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Adam Gross

What Rabbi Sacks might have said about the prospective Gaza deal

The Torah is “our life and the length of our days” (Deut 30:20). Therefore, we repeatedly find that the weekly Torah reading guides us on topical issues of the moment.

This week’s prospective Gaza deal – to secure release of the Israeli hostages at the apparent cost of ending the war and giving Hamas free rein to maintain its governance and rebuild its capacity – goes to the heart of what it means to be Jewish, touching on some of the great tensions at the heart of our faith.

Of course no-one can really know what Rabbi Sacks would have said about the Gaza deal. I would defer fully to those who were closest to him in his life and his studies.

However, some of the thorny issues we must wrestle with are addressed head on in one of Rabbi Sack’s always brilliant parsha commentaries from the Covenant & Conversation series.

Writing on this week’s parsha, Shemot, (‘Of What was Moses Afraid?’), Rabbi Sacks observes the following, drawing on thoughts from his own teacher, Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch: [Relevant parts of the text extracted; emphasis in bold added by the author.]

“One sentence in this passage [about the Burning Bush] intrigued the Sages: ‘At this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.’ ….

“They noticed a parallel between these words and a later passage, after the Golden Calf, when Moses comes down from the mountain, having secured forgiveness for the people, and new Tablets to replace those he had broken when he first saw the Calf.

“The text reads: ‘When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the Two Tablets of the Testimony in his hands, he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord [Hashem]. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw that Moses’ face was radiant, they were afraid to come near him.’

“Pain, harm, suffering are evils. Yet there are circumstances in which we make our peace with them – when we know that they are necessary for some good. To be a parent is to be troubled by the cry of a child in distress, yet we willingly give a child medicine, and put up with its cries, when we know it will cure the illness from which the child is suffering. A surgeon must, at a certain point, treat the patient on the operating table as an object rather than a person, for were it otherwise he could not perform the surgery.

“A political leader may have to make a decision that will have a disastrous impact on some people – thrown out of work as a result of stringent economic policies, even killed on the battlefield as the consequence of a decision to go to war. One who shrinks from these choices because of a strong sense of compassion may be a good human being but a wholly inadequate leader, because the long term result of a failure to make tough choices may be far worse. There are times when we must silence our most human instincts if we are to bring about good in the long run.

“It was just this – my teacher argued – of which Moses was afraid. If he could ‘look at the face of God,’ if he could understand history from the perspective of heaven, he would have to make his peace with the suffering of human beings. He would know why pain here was necessary for gain there; why bad now was essential to good later on. He would understand the ultimate justice of history.

“That is what Moses refused to do, because the price of such knowledge is simply too high. He would have understood the course of history from the vantage point of God, but only at the cost of ceasing to be human. How could he still be moved by the cry of slaves, the anguish of the oppressed, if he understood its place in the scheme of things, if he knew that it was necessary in the long run? Such knowledge is divine, not human – and to have it means saying goodbye to our most human instincts: compassion, sympathy, identification with the plight of the innocent, the wronged, the afflicted and oppressed.

“If to ‘look at the face of God’ is to understand why suffering is sometimes necessary, then Moses was afraid to look – afraid that it would rob him of the one thing he felt in his very bones, the thing that made him the leader he was: his anger at the sight of evil which drove him, time and again, to intervene in the name of justice.

“Moses was afraid to ‘look at the face of God’. But there are two primary names of God in the Bible: Elokim [translated as God] and Hashem [translated as the Lord], (i.e. the so-called tetragrammaton, the four-letter name). Elokim, say the Sages, refers to God’s attribute of justice. Hashem refers to His compassion, His mercy, His kindness. At the Burning Bush, Moses was afraid to look at Elokim.

“His reward, years later [at the time of the golden calf], was that he saw “the form of Hashem.” He understood God’s compassion. He did not understand – he was afraid to understand – God’s attribute of justice. He preferred to fight injustice as he saw it, than to accept it by seeing its role in the script of eternity. When it came to kindness and mercy, Moses was inspired by heaven. But when it came to justice, Moses preferred to be human than Divine.”

Here’s my take, for what it’s worth.

The details of the Gaza deal are very painful to contemplate. For the millions of Israelis in favor of this deal, their hearts willing to cede everything necessary to secure the release of our dearly-missed brothers and sisters in captivity, may they be well, its consequences may not have been clearly understood. (Seth Frantzman and Andrew Fox have written lucidly on this subject). In fact, perhaps the reality is, Israelis right now simply do not want to understand the consequences. They are afraid to do so, just like Moses.

About the Author
Adam Gross is a strategist that specialises in solving complex problems in the international arena. Adam made aliyah with his family in 2019 to live in northern Israel.
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