Jew as Metaphor

Well, Rabbi, welcome back for another week of Madlik Disruptive Torah.

How are you today?

AM: I’m excited.

You’re heading off to Mexico.

I’m heading off to China.

Here we go, okay.

GS: So as I told you when we were talking before the show, last night I went to the Anu Museum dinner.

And Anu used to be called Beit HaT’futzot, but it’s a wonderful museum on the campus of the Tel Aviv University.

And it really talks about the breadth and width of Jewish culture, religion, contributions to the world from the beginning up until the modern era.

And if you haven’t been there, when you go to Israel, go to see it.

But Brett Stevens spoke, and there’s one thing that he said that really intrigued me, because he was talking about the source of bad things for the Jews, otherwise known as anti-Semitism.

And he says he has identified two trends that we need to worry about.

One is Conspiracy Theories, which in a much larger sense is rumor mongering, is speaking untruths about situations, exaggerating situations.

And of course, I think there he was focused a little bit on the Right, if you want to look at US politics.

And the other thing he talked about was the Politics of Envy.

Those who talk about anyone who is successful as privileged, and what they ignore is the success part of it, because especially in America, if we stop admiring success, we are really cutting at the core of what makes America the promised land (Goldena Medina).

And of course, privilege is something that comes from the Left.

So I want you to keep that in mind, because today we are going to talk not only about, as I said in the intro, where the Jews are personified as failure, and are used as a kind of a proverb or a tag for depravity.

But for a second, we are also going to touch on what is another aspect of our parsha, which we have done in the past (see previous Madlik Episode: Chosen), which is the chosen people.

So we are going to look at the good and the bad together.

And so we are in Deuteronomy 26.

And God is saying, in the words of Moses, you have affirmed this day that God is your God, in whose ways you will walk, whose laws and commandments and rules you will observe, and whom you will obey.

And God has affirmed this day that you are, as promised, God’s treasured people, Am Segula, who shall observe all the divine commandments in the Koren translation instead of “treasured people for “his possession”.

The idea of the chosen people resonates very strongly in these parting lectures of Moses on the condition that you keep his laws.

But we’re going to focus on the rest of the talk today on the flip side of that.

And in Deuteronomy 28: 37, after describing what happens if you don’t obey the commandments, it says you shall be a consternation, a proverb, and a byword among all the peoples which God will drive you.

L’shamah, l’mashal, l’shenina, b’chol ha’amim.

Other translations, Fox says you will become “an example of desolation, a proverb, and a byword among the people”.

Koren says an “astonishment, a proverb and a byword”.

So, you know, we always talk rabbi about the tropes (of antisemitism), but this clearly is in the Bible, whether, you know, we’re talking about Moses and had the foresight as he sent the people across the Jordan River to understand that this was going to be the unfortunate luck of the Jewish people, or if this was written after the Babylonian exile at the time of Ezra, either way, whoever wrote these words  miraculously, and I’ll say that outright, had an insight into the future of the Jewish people, because we truly have become a parable….   there are people, nations in this world, who use the Jew as a metaphor who haven’t even met a Jew.

AM: I mean, isn’t that amazing?

That is amazing.

That’s true.

I mean, that last point is the most interesting point of all, because there are people who use the Jew who don’t even know what a Jew is.

GS: So we have become a caricature is the best word that I can say.

And the truth is that it is literally, I mean, it’s almost as though the text is looking for adjectives just as much as we’re looking for adjectives (to describe this unique phenomenon).

It uses three different words.

Rashi says, Thou shalt become an object of astonishment.

One of our translations (Koren) used that word.

And he uses the old French word for it. (etourdison)

Timahon תמהון, it’s like amazing.

Whoever will see you will be astonished about you.

You shall be a mashal, a proverb, when an extraordinary misfortune comes upon a man, they will say, this is like the misfortune that befell Mr. So-and-so.

