Ezekiel and I: Thoughts on
Netzavim Vayelech and Therefore Choose Life
Last
week, I pointed out that there was a ceremony of offering of the 2nd
tithe for the poor, in which we were told to declare that nothing had been set
aside for the dead or for mourning. I pointed out that the emphasis throughout
the Torah is life, not death.
This
week, we have the portion of Netzavim-Vayelech. Moses is driving home his final
pitch to the children of Israel:
I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I
have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore
choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed ( Deut 30).
The
choice, it is very clear, is in our hands, and this is the very theme of our season,
the month of Elul, leading into the Aseret Yemai Teshuvah, the Ten Days of
Repentance.
There
yet remains, in this idea of choice and consequence, one thought: Moses is
constantly speaking to the people as a group. In the Torah, very little is
actually said about responsibility and consequences to the individual. Indeed,
in Jewish thought, we always have the metaphor that we are all in one boat
together. We float together or we sink together.
Is
there a “Me” in this picture, as opposed to an “Us”?
Yet, as we have come
to recognize, individual responsibility became a corner stone of Jewish thought
and with it, individual thought, rather than “group think”.
It gradually made its way into the Jewish
psyche, so that in the old Soviet Union,
where Jews had been removed from contact with Judaism, the head, Nikita
Khrushchev( remember the one who banged his shoe on the desk at the UN) could complain of our fellow Jews:
"They are all
individuals and intellectuals. They want to talk about everything, they want to
discuss everything; they want to debate everything--and they come to totally
different conclusions."
How did we get to be
this way? How is it that we have been singled out as proponents of individual
difference, of individual responsibility?
To
answer this, we look to a prophet who taught and wrote long after Moses, who
taught and wrote when all the predictions by Moses of the failure of the people
and of exile had come true, the Prophet Ezekiel. It is this prophet who lays
the groundwork for individual responsibility, choice and consequences. He is
the father of Jewish ego psychology; that is some twenty-five hundred years before Freud’s adversary, Alfred Adler, discovered
the power of conscious rational choice.
In two earlier sermons I had mentioned Isaiah
and Jeremiah as molders of contemporary Jewish and universal thought-Isaiah for
the messianic concept, and Jeremiah and the response to catastrophe.
Now, I will examine Ezekiel as the founder of
ego psychology.
Unfortunately, he has always been plagued by
bad press-he is always picked on as the most unusual, most bizarre of the
prophets. If anyone writes on flying saucers in antiquity, Ezekiel's vision of
the heavenly wheeled winged creatures always earns a full page or two. When our
fundamentalist neighbors try to predict the end of days, when world powers
obliterate each other with nuclear weapons, it is always based on Ezekiel's
vision of the War of Gog and Magog. Whenever life after death is discussed,
there is Ezekiel with his vision of dry bones growing skin and coming back to life.
He is now perhaps best known for Ezekiel Bread, based, the manufacturer claims,
on the ingredients Ezekiel used in his loaf.
To be frank, he almost failed to make it into
the Bible. When the early sages where deciding what to include, they were
perturbed at Ezekiel’s many prediction which had failed.
His assets, however, outweighed his
liabilities, and, instead of his works being buried, they were preserved, for
our benefit.
Ezekiel was a man of tremendous imagination
and a marvelous flair for dramatics; hence his unusual imagery. However, behind
the highly colorful depictions in his writings, there lurked real substance.
It is Ezekiel who gives great weight to the
idea that the individual is responsible for his or her own actions.
Let's transpose our minds from that of
twentieth century sceptics to ancient middle easterners. What thought had we of
ourselves and our actions?
The Hittites, a few centuries before Ezekiel,
had a poem, in rough translation, as follows:
"Men and gods are all alike. If the
servant angers his master, then they kill him, his wife, his children,
brothers, sisters in-law, the whole lot. If a man angers his gods, then he
doesn't punish him alone. No, he destroys his wife, children, descendant’s
cattle and harvest as well."
In other words-what I do is of no
significance-I get punished for the other guy’s faults.
Standard law in Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq and
Syria, just in those lands where Ezekiel was sitting in Exile, had laws that applied
this complaint and put it to practice: a murderer could offer a substitute to
be executed in his place, for example-son, brother, wife, slave; it really
didn't matter who was punished, as long as someone was, and justice was thereby
done.
