildren even more than they do children, for several reasons. They are easier to take care of and when you tire of them, you can send them home. Grandparents and grandchildren get along so well because they have a common enemy, the parents. And so, because of the special bond that exists between grandparents and grandchildren, Maimonides says, the Torah uses this threat to keep people from sinning. Would anyone sin if they knew that it would affect their grandchildren?
This, by the way, is the thesis of a novel recently published by Alan Dershowitz, called, Just Desserts. In this novel, a child sees his parents, his siblings, even his baby brother killed by cruel, sadistic Nazis. And he vows that if he ever gets the chance, he will take vengeance for what they did.
Fifty years later, this child - now an old man - is living in Boston, and he somehow discovers that Nazi, now living nearby. At first, his reaction is to kill him. But then he finds out that this Nazi is suffering from terminal cancer, that he only has a few more months to live. If he kills him, he will be doing the man a favor. He will be saving him three months of torture. So what should he do instead?
The ex-Nazi has a grandchild, whom he adores. So the man kidnaps the ex-Nazi, ties him up and makes him watch videos (actually fakes) in which he sees his grandchild being tortured. This is just desserts, that is, the appropriate punishment, says Dershowitz, and what he is saying in this novel is very close to what Maimonides is teaching when he says that there will be no more effective deterrent to sin than knowing that your sin will lead to suffering for your grandchild.
Now let me show you just one modern interpretation of this passage. It comes from Umberto Cassuto, an Italian Jew, who became one of the first professors of Bible at the Hebrew University when it opened. A wonderful Bible scholar, Cassuto had a marvelous sense for the structure of biblical passages and for the nuances of words and word order. And this is how he explains the five words, poked avon avot al banim, with which we have been struggling.
He says that it does not refer to individuals; it refers to the community, to society as a whole. If a generation does evil - if it pollutes the atmosphere, if it pillages the environment, if it destroys the trees or poisons the waters - it is the future generations that will pay for the ecological damages that it does.
Cassuto wrote two generations ago, but how timely his words are to us in this generation. We have become painfully aware of how true they are. Each generation now realizes that it has to be stewards of the planet; that it has to guard the universe, preserve it and protect it, so that it can be handed over intact to the next generation. Otherwise, the sins that we do to the planet will come back to haunt our children and their children after them.
Look now at what we have here. We have traveled from Moses to Jeremiah and Ezekiel who challenge him and who question the morality of what he said. From them, we moved to the Sages of the Talmud, who sided with the prophets and not with Moses. Then we saw how three different Sages in the medieval period understood these five words in three different ways. Finally we discovered how a biblical commentator who came from Italy understood them in a whole different way in this century. And long the way, we saw how poked avon avot al banim is played out in the German Parliament and how it is the central theme in a novel that was written here in the Untied States.
Look how differently different generations understood this text. None of them accepted it docilely. None of them said, "Oh it's in the Ten Commandments, so we have to accept it, and believe it, period." Instead, they wrestled with it, struggled to understand it, tried to comprehend it by means of reason and with a sense of justice.
We are heirs to a noble tradition - a tradition of study, of fairness, and of protest. We are heirs to a tradition that insists on saying, "Wait a minute, why?" even to a passage that is found in the Ten Commandments. We are heirs to a sacred tradition that values, permits, respects, and even encourages protest, when it is for the sake of human beings and for the sake of justice.
All these voices, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Sages of the Talmud, Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra, Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon, and Moshe David Cassuto are partners in the continuing story of the struggle to understand the Torah which began with Moses at Sinai and which continues until us - and God willing, shall continue through us, until the end of time.
Now, let's go back to where we began - back to Moses. The simple truth is that Moses was right. Poked avon avot is a fact, whether we like it or not. What we do does affect our children and their children. If you are an abuser, the odds are good that your child will be too. If you take drugs, certainly during pregnancy, but even before or after, there is no doubt that your children will pay for it, not just you. If you commit a crime and go to jail, there is no doubt that your children will pay for it, as well as you. They will have to live with the stigma of what you have done. And they will have to suffer from your absence from their lives. It isn't fair? Is isn't right that they should have to suffer for what you do? But that is the way it is. That is a fact of life. What we do does affect our children, and, through them, their children as well, fair or not.