It’s like, you know, this is a definition of how the word Jew and how the character of the Jew has been used for a thousand years.

And it’s predicted, I would say, here in our texts.

And a byword, says Rashi, this is an expression, the same meaning as in Deuteronomy 6-7, Vashinantem, and that you’ll speak often.

Here, this is absolutely amazing, Rabbi.

We are taking a verse that we say through two times a day in the Shema that says, Vashinantem levanecha v’dibarta bam, that you shall constantly impress the good words…  of the Torah on your children, l’dor l’dor.

And Rashi is hereby saying, this is the same word that’s used here, that the nations will impress.

You know, you hear the expression, drinking anti-Semitism from the tit of your mother.

They will impress this on their children on a daily basis.

I couldn’t but mistake the irony of using this word (in both instances), but that’s clearly what it is.

This isn’t like an out of the blue thing.

This will be a part of culture.

AM: That is such an interesting thing.

The difference between just doing it as an individual and the fact that it’s part of culture.

Okay, I think this is all very interesting.

And this is something that the Torah in Deuteronomy puts into play.

You know, this idea does not appear in the first four books of the Torah, right?

That’s an important thing to know.

This is Moses’ message for all generations.

GS: So David Tvi Hoffman, a great German commentator, says the following.

He says that, you know, his everybody is giving a different translation or a different synonym.

He says, and you will be a constant consternation.

That is, you will be the thing that people are mad about, passionate about, crazy about, like the end of the verse where it talks about all the terrible things.

They will be a mockery.

And he says, this is the curse that is mentioned in Jeremiah.

But then he goes on to say something literally that you just said.

He says, therefore, this curse goes beyond the following curses, because to the general disgrace will be added the disgrace of hunger.

In other words, we have encountered hunger.

We have encountered pestilence.

We have encountered losing one’s children in front of one’s eyes.

But what this is adding is the disgrace of all of that.

And I would say even more so, this is adding something that really doesn’t come up anywhere else, where this will be a figure of speech and a way of thinking, which is more important, of the nations.

And it’s an absolutely, I would say, the word that I’m looking for is insight.

What an amazing insight this ancient text has.

AM: Yeah, that’s great, that’s correct.

I mean, that was my point, is that it’s amazing that Moses, 3,500 years ago, is identifying this thing, that it’s just as alive today as it ever was.

That’s remarkable.

Yeah.

And Hoffman, references the verses in Jeremiah.

And there, in addition to say, le-mashal, and we’re going to talk about what a mashal or a parable is, he goes l’cherpa ul’mashal.

It’s like busha v’cherpa.

This is scorn.

This is something that is not simply spoken.

It is our impact, material impact, l’cherpa b’chol hagoyim.

It’s interesting that here we’re kind of seeing the two isolated cases.

We’re seeing if you do good, you’ll get a blessing, things will be great, you’ll be the chosen people, Am Segula, and then we see the klala (curse).

But the truth is, then the vision turns around in the days to come, so to speak.

When the redemption happens, Zachariah will says that, and just as you were a curse among the nations, O house of Judah and house of Israel, so when I vindicate you, you shall become a blessing.

And of course, this goes back all the way to Genesis, Rabbi.

When God is promising to Abraham, he says, I will make you a great nations, and I will bless you, I will make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.

It really gets to the crux of the matter that one way or the other, the Jew, it almost reminds you of Tevye’s question, “can’t you choose someone else for a change?”

We are the poster child of blessing, and we then become the flip side of that, is there’s the potential for us being at the other tip of the scale and the poster child for depravity.

AM: Yeah, I mean, this is related to what Brett Stevens speaks about, right?

It means the fact that the Jew is all of these things together, right?

They don’t all actually fit together, but the Jew is all of these things together.

GS: Well, I love that you came back to that, because again, where the chosen people gets us in trouble is when it’s looked upon as though it is a privilege.

