Beha’alotecha 5781 – The Best Things In Life Aren’t Free

As the Jewish people wandered through the Sinai desert, they began to complain (what else is new!). One of their complaints in particular is almost comically tragic: (Bamidbar 11:5) – “We remember the fish that we used to eat for free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic”. For free! (“Hinam”, in Hebrew). Rashi comments that of course the food did not in fact come for free. It came in exchange for forced labor! Rashi exposes the true underlying psychology behind their bizarre nostalgia: “hinam min hamitzvot” – they really missed being free from the Commandments.

We can universalize Rashi’s comment as meaning “free from responsibility”. A slave of course has numerous tasks, but no real responsibility because responsibility, as represented by the covenant of mitzvot, implies choice (“Behold, I place before you the Good and the Bad, the Life and the Death…so that you shall choose Life”). Sometimes some people prefer slavery to responsibility. At least then your choices are narrowed, and your anxiety therefore curtailed. That was the sin of that generation. And so, God babied them, as they required: He rained down magical food from Heaven (the Manna), built them ready made huts to dwell in (Sukkot), protected them with magical Clouds of Glory. Their children would be ready to be sovereign in the Promised Land, but not them.

The word hinam means “free”; in its connotation as an adjective; free of cost. But freedom as an adverb, as a state of being, is represented by the word herut. “No one is free except he who engages in Torah” (ie, he who is engaged with grappling with his/her set of ideals, responsibilities, and principled choices), so teaches Pirkei Avot.

Herut and hinam are two very different things.

There appears to be a line of thought among some young and misguided American Jews that if only the State of Israel didn’t exist, we would not have to contend with antisemitism anymore. This was the apparent line of thinking of the comedian Sarah Silverman when she tweeted, in response to the recent violent attacks on Jews all over the country: “Jews in the Diaspora need allies. WE ARE NOT ISRAEL!”

Jews in the diaspora need allies. WE ARE NOT ISRAEL. And we sure as fuck aren’t the Israeli government. (Thank you to the mensch in grey) https://t.co/JtRbvBr1v4

— Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) May 19, 2021

Considering that close to half the world’s Jews live in Israel, and a strong majority of the other half support it in some way, it is simply not the case that one can so neatly separate Jews from Israel. But for the sake of the argument, I’ll accept Silverman’s premise. Perhaps it is indeed the case that if only we’d stop peskily asserting our right to simply exist as a nation in our Homeland, free from genocidal terror, that the Jews in the diaspora would be left alone.

I suppose this is true of anything in life: if you stopped asserting your rights and needs, you’d likely be free from the need for confrontation. Your life would be free of cost and sacrifice. This would be a state of hinam. But you wouldn’t have freedom, herut. And neither would the Jewish People, without the State of Israel.

“Today we are slaves, next year we will be free (bnei horin); today we are here, next year in the Land of Israel”; begins the Magid narrative of the Hagadah. We always knew that our herut in Israel would entail struggle, cost and sacrifice. Bamidbar 10, also from this week’s parsha:

When you are at war in your land against an aggressor who attacks you, you shall sound long blasts on the trumpets, that you may be remembered before the LORD your God and be delivered from your enemies.

I imagine those long blasts on the trumpets sounded just like the sirens that people in Ashdod and Ashkelon heard last week, giving them about 65 seconds to run for shelter from the rockets raining down. Thank God for the miracle of the Iron Dome.

File the following under things I like to teach that most Jews don’t know: Our parsha speaks of the Jews observing Pesach in the Sinai Desert. The Talmud tells us that the Jews only observed Pesach in the Sinai desert that one time, on the one-year anniversary of the Exodus, as a special dispensation for that occasion alone. They didn’t celebrate Pesach for the next 38 years, until they reached the Promised Land – because the Exodus was not considered to be complete until that point. On the haftorah of the first day of Pesach (when most people are asleep or hung over from the previous night’s seder) we read from Joshua 5:

Encamped at Gilgal, in the steppes of Jericho, the Israelites offered the Passover sacrifice on the fourteenth day of the month, toward evening. On the day after the paschal offering, on that very day, they ate of the produce of the Land, unleavened bread and parched grain. On that same day, when they ate of the produce of the Land, the manna ceased. The Israelites got no more manna; that year they ate of the yield of the land of Canaan.

The manna they’d eaten in the desert was free, in the sense of free from cost and toil. But only once they ate from the produce of their own land, which they had to work to produce, were they considered to be themselves in a state of freedom. That’s when the Exodus was complete, 40 years delayed. The coins produced by Bar Kochba read “year one/year two to the Liberation of Jerusalem” (Herut Yerushalayim). Sadly, that liberation did not last. But Bar Kochba understood at least that freedom comes at great cost.

I’ve been horrified and even traumatized by the antisemitic violence of the past week. One source of comfort I draw is in telling myself that if this is the price of standing up for our right to national liberation as a people, I’ll accept it. I’d rather have herut than hinam. We recognize the word hinam from another phrase which is deeply tied into the idea of our sovereignty in the Land of Israel, or more specifically, to our loss of it: sinaat hinam. Sometimes translated as baseless hatred; more accurate I think to render as “uncontrolled hatred”; undisciplined rampant, and “free”. Uncontrolled connotes chaos, and therefore the loss of sovereignty and order by definition. There was a popular informal slogan in the army when I served as a chaplain: freedom isn’t free. That phrase became so trite and cliché, that I imagine it probably sounds quite lame to most people today. I think South Park even made a parody of it. So be it. But it’s true, isn’t it? As clichéd as it is, perhaps the Hebrew version can be “herut isn’t hinam”. Maybe somebody can put that on a T-Shirt.

Don’t ever confuse freedom with free of cost.

And why are we so willing to pay that high cost, much of the world seems to wonder? Wouldn’t or shouldn’t we rather live without confrontation, without sacrifice? The most concise answer I’ve seen of late was provided by a Vietnamese general, as quoted in an article in Times of Israel:

In the mid-1990s, two IDF major generals were coming to the end of their long and storied military careers…

They applied for visas and made a special request to the Vietnamese authorities: to meet General Vo Nguyen Giap. …

When the Israelis rose to leave, Giap suddenly turned to the Palestinian issue. “Listen”, he said, ”the Palestinians are always coming here and saying to me, ‘You expelled the French and the Americans. How do we expel the Jews?’ The generals were intrigued. “And what do you tell them?’’ “I tell them,” Giap replied, “that the French went back to France and the Americans to America. But the Jews have nowhere to go. You will not expel them.”

He was not a righteous man, this Giap, but I suppose he had some wisdom. As we lament the cost and sacrifice that is occasionally unjustly and outrageously extracted from diaspora Jewry for supporting Israel, let us also find space to celebrate the fact that this cost derives from our resolute and undeterred willingness to support the freedom of our brothers and sisters in Israel; Let us therefore continue to pray for the day, as we always have, that Jews and Arabs can both live in a sense of peace and liberation together in Eretz Yisrael. Amen.