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Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, is remarkable for the extreme realism with which it portrays human character. Its heroes are not superhuman. Its non-heroes are not archetypal villains. The best have failings; the worst often have saving virtues. I know of no other religious literature quite like it.

This makes it very difficult to use biblical narrative to teach a simple, black-and-white approach to ethics. And that – argued R. Zvi Hirsch Chajes (Mevo ha-Aggadot) – is why rabbinic midrash often systematically re-interprets the narrative so that the good become all-good and the bad all-bad. For sound educational reasons, Midrash paints the moral life in terms of black and white.

Yet the plain sense remains (“A biblical passage never loses its plain interpretation”, Shabbat 63a), and it is important that we do not lose sight of it. It is as if monotheism brought into being at the same time a profound humanism. God in the Hebrew Bible is nothing like the gods of myth. They were half-human, half-divine. The result was that in the epic literature of pagan cultures, human heroes were seen as almost like gods: semi-divine.

In stark contrast, monotheism creates a total distinction between God and humanity. If God is wholly God, then human beings can be seen as wholly human – subtle, complex mixtures of strength and weakness. We identify with the heroes of the Bible because, despite their greatness, they never cease to be human, nor do they aspire to be anything else. Hence the phenomenon of which the sedra of Beha’alotecha provides a shattering example: the vulnerability of some of the greatest religious leaders of all time, to depression and despair.

The context is familiar enough. The Israelites are complaining about their food: “The rabble among them began to crave other food, and again the Israelites started wailing and said, ‘If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost—also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!’”(Num 11: 4-6)

This is not a new story. We have heard it before (see for example Exodus 16). Yet on this occasion, Moses experiences what one can only call a breakdown:

He asked the Lord, “Why have you brought this trouble on your servant? What have I done to displease you that you put the burden of all these people on me? Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth? . . . I cannot carry all these people by myself; the burden is too heavy for me. If this is how You are going to treat me, put me to death right now—if I have found favour in your eyes—and do not let me face my own ruin.” (Num. 11: 11-15)

Moses prays for death! Nor is he the only person in Tanakh to do so. There are at least three others. There is Elijah, when after his successful confrontation with the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel, Queen Jezebel issues a warrant that he be killed:

Elijah was afraid and ran for his life. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, while he himself went a day’s journey into the desert. He came to a broom tree, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, Lord,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.” (I Kings 19: 3-4)

There is Jonah, after God had forgiven the inhabitants of Nineveh:

Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. He prayed to the Lord, “O Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, O Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.” (Jonah 4: 1-3)

And there is Jeremiah, after the people fail to heed his message and publicly humiliate him:

“O Lord, You enticed me, and I was enticed; You overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me . . . The word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long . . . Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, made him very glad, saying, “A child is born to you—a son!” . . . Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?” (Jeremiah 20: 7-18)

Lehavdil elef havdalot: no comparison is intended between the religious heroes of Tanakh and political heroes of the modern world. They are different types, living in different ages, functioning in different spheres. Yet we find a similar phenomenon in one of the great figures of the twentieth century, Winston Churchill. Throughout much of his life he was prone to periods of acute depression. He called it “the black dog”. He told his daughter, “I have achieved a great deal to achieve nothing in the end”. He told a friend that “he prays every day for death”. In 1944 he told his doctor, Lord Moran, that he kept himself from standing close to a train platform or overlooking the side of a ship because he might be tempted to commit suicide: “A second’s desperation would end everything” (these quotes are taken from Anthony Storr, Churchill’s Black Dog).

Why are the greatest so often haunted by a sense of failure? Storr, in the book mentioned above, offers some compelling psychological insights. But at the simplest level we see certain common features, at least among the biblical prophets: a passionate drive to change the world, combined with a deep sense of personal inadequacy. Moses says, “Who am I . . . that I should lead the Israelites out of Egypt?” (Ex. 3: 11). Jeremiah says: “I cannot speak: I am only a child” (Jer. 1: 6). Jonah tries to flee from his mission. The very sense of responsibility that leads a prophet to heed the call of God can lead him to blame himself when the people around him do not heed the same call.

Yet it is that same inner voice that ultimately holds the cure. The prophet does not believe in himself: he believes in God. He does not undertake to lead because he sees himself as a leader, but because he sees a task to be done and no one else willing to do it. His greatness lies not within himself but beyond himself: in his sense of being summoned to a task that must be done however inadequate he knows himself to be.

