Shabbat Emor 5 Iyar 5768, 10 May, 2008

EFRAT, Israel—Although he wasn’t speak¬ing about Yom Ha’atzmaut directly, one of the themes important in Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s theology sheds light on what Israel’s Independence Day means to modern Jewry.

During that historic Passover of 1949, the first year we were actually living in our own State of Israel, one paragraph in the Haggadah must have especially resonated with remarkable and particular poignancy: “The Covenant has stood by our ancestors and us; in every generation there are those who stand up against us to destroy us, but the Holy One Blessed be He saves us from their hands…”

In his essay, Kol Dodi Dofek (“The Voice of My Beloved Knocks”) Rabbi Soloveitchik speaks of the two covenants in which G-d enters with the Jewish people: the covenant of coercion and the covenant of choice.

The first covenant, commonly called the “Pact Between Halves” (Genesis 15), is with Abraham: overwhelmed with the fear that his only heir will be Eliezer, his Damascan servant, G-d reassures him that his descend¬ants will be as numerous as the stars, again promising the land of Israel as his possession. When Abraham wants reassurance, God commands that he bring a heifer, a goat, a ram, a dove and a young pigeon; the animals, except for the birds, are then split in half, the blood of both halves mingling together. Abraham then falls into a deep trance-like sleep, struck by a great black dread, whereupon it is revealed to him that his descendants will be slaves in Egypt. When he is resuscitated, a smoking furnace and a flaming torch miraculously pass between the ‘halves’; symbolizing the Divine Presence and Abraham united by the common blood, as it were, G-d then declares, “To your descendants I have given this land from the Egyptian river, as far as the great river of the Euphrates” (Gen. 15:18).

Although Abraham has no children when this promise is made, the guarantee of descendants means there will always be Jews, despite the ravages of history, destructions, exiles and persecutions. Indeed, even if we fall pray to assimilation, if we forget we are Jews, G-d will send an anti-Semitic leader who will remind us that we are Jews, forcing us, as it were, to remain part of the covenant as an eternal people. This, says Rav Soloveitchik, is the covenant of coercion, which Rabbi Soloveichik calls a covenant of fate. When you’re born a Jew, that’s your fate. You had no choice in the matter, and, to a great extent, your Jewishness is imposed from without. Even the most indifferent and apathetic Jews were sent to Auschwitz!

The second covenant is the covenant of choice, and it takes place at Sinai, in Parshat Mishpatim, the portion dealing with civil legislation. After Moses writes down all the words of the Ten Commandments and receives divine instruction, he builds an altar at the foot of the mountain, and he and the young men offer oxen as burnt offerings to God. Moses takes half the blood and places it into large bowls, and the rest he sprinkles on the altar. “He took the book of the covenant, and read in the hearing of the people; they responded ‘All that the Lord has spoken we will do and we will obey’ ” (Exodus 24:7).

Here, too, there is the blood of covenant. However, at Sinai the Jews are not coerced into accepting the Torah. Instead, they voluntarily take it upon themselves, crying out with one voice, ‘We will do and we will obey,’ meaning that we will not be Jews merely because we were born Jews, or because the Gentile world defines us as Jews. At Sinai we chose, freely and openly, to accept a binding system of morality, to adapt a unique lifestyle, to strive to become a Kingdom of priest-teachers and a holy nation. At Sinai, Israel turned her fate (what she was born into) into destiny (what she willed herself to be).

We find both of these covenants evident in two of Judaism’s major rites of passage: circumcision and the bar or bat mitzvah. The first is foisted on the child when he’s eight days old. It’s the choice of the parent,”cut” into the very organ of propagation of the child, foisted upon him as a fateful birth-obligation. The symbol of this covenant is blood and pain. In his major novel, The Assistant, Bernard Malamud describes and defines the Jews essentially on the basis of this covenant of suffering. A Jew is a Jew because he suffers, and although his suffering will often ennoble those fated to endure it, as Malam¬ud’s most successfully drawn characters demonstrate, it’s not necessarily a suffering of one’s own choosing.

The second important rite of passage occurs on a girl’s 12th or a boy’s 13th birthday, when for the first time a young woman or man publicly declares before the congregation of Israel that he/she is now part of the Jewish people, accepting privileges and obligations, the ‘we will do and we will obey’ part of the Sinai covenant, the destiny of being a light unto the nations, witnesses of a G-d of love and peace, partners with the Divine in bringing about world redemption.

The Holocaust, a six-year-long circum¬cision of pain and blood, is the most vivid expression of the covenant of fate. And with Yom HaAtzmaut, the declaration of Israel’s independence as a unique nation among the nations of the world, we turned our fate into destiny, we took back our existential decisions from the hands of the Gentiles into our own hands as a free nation, and re-joined the annals of history. If we will only accept the prophets of our Bible as our guides, we can legitimately reach not only for survival but for redemption, and the next sixty years may well usher in a world “where nation will not lift up sword against nation and humanity will not learn war anymore.”

Shabbat Shalom and a meaningful Yom Ha’Atzmaut!
Shlomo Riskin
Chancellor Ohr Torah Stone
Chief Rabbi - Efrat Israel