Right from the beginning, right after Hashem revealed Himself in the Cloud of Glory to instruct His people in Torah and
mitzvos, "civil" laws were given. This is the
beginning of all what was to follow in creating a nation of G-
d which would know and absorb that there is no distinction
between commandments and legislations. "And these are the
laws: and it was on the third day, at dawn: the Torah was
transmitted in the morning and in the evening, the ordinances
were given" (Shemos Rabba 30:11).
Just as the commandments of the Torah are an expression of
the Divine sovereign command, so are the civil laws. The road
from Sinai leads to Eretz Yisroel, but one cannot conceive
that the sovereign will of a people should be separate there,
G-d forbid, from the overall Divine design. Or that the
people should convene to establish a separate code of
national laws, a legal and judicial system according to the
needs of the nation as seen in the eyes of its elected
representatives, with a built-in mechanism for effecting
changes, according to the changing times, styles and mores.
This is untenable.
"The Jewish nation is Hashem's Chosen Nation, and Eretz
Yisroel is His Land. Hashem bequeathed His land to His people
so that they would keep His statutes and maintain His
ordinances, for the Torah is the blueprint of Creation; it is
its ultimate purpose and design. Hashem verily created the
world for the sake of the Torah, and the mission of His
people in His land is to be: `The prime of its produce --
reishis tvu'osa' (Yirmiyohu 2:3). Hashem's harvest
will be all of mankind, all of its nations, in the End of
Days. His people will reside in His land and will constitute
the prime of its produce" (Rabbi Dr. Yitzchok Breuer z'l,
Nachliel, p. 309).
There is a significant difference in the angle from which one
approaches law: if from its divine source, i.e. the
commandments of the Creator as the expression of His will,
or, G-d forbid, from the common, private will of the people,
or the collective will of all the individuals comprising the
nation as a whole.
Hashem delivered us from Egypt to become His people, and gave
us Eretz Yisroel so that we would keep His statutes and
teachings. This was the whole purpose of the exercise. And in
this light we can thoroughly understand the words of Rashi
from the beginning of this week's parsha, "And these
are the laws which you shall place before them -- and not
before idolaters. And even if you know that regarding a
certain matter, the secular law is identical to that of the
Torah, do not bring [your case] before their courts, for
whoever brings Jewish matters before a non-Jewish court is
desecrating Hashem's Name while consecrating the name of
their gods to favor them, as it is written (Devorim
32, `For their rock is not like our Rock, even our enemies
being judges' -- when our enemies become our judges, this
indicates our preference for their gods."
The Sfas Emes explains in the name of his grandfather,
the Chiddushei HaRim: "Rashi wishes to teach us why
this is specified by judicial ordinances -- to teach us that
the very laws that one realizes must exist for the sake of
order in society, are different when they are divinely
ordained through the Torah, and one must not bring civil
matters before secular courts even in matters where the
judgment is identical to the Torah, for justice belongs to
Hashem, and even the rationale behind it, and the logic and
reason which man's intellect accepts cannot be valid cause
for a Jew to prefer those courts to his own, where Torah
reigns supreme and justice is the expression of the Divine
will" (reish Mishpotim).
Therefore, let not the rationalists rise up to take any
action, to establish a legal system of their own, according
to the dictates of their own intellect, be it the product of
the most straightforward reasoning -- for "Torah was given in
the morning and laws were given in the evening," as the
Midrash teaches. There is no separation between them. "He
tells His words to Yaakov, His statutes and ordinances to
Yisroel" (Tehillim 147:19). It is unique onto Israel,
for "He did not do so to any other nation, and the statutes
they did not know." Such a design for a people, wherein
everything follows the Divine word, has no parallel by any
other race or people.
*
Just as "And these are the laws" directly follows the Giving
of the Torah, so is this evident in our daily prayer,
"Restore our judges as of yore" in the Shemoneh Esrei,
which immediately follows the blessing for the ingathering of
the exiles and precedes the other blessings which relate to
the renewal of royal sovereignty, the reconstruction of the
Mikdash and the restoration of the sacrificial service
therein. "And remove from us all agony and sighing" is a
prerequisite for the restoration of the kingdom of Hashem.
"And rule over us speedily, You, Hashem, alone."