Despair can be part of leadership itself. For when the prophet sees himself reviled, rebuked, criticized; when his words fall on stony ground; when he sees people listening to what they want to hear, not what they need to hear – that is when the last layers of self are burned away, leaving only the task, the mission, the call. When that happens, a new greatness is born. It now no longer matters that the prophet is unpopular and unheeded. All that matters is the work and the One who has summoned him to it. That is when the prophet arrives at the truth stated by Rabbi Tarfon: “It is not for you to complete the task, but neither are you free to stand aside from it” (Avot 2: 16).

Again without seeking to equate the sacred and the secular, I end with some words spoken by Theodore Roosevelt (in a speech to students at the Sorbonne, Paris, 23 April 1910), which sum up both the challenge and the consolation of leadership in cadences of timeless eloquence:

It is not the critic who counts, Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, Or where the doer of deeds could actually have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, Whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, Who strives valiantly, Who errs and comes short again and again – Because there is no effort without error and shortcomings – But who does actually strive to do the deed, Who knows great enthusiasm, great devotion, Who spends himself in a worthy cause, Who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement And who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly – So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls Who know neither victory nor defeat.

Leadership in a noble cause can bring despair. But it also is the cure.

There was an article in one of yesterday’s papers about how more men are following the actor George Clooney and allowing their hair to go grey, which greatly relieved me because mine has been going grey for years. Then I noticed a news item about how a lady from Hampshire had just set a record by abseiling down a 110 foot office block on her 99^th birthday. She took up abseiling when she was 85, and said, I really like the high buildings best. She’s planning to do it again next year.

The growth of life expectancy in Britain– from around 47 years in 1900 to 80 today, is one of the greatest transformations of our time. How will we deal with it? An ever smaller population of working age may have to support an ever larger population of the elderly. Should the retirement age be adjusted upward still further?  Will we be able to treat the hazards of age, like dementia and Alzheimer’s? How can we ensure that care of the elderly is of the best? This is an historic shift, and it will challenge us at the highest levels of the moral imagination.

There is a religious dimension to this, at least as I read my own tradition. One of the most poignant lines in the book of psalms says, “Cast me not aside when I grow old; as my strength fails do not forsake me.” The book of Leviticus says, “Stand in the presence of grey hair and give respect to the elderly.” The Bible takes it as axiomatic that a society is judged by the way it treats the most vulnerable: the very young and the very old. And for me one of the beautiful aspects of Jewish life, in our synagogues, old age homes and extended families, is the conversation and friendship between the young and the old, between grandparents and grandchildren, sometimes even into the fourth generation. That’s how it should be, the young sharing their dreams with the old; the old sharing their memories with the young.

Years ago the late Alastair Cooke in one of his Letters from America spoke about a remote region whose inhabitants lived to a great old age. A team of researchers went to discover their secret. Was it the climate, or the diet, or their genes? The answer was none of these. It was simply that their society honoured the elderly. So should we. It may not add years to their life, but it will add life to their years.

I learned this from the biblical story of Joseph. Envied and hated by his brothers, he was sold into slavery by them, lucky not to be killed. Eventually he became viceroy of Egypt, second only to Pharaoh. The brothers, arriving in Egypt to buy food during a famine, do not realise that the man in royal robes is their brother. After putting them through a series of trials to show that they had repented of what they did, Joseph revealed his identity and forgave them – the first act of forgiveness in literature. The book of Genesis, a set of variations on the theme of sibling rivalry, ends on this sublime note of reconciliation.

How was Joseph able to forgive? The Bible tells us. He says to his brothers: “Do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you … So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God.” This is one of the most transformative passages in the Bible. It explains how Joseph was able to free himself from the hurt and humiliation he surely felt at being betrayed by his own family.  Nowadays this is called cognitive behavioural therapy. Joseph changed the way he felt by changing the way he thought.

Evidently he had asked himself, “Why has God put me through this suffering?” But there are two ways of asking it, and it makes all the difference which way we do. One is oriented to the past: “What did I do to deserve this? For what sin am I being punished?” The other is directed to the future: “What is it that God wants me to do, that I can only do here, now and in these circumstances?”

Joseph must have asked this second question often during the long years he spent, first as a slave, then as a prisoner. The answer eventually came. The moment he was taken from prison to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams – seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine – he realised that all the seemingly random events of his life were a preparation for this moment when he was able to devise a plan that would save a whole region from starvation. As soon as he had these thoughts, he was able to forgive his brothers. His fate, he now knew, was not about them at all. “It was not you who sent me here but God.” That one thought has the power to cure resentment and banish pain.

