"To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner.  I am not a teacher, only a fellow student."  (Soren Kierkegaard)

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A FEW PRE-SHABBAT WORDS FROM RABBI AARON

Poisonous Words
Ancient texts are more than objects which stir our imagination. Some of them continue to exert a powerful influence over millions of human beings - thousands of years ago they were first written down. In chapter 31 of Numbers (parashat Matot), God sends Moses on a mission of vengeance. Because Midian sexually lured the Israelites into worshipping their gods, Israel's God demanded bloody vengeance:

Moses said to the people, "Let men be picked out from among you for a campaign, and let them fall upon Midian to wreak the Lord's vengeance on Midian.  You shall dispatch on the campaign a thousand from every  tribe of Israel." So a thousand from each tribe were furnished from the divisions of Israel, twelve thousand picked for the campaign. Moses dispatched them on the campaign, with Pinchas son of El’azar serving as a priest on the campaign, equipped with the sacred utensils and the trumpets for sounding the blasts.  They took the field against Midian, as the Lord had commanded Moses, and slew every male. Along with their other victims, they slew the kings of Midian: Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur, and Reba, the five kings of Midian. They also put Bil’am son of Beor to the sword. The Israelites took the women and children of the Midianites captive, and seized as booty all their beasts, all their herds, and all their wealth.  They burned down all the towns in which they were settled, and their encampments. They gathered all the spoil and all the booty, man and beast, and they brought the captives, the booty, and the spoil to Moses, Eleazar the priest, and the whole Israelite community, at the camp in the steppes of Moab, at the Jordan near Jericho. Moses, El’azar the priest, and all the chieftains of the community came out to meet them outside the camp...

"Have you allowed all the women to live?" he asked them. "They were the ones who followed Bil'am's advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the Lord in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the Lord's people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. "All of you who have killed anyone or touched anyone who was killed must stay outside the camp seven days. On the third and seventh days you must purify yourselves and your captives. Purify every garment as well as everything made of leather, goat hair or wood." Then Eleazar the priest said to the soldiers who had gone into battle, "This is the requirement of the law that the Lord gave Moses:  Gold, silver, bronze, iron, tin, lead and anything else that can withstand fire must be put through the fire, and then it will be clean. But it must also be purified with the water of cleansing. And whatever cannot withstand fire must be put through that water. On the seventh day wash your clothes and you will be clean. Then you may come into the camp."

Suppose, for example, we heard a general's testimony at the Hague - the man standing trial for war crimes - calmly describe the mass killing where Serb soldiers murdered Croats, raped the virgins, and torched the town. And suppose that the justification was connected to some religious imperative. We would feel anger and revulsion because we in the so-called civilized 21st Century world do not accept such behavior.

Well, like it or not, our sacred writings feature more than a few passages that read like Numbers, chapter 31. How do we wrestle with such a text? What does it feel like to be called for an aliyah to the Torah for this particular passage? We cannot unlearn the meaning of these toxic words. Nor can we can we stand on top of our desks - Dead Poets' Society style - and tear out the offending pages. These troubling words are embedded within our character. Tearing away the offending passages would deprive future generations of the God-wrestling they must undertake.

Shelby Spong, an important contemporary Christian thinker, describes such a text as Terrible. Words like these inspire terror, they are employed as weapons of mass destruction. They continually yield a harvest of sorrow and pain. And yet, they are with us. The warriors of chapter 31 learned the details of how to ritually purify certain elements, as well as themselves.

But warriors who undertake a genocidal campaign - even if they immerse themselves countless times, even if they offer countless animals without blemish - cannot ever wash the blood from their hands. For me, Numbers 31 is a a poisonous vessel. But when we render it invisible, we do not solve the problem. We keep it with us. We take it out. We argue about it. We relentlessly teach the words - as a warning about what people can and will do in the name of a God who demands such terrible sacrifice.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Aaron