And even if we look upon ourselves as privileged, and I think what comes out of these verses is it is a station that is only achieved by one’s following the commandments and living a certain type of life.

So it is, in a sense, achieved success.

And when one doesn’t keep those commandments, it is failure, only that for the Jewish people, it’s all on steroids, and it’s all on this world stage, and how the authors of this book could fathom that this, we would be that canary, so to speak, in the mineshaft, that we would be this barometer, and that upon us, it would go one way or the other.

But we’ve been hated for being successful too, as Brett Stevens says, when the politics of envy play out.

So it’s all, all the ingredients are there.

It’s really kind of amazing.

AM: It really is, I mean, right.

In light of what you heard last night, it really is amazing that it’s all right here.

He just needed to listen to Clubhouse to add this to his speech last night.

So before we really get into possibly how this plays out in modern literature, I want to spend a few minutes talking about Mashal.

You know, it’s famous, I even met an artist at an art fair recently, and she did a piece of art called Pardes.

And she said, you know what Pardes means?

The pardes that the four rabbis went into.

It’s Peshat, Remez, Drash and Sod.

The four ways of interpreting our texts.

Peshat is the simple meaning.

Remez is the hinted meaning.

Drash is interpretation.

Sod is the secret meaning.

So forth and so on.

So I’m not sure 100% whether allegory is there.

Maybe one could say that is remez or Sod.

I think that more people today, when they talk about remez and Sod, they talk about maybe Kabbalistic numeration or stuff like that.

But we don’t talk enough about the power of a story of Mishlei.

And this verse is really saying that the Jew will be a Mashal.

He will be this kind of proverbial Jew.

But that means there’s a story there.

So I want to spend, with your permission, just a few seconds talking about how Mashal plays out in our tradition.

I mean, first and foremost, we have a book of the Tanakh called Mishlei…. The Book of Proverbs.

It starts Mishlei Shlomo Ben David Melech Yisrael.

And Rashi says the proverbs of all his words are illustrations and allegories.

Dugma’ot u’Mishalim.

He compared the Torah to a good woman, and he compared idolatry to a harlot.

So we have this throughout our Bible, where God is comparing himself to us as a spouse, as a father.

We really do have a rich history, even in our own tradition, of using allegory, of Mishal.

I don’t think we talk about it enough.

AM: Yeah, I mean, Mashal, so Mashal goes back to the Bible, right?

When David sins with Bathsheba, so Nathan, the prophet, comes and gives him a Mashal, right?

Sometimes the best way to make an impression on somebody is not to criticize them directly, but rather to use a Mashal to use a parable.

II Samuel 12:1-7

(1) and the LORD sent Nathan to David. He came to him and said, “There were two men in the same city, one rich and one poor. (2) The rich man had very large flocks and herds, (3) but the poor man had only one little ewe lamb that he had bought. He tended it and it grew up together with him and his children: it used to share his morsel of bread, drink from his cup, and nestle in his bosom; it was like a daughter to him. (4) One day, a traveler came to the rich man, but he was loath to take anything from his own flocks or herds to prepare a meal for the guest who had come to him; so he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him.” (5) David flew into a rage against the man, and said to Nathan, “As the LORD lives, the man who did this deserves to die! (6) He shall pay for the lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and showed no pity.” (7) And Nathan said to David, “That man is you! Thus said the LORD, the God of Israel: ‘It was I who anointed you king over Israel and it was I who rescued you from the hand of Saul.

So, that’s something that’s part of our tradition from the beginning and something that’s continued throughout.

That’s good, yeah.

GS: So, I mean, like the Malbum says, that what’s a proverb, you talk about things that might be beyond your comprehension or you can’t touch it, A mashal is based on known things.

I think in the wonderful example you just brought of David, it’s maybe you show to a person things that are otherwise uncomfortable to him or things that he’s too close to to see by talking about a story of a shepherd and sheep and you say, do you agree?