Whenever we come close to despair, the strongest lifeline is to think like Joseph. That is how psychotherapist Viktor Frankl saved the lives of several of his fellow prisoners in Auschwitz, by helping them realise that they had a task to perform or a mission to fulfil that they could only do by surviving. This gave them the will to live. People who have suffered tragedy have often found meaning by alleviating the suffering of others. The grief may not disappear but it is redeemed. The adagio, with its intense sadness, is not the last movement of the symphony.

Seen through the eyes of faith life is not what Joseph Heller called it: “a trashbag of random coincidences blown open in a wind.” Each of us is here for a reason, to do something only we can do, and all the pain and heartbreak are bearable if we can discern God’s purpose or hear, however muffled, His call. As Nietzsche used to say, “He who has a strong enough Why can bear almost any How.”

In crisis, the wrong question to ask is, “What have I done to deserve this?” The right one is, “What am I now being summoned to do?” Each of us has a task. Every life has a purpose. We can bear the pain of the past when we discover the future we are called on to make.

One question, asked in faith, has the power to change a life. I know because it changed mine. It happens when you ask: what is God calling on me to do in these circumstances at this time? To believe in divine providence is to trust that God is interwoven in our lives. This does not make suffering less painful. But it opens a door that leads us to the light. It helps us live a life that is an answer to God’s call.

 I learned this from the biblical story of Joseph. Envied and hated by his brothers, he was sold into slavery by them, lucky not to be killed. Eventually he became viceroy of Egypt, second only to Pharaoh. The brothers, arriving in Egypt to buy food during a famine, do not realise that the man in royal robes is their brother. After putting them through a series of trials to show that they had repented of what they did, Joseph revealed his identity and forgave them – the first act of forgiveness in literature. The book of Genesis, a set of variations on the theme of sibling rivalry, ends on this sublime note of reconciliation.

 How was Joseph able to forgive? The Bible tells us. He says to his brothers: “Do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you … So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God.” This is one of the most transformative passages in the Bible. It explains how Joseph was able to free himself from the hurt and humiliation he surely felt at being betrayed by his own family.  Nowadays this is called cognitive behavioural therapy. Joseph changed the way he felt by changing the way he thought.

 Evidently he had asked himself, “Why has God put me through this suffering?” But there are two ways of asking it, and it makes all the difference which way we do. One is oriented to the past: “What did I do to deserve this? For what sin am I being punished?” The other is directed to the future: “What is it that God wants me to do, that I can only do here, now and in these circumstances?”

 Joseph must have asked this second question often during the long years he spent, first as a slave, then as a prisoner. The answer eventually came. The moment he was taken from prison to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams – seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine – he realised that all the seemingly random events of his life were a preparation for this moment when he was able to devise a plan that would save a whole region from starvation. As soon as he had these thoughts, he was able to forgive his brothers. His fate, he now knew, was not about them at all. “It was not you who sent me here but God.” That one thought has the power to cure resentment and banish pain.

 Whenever we come close to despair, the strongest lifeline is to think like Joseph. That is how psychotherapist Viktor Frankl saved the lives of several of his fellow prisoners in Auschwitz, by helping them realise that they had a task to perform or a mission to fulfil that they could only do by surviving. This gave them the will to live. People who have suffered tragedy have often found meaning by alleviating the suffering of others. The grief may not disappear but it is redeemed. The adagio, with its intense sadness, is not the last movement of the symphony.

 Seen through the eyes of faith life is not what Joseph Heller called it: “a trashbag of random coincidences blown open in a wind.” Each of us is here for a reason, to do something only we can do, and all the pain and heartbreak are bearable if we can discern God’s purpose or hear, however muffled, His call. As Nietzsche used to say, “He who has a strong enough Why can bear almost any How.”

 In crisis, the wrong question to ask is, “What have I done to deserve this?” The right one is, “What am I now being summoned to do?” Each of us has a task. Every life has a purpose. We can bear the pain of the past when we discover the future we are called on to make.

Tonight we begin Shavuot, the Jewish festival in which we recall the revelation at Mount Sinai in the days of Moses, thirty three centuries ago, when our ancestors made a covenant with God.

And tomorrow a book is published, called Permanent Present Tense, about a man with no memory. Henry Molaison, an American born in 1926, suffered from epileptic seizures, so a doctor performed experimental surgery that involved removing parts of his brain. The trouble was that for the rest of his life, another fifty five years, he completely lost the ability to form any memory lasting longer than 15 seconds. People he saw yesterday and every day he couldn’t remember today. He had no sense of identity, no ability to form relationships, and no concept of the future.

There’s no connection between Molaison and tonight’s Jewish festival except that they stand at opposite extremes of what it is for an individual, or a group, or a nation, to remember.