So here is a commandment and a warning which bears thinking about and struggling with and confronting by our generation, as it has been thought about and struggled with by all the previous generations.
What we learn from comparing and contrasting these seven commentaries that we have studied - two from the prophets, one from the Talmud, three from the Middle Ages, and one from a modern scholar - is that even the Ten Commandments are not so clear and not so simple as you might think, that even they need to be thought about and thought through in every generation. It is this never-ending fascination with the Text of the Torah, this never-ending struggle to understand how it should be understood and how it should be lived by, that makes us Jews.
Here, then, is a brief tour down through the centuries of the commentaries on just five words. Let us listen to each one and let us add our voice, our perspective, to the ongoing debate, which is Jewish spiritual history.
Let me conclude with one of my favorite stories. I published it a number of years ago in one of the Holyday handbooks. Saul Lieberman was one of the great Talmudic scholars of the 20th century. He taught Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the Conservative Movement's great seminary. Once the New York Times sent a reporter out to visit him. The reporter was a curious man and when ushered into Lieberman's study, he said: "What's that book on your desk?"
Lieberman answered: "It's a Chumash - the Five Books of
Moses."
The reporter asked him: "What's that book next to it?"
Dr. Lieberman replied: "That's the Mishnah."
"What's the Mishnah?", asked the reporter.
"The Mishnah is a second century commentary on the laws in the Chumash," answered Professor Lieberman.
"So what is that stuff below the Mishnah?", asked the reporter.
Lieberman said: "That is the Gemora."
"What's the Gemora?", asked the reporter.
"The Gemora is the Aramaic exploration of the meaning of the Mishnah. It was completed in the fifth century."
"So what is that stuff in the right-hand margin?", asked the reporter.
"That is the commentary of Rashi. Rashi was a French commentator on the Gemora who lived in the tenth century."
"And what is that stuff on the other margin?", asked the reporter.
"That is the work of the Baalay Tosafot, who lived in Germany two centuries after Rashi."
Then the reporter said: "I get it. Judaism is a continuing conversation between the generations."
Dr. Lieberman said afterwards that this non-Jewish reporter had really given the shortest, simplest definition of Judaism that he had ever heard. Judaism is a continuing conversation between the generations.
This Shabbat, we have listened in on what seven different generations have had to say about just five words. May we listen well to what they have to teach us and, dear friends, may we in turn add our voices and our insights to the continuing conversation about words first heard at Sinai. That is the meaning of Jewish life. Amen
This lesson is based on the writings of Rabbi Jack Riemer.
A Profoundly Simple Definition of Judaism
Gates of Prayer, p. 701 - (Consider, for example, is #2 one or two commandments - no other gods and no idols? Is #10 one or two commandments?)
Poked Avon Avot Al Banim - inflicting the sins of the parents upon their children; visiting the guilt of the parents upon their children
Jeremiah (Chapter 31) - "In those days, they shall no longer say, 'the parents have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are blunted.'"
Ezekiel (Chapter 18) - "As I live, declares the Lord God, this proverb shall no longer be current. Instead, the person who sins, only he shall die."
Talmud (Makkot 24A) - "Moses pronounced an adverse sentence on Israel, the visiting of the sins of the fathers upon the children and it was revoked by Ezekiel."
Abraham Ibn Ezra - ". . . God will remember the sins of the parents when He comes to judge their descendants. . ."
pakad - remember, take notice, take into account, not "punish"
Ramban (Nachmonides) - ". . . Only in connection with idolatry is the sin of the fathers visited upon the children; nowhere else, because only here, only in connection with this commandment is this rule found."
Maimonides - "The Torah uses this threat to keep people from sinning. Would anyone sin if they knew that it would affect their grandchildren?"
Cassuto -"It does not refer to individuals; it refers to the community, to society as a whole."
"Judaism is a continuing conversation between the generations."