And Nathan says, don’t you agree, and then David says yes and Nathan says, well, isn’t that exactly what you just did?

So I love your example because it’s a perfect example of how mashal is used.

So we’ve talked about this wonderful saying that Nachmanides brings, which is that ma’aseh avot siman l’banim, that the stories of the patriarchs or you could say of our founders, foundational stories, are a siman or a sign, you could almost say that it is saying that much of the Torah is allegorical.

The one Jewish thinker that really pushed that to the extreme was Philo of Alexandria.

And if you read his commentaries, he literally looks at, for instance, the story of the creation of Eve is not to be taken literally.

It’s a myth according to Philo, and it’s showing the origin of sense perception, which becomes active when mind is sleep.

Then he goes, the bringing of woman to man is the introduction of sense perception.

AM: Now, this is pretty complicated.

GS: It is very complicated (and contrived), and it gives you real sense of how he read it.

And did he read it, as I said before, where there were different ways of looking at the Torah as still another way?

Or did he believe this is the only way?

I think he thought it was a tool.

But again, here was somebody who used allegory to the extreme, was almost criticized for it.

But Mashal is a very powerful tool.

And I think with David, you picked the best one.

AM: Yeah, there’s no question that that’s the most striking one, isn’t it?

GS: Yep.

So as long as we’re talking about Mashal, there was a tradition in Eastern Europe.

I don’t know if it was elsewhere.

There were people called the Magidim, like the Dubno Magid, maybe also the Magid of Mezrich, who was a student of the Baal Shemtov.

Maybe even the Baal Shemtov.

Martin Buber brought Hasidism to the general public by publishing stories of the Hasidism.

The Dubno Magid would go from village to village, and he would tell these parables.

The Hasidim were rich with these parables.

I would say that while we can talk about the vilification of Jews by making us into caricature, we shouldn’t do that at the expense of realizing how important caricature is, how important mashal is.

There’s a mashal and a nimshal.

The mashal is the story.

The nimshal is the lesson that you draw from the story.

A famous story of the Dubno Magid is they asked him how he came up with all of his great stories and lessons.

So he says, it’s like a bullseye.

He told the story of someone who went to a forest and you see 15 trees with bullseyes painted on them, and every bullseye has the arrow exactly in the center of it, he went to find the kid who shot the arrows, and he goes, well, how did you do it?

How do you hit everyone right in the center of the bullseye?

And the kid says, well, what I do is I shoot the arrow and then I draw the bullseye around it.

And that’s a famous story to say how we all use parables to make our point.

I think that’s the takeaway here.

AM: That’s a great story.

I love it.

GS: So it really is, I think, you know, probably rabbis and sermons use parables from time to time.

But it’s definitely something that, and the fact that we create parables is, I think, something worth, we’re focusing on as we look at what forms our opinions and our impressions, whether we’re young, old or growing.

AM: I think that’s great.

I mean, this is, parables are such a good topic, right?

I mean, because we all know parables, and the reason we know them is because they’re so effective.

GS: You know, the distance from a parable to stigmatization is, unfortunately, very short… that same power is there.

That when you can create a parable about somebody or a group of people, you can no longer see them in the same way as you did prior to that parable.

It kind of sticks.

And there’s an amazing book by Jean-Paul Sartre.

In English, it’s called Antisemite and Jew.

And I think probably the most quotable line in it is,” if the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.”

And of course, he’s not talking about the physical Jew.

He’s talking about this caricature.

He’s talking about this need of humanity to have that scapegoat, to have that parable that they can raise their children on, that they can educate their culture on.

You know, it’s too…

I think it sells us short to say that, let’s say, why is a Jew the main character in James Joyce’s Ulysses?

Simply because he wanted to use the other.

Yes, the Jew is the other.

The Armenian is also the other.

There are a lot of others in this world.

But I think the character of the Jew has more depth to it than that.