Jews are a people of memory. We had to remember slavery if we were to cherish freedom. We had to remember the covenant at Sinai if we were to keep our sense of loyalty to God. We had to remember where we came from and where we were going to if we were to retain our identity and values across centuries of dispersion and persecution. Memory tells us who we are and why.

Meanwhile all around us, contemporary society, with its smartphones and tablets and laptops is bombarding us with a non-stop stream of texts, tweets, updates and viral videos, all focussing with relentless speed on what’s happening at this moment, so that yesterday’s news is dead and forgotten while we live in a continuous, clamorous, attention-demanding now.

Many people think this is great, which in some ways it is. But to me it looks incredibly like the man who lost part of his brain so that he couldn’t remember yesterday and lived in what the book calls a permanent present tense. And that wasn’t a good place to be because it meant no sense of past, no long term goals to aspire to, no lasting relationship, and no narrative continuity to give meaning to a life. No music, just noise. The only saving grace was that he couldn’t remember what he’d lost.

Today needs a yesterday if we’re to plan for tomorrow. If we, as individuals or as humanity, are to shape a better future, we need to take time to remember the past.

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This week’s sedra begins with a continuation of the census begun in last week’s – the act that gives the entire book its English name: the book of “Numbers.” Two things, though, are puzzling. The first is the very act of numbering the people. Jewish tradition conveys two quite different, apparently contradictory, attitudes toward the taking of a census.

Rashi notes that this is not the first time the people had been counted. Their number (“about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children”) had already been given as they prepared to leave Egypt (Ex. 12: 37). A more precise calculation had been made when the adult males each gave a half shekel toward the building of the sanctuary (yielding a total of 603,550; Ex. 38: 26). Now a third count was taking place. Why the repeated calculations? Rashi’s answer is simple and moving:

Because they (the children of Israel) are dear to Him, God counts them often. He counted them when they were about to leave Egypt. He counted them after the Golden Calf to establish how many were left. And now that He was about to cause His presence to rest on them (with the inauguration of the sanctuary), He counted them again. (Rashi to Bamidbar 1:1)

For Rashi, the counting of the people was an act of Divine love. Yet this is not the impression we receive elsewhere. To the contrary, the Torah sees the taking of a census as profoundly dangerous:

Then God said to Moses, “When you take a census of the Israelites to count them, each must give to God a ransom for his life at the time he is counted. Then no plague will come on them when you number them. (Ex. 30: 11-12).

Centuries later, when King David counted the people, there was a moment of Divine anger, during which 70, 000 died. It seems hard to reconcile the idea of counting as an act of love with the fact that counting involves great risk.

The second source of perplexity is the phrase the Torah uses to describe the act of counting: naso/se’u et rosh, literally, “lift the head.” There are many verbs available in classical Hebrew to indicate the act of counting: limnot, lifkod, lispor, lachshov. Why, in the books of Exodus and Numbers, does the Torah resort to the strange circumlocution, “lift the heads” of the Israelites?

To understand the revolution the Hebrew Bible brought to the world, we have first to enter imaginatively into the consequences for humanity of the birth of civilization. In the earliest hunter-gatherer societies, people lived together in small groups. There were, as yet, no cities, no states, no large concentrations of population. The Torah attributes the building of the first city to Cain (Gen. 4: 17). Cities emerged with the birth of agriculture – in the fertile alluvial plain in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates, and the well-irrigated Nile delta. Twice in the book of Bereishit the Torah sketches a portrait of urban culture: first, the Tower of Babel, second, the Egypt to which Joseph is brought as a slave. They are both highly critical accounts. In Babel, human life was cheap (when the Tower was being built, said the sages, if a person fell and died, no one noticed. If a brick fell, they wept). In Egypt, entire populations – among them, eventually, the children of Israel – could be pressed into service as a labour force to build pyramids, temples and monuments, many of which still stand today.

The birth of agriculture and the growth of towns had huge social implications. For the first time, surplus wealth was possible and could be stored in the form of money (initially, precious metals such as silver and gold). So too, as populations expanded and the division of labour became more elaborate, social stratification began. Inequality – deep, pervasive and systemic – became one of the universal features of the earliest societies. At the top was the king, emperor or Pharaoh, seen as no less than a god or child of the gods, who held a massive concentration of power. Below him (or her) were the various ranks of privilege: court circles, military chiefs, administrators and priests. The mass of the people – poor, illiterate, expendable – was significant, whether as an army or a construction force, as a mass, by sheer weight of numbers. Hence the significance of censuses in the ancient world (and in this respect, little has changed from then to now). Size meant strength, military or economic. Population counts gave rulers information about the size of the army they could muster, or of the income they could raise by taxation.

