OzTorah

What grumblers the people of Israel were!

The wilderness was not too hospitable, the food did not satisfy everyone; even Egypt seemed pleasant by comparison.

They even said they missed the fish which they ate in Egypt chinnam – freely.

Ramban thinks fish was so plentiful that the Egyptians gave it away free, Ibn Ezra says it was not actually free but inexpensive.

But the sages argue that if the Egyptians refused the Israelites straw to make bricks, why would they give them fish?

No, they say: the fish was free of mitzvot.

They mean that things had changed after the Exodus and now the people had responsibilities and commandments. With the fish came a sting in the tail.

There were laws of honesty: you might not steal another person’s food. There were laws of charity: others also had to have food. There were duties to God: you had to make a b’rachah.

Maybe in Egypt one was free of all this. But is it not better to be out of the house of bondage with dignity restored and a chance to reach for the stars?

Q. May a Jew who has married out of the faith be a member of a synagogue board of management?

A. The Torah (Deut. 7:3) prohibits intermarriage. Maimonides codifies this as the rule (Hilchot Issurei Bi’ah 12:1).

Nonetheless, a Jew who has “married out” remains Jewish and when he dies may be buried as a Jew.

The Talmud (Sanh. 44a) is clear that an Israelite, though he has transgressed, is still an Israelite and is obligated to observe the mitzvot, but most congregations deny him any honours because his marriage has offended against what the synagogue stands for.

This policy is endorsed by Saadya Ga’on (Otzar HaGe’onim) who says that a person’s communal status depends on his birth or conversion, regardless of his degree of observance.

Rabbi Judah Greenwald (Zichron Yehudah, vol. 1, no. 45) finds no strict rule against calling such a person to the Torah but adds that a community may and should choose to impose sanctions on him.

Until recent times it was unthinkable for a person who had married out to seek to join a synagogue board, but now that it does occasionally happen, a congregation has a right to deny him membership of the board as a matter of principle and policy.

Some synagogues refuse even to let such a person be a member of the congregation. In 1945, Chief Rabbi JH Hertz and the London Beth Din sought to introduce such a rule in the United Synagogue in London but the United Synagogue did not formally accept their ruling.

Their basis was a technicality that Hertz had not acted as Chief Rabbi, in which case his rabbinical rulings would be binding on the United Synagogue, but as chairman of the Beth Din, whose decisions at that time were not automatically followed by the United Synagogue.

The priestly blessing, like many of our prayers, ends with shalom.

Everyone knows what shalom means, or rather, everyone has their own definition and their own recipe.

But do you know how the thrush and nightingale defined shalom?

This is the story.

There was a meeting of the animals and birds in the forest.

The lion told the others that they all had to listen to him because he was the king.

He explained that this was because he could roar much louder than any of them could.

To prove it, he emitted such a huge roar that it made the rest of the animals and birds jump with fright.

After a few minutes, when the echo had died away, the little thrush said quietly, “Yes, lion, it is true that you can produce a much bigger roar than anyone else, but your voice is only strong at the beginning.

“It gets weaker and less audible the further away one is. A mile or so away, no-one can hear you at all.

“Compared to you, my voice is much weaker, but when I begin to sing, all the other birds join in and after a few moments the whole forest is alive with the sound of music.”

What does this tell us about peace?

The way to peace is not through a big roar that scares everyone else into submission and obedience, but through the sweet sounds of people joining in the music of harmony.

The haftarah relates the story of the birth of Samson.

God tells Samson’s mother, “The child shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb” (Judges 13:5).

The nazir lives an ascetic life without wine or pleasures. But to be a nazir “from the womb” seems a tall order.

Gersonides explains that God foresaw that Samson would be a sensual, passionate man, who even from birth had to be kept to a strict discipline.

Whether this helped in the end is a matter of opinion; it may be that tragic as his end was, things might have been far worse without the strict controls that started the moment he was born.

This leads to another question in relation to our own children.

We bring them up as Jews from the moment of birth; indeed even before birth a child can be influenced by the spiritual choices made by its parents.

But was the child given a vote about being Jewish? Is not Jewishness something that we impose, as it were, regardless of the child’s own feelings and desires?

In one sense, the answer is “yes”. But on the other hand no-one consulted the child about other things either – about whether to be born at all, whether to be born to these particular parents, and whether to inherit a particular genetic make-up or not.

Yet there is a halachic principle that one may benefit a person even in their absence – zachin l’adam shello b’fanav (Kidd. 23a etc.).

So we may be said to have a right to benefit a child with the gift of life, identity and a spiritual heritage.

We can only hope and pray that the child will grow up to cherish these gifts and regard them as blessings.

Q. Which takes priority – religious or secular law?

A. We have a principle, dina d’malchuta dina, “the law of the land is the law”.

Enunciated in the Talmud several times, it does not override religious law but is part of it in situations in which the regime has a direct interest. Thus if the government tells a Jew to put butter on a steak, it is intruding upon religious law and is out of order.

In some countries where shechitah was banned, Jews had no choice but to suspend the performance of shechitah – but the fact that they would not eat t’refah meat was their business and not the government’s.

However, the government has a direct interest in securing enough taxation revenue to keep the country going, so dina d’malchuta dina tells a Jew that paying taxes is not only a government but a religious requirement.

Generally in a democratic society the two legal systems co-exist and indeed the secular law is of assistance to the religious law.

There is a halachic question concerning the law of the State of Israel. As religious Jews see it, every aspect of Israeli law (torts, criminal law, property law, commercial law, etc.) ought to be halachic, and when the State was in its infancy various rabbinic experts urged this.

In the event, the Knesset enacted a Foundations of Law Act which requires reference to Jewish legal principles when there is a gap in the law, but though some derivations from halachah have entered the law of the State, many problems remain.

Some say that Israeli law has the status of dina d’malchuta, which would endow government legislation with Jewish legal status.

A major theological and ethical issue arises when there is a conflict of duties between obedience to God and obedience to the government.

If a government imposes on its people racist, discriminatory or immoral requirements which conflict with Biblical and religious ethics, must a Jew obey?

One view is that dina d’malchuta cannot apply to a country which has a “wicked government” – a phrase the rabbis used for their Roman overlords – but whether a modern democratic nation can be tarred with this brush is debatable.

America involved itself, for example, in controversial wars ranging from Vietnam to Iraq, and though many citizens profoundly disagreed with the decision to go to war and used adjectives which included “wicked”, it is impossible to deem the United States a “wicked government” in halachic terms.

The advantage of a democratic society is that there are built-in ways of legitimate protest, but then the issue is how many good, loyal members of the military have to lose their lives before a fragile policy is changed.

Further, political issues are rarely straightforward and simple, and the populace is often not fully enough informed to enable them to exercise a wise judgment.