It is the character of how does one succeed, at what expense does one live the human life, how, and there’s this need to stigmatize success and also to therefore caricature the failure in order to help others navigate what Sartre says, “far from experience producing his idea of the Jew, It was the later,( in other words, the idea of) the Jew that explained his experience.

If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.

Anti-Semitism is a view that arises not from experience or historical fact, but from itself.

It lends new perspective to experience and historical fact.

The anti-Semite convinces himself of beliefs that he knows to be spurious at best.”

“The anti-Semite” says Sartre “is afraid of himself, of his own consciousness, of his own liberty, of his own instincts, of his own responsibilities, of his solitariness, of change, of society and the world, of everything except the Jews.

He is a coward who does not want to admit his cowardice to himself.

Anti-Semitism in short is fear of the human condition.”

So, there’s a mouthful there and it’s an amazing book, but I think again in terms of the Magid of Dubno’s story says is what Sartre is arguing is that the anti-Semite draws the circle around his arrow.

He needs a certain straw dummy to project onto and to distance themselves from.

And what is fascinating again to me is that the ancient text of the Torah had this insight because it’s not only saying that the Israelites will become this stigma.

What it’s saying is that a stigma like this will exist.

It’s saying that there will be this kind of construct in society.

That the world, the nations will…. forget about calling it a Jew, forgetting about calling it an Israelite who has erred. That there is this need for this universal kind of caricature.

I find that is so fascinating.

AM: That is fascinating.

I mean, that’s just fascinating.

Let’s take it back to the Chumash.

What do you think Moshe had in mind?

GS: You know, it’s one of those situations that I think it’s so pristine.

And you know, it doesn’t just drop the word mashal.

It really kind of flushes out the idea.

And sure, you can make a case that stigmatizing another people, you know, that’s as basic as it gets, that’s tribal, that’s familial.

The McKenzie’s are good, the O’Brien’s are bad.

So that’s not new.

And so from that perspective, I could say, okay, so this is, it’s regional, it’s localized.

And that, they all experienced already, because after all, Moses and the children of Israel going through the desert, they already encountered a Amalek.

They created their own metaphor.

We Jews have our own metaphor for evil, and it’s called a Amalek.

The Moabites and the Egyptians, who maybe we have a love-hate relationship with.

But yes, in our tradition, Mitzrayim becomes a parable.

It’s a narrow place, for instance, and things like that.

So I think that yes, you’re probably correct.

We are probably reading more into it based on the history that followed.

But I certainly think that the way that this verse in particular characterizes it, as Hoffman says, they take it beyond just the generalized punishment, makes it fascinating to us.

And it does raise your question.

I think I have more questions than I have answers, but it raises your question.

What can you possibly believe the author of it was thinking?

What were the listeners who heard these words for the first time were thinking?

And in all probability, they were thinking, well, if we get taken to Rome, and we’re going to be put in a Jewish quarter, maybe, and we’ll be stigmatized, and we’ll be the laughing stock, or we’ll be the end of every curse, so forth and so on.

But it just strikes me, this is the basis of something that has really played out.

And maybe it’s because Christianity took these verses and popularized them.

That gets a little bit into Ruth Weiss’s theory that we Jews, by blaming ourselves for everything bad that happens to us, really gave a lot of fodder to our enemies who say you must be bad.

AM: Yeah, I mean, that’s interesting.

You go from Brett Stevens to Ruth Weiss, right?

So Ruth Weiss thinks that our mistake is we don’t have enough Jewish power, right?

That’s her thing, right?

That we need to be stronger as Jews.

That wasn’t Brett Stevens’ argument last night.

He made a different kind of argument.

He says we need to be proud.

He doesn’t want us to be strong.

GS: Well, yes and no, but I think the element that Ruth Weiss brings is that she says all of these verses where we blame anything, this old question of when bad things happen to good people, when we blame ourselves for who we have become or bad moments in our history, we’re giving fodder to the non-Jews who therefore, take this and make it into a caricature.

