The Jewish Hero
Adapted from Rabbi Braun’s sermon in 5767
Fish’s Eddy was a wonderful store on the corner of 77th and Broadway in Manhattan. It sold the oddest variety of plates, cups and dishes that seem to have been bought as hotels and other establishments have gone out of business. Every time that you went in you were sure to find something different.
My greatest find there was a set of four “Rebbe cups”. They are glass cups with the picture of a famous rabbi on them, the name of the rabbi and on top of the glass it simply says “Heroes of the Torah”.
Over the years we certainly have been trained to think that way. The great rabbis are our heroes and role models. They are the model of piety and religious performance. On the wall in the pizza store on Norwood Avenue the posters on the wall are of great rabbis, somewhat monolithic but great rabbis nonetheless.
The underlying assumption of this perception is that the be all and end all of Judaism is the learning of Torah and those who do it best are the best Jews.
I would be the last one in the room to knock the rabbis, and I certainly agree that one of the most important things in the world is the learning of Torah and that those who learn it, live it and know it deserve our respect. We are only a few days away from Shavuot when we celebrate the day that we received the Torah. We have been counting up to the date for nearly seven weeks.
Still, as I sat to write this sermon on Wednesday morning, Yom Yerushalayim, the day that we celebrated the recapture of Jerusalem, I could not help but think that maybe we have forgotten about another type of Jewish Hero, one that we have only been reacquainted with in recent years- The Jewish Soldier.
And my thoughts turned back to the phrase on the top of the cup, “heroes of the Torah” and I asked myself who really “the Heroes of the Torah” are? Of course to answer that question – what better place to look than the Torah itself.
Let’s take 6 quick examples: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Moshe, and Joshua.
Each had communication with God, Avraham found God, and Moshe received the Torah. They were clearly men of great spiritual stature. They were also all men of great military prowess. After the capture of Lot Abraham gets together his army and defeats the armies of the 4 mighty kings. Isaac battled with the Plishtim. Yaakov prepared for battle with Esav. Moshe fought the wars against Sichon and Og. Joshua fought the war against Amalek and led the people into the land of Israel.
It appears that the true heroes of the Torah are soldiers as well, warriors. They are people who are able to combine the spiritual and the physical. They yearn for God and cleave to God, yet when duty calls they have to ability and strength to do battle with their enemies.
Why then you might ask is that not our perception today? The answer to that is actually quite simple. From the second century of the Common Era to the middle of the 20th century Jews did not have a homeland and we did not have an army. We were persecuted and subjected to crusades and pogroms.
During those many centuries of struggle and persecution we developed an self image that of weakness and timidity.
It can be best summed up with the following joke:
Two Jews were dragged by anti-Semites before a firing squad. The first one cries out “Stop! Stop! You’re murdering an innocent man!” “Sh… Sh… says the second. Don’t make trouble”
We did not have any warriors to admire let alone religious warriors and so we held onto the one aspect of our biblical heroes that we could maintain in the Diaspora- the spiritual one and it has succeeded in maintaining us for nearly two thousand years. Our traditions and torah learning have kept us alive and together for the last 1800 years. Over that time we have come to recognize that Torah is our supreme value and it and those who study it are to be admired and respected. But if you could say that that was a downside to that singular focus it was that we lost sight of the other aspect of the Biblical hero, the religious soldier.
The transition from warrior to scholar can best be seen in the Midrash describing the death of King David.
The Gemara in Shabbat (30a-30b) relates that David Hamelech is told by God that he was going to die on Shabbat and so David spends all Shabbat learning and while he is learning the angel of death is powerless over him. What does the angel do? He created a distraction among the trees in the backyard and when David went down the steps to see what was happening he fell down the steps and died.
The context of this story in the Gemara and the other versions of the story are worth studying and we will do that on Shavuot but two things are very clear in this story.
- Torah is all powerful; it can even stop death from occurring. It is the be all and end all of our lives.
- The second point I have read in the writings of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and in an article by a professor at Bar Ilan University. The rabbis of the Talmud have taken King David, psalmist and warrior, and transformed him into a Talmid Chacham.
The point is subtle but should not be underestimated. In Babylonia the focus was Torah, there was no king or army and the Rosh Yeshiva was the king and Hero.
That attitude prevails until 1948 when the Jewish state is reborn. We once again have the privilege and opportunity to fight for and defend the Land of Israel. We have an army and a might and powerful one at that. It is something to take great pride in and to celebrate. While fighting is certainly not something that we look forward to or even want to take part in, when necessary we should understand that it is our sacred duty to fight.
And so as we sit squarely between the holiday of Shavuot that we will celebrate this Wednesday and Yom Yerushalayim which we celebrated this past Wednesday we should appreciate that the real Jewish hero is the one who can celebrate both. The real Jewish Hero is the person counting the days to the giving of the Torah, who learns and appreciates the Torah as god’s gift to us and the core value in our lives. And that very same person understand and appreciates that without an army in the sovereign land of Israel we would never had reclaimed Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and that without the army we would not be able to live as a people in our holy land.
That realization is slow in coming and not appreciated by all but we hope that a day will come when all Jews can celebrate both Shavuot and Yom Yerushalayim and maybe the next set of glasses and the next posters in the pizza store will portray some of those heroes as well.
