Tag Archives: alienation

Well, welcome, Rabbi. Last week you were in Israel. Now we are both in the Diaspora.

1:23 – AM:

That’s the topic. Okay, I’m looking forward.

1:26 – GS:

So, I looked back and we did an episode two years ago on exactly the same verses that we’re talking about now. It was called Driven Leaf from one of the phrases that are in the chapter that we’re going to read. And as I read through it; if you’re intrigued by the flowery language, by the emotive language that’s used to describe on the one side what it’s like to be with one’s God in one’s land, and on the other side to be without one’s God in exile, go listen to that other episode, because we’re not going to focus on the language. As I said in the intro, we’re going to focus on one word that was translated, not only in a unique way, but according to most authorities, the first time the word was used, it was coined in the translation. So here we go. We are in Leviticus 26. We’re going to start with 3. It says, If you follow my laws and faithfully observe my commandments, I will grant you rains in their season, so the earth will produce. The threshing shall overtake the vintage. I will grant peace in the land, and you shall lie down untroubled by anyone. I will give the land respite from vicious beasts. When you go out to war, five of you shall give chase to a hundred. A hundred of you shall give chase to ten thousand. Your enemies shall fall before you. I will establish my abode in your midst, and I will not spurn you. I will be ever present in your midst. I will be your God and you shall be my people. I am God who brought you out from the land of the Egyptians to be their slaves no more, who broke the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect. Ve’eshbor motot al u’lachem ve’olech etchem komamiyut. But if you do not obey me and do not observe all those commandments, I in turn will do this to you. I will wreck misery upon you, consumption, and fever. You shall sow your seed for no purpose, for your enemies shall eat it. I will set my face against you. You shall be routed by your enemies, and your foes shall dominate you. You shall flee, though no one pursues you. And if for all of that you do not obey me, I will break your proud glory. I will make your skies like iron and your earth like copper, and your strength shall be spent for no purpose. Your land shall not yield produce. If you remain hostile to me, I will go on smiting you sevenfold. It goes on. I will withdraw into your cities. I will send pestilence. It goes on and on with phrases that we are all too familiar with. But then in verse 33 it says, and you I will scatter among the nations. I will unsheathe the sword against you, your land shall become a desolation and your cities a ruin.

5:10 – GS:

So here is the first reference to not only punishing you in your land, not only giving you no harvest, not only having you work for naught, but actually scattering you among the nations. And it is here that the Septuagint translates, and it’s hard to even say translate. We’re going to do a search of many of the places that the Septuagint uses this word “Diaspora”, and we’ll see that it’s not literally attached to one specific word. But in the Greek, and it’s in the source sheet, it says, kia despore. Now, I am going to play a short recording of how it sounds in Greek, because we’re reading the Septuagint. We should actually hear and understand how it sounds. So here it goes. It’s going to read the verse with the word in it. And then I had at the end it repeat the word diaspora twice more. So give a listen. Che diaspero in massista etni. Keksanalosi imas epiporevomeni imakera, ke diasperoi. ke diasperoi

AM: That’s great.

GS: So now you heard it first on Madlik. In Deuteronomy 4.27, it says, I will scatter you among the peoples. And there the Septuagint translates different words the same way.

6:52 – GS:

In Deuteronomy  28.64, God will scatter you among all the peoples. So already, for those who used to go to the museum in Tel Aviv that features Rabbi Adam on a plasma screen, it used to be called Beit HaTfutzot. (The House of the Diaspora) The t’fitzah was spread out, scattered. That is the word that we’re using in Deuteronomy, but as I said before, it is translated in the Septuagint in the same way as the word in our verse here, which really says ve’ezrah bagayim. Ezrah means more, I think, to plant you. It kind of has the sense of planting seeds.

7:42 – AM:

Yeah, to plant you in the different places. Yes.