The religion of Israel is a sustained protest against this view – military, political and economic – of the human situation. At this distance in time it is hard fully to appreciate the breathtaking novelty, the transformative potential, of the cluster of ideas generated by a single revelation – that the human person as such, man or woman, rich or poor, powerful or powerless, is the image of God and therefore of non-negotiable, unquantifiable value. We are each equally in the image of God, therefore we stand equal in the presence of God. Much of Torah, Jewish history and the development of Western civilization is about the slow translation of this idea into institutions, social structures and ethical codes.

It should now be clear why the taking of a census is fraught with spiritual risk. The numbering of a people is the most potent symbol of mankind-in-the-mass, of a society in which the individual is not valued in and for him- or herself but as part of a totality whose power lies in numbers. That is precisely what Israel is not. The God of Israel, who is the God of all mankind, sets His special love on a people whose strength has nothing to do with numbers, a people that never sets itself to become an empire, that is never commanded to wage holy war in order to convert populations, that was and remains tiny in both absolute terms and relative to the empires with which it was and is surrounded, standing as it does at the vulnerable crossroad between three continents.

Both questions with which we began are now answered. There is a difference between a human census and one commanded by God. David’s was a human census. Israel’s second king had laid the foundations of a nation. He had waged successful wars, united the tribes and established Jerusalem as his capital. Shortly after his death, Israel reached its zenith as a power in the Middle East. Under Solomon, through strategic alliances, it became a centre of trade and scholarship. The Temple was built. It must have seemed at the time as if, after many centuries of wandering and war, Israel had become a power to rival any other. It was a shortlived, cruelly-shattered illusion. Almost immediately after Solomon’s reign, the kingdom split in two, and from then on its this-worldly fate was sealed. A history of defeats, exiles and destructions began, which has no parallel in the annals of any other nation. The Hebrew Bible is not wrong in seeing the starting-point of this decline in the moment at which David acted like any other king and ordered a census of the people.

A Divine census is utterly different. It has nothing to do with strength-in-numbers. It has to do, instead, with conveying to every member of the nation that he or she counts; that every person, family, household is held precious by God; that distinctions between great and small, ruler and ruled, leader and led, are irrelevant; that we are each God’s image and the object of His love. A Divine census is, as Rashi says, a gesture of endearment. That is why it cannot be described by the usual verbs of counting — limnot, lifkod, lispor, lachshov. Only the phrase naso/se’u et rosh, “lift the head”, does justice to this kind of enumeration, in which those entrusted with the task are commanded to “lift the head” of those they count, making every individual stand tall in the knowledge that they are loved, cherished, held special by God, and not merely a number, a cipher, among the thousands and millions.

There is a wonderful verse in Psalm 147 which we say every morning in our prayers: “He counts the number of the stars and calls them each by name.” A name is a marker of uniqueness. Collective nouns group things together; proper names distinguish them as individuals. Only what we value, do we name (One of the most chilling acts of dehumanisation in the extermination camps of Nazi Germany was that those who entered were never addressed by their names. Instead they were given, inscribed on their skin, a number). God gives even the stars their names, all the more so human beings – on whom He has set His image. God counts to signal to us that each of us counts, for what we are as individuals, not en masse. He “lifts our head” in the most profound way known to mankind, by assuring each of us of His special, enduring, unquantifiable love.

That is the nature of the census in the book of Numbers. As the Israelites prepared to become a society with the sanctuary — visible home of the Divine presence – at its centre, they had to be reminded that they were to become the pioneers of a new and revolutionary social order, whose most famous definition was given by the prophet Zechariah as the Israelites prepared to rebuild the ruined temple:

“Not by might, nor by strength, but by

My spirit, says the Lord.”

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In Judaism, mysteries have a habit of becoming controversies, none more so than in the case of Shavuot, otherwise known as Pentecost or the Feast of Weeks. Shavuot generated one of the great arguments in Jewish history. It is not too much to say that on its outcome the future of Jewish people turned.

The mystery of Shavuot is twofold. The first is that uniquely among the Jewish festivals it has no date; the Bible gives it no explicit place in the Jewish calendar. Instead, it is to be arrived at by counting seven weeks after the beginning of the Omer, the offering brought from the barley harvest, the first crop to ripen in the spring. ‘And from the day on which you bring the sheaf of the wave offering – the day after the Sabbath – you shall count seven weeks’ (Leviticus 23:15).