AM: I think it’s just a fascinating subject and to think that truly this verse is a launching point for the discussion is great.

GS: What I want to end with is I think if you had to characterize American Jewish literature, whether it’s Philip Roth or Saul Bellow (or Arthur Miller) or I’ll go to Canada, Mordechai Richter, many of them did something that was never done before.

They got into the head and the story of Jews who were clearly less than perfect, clearly who were louses.

And there’s an amazing article in Commentary Magazine, and it’s written by Philip Roth, and Writing about Jews is the name of it, and basically he is defending himself against Jewish critics who take him to task to portraying Jews negatively. So, for argument’s sake.

How could he have a Jewish person who’s an adulterer?

Why couldn’t he pick Mr. O’Brien?

And why did he have to pick Mr. Epstein?

And so in it, he says, and please look at the show notes and read the whole article. It’s fascinating.

He says, “at times they see wickedness”, meaning his critics.

“When I myself see energy, courage, or spontaneity, they are ashamed of what I see no reason to be ashamed of, and defensive where there is no cause for defense.”

Roth continues, “I write a story of a man who is an adulteress to reveal the condition of such a man.

If the adulterous man is a Jew, then I am revealing the condition of an adulterous man who is a Jew.

Why tell that story?

Because I seem to be interested in how and why and when a man acts counter to what he considers to be his best self, or what others assume it to be or would like it to be.

The subject is hardly mine.

It’s interested readers and writers for a long time before it became my turn to be engaged in it.”

But he ends by saying, “I might present my Jewish figures who are less than perfect, not as the stereotype of the Jew, but as a Jew who acts like the stereotype, offering back to his enemies their vision of him, answering the punishment with the crime.

Given the particular kinds of denials, humiliations and persecutions that the nations have practiced on their Jews, it argues for far too much nobility to deny not only the Jews like (his character) Grosspart exist, but to deny the temptations to be Grosspartian.”

So what he’s saying is we have the right ultimately to fail too.

He is a fact of Jewish experience and well within the range of moral possibilities.

So what he says is, and maybe this also gets to the crux of what our text is saying here, that it allows us as the listener, whether in the desert or on the banks of the Jordan or today in 2024, to hear about the Jew as wholly human and as failing and as succeeding.

And it’s important for the world to know that.

And if they got the wrong message, that’s their problem.

But I think what all of these authors did, and maybe it’s part of success of American Jewry, they felt that we are entitled to talk about ourselves in the fullest form.

And that maybe when a Jew fails, he fails as a Jew.

And there’s an insight into who we are (in failure) and success.

And of course that gets back into Mashal and Nimshal.

And it’s so part of our tradition, I think.

AM: I love the fact that we started with the success of the Jews and Brett Stevens.

And now we say when you fail, you have to fail as a Jew too.

That’s coming full circle, right?

I mean, I think that’s a very important thing.

We were successful as Jews, and when we mess up, we mess up as Jews too.

And we need to appreciate all of that.

I think that this is great.

And Mashal and Nimshal, sorry, I interrupted you.

GS: No, no, no.

And I think that’s what makes our texts so powerful.

And Tanakh (the canon of the Hebrew Bible) that we celebrated last night (at the ANU event) in terms of (Sasoon) Codex, it’s such a powerful book.

It has it all.

It’s all of the band-aids are ripped off.

And that is a powerful story that gets beyond sensational journalism (and conspiracies and stereotypes) and gets beyond either that you’re privileged or that you’re cursed.

It’s human, and it is one of the most human documents that there is, and maybe that’s the biggest argument for how divine it is!

AM: Amazing. Have a great trip to China. We’ll have a great trip to Mexico City.

I look forward to next week.

Shabbat shalom.

GS: Shabbat shalom.

Everybody enjoy reading this week’s Parsha, and we’ll see you all next week.