7:46 – GS:

And so, if you look at Psalms 147.2, it says, the Lord rebuilds Jerusalem. He gathers in the exiles. And there it says, Nidchei Yisrael yekanes. Nidchei Yisrael is translated as those who are in the diaspora. So what’s fascinating here is that if you look in Wikipedia and you look up the word diaspora, you will see that Greek scholars tried to find it in the great Greek writings, but it truly did not exist. I’m going to be in Venice in a few weeks, similar to the word “ghetto”, which was probably a word that was imposed upon the Jew in the Venice ghetto, it is a word that was birthed. It was coined to describe a Jewish condition. Diaspora is something that if you look at that article in the Wikipedia. You will see a list of people who are considered diasporas. You will find that there’s a Mexican diaspora. There is a Caucasian diaspora. There are so many ethnicities that talk about having a diaspora. But the Jewish people not only were the first, but the Greek-Jewish translators who created this world diaspora, coined it for that situation. And at the end of the day, the question is, what is different about the diaspora that they had to coin a new word? The word comes from two Greek words. Diasporo, I scatter, I spread about, is composed of dia, which is between though and across, and I sow and I scatter. So, it is kind of unique, Rabbi, that we are going to kind of look at the Chumash today through the eyes of those 70 Greek-speaking sages, who coined a new word to describe what potentially was a new social construct.

10:27 – AM:

Yeah, that’s so interesting. That’s all you need to say. The word was created to describe a new social contract. Okay, let’s go on. This class is worth it just to hear them say diaspora in Greek!

10:47 – GS:

Great. So, the beautiful thing about Bible study is that so many scholars have studied the Bible that they’ve created what is called a concordance. So, you can look up any Hebrew word and you can go to various concordances. There are Hebrew concordances, Jewish concordances, Christian concordances, and you can find every time that that word is mentioned. And because I noticed right from the start that the word diaspora wasn’t necessarily used to translate a particular word, but more of a situation, I decided to follow Strong’s Concordance and see where else not a particular Hebrew word occurred but a word that the translators of the Septuagint saw themselves putting the word. (see: Strong’s G1289 – diaspeirō) And so in Genesis 9, 19, we’re talking about Noah. It says, These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole world branched out. Me’elu naftza kol ha’aretz. Here, the Septuagint uses that same word, diaspora, which kind of makes sense, Rabbi, in terms of sowing seeds, right? It’s like we’re reading the birth of humanity and we’re studying the early genealogies of Adam and Noah and how the world was branched out. Here, it’s clearly not a punishment. We’re going to get very quickly to where it was a punishment. So here it’s not even something that’s negative. It continues in Genesis 10.32. These are the groupings of Noah’s descendants according to their origins by their nations from these nations branched out over the earth after the flood. Nifradu ha-gayim, the Septuagint translates it with the word diaspora. Nifrada comes from Lifrotz to like Havdalah, to divide. [נָפַץ (v) heb to shatter,  break,  dash,  beat in pieces(Qal)to shatter, shattering (infinitive), (Piel) to dash to pieces, (Pual) to pulverize, to scatter,  disperse,  overspread,  be scattered(Qal)to be scattered

dispersed (participle)) The division of humanity into tribes is part of this diaspora construct. And that’s why I said in the intro, it’s almost the creation of ethnicities, the creations of nations, the creations of different people. In Genesis 11.14, the Tower of Babel, and they said, come let us build a city and tower with its top to the sky to make a name for ourselves, else we shall be scattered all over the world. Ben nafut alpnei kol haaretz. Here, too, the Septuagint sees the seed of diaspora, and here you can definitely say, and in the story of the Tower of Babel, you can definitely sense a sense of diaspora is a punishment. But it’s also something that turns out to be part of the fabric of humanity. Then, in Genesis 11, 18, it says, God thus scattered them from there over the face of the earth, and they stopped building the city. Interesting, if you notice when I read the Parsha, when he punishes them, he’s punishing them even if they’re in the city. And here we have this city again, too, kind of interesting. A city is where you’re not spread out, where you’re densely populated. And it seems that we try, every time we try to be densely populated, In a sense, we’re trying to be a little bit like the generation of the Tower of Babel. We’re trying to create our strength in numbers and be together, and if we sin, if we get punished, God’s neferatsu. He spreads us out. It’s kind of fascinating, and I’ll stop in one more second, but clearly, what was this tower? It was the Tower of Babel. And God confounded their speech, and where was the first diaspora of the Jewish people? In Babylon. So if you want to talk in terms of early myths, ma’aseh avot siman l’banim, so here you have Babel is associated with the scattering, with the diaspora. It’s kind of an interesting little exercise, don’t you think, to see how these translators use this newly coined word?

15:26 – AM:

Can I ask a question?

GS: Sure.