The second is that alone of the pilgrimage festivals it has no overt historical content. The Jewish festivals have a double character. They belong to cyclical time – the seasons of the year. And they belong to linear time – they recall formative moments in Jewish history. So Pesach is the festival of spring and also the time when we re-enact the exodus from Egypt. Sukkot is the festival of the autumn harvest and the time when we re-live the journey through the wilderness in temporary dwellings or tabernacles. But as we read the biblical description of Shavuot, half of the festival seems to be missing. Its seasonal significance is clear. It is called the ‘Feast of the Harvest’ and the ‘Day of Firstfruits’. But the historical dimension is absent. So Shavuot raised two questions that were to become the subject of deep controversy: when was it celebrated, and why?

The argument became acute in the days of the second Temple when Jews were divided into several groups, most notably the Sadducees and Pharisees. We know all too little about this period, but we can say this. Of the two groups, the Sadducees were the more affluent and influential. They were closely connected to the Temple hierarchy and to the political elite. They were as near as Jewry came to a governing class. The Pharisees drew their support from the poorer groups of the population, and they had a distinctive ethos. Whilst the Sadducees saw Jewish identity in terms of the State and its institutions, the Pharisees saw it in terms of personal piety and scrupulous observance of the Law. In particular, they had a passion for education. They built academies and schools and devoted their days to the study of Torah.

There were several doctrinal differences between the two groups, but one in particular was crucial. The Pharisees gave equal authority to the twin sources of Judaism, the Written Torah (especially the Mosaic books) and the Oral Torah, the unwritten traditions which accompanied the biblical text, interpreting and supplementing it. The Sadducees accepted only the Written Torah, not oral tradition. This was to become the key issue in the debate over the date of Shavuot.

The Torah had specified that the counting of seven weeks should begin on ‘the day after the sabbath’. The Sadducees took this literally. The counting should begin on Sunday, so that Shavuot would always fall on Sunday seven weeks later. The Pharisees invoked tradition and argued instead that in this case `sabbath’ meant ‘festival’, specifically the first day of Pesach. The counting should begin on the second day of Pesach, so that the dates of Pesach and Shavuot were linked. The argument between them became acute — inevitably so, since there can be few more divisive situations than one in which two sections of the population are celebrating the same festival on different days.

When we read about religious controversies, we are often surprised and even dismayed that so much passion should be spent on matters that seem so slight. This is usually because we fail to understand the deeper issues at stake, issues rarely spelled out by the protagonists at the time. Between the Sadducees and the Pharisees, I suspect, lay an argument that had little to do with the meaning of the word `sabbath’ and everything to do with the nature of Jewish history and character.

The Sadducees read the message on the surface of the Bible. This said that Shavuot was an agricultural festival whose date was determined by the barley harvest. There were even Sadducees who argued that the Almighty must have had farmers in mind when He decided to fix Shavuot on Sunday: at the end of the harvest it gave weary workers a long weekend! The religion of Israel was the religion of a people in and on its own land. It was about kings and priests, the Temple and sacrifices, farmers and fields, the seasons and their celebrations.

The Pharisees, though, read not only the text but also the subtext. They sensed the link between the two great events with which the history of Israel began: exodus and Sinai, liberation and revelation, the going out from Egypt and the giving and receiving of the Law. That was what the mysterious counting of seven weeks was about. It represented not the duration of the harvest, but the forty-nine days between Moses leading the people out of Egypt and their assembly at the foot of the mountain to receive the Torah. Shavuot was not simply an agricultural festival. It was a historical festival with a precise date and content. It was the anniversary of the revelation at Mount Sinai, the day of the Giving of the Law.

Occasionally there are arguments that are decided by history, and this was one. In the year 70 of the Common Era, the Temple was destroyed by the Romans. Jewish autonomy in the land of Israel came to an end and a millennial exile began. The movement represented by the Pharisees became the dominant force in Jewish life for the next eighteen hundred years. Of the Sadducees almost nothing remained: no literature or philosophy, no lasting trace of their influence. The once ruling class vanished within a generation. It could hardly have been otherwise. The things on which they based their identity – the Temple and its priesthood, the land and its farmers, Jerusalem and its seat of power – were gone. Had Judaism been nothing but these, it too would have disappeared. Jews would have argued (as Spinoza did, many centuries later) that the end of their sovereignty meant the end of the covenant. God had given Israel a law and a land, a law for the land. The loss of one spelled the demise of the other. You could not celebrate Shavuot, the harvest festival, when you had no fields to harvest. You could not observe your own law when you had no country over which you ruled.