Secular civil law is a stumbling block for the reinstatement
of the Jewish nation. That -- and the legal code of the Torah
-- cannot coexist. "See, I have taught you statutes and laws
as Hashem, my G-d, commanded me to do in the midst of the
land which you will be going to inherit. And you shall heed
and do them, for it is your wisdom and understanding in the
eyes of the nations which have heard of all these statutes,
and who say: How wise and understanding is this great nation
. . . And who is so great a nation that possesses statutes
and laws which are so just, like this entire Torah which I am
giving before you today" (Devorim 4:5-8).
Keeping and executing the statutes and laws of the Torah is a
precondition to inheriting the land. Only thus can we hope to
exist here, and when the very opposite is being done, it is
an explicit violation and contradiction -- a threat -- to our
possibility of inhabiting the land and existing within it. We
are explicitly warned, "I have hereby called upon the heavens
and earth as witnesses in warning you today that you will
surely speedily perish from the land to which you are
crossing the Jordan for the sake of inheriting it. You shall
not last long upon it for you shall surely be destroyed"
(Ibid., 25).
It is not the content of the legal code which is under
contention for, as Rashi notes, "even if the law is identical
to that of Jewish law in a certain matter . . . " The root of
the matter lies in the source of authorization, in our case
the Divine source of our legal code. If we recognize this
divineness in the midst of the Jewish nation, we will be able
to return to our original status, to our source, and the way
is then paved to our ultimate sublime aspiration, of imposing
Divine kingship upon us.
"Understand well and make no error! We are not concerned with
the actual content of secular law. Many times `the laws of
the Kusim are identical to those of the Jews'! They also deal
with laws involving money loans, rental, sales, civil
marriage, inheritance and so on. It may be that the laws
coincide in certain areas, and that for reasons of their own,
they may intentionally decide to rule like us. But this is
totally irrelevant, since we must realize that they do not
judge thus in the name of the G-d of the world, but simply
for their own practical purposes. They do not use these laws
as divinely transmitted ones, but as pragmatic codes whose
purpose is to maintain order through law and justice. The
content does not determine: Hashem is the Determinant.
Governmental benefit as opposed to Divine justice equates to
evil. Pragmatic political law versus true Divine justice,
again equals evil! Rebellion there, rebellion here! `And
ordinances which they did not know!'" (Nachliel, p.
313).
*
Sometimes only a very thin line separates truth from
falsehood, justice from injustice. And that selfsame thread
finds expression in pleasant, palatable words. "Oh, yes, we
also recognize the value of Judaism, but one must remember
that Torah has seventy faces, correct? Is that not what
Chazal, themselves, stated? Why, then, do the chareidim
ignore that and refuse to allow us our own
interpretation?"
They attempt to stuff everything into that seventy-faced
idiom, including secularism, and the fashion of "a Jewish
bookcase" which represents a showcase Judaism without any
bookmark strings attached, the disobligation of Reform and
its colleagues, the Conservatives, the idolizers of the
Hebrew language and all the rest. Not surprisingly, those who
use the teachings of Chazal, out of context and content,
those teachings which were bequeathed to us through the Oral
Tradition which is one solid bloc, use them to distort and
refute the historic truths, to fight against them. Because
all of those `seventy facets' are true faces of the Torah,
while theirs is a misnomer, a mutation, a nonexistent seventy-
first facet, if you wish, which negates all the true seventy
ones. It is a face of the kind referred to as "revealing a
face/t of Torah contrary to the halocho."
Is not one of the fundamental rules of "seventy faces to
Torah" the very fact that they all comprise one perfect
whole, and are all interdependent upon one another? The
Midrash Rabba, one of the very sources of this saying,
states: "One silver bowl -- corresponding to the Torah which
is likened to wine, as it is written, `And drink of the wine
which I have mingled' (Mishlei 9:5). It was customary
to drink from special bowls, as it is written, `Those who
drink from wine bowls' (Amos 6:6). This is why the
nosi brought a bowl for the dedication of the
Mishkan.
"Why a value of seventy shekel in holy coinage? Just
like wine has a numerical value of seventy, so does Torah
have seventy facets. Why in one vessel? Just like Torah must
be one complete entity, as it is written, `One Torah and one
law shall there be for you' (Bamidbor 15:16). Why in
one vessel? To show that both the written and the oral
traditions have a single source, come from one Shepherd, from
one G-d Who taught them to Moshe at Sinai" (Bamidbor
Rabba 13:15).