AM: Why is it a punishment to be scattered? That’s taken for granted in the Chumash. But I’m asking a bigger question. Why is that true?

15:38 – GS:

Well, as I pointed out, in the case of Noah, where it uses that same word, I don’t think you can make a case that it was a punishment. So, my only answer to you, where my thinking is right now is, you know, the best punishment has a cure built into it (Restorative punishment). To just punish your child to sit in the room is punitive. But if I punish my child for not treating somebody nicely, by making them treat somebody nicely, that is a punishment, but it’s (restorative) also part of a cure. And what I’m thinking as we continue on this pathway and look at the texts, that I kind of agree with you. It is a punishment, but it’s also something that provides an impactful, profound lesson to the participants and those who are the observers. Do you buy into that?

16:37 – AM:

I buy into that. That’s exactly what I want to explore, that balance between punishment and lesson.

16:45 – GS:

So, before we even go there, I think that we don’t have to look to the Greeks or the Greek translators to find that this concept of being scattered, being divided, this question of dividing between things—God actually created the world by dividing between night and day and water and land and all that—it’s intrinsic. But clearly, the sense of being mefuzar, of being spread out like those seeds, and of course, getting back to your question, you know, if it’s a word that at its base is like sowing seeds, how much of a punishment can that be? That’s how life is born, correct? I mean, it has definitely a positive aspect to it. So if you go to Esther 3.8, the Megillat Esther, what does Haman say to Ahasuerus about the Jews? There is a certain people scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm whose laws are different from those of any other people and who do not obey the king’s laws and it is not in your majesty’s interest to tolerate them. So yes, we can focus on the canard and the trope of the anti-Semite, but we can also focus on what he saw and what was obvious. And yes, they were in the Babylonian diaspora, they were scattered, but they kept their laws and they kept this connection with each other. It’s descriptive as well as it’s critical, but clearly that’s who the Jew was. There are those that argue that the word ivri comes from the word avar, to pass over from the other side. There are those that link it to apiru, which was tribes who came from another place, Part and parcel of being an Israelite, of being Jewish, is being engaged in this, being a people that is not only a migrant, because as I said in the intro, the difference is that you are a people who reside elsewhere within a specific geographic location, but you want to be somewhere else. You aspire to be something else. It is part of our identity, I think. It’s a profound part of our identity.

19:22 – AM:

I think that’s real. I mean, there’s no question that that’s right. And, you know, and that’s related. I mean, and based on that idea, I think we want to go back. Avraham Ha’ivri, right? That it’s so much part of our identity that Abraham is referred to as the Ivri.

19:41 – GS:

Yeah.  Which even strikes you there as someone else. When he went to buy, when he went to buy the Kever Machpelah (Genesis 23: 4) , he was a Hebrew. When he went to fight (the five kings Genesis 14: 13), all of that, that’s who we were. We were people with a unique identity, living, and what’s fascinating is that so far we’ve seen a case of with Esther there in Babylonia. I’m going to read Exodus 1.8 now where we are in a diaspora in Egypt before we were even a nation. It says, A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph and he said to his people, Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Let us deal shrewdly with them so that they may not increase. Otherwise, in the event of war, they may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise from the ground.” Again, there was this sense that we were another living within, that we were not simply displaced people and were refugees. I think that’s the key point, and that’s the key innovation, I think, of this concept of diaspora, that you maintain your ethnicity, you maintain your identity, but you are nonetheless not in your chosen place.

21:05 – AM:

Yeah, I think that’s good means it’s about not being where you want to be. It’s being it’s for you’re forced to deal in a in an unnatural place, right? Something like that.

21:18 – GS:

Yeah. You know, I missed out on a Genesis 49, where the blessings are being given to the children, and all of a sudden, we have Shimon and Levi. And all of us are used to thinking of Levi as the tribe of the Kohanim, and that they don’t get a portion because maybe they’re a little bit like Buddhist monks. They go around, they live off tithes, they live off charity of other people, they’re Torah teachers. But in Genesis 49, it’s too close to what they did in terms of the revenge for Dina. And they’re getting cursed. So here is something interesting.