Judaism owes its continued existence to the fact that, two thousand years ago, the Sadducees were not the only force in Jewish life. There were others, the Pharisees, who did more than read the Torah’s written text. They listened to it with an inner ear. In it they heard Moses’ warning that the people of Israel would suffer exiles. They understood that the Law had been given in the wilderness to signal that it applied everywhere, outside the promised land as well as within. They knew that this was the crucial fact about Israel, that even without a land it still had a Law, and even in exile it still had the covenant. When you can no longer celebrate Shavuot as an agricultural festival, you can still observe it as the anniversary of the giving of the Law.

The controversy over the date and significance of Shavuot – fought over the meaning of a single word – was nothing less than an argument about the terms of Jewish history, about whether the key event in the Hebrew Bible was the giving of the land or the Law. That there has been Jewish history for the past two thousand years is due in no small measure to those who successfully argued that Shavuot was more than a celebration of the land. There is something left even when the land is lost, and that is what Shavuot recalls: the giving of the Torah, text of the eternal covenant between God and His people.

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My earliest memories are of the time when we lived together with my grandparents in Finsbury Park. My maternal grandfather, a stout and gentle man with a rich head of silver hair, owned his own synagogue – I never discovered why. He was not a rabbi, though he was the son of one, and he presided over a little house of prayer a few doors away from where we lived. As his grandson 1 was given a special privilege during the Sabbath morning services. When the reading from the Torah scroll was over, and the scroll had been raised and rebound in its velvet covering, I would take the silver bells which were its ornamentation and, lifted by my father (I was two at the time), I would place them on its wooden handles. The scroll was then ready to be placed back in the ark.

From that day to this I have been awed by the love Jews have for the Torah. Generally speaking, we are not a reverential people nor is ours a religion of holy objects – with one exception: the Torah scroll itself. In its presence we rise. On the day we complete its reading, we dance with it as if it were a bride. The Torah alone comes near to the sanctity we attach to human beings. If, God forbid, a Torah scroll is dropped, the congregation fasts. If, even worse, a scroll is desecrated or destroyed we mourn as if someone had died and we bury it as if it were a person. My great-grandfather once travelled, in the 1870s, from Lithuania to Jerusalem, a long and hazardous journey in those days, carrying with him a Torah scroll he had commissioned so that he would have one from which to read in the Holy Land. He spent the whole journey carrying it, never letting it out of his sight so that it should not fall. It stayed there, in one of the little synagogues in the Old City, until the Jordanians destroyed it and the synagogue in 1949. I never knew my great-grandfather. He died before I was born. But from photographs (he had stern eyebrows but otherworldly eyes) I can imagine him cradling the scroll in his arms as if it were a child.

Jewish spirituality is quite simply the story of a tempestuous love affair between God and a people: the story of a marriage whose contract is the Torah. Every weekday, Jewish men bind the strap of their tefillin (phylacteries) around their finger as if it were a wedding ring, and recite the moving words of Hosea:

I will betroth you to me for ever

I will betroth you in righteousness and justice,

In love and compassion

I will betroth you in faithfulness

and you will know the Lord. (Hosea 2:2.1-2.)

But it has not been an easy marriage. The prophets speak of Israel’s infidelities, and were they alive today they would do so again. Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah and Job contend with God for His apparent injustices, and had they foreseen the Holocaust what would they have said? There is argument, even long periods of estrangement. Yet, said Isaiah, there is no divorce. And for the prophets and the rabbis the Torah itself was the proof. It was Israel’s never-to-be-rescinded marriage contract with God.

So Jews studied it and wrote commentaries to it. Wherever they were, and however harried and distressed, they gathered together to debate and meditate on its words. In the shtetl, the small township of Eastern Europe, when Jews met, one would say to the other: `Zog mir a shtickl Torah – Tell me a little Torah.’ Its words were their intimations of infinity, its letters the solid shapes of mysteries to be decoded. They would stay up long into the night arguing over its meaning, each hoping to hear a chiddush, a ‘new’ interpretation, ‘new’ in inverted commas because all true interpretations had already been revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai. But especially on Shavuot they would stay awake all night, for as the mystical treatise, the Zohar, said: All the wedding guests must stay with the bride on the night before her wedding, rejoicing with her in her preparations for the great day. Shavuot was the wedding day between God and Israel.

In our prayers every day we say:

Blessed be our God …

Who gave us the Torah of truth

And planted in us everlasting life.

Those who study Torah become part of an unbroken conversation that has continued throughout the centuries in which all Israel’s prophets and sages participated. To become a sentence in that conversation, a letter in the scroll, is what we and our ancestors understood as everlasting life.

Chag sameach!