This Midrash, as all other teachings of Chazal which refer to
the seventy faces of Torah, teaches us that we cannot be
selective. Rather, it is all one. "Both the written and the
oral traditions have a single source, come from one Shepherd,
from one G-d Who taught them to Moshe at Sinai." One cannot
take anything outside of these `seventy faces' of Torah and
pretend that it is Judaism. Indeed, this is Reform Judaism on
one foot. Whatever the `rabbi' invents is his brand of
`Judaism'; whatever he institutes in his temple is his own
religion, inclusive of his mixed swimming pool, Sunday
services, organ and so on.
*
Not only are these removed from the seventy faces of Torah,
but they are contrary to it and to the survival of the Jewish
people. These cultivated and produced religious anarchy,
destruction and desolation. Why? Because they played up the
human intellect, self determination, materialism and
gratification, while downgrading the Torah and the Divine
will implanted in all of creation as a whole and in the
Jewish world in particular.
The saintly Yid HaKodosh of Pshischa zy'o explained,
"And these are the laws which you shall place before them --
that the laws of Hashem should come before vital things of
man; they should precede them in importance." The Admor of
Sadiger, R' Shlomo Chaim zt'l, brought another verse
in this context: "And the land became corrupted before
Hashem" -- the greatest corruption of all takes place when
`the land' comes before `Hashem' [in importance], when
earthiness and materialism reign supreme.
Man has such a tremendous power of destruction that he can
overturn the routine of nature as established in the world by
his evil deeds. If the entire world was destroyed because of
evil deeds, then a small part of one nation can also be
destroyed through evil deeds.
The Divine Torah established clear cut boundaries between Jew
and non-Jew, and when one follows the laws of the Torah,
everything is clear. But when one bows to the human intellect
and lets it lead the way, one can only become hopelessly
entangled. Witness that unfortunate incident with the young
man from Russia, son of a non-Jewish woman, whose fate
captured the attention of half a nation last year. He
immigrated to Israel, was drafted into the army and sent to
the Lebanese front, where he met his death. A human tragedy,
no doubt, but even more astonishing was the fact that his
gentile mother sought to have his remains brought to burial
where she still lived, in Caucasia.
The media went into detail in describing the impoverished
living conditions of the father and sister in Tel Aviv, who
had come in the wake of the son's immigration. There was a
general self flagellation for the government having allowed
such negligence of subhuman conditions, and hinted
expressions of blame and hate towards the `rabbinical
establishment' which would surely have placed impediments to
his being buried as a Jew if circumstances had been
different. What a topsy-turvy world -- instead of looking to
blame those who do not adhere to the boundaries established
by the Torah, they prefer to blame those who do safeguard
those boundaries.
The episode was hushed up after it was learned that the
father lived in such abject poverty out of choice, so that he
could send back the money he had received from the government
for his immigration needs, the unemployment benefits he
gained and all the money he had ever earned -- so that his
wife could buy a home in Russia to which they would all
eventually retire. The naive young man apparently thought
that by serving in the army, he could `earn' the right to
call himself a Jew. And a Jewish state distributed money for
absorption needs -- so that a gentile family could buy itself
a home in Russia -- at the expense of genuine Jewish
immigrants trying to make a go of it in their true homeland.
What a ridiculous, perverted situation!
*
"And I also gave them statutes that are not good and laws by
which they could not survive" (Yechezkel 20:25).
The commentators are divided in their interpretation of this
verse. Some say that since the Jews did not heed the statutes
of Hashem, they were delivered unto an enemy which imposed
harsh statutes by which they were unable to live.
The Targum, however, explains this in a manner which can be
fully appreciated in modern day circumstances, and Rashi
follows suit: "I have delivered them into the power of their
evil inclination so that they will stumble in their sins."
Targum Yonoson says: "And I delivered them into the
hands of their foolish yetzer and they went and
followed laws that are not viable and customs by which they
cannot survive."
Neither Saddam Hussein nor the PLO, not Hamas, nor the
Islamic Jihad, not Syria or Iran threaten our survival in the
land. Rather, it is our distancing ourselves from "these are
the statutes," the laws of Hashem, a terrible sin which
causes harsh punishment of deliverance into the hands of
evil. This is truly a punishment measure for measure -- "And
I, too, gave them statutes which are not good, and laws by
which they cannot live."
