OzTorah

Do I really have a say in what happens in my life?

If I search this week’s sidra for an answer, it might appear to support the old saying, Alles is bescherrt – “all is preordained”.

The sidra talks about Pharaoh and not about me, but the principle ought to be the same. It says in the name of God, “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart” (Ex. 7:3). The implication seems to be that Pharaoh’s hard-heartedness was God’s doing and that he had no say in the matter.

Yes, it is true Pharaoh had previously hardened his own heart, but why does God now step in and turn him into a royal puppet on a string?

The long-established principle of Jewish theology is enunciated by Rabbi Akiva, who said, “All is in the hands of Heaven except for the fear of Heaven” (Avot 3:15).

It sounds like a paradox. It is saying both that we have and do not have free will, and how can both assertions be true?

One answer is to distinguish between the external event – i.e. what happens to us, which is often beyond our control – and the internal event – i.e. how we handle what happens to us. Even so the subject bristles with difficulties, but it is still a helpful approach.

Mr Micawber always hoped that something good would be just around the corner, but he could not be certain.

Nor can we or anyone else be certain of what is round the corner, because most of the time it is not up to us. But our moral and spiritual decisions are another matter.

As the great physicist, Sir James Jeans, said, “We have an intuitive belief that we can choose our lunch from the menu or abstain from housebreaking or murder; and that by our own volition we can develop our freedom to choose. We may, of course, be wrong. The old physics seemed to tell us that we were, and that our imagined freedom was all an illusion; the new physics tells us it may not be.

“It may give us room for such freedom as we have always believed we possessed; it seems possible that in it we can mould events to our desire, and live lives of emotion, intellect, and endeavour…”

So far so good. Moral and spiritual choices seem up to us. But Chief Rabbi JH Hertz offered a realistic qualification when he said, “We are free agents in so far as the choice between good and evil is concerned. This is an undeniable fact of human experience; but equally so is the fact that the sphere in which that choice is exercised is limited for us by heredity and environment”.

So the question is, what influences our apparently free choices?

It is clear there are constraints. And this is how we can explain the Pharaoh story. Pharaoh’s early actions towards the Israelites were free choices of evil which reflected his heredity and environment; his later actions, described by the Torah as God hardening his heart, were Pharaoh becoming so conditioned to hard-heartedness that he could no longer put up even a token show of resistance.

Our own concern, all these centuries later, must be to ensure that heredity, environment or other factors do not become so strong and powerful that we lose the last shreds of moral conscience and responsibility.

Q. Is there a Jewish view as to women in the military?

A. The Talmud (Kiddushin 2b) says, “It is the way of a man to make war and not the way of a woman”.

On the whole this has been the fact of life, that men have gone off to war and women have stayed home.

But this is not the whole story. Deborah (Judges 4:4-16), Yael (Judges 4:17-24, 5:24-27) and Judith (Apocrypha) all played a significant role in destroying the enemy.

The Mishnah states that in an obligatory war (e.g. to defend Israel) every Jew must go and fight, even a bride from her Chuppah (Sotah 8:7).

Some commentators ask how this is possible when Judaism usually prefers women’s role to be non-public: “The glory of the princess is in the inner chamber” (Psalm 45:14). One possibility is that women did not actually go into battle but served in a non-combat capacity.

Thus R. Eliezer ben Ya’akov says that a woman should not wear military uniform or carry weapons of war (Nazir 59a; Sifre Deut. 226; Onkelos to Deut. 22:5).

The Sefer HaChinnuch (Mitzvah 603) exempts women from rooting out Amalek, but the Avnei Nezer (Orach Chayyim 509) makes a distinction between an actual battle, in which only men took part, and attacking an individual Amalekite, which even a woman must do.

The conclusion would seem to be that women’s modesty and dignity require that they not serve in combat positions but can and should assist the war effort in other roles.

Q. Why is it customary to pour out the water from vessels in a house where a person has died?

A. There are several theories.

A prosaic explanation is that this is an indirect way of making it known that a person has passed away. This was considered better than to spread the bad news by word of mouth.

Some link it to an episode in the wilderness: when Miriam died her well stopped flowing.