It is true that Ezekiel didn't break ground
entirely on his own
Biblical law had long before held that, when
it comes to crime, only the guilty could be punished-the sons could not be held
accountable for the crimes of the fathers, and the individual had long since been
accorded the possibility of choosing right from wrong.
Nevertheless, it was still only an embryo of
an idea.
The courts could not punish the sons for the
sins of the fathers, but God could. Entire
families could be held liable out by divine decrees for the sin of one member.
It’s there in the Ten Commandments; it’s there in the revelation to Moses at
the Golden calf.
In Ezekiel’s time, the popular slogan was: The
fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children have their teeth
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it has already been determined by ancestral deeds and misdeed. Why bother being a righteous, decent person-it won't do any good anyway.
When Ezekiel hears this proverb, he explodes:
"What mean you by this proverb! As I live, says the Lord God, you shall no
longer use that proverb. Behold, all souls are mine. The soul that sins-it
shall die, but if a man be just he shall surely live."
Ezekiel continues his lesson to the public
gathered to hear him: A just man can have a wicked son-that son will get no credits
for the father's sainthood. But a wicked man can, in turn, have a righteous son.
Nothing that the father did wrong can be held against the son.
With one fell swoop, Ezekiel throws out of consideration
ancestral history as a determinant of human fate. He also makes impossible the
entire concept of original sin, upon which Christianity has hung its peg.
Ezekiel moves even further. The worst person,
he contends, is endowed with free choice--he can change his actions and become
a saint. Even a saint has free choice-he can become a sinner.
In short, in the eyes of both God and man,
people are individuals, free to choose right and wrong, and responsible for the
rewards and consequences of their deeds and misdeeds.
It is possible to call Ezekiel's words a
declaration of independence of the individual-independence from the weight and
burden of ancestral wrong-doings and independence even from one's own past. You
and I are at any moment radically free to choose.
The Rabbis recognized
this move. The Talmud sums it up: Moses said “ He visits the guilt of the parents
upon the children “( Ex.20:4) and Ezekiel came and overturned that.” The person
who sins, only he shall die.” ( Ezekiel 18:4). ( Talmud Makoth 24a).
It is a heavy notion,
one that took yet many centuries to take hold in Jewish thought, and one which
is still not fully accepted today. In action and deed too much of humanity
respond to reality with the despair that they themselves are of no consequence
in the order of things.
That is behind the
idea of pre-destination that is found in some streams of Christianity and very
much so in classical Islam.
Every dictatorship on the face of the earth is
the consequence of such a submission to fate, such an abdication of individual responsibility
and choice.
In my freshman week in
college, our required reading was the novel by the behavioral psychologist, BF
Skinner, Walden II. In this description of a perfect society, by this most
influential of American psychologists, everyone is preprogramed for specific
roles and functions. All of life's choices are intelligently chosen for the
individual by the programmer.
That was the generation of Hippies, free this
and free that, the generation most individualistic, yet it was just this work,
which spoke of the disappearance of the individual, which was the most popular.
There are many who say we should go that
route.
Freudians claim we are
but an amalgam of instincts and mournful childhood experiences. The
behaviorists say that we operate on the same principals as their laboratory
pigeons and rats. Sociobiologists claim our behavior is determined by genetic
patterns. Classical Marxists place our mode of thinking to our position in the
class struggle.
But we, as Jews, have to keep room for ourselves
in all of this. We look back at that ancient dreamer, Ezekiel, and constantly
must remind ourselves that we are, each of us, responsible for our lives, and
even as we are part and parcel of our families, our communities, and our world,
we play that part well only in so far as we deal with ourselves with
responsibility.
Nikita Khrushchev paid us a back handed compliment,
about us being such terrible individualists; why couldn’t we be like the rest
of the proletariat, sheep to follow the leader in a flock. I am sure that Pharaoh
in ancient Egypt had the same complaint—after all, why weren’t we happy to be
slaves like the rest of the Egyptians? Haman in Persia had the same complaint:
their laws are different!
We should not let these miscreants down!
This
Rosh Hashanah, as good students of the Prophet Ezekiel, let us be sure to live
up to the Prophets expectations, each of us taking responsibility. Let us
fulfill the challenge of Moses, our teacher,” Therefore Choose Life.” So may it
be. Amen.
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