‘Forty-Two’ Parashat Ekev 5784

One of my favourite parts of the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” concerns a simple answer to a difficult question. “Deep Thought” was a supercomputer created by a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings that was programmed to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. After 7.5 million years, Deep Thought had finally arrived at an answer. At a festive “Day of the Answer”, Deep Thought revealed that the answer was “forty-two[1]”. Suddenly, it began to dawn on people that they had never considered what question they had asked it to answer.

One week before his death, Moshe gives the Jewish People all the information they need in order to become [Shemot 19:6] “A Kingdom of Priests and a Holy Nation”. He even reveals to them the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything [Devarim 10:12-13]: “Now, O Israel, what does G-d ask of you? Only to fear G-d, to walk in all His ways and to love Him, and to worship G-d with all your heart and with all your soul”. Forget about those six-hundred and thirteen commandments. Don’t get bogged down in the details. Here is your “forty-two”: What G-d really wants is for you to fear Him. And to walk in His ways. And to love Him. And to worship Him with unbridled passion. Well, it certainly looks like Moshe is telling the Jewish People is that there is no shortcut. All G-d wants from them is to keep the Torah.

Other than the disappointment of there being no free lunch, the Jewish People could have chided Moshe for another reason. “All you have to do is to fear G-d”. All you have to do? I beg your pardon, but since when is fearing G-d a straightforward task? Only after our forefather, Abraham, nearly offers his son Isaac up on an altar, sacrificing all that he had and all that he would become, only because G-d had told him so, does G-d say to him [Bereishit 22:12] “For now I know that you are a G-d fearing man, as you did not withhold your son, your only one, from Me.” If attaining the level of a “G-d fearing man” requires the sacrifice of one’s only child, I personally would rather leave fearing G-d for other people, thank you very much. The Talmud in Tractate Berachot [33b] puts a ribbon on it: “Is fear of Heaven a minor matter that it can be presented as if G-d is not asking anything significant?” The Talmud answers, “Indeed, for Moshe fear of Heaven is a minor matter. As Rabbi Hanina stated: It is comparable to one who is asked for a large vessel and he has one, it seems to him like a small vessel because he owns it. However, one who is asked for just a small vessel and he does not have one, it seems to him like a large vessel.” For Moshe, fear of G-d came naturally. For everybody else, not so much.

But this begs a question: If the average person has far more difficulty fearing G-d than Moshe, how, then, could he ask them to fear G-d the same way he did? That would have been an impossible task. Indeed, the Torah testifies [Devarim 34:10] “There was no other prophet who arose in Israel like Moshe, whom G-d knew face to face”. Did Moshe really believe that the rest of the Jewish People were as spiritually elevated as he was? And if he did not, couldn’t a case be made that Moshe was turning Judaism into an elitist faith in which the Torah is reserved only for the best and the brightest? Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter[2], writing in “Sefat Emet”, answers that every Jew has a small spark of Moshe in his soul. Each of us is far more spiritually advanced than we give ourselves credit for and each of us is capable of attaining Moshe’s fear of G-d, if not quantitatively then qualitatively. I would like to propose an alternate way ahead but in order to do so, we require a crash course in humility.

The Torah describes Moshe as being [Bemidbar 12:3] “Very humble, more than any other man on the earth”. This seems to fly in the face of what we know about Moshe. He was a consummate leader, a great sage, and he attained a closeness to G-d never to be replicated by any other human. What did he have to be humble about? The answer lies in the definition of humility. Does humility require self-nullification? Not necessarily, says Rabbi Abraham Twerski, a brilliant Torah scholar who was simultaneously a world-renowned psychiatrist, specializing in drug rehabilitation[3]. In his lifetime, he published over thirty books on stress, self-esteem, and spirituality, as well as chemical dependence. Rabbi Twerski maintains that a person can be humble while still retaining his self-esteem. Self-esteem comes from knowing what one has accomplished. Humility comes from knowing what one has not yet accomplished, although he is capable of doing so. A person should be proud of who he is and what he has done but he must always remain cognizant of all that still needs to be done. Humility does not spring from self-abnegation. It springs from self-confidence.

Now that we understand the definition of humility, we can understand how critical humility is to the acquisition of knowledge. The Talmud in Tractate Berachot [56a] teaches that G-d grants wisdom only to a person who already possesses wisdom[4]. This statement leads to a paradox of sorts. A person who already possesses wisdom has a clear path to further G-d-given  wisdom and so his “wisdom factor” will be a monotonically rising function. But for the person who has no knowledge at all, it seems that he will remain eternally without knowledge. To borrow a term from Peter Thiel, how does this person go from zero to one so that he can begin to accrue knowledge? Rabbi Chaim of Volozhn[5], writing in his monumental “Nefesh HaChaim” [4:5], points to a verse in Psalms [111:10] “The beginning of wisdom is the fear of G-d”. Rabbi Chaim posits that in order to activate the process of Divine access of wisdom, a person must first fear G-d. What does fearing G-d have to do with attaining wisdom? A person can learn only if he admits that he does not have all the answers. He will attain wisdom only if he searches for wisdom. The Talmud is teaching us that a person who earnestly strives to learn will be blessed with wisdom.

Now we can begin to tie things together. Moshe was more spiritually advanced than any other human. This means that far less remained unknown to him than to any other human. The inevitable conclusion must be that if Moshe could remain humble, then so could any other human. We have so much more to learn than Moshe – we have not achieved nearly as much of that of which we are capable. Moshe was not speaking down to the rest of the Jewish People, rather, he was implementing an a fortiori (kal va’chomer) argument: If he could still fear G-d, then certainly so could anybody else.

One last piece remains in our puzzle. What is the purpose of the list of requirements that follows the “trivial” requirement of fearing G-d – imitation of G-d, love of G-d and worship of G-d?  I suggest that these three requirements do not, together with fearing G-d, constitute an overarching list of requirements. Rather, the verse is presenting an if-then relationship: If you fear G-d, then you will be able to imitate Him, to love Him, and to worship Him. The fear of G-d is a necessary first step in this process. Only if a person fears G-d, only if he accepts upon himself a Higher Authority, only if he unabashedly admits that there is much that he does not yet know, only then will he be able to meaningfully deepen his relationship with G-d. And that is the real Jewish “forty-two”.

Ari Sacher, Moreshet, 5784

Please daven for a Refu’a Shelema for Shlomo ben Esther, Sheindel Devorah bat Rina, Esther Sharon bat Chana Raizel, and Meir ben Drora.

[1] Interestingly, 42 is also the numeric value (gematriya) of the word “Google”.

[2] Rabbi Yehuda Leib lived in Poland in the later half of the 19^th century. He became the leader of the Gerer Hassidic sect.

[3] Rabbi Twerski died three years ago.

[4] The Talmud brings prooftexts from Shemot [31:6] “all the wise hearted into whose hearts I have instilled wisdom” and Daniel [2:21] “He grants wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who know understanding”.

[5] Rabbi Chaim lived in Volozhn, Belarus, at the turn of the 19^th century. The “Nefesh HaChaim” is a sort of Lithuanian response to Hasidism, particularly to Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi’s “Sefer ha’Tanya”.