22:14 – GS:

Here they are scattered within their own land. Here they are landless within their own land. Here, Rabbi, it does seem to be a little bit about a punishment. But on the other hand, it’s a little bit of a cure, if you think in the terms of the tribe of Levi was landless, but it also didn’t join the army. They had a tendency to be maybe a little bit too militaristic. So, they were put in a different direction. But it is fascinating how once you start looking through the lens of being scattered and the diaspora, you start to read the texts in a different, in a totally different way.

22:55 – AM:

Yeah, that’s really interesting. This idea of diaspora, you know, and again, you know, all cultures talk about a diaspora. The Armenians talk about the diaspora, right? That’s come to mean something very specific, but it comes from us first.

23:16 – GS:

And we are the poster child. We have defined what a diaspora can be. You know, I said a second ago that you can be in the diaspora in your own land. I think the best example of that is Hanukkah. And on Hanukkah we sing a song, everybody knows it, it’s called Mo Otzor Yeshu Oti. And most people only sing the first stanza. But the truth is, there are one, two, three, four, five, six stanzas, and as you go through them, they are, correct me if I’m wrong, but they are talking about, is it the five galiot? That galut is another word, we haven’t mentioned it before, for being in exile, being in the diaspora. And that becomes fascinating because if you read the different stanzas, there is a stanza about Haman and Mordecai. There’s a stanza about the Babylonian. There is a stanza about the Greeks. (A stanza about Edom which is Rome) So even though the Jews were still inhabiting their own land, they were strangers in their own land. They were in the diaspora in their own land. So it really is a very powerful concept, and I’ll say this because we’re not really going to have enough time to get into everything. We’ve been talking about the Haredim over the last few weeks, and at one point I said, I scratched my head, how can you possibly live in a country and not consider that the soldiers are fighting for you and are your soldiers. And I think one of the insights that you need to understand is that the Haredim really, truly, absolutely believe that they are in the diaspora in the Land of Israel.

25:15 – AM:

Yeah, that’s a very important point, you know, that they make use of what Israel gives them, free education, free health care, you know, all of that. But they feel as if they’re in the diaspora. It’s like being in Lithuania of old.

25:33 – GS:

Absolutely. And so it does really, kind of like last week, we talked about not only what you can’t do in the Shemitah year, but then we asked the question, and since I’ve talked to people about it afterwards, they go, I never thought of the question of what you do do during the seventh year. Here, we talk so much about being redeemed and returning to the land. That I think that sometimes we miss out on talking about what the existence is outside of the land. And as you say, it’s not necessarily a punishment. It’s something that really, I think you can safely say that the Jewish people would not be who they are today without their experience of this diaspora. And I’m not saying it from the perspective of, and therefore the diaspora is important and it has to stand on equal legs. I am talking in terms of our shared history. You cannot understand Judaism and the Israelite journey without understanding this concept of diaspora.

26:43 – AM:

That is, that is right. And that’s really, that’s a great point. And it’s really interesting to bring it back to this week’s parasha, because that is what defines the tochakha. The tochakha, which is, you know, the curses, it’s all about being spread out in the land, is being forced to go into a diaspora. And of course, we observe that because that’s what we fast for on Tisha B’Av. We fast on Tisha B’Av because the Temple is destroyed. But because the Temple is destroyed, therefore we have to go into a diaspora.

27:19 – GS:

So I thought it would be helpful, there is a scholar named William Safran who actually set out six rules to distinguish diasporas from migrant communities, because that actually is what we’re talking about. There are many communities. I will say, for instance, that the Syrians that left Syria and now are in Europe, I’m not sure I get a sense that they plan on returning. I can’t speak for them, I don’t know, but clearly there are many refugee or migrant communities, I will say, that move from one area to another, and that’s the long and the short of it. So let’s listen to what he has to say, because it might give us an insight. These five, six criterias include that the group maintains a myth or collective memory of their homeland. They regard their ancestral homeland as their true home, to which they will eventually return. Being committed to the restoration or maintenance of that homeland, and they relate personally or vicariously to the homeland to a point where it shapes their identity. Fascinating if you think about it. You know, I think one of the myths that was punctured on October 7th, you know, there was one myth that we establish a state, we can defend ourselves (by ourselves). The other myth that was shattered was that there was a part of the Zionist dream that we would create a New Jew. We would create, by being an Israeli, we, and with our own land standing on our own two feet, we somehow had made a paradigm shift. And what every Israeli realized on the day of October 7th is that they were still Jews. They were being killed and butchered because they were Jews. The myth that a pogrom can only happen outside of Israel, it was shattered. So I think it’s also kind of timely to understand diaspora as a concept, as a social construct, also within the context of redemption and being in Israel and being part of Israel. It’s part and parcel. It’s the flip side, but it’s a side that doesn’t go away. And I think that you can easily, flippantly say that world Jewry stood by Israel. We never had a moment that we showed the importance and the connectiveness of the Jewish people as we did in the last six months, but I think you can go a little bit deeper than that, and that you can go so far as to say that the diaspora and the redemption experience are two parts of the same whole. And that we can never forget one and expect one to totally replace the other. That’s kind of my takeaway in terms of how deeply rooted it is even in the biblical narrative of creation and the creation of nations. And it’s what kind of we Jews—you said that we created this, and now there are so many other diasporas, but they’re modeled after who we are. Maybe that’s one of the reasons we’re hated so much, because in a sense, we show that man is both a part of something and apart from something. I don’t know. I think Anti-Semitism is not something that any of us will ever solve, but when we come across concepts like this, it makes you think in terms of the uniqueness of the Jewish people and how they are reacted to and interacted with.

31:09 – AM:

You know, I’ll just tell you that in Zionism, there was a big debate about how to deal with the diaspora. The question was, do we, do we, you know, want everyone to come to Israel? Or do we accept the fact that there’s Israel and then there’s the diaspora? There’s both. And I think that’s really your question about how do we deal with diaspora? Diaspora is what the Tochaka talked about, but how did Jews throughout history and how did Jews now with modern Zionism, how do they deal with the diaspora?

31:43 – GS:

And you know what’s fascinating? I heard, I was meeting with a charity; Amutah that I think very highly of, they’re visiting the States, and they say the night before they went to a gathering, a gala dinner of an organization for Israelis living in America. IAC So think of it, Rabbi, wrap your arms around this. We have diaspora Jews going to Israel. We have Israelis thinking that they have transcended the diaspora living in Israel. We have Jews in the Diaspora who understand the importance not only of Israel but of the Diaspora. And now we have Israelis coming to America and trying to figure out how, as Israelis, they need to make their mark in our Diaspora, because they don’t want—they don’t feel comfortable with the existing Jewish structures, whether it’s the synagogue, network, or it’s the UJA Federation. It is extremely, extremely ironic, and it’s a reflection and a refraction that just makes the whole picture so much more interesting, but it won’t, it’s not going to go away.

32:56 – GS:  

It’s a dialectic in the true sense of a dialectic.

AM: It’s amazing. I have to go now to my memorial service, but this was an amazing topic. I wish everybody a Shabbat Shalom and look forward to next week. Shabbat Shalom. See you all next week.

GS: I am going to close by reading just two paragraphs that were written by Chaim Bialik, who is considered one of the great Zionist writers, but he wrote an article called Jewish Dualism. And I’m going to quote from the beginning and the end, but it is absolutely mind-blowing. He writes as follows, If we investigate ancient Jewish times, and perhaps even its early history, we shall discover that two tendencies, on the one hand the desire to expand from the center, and on the other to contract toward it and cleave to it, No nation strives to be swallowed up in other groups as much as the Jews and, at the same time, to remain an entity, an entity whose least particle is still recognized Jewish. A nation which builds a ghetto for itself in its place of dispersion and adjusts its life to an alien environment, and, in a time of national emergency, permits itself to be killed over a minuscule change in its religion, a group which adopts itself to the ways of life of a whole world, but nevertheless remains a people dwelling apart, not reckoned among the nation. These things are well known.

He concludes, After wandering for thousands of years and after endless changes and re-evaluations, after influencing the whole world and being influenced by it, we are now, for the third or fourth time, once again returning to our land. And here we are destined to fashion a culture sevenfold greater and richer than any we have heretofore created or absorbed. And who knows, perhaps after hundreds of years we will be emboldened to make another exodus which will lead to the spreading of our spirit over the world and a city is striving toward glory.

This is a Zionist who is saying, and who knows, we will return to the land and we might leave it again. It’s just a fascinating enigma of the Jewish people. See you all next week. Shabbat shalom. And whether you’re in the diaspora or in the land of Israel, find your roots, love who you are, and grow, and let the force be with you. Bye-bye.