Salt or Sulfur? It’s Our Choice

You are all standing today before G-d, your G-d — the leaders of your tribes, your elders, your sheriffs, every Israelite man, our young children, your womenfolk, and your converts who are in your camp, from your woodcutter to your water-drawer… [Deuteronomy 29:9]

On the day of his death, Moses, as told in our weekly Torah portion Nitzavim, gathered the entire Jewish people — from the highest to the lowest. Even former Canaanites, seeking to avoid the imminent war in what would become the Land of Israel, were included after conversion. The aim was to enter into another covenant with G-d as millions of Israelites prepared to become a divine nation.

The idea of a covenant was not new. The patriarch Abraham entered into such an arrangement with G-d some 400 years earlier. Moses led the Jewish people into a covenant on Mount Sinai weeks after their liberation from Egypt. The formula was the same: The people formed two lines and then took turns walking in between. This would be repeated when Joshua and Samuel became leaders.

Finally, G-d, in the ultimate identification with His people, passes through as well. It was an act that represented the survival of a small but divine nation. Regardless of any tragedy, the Jewish people would go on and eventually witness the light from heaven. G-d and His people have been inexorably linked so abandonment would be impossible.

Since He spoke regarding you and swore to your forefathers that He would not exchange their descendants for another nation, He is binding you with these oaths so that you will not antagonize him, since He is unable to separate Himself from you. [Rashi on Deuteronomy 29:12]

Hezekiah Ben Manoach lived some 200 years after Rashi in France, and by the time he was 20 wrote a commentary called the Chizkuni, in memory of his father whose right hand was severed by the church that tried to convert the Jews. The Chizkuni quotes Rashi, Rambam, Ibn Ezra, Midrash, usually without attribution. Hezekiah explained that through the anonymity of his sources he sought to “glorify the great with the small.”

Based on Deuteronomy 29:22, the Chizkuni says the Jewish people contain two properties. When they follow G-d, they are akin to salt, which because of their strong ionic bonds can resist the hottest of flames. When the people abandon G-d, they are comparable to sulfur. Like salt, sulfur is odorless. But fire can rapidly consume sulfur. The resulting gas, sulfur dioxide, is toxic and explosive.

Had they observed the Torah they would have stood before me like salt, that which fire cannot consume. Now, that they don’t observe it, the fire that emanates from the Torah will consume them like sulfur, that which fire consumes. [Chizkuni on Deuteronomy 29:22]

The Jewish people have been burned by heavenly blazes throughout history. Sometimes the fire exploded and rapidly took the lives of many Jews as in the pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023 or the war on Yom Kippur 1973. But the fire never burned hotter or longer than during World War II. How does a nation fighting a two-front war manage to kill more than six million Jews in less than six years? During the recesses at Nuremberg, even some Germans asked that question.

The Talmud regards all misfortunes as the result of sin, including the destruction of the First and Second Temples. Still, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the rebbe of Lubavitch, could not fathom that G-d would allow the killing of his people for their sins. In his words, “Even the Accusing Angel himself could never find enough sins in that generation to justify the extermination of six million holy martyrs with such unspeakable cruelty.”

The language of Nitzavim, however, is uncompromising. G-d has turned a sinful Israel into an inferno. Everything has been destroyed, and the land is barren — the result of divine rage.

‘Everything is sulfur and salt! This nation’s entire land is burned up! It cannot be sown, nor can it grow anything; not even any grass will sprout from it. It is similar to how G-d overturned Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Tzevoyim in His fury and in His rage.’ [Deuteronomy 29:22]

The key word is “everything.” The assimilated and Christianized Jews of Germany and Austria were stripped of their gentile identity and sent to Auschwitz. But so were the devout Jews of Poland and Hungary. They didn’t commit the same sin, so why did they share the same fate?

Although he lived 700 years before the Holocaust, the Chizkuni has an answer. It wasn’t G-d who started the fire that destroyed the Jews. It was the Torah itself. And perhaps the Torah was most furious regarding those who saw themselves as devout Jews.

For centuries, the yeshiva stood at the apex of Jewish society. It produced generation after generation of those who ranged from simply devout to the scions of scholarship. But in the mid-19th century, a shift became perceptible. Great institutions such as Mir, Telshe and Volozhin catered to the gifted and wealthy. The tens of thousands of ordinary youngsters had to make do with makeshift schools that failed to provide food, shelter or even qualified instructors.

The worst hit were the children — many as young as 10 sent away by their poverty-stricken parents to communities that no longer wanted them. They slept on the benches of synagogues in rags. They went hungry for days on end because they couldn’t find hosts. They were forgotten.

The yeshiva has been going down for several years; it’s falling lower and lower — nobody knows why. the town has no love for us; it has no faith in our studies nor in our fear of G-d. We’re a burden on them… [Eating Days. Lamed Shapiro. Translated into English in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories. Irving Howe, Eliezer Greenberg, editors. Viking Press. New York, 1954]

What happened to the masses of urchins? A few continued despite the hardship. Many if not most left the yeshiva, shaved their beards and ear locks, removed their skullcap and sought work and life among the gentiles. And that was the state of affairs on the eve of World War II. Then came the sulfur.

Our sages say that the Jewish nation has one means of defense — not the Bar Lev Line, the wall in Judea and Samaria, the Silicon Valley-age barrier along the Gaza Strip or the Iron Dome. Our defense is the Torah. When we observe it, support its scholars, we become invulnerable. When we abandon the students — whether the rabbis or the young children — we become ripe for tragedy. It is the basis of the covenant presented by Moses for eternity.

I am not making this covenant and administering this oath on G-d’s behalf solely with you,
but with those standing here with us today before G-d, our G-d, and with those who are not here with us today. [Deuteronomy 29:13-14]