A person’s life is like a flowing well and death deprives the world of the person’s vitality.

The daughters of Jethro need assistance at the well and Moses is able to help them.

Home they go and say, “An Egyptian man saved us from the hand of the shepherds and he drew water for us” (Ex. 2:19).

They do not call him an Israelite; they have no idea he is a descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that his parents were Amram and Yocheved, or that he is a person of principle. All we hear is that he is an Egyptian man.

How did they know he was Egyptian? They must have seen Egyptian characteristics – clothes, speech, mannerisms.

And this raises a fascinating modern question. It is usually obvious that an Australian Jew is Australian, a South African Jew a South African, an American Jew an American. Most of us are recognisable with minimal difficulty. A visitor only needs to say “Shabbat Shalom” and you immediately know where they come from.

But Pinchas Peli points out that in the USA Jews are the only ethnic group who are referred to as “American Jews”, unlike other groups who are called “Italian Americans” or “Irish Americans”.

Stating our geography before our Jewishness may be a semantic accident, but it is more likely that it arose out of Jewish ambiguity in the Diaspora.

Peli recounts the story of David Ben Gurion meeting Leon Blum, the former prime minister of France. Blum lost no time in saying he was “first of all a Frenchman, then a socialist and only then a Jew”. Ben Gurion retorted, “It is quite all right, Monsieur Blum; you most likely know that in Hebrew we read from right to left…!”

The question addressed in this exchange was which part of one’s identity was uppermost.

Once, finding a way through two worlds led some to emphasise one, some the other. Today more and more people are comfortable with both sides of their identity. We are Jewish – and Australian; Australian – and Jewish. But the question remains: what do I mention first – Australian” or “Jew”? Perhaps the order does not matter?

There are two issues – whether my geography is good for my Jewishness and vice-versa, and what to do if geography threatens Jewishness.

Judaism goes well with an enlightened, democratic society. More: the history, flavour and even climate of a country all influence its Judaism, as do its values; a tragic illustration is Hermann Cohen’s insistence early this century that the German and the Jewish ethos were alike and akin. More accurate is the Anglo-Jewish belief that British and Jewish principles go well together.

The problem is when the policies of a given country are ethically questionable.

The Tanya, in dealing with distracting or “opposing” thoughts during prayer, says such thoughts should not ruin one’s concentration but evoke even greater determination to pray properly. Similarly in a culture like ancient Egypt (and there are modern equivalents), a Jew should work all the more on being a good Jew and raising the ethical quality of society.

Q. Do you believe that Israel should allow civil marriages between Jews?

A. Part of the secular struggle against religion in Israel is the agitation for civil marriages.

Though the State of Israel determined from the beginning that marriages between Jews had to follow traditional Jewish practice, this is too religious and constricting for some. The result is that marriages that can not be solemnised in Israel are occasionally taken off-shore to Cyprus.

But this is not good enough for people like Shulamit Aloni, who in 1986 publicly claimed to have “married” hundreds of couples without chuppah, k’tubah or ring.

Such “marriages” are valid neither by Jewish nor by Israeli law, but she claims that people have a right to choose the ceremony they want.

In 1986, Rabbi Menachem Porush addressed the following words to Mrs Aloni in the course of a Knesset debate:

“How far have you drifted from your glorious heritage! Has your Jewish heart turned to a cold unfeeling stone? Has your ‘war’ against the tenets of Israel forced you to forsake whatever is and has been for centuries our most cherished treasures?

“By what mandate have you denied hundreds of young couples the opportunity to build a house in Israel upon the foundations of peace and tranquillity, merely to further your own campaign against your very own heritage?”

Rabbi Porush’s argument rightly centres upon the pride we ought to feel in our Jewish tradition. Even a secularist ought to appreciate that, like every nation, we have our own distinctive culture, and the chuppah, k’tubah and kiddushin are indispensable Jewish cultural if not religious usages.

But there is more to it than this. If everyone does what is right in their own eyes, our people will be irreparably split, Jewish identity will be fractured, no-one’s Jewish lineage will be safe, and secularists’ children who seek to find their way to Torah will never be able to forgive their parents.