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On the face of it the connections between the sedra and haftarah of Bemidbar are slender. The first has to do with demography. Bemidbar begins with a census of the people. The haftarah begins with Hosea’s vision of a time when “the number of the children of Israel will be like the sand on the sea-shore which cannot be measured or numbered.” There was a time when the Israelites could be counted; the day will come when they will be countless. That is one contrast between the future and the past.

The second goes deeper. The sedra and the book that bears its name are called Bemidbar, “in the wilderness”. The book is about the wilderness years in both a physical and spiritual sense: a time of wandering and internal conflict. Hosea, however, foresees a time when God will bring the people back to the desert and there enact a second honeymoon:

. . . I will lead her into the wilderness

and speak tenderly to her . . .

There she will respond as in the days of her youth,

As in the day she came out of Egypt.

What gives the haftarah its special resonance, however, is the fact that Bemidbar is always read on the Shabbat preceding Shavuot, the festival of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. The fact that tradition chose this of all prophetic passages tells us something deeply moving about how the Jewish people understood this festival and about the Torah itself as the living connection between a people and God. The story of Hosea is one of the strangest of that great chain of visionaries we call the prophets. It is the story of a marriage. The prophet married a woman called Gomer. He was deeply in love with her. We can infer this, because of all the prophets, Hosea is the most eloquent and passionate on the subject of love. Gomer, however, proved faithless. She left home, had a series of lovers, was serially unfaithful, and was eventually forced to sell herself into slavery. Yet Hosea, caught between anger and tender longing, found that he could not relinquish his love for her.

In a flash of prophetic insight, God leads him to understand that his own personal experience mirrors that between God and the Israelites. He had rescued them from slavery, led them through the wilderness and brought them to their new home, the land of Israel. But the people proved faithless. They worshipped other gods. They were promiscuous in their spiritual attachments. By rights, says God, I should have abandoned them. I should have called them (as the prophet called his third child) Lo-ammi, “you are not My people”. Yet God’s love is inextinguishable. He too cannot let go. Whatever the people’s sins, He will bring them back into the desert, scene of their first love, and their marriage will be renewed.

The Talmud in Pesachim gives an extraordinary account of the dialogue between God and Hosea – the unwritten story of the episode that precedes chapter 1 of the book of Hosea:

The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Hosea, “Your children have sinned.” To this, the prophet should have replied, “ – they are Your children, the children of your favoured ones, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Be merciful to them.” Not only did he not say this, but he actually said, “Lord of the universe, the whole world is yours. Exchange them for another nation.” The Holy One, blessed be He, said, “What shall I do with this old man? I will tell him to go and marry a prostitute and have children by her. Then I will tell him to send her away. If he can, then I too will send Israel away.”

There are few more telling passages in the whole of rabbinic literature. If I were to summarise it, I would say: Who is a leader of the Jewish people? Only one who loves the Jewish people. Reading the prophetic literature, it is easy to see the prophets as social critics. They see the people’s faults; they speak them aloud; their message is often a negative one, foretelling disaster. The Talmud is telling us that such a view is superficial and misses the essential point. The prophets loved their people. They spoke not out of condemnation but from the depths of deep desire. They knew that Israel was capable of, and had been summoned to, great things. They never criticised in order to distance themselves, to set themselves above and apart. They spoke in love – God’s love. That is why, in Israel’s darkest nights, the prophets always had a message of hope.

There is one verse in the haftarah so deep that it deserves special attention. God is telling the prophet about the time yet to come when He will bring His people back to the places they once visited, the desert where they first pledged their love, and there they will renew their relationship:

In that day – declares the Lord – you will call Me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call Me ‘my master’.

The resonances of this sentence are impossible to capture in translation. The key words in Hebrew are Ish and Baal, and they both mean ‘husband’. Hosea is telling us about two kinds of marital relationships – and two kinds of culture. One is signalled by the word Baal, which not only means ‘husband’ but is also the name of the Caananite god. Baal, one of the central figures in the pantheon of the ancient Near East, was the storm god of lightning and the fertility god who sends rain to impregnate the ground. He was the macho deity who represented sex and power on a cosmic scale.

Hosea, punning on the name, hints at the kind of world that emerges when you worship sex and power. It is a world without loyalties, where relationships are casual and people taken advantage of and then dropped. A marriage predicated on the word Baal is a relationship of male dominance in which women are used not loved, owned not honoured. The word Baal means, among other things, ‘owner’.

Against this Hosea describes a different kind of relationship. Here his literary device is not pun but quotation. In using the word Ish to describe the relationship between God and His people, the prophet is evoking a verse at the beginning of Genesis – the words of the first man seeing the first woman: 

“This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called ‘woman’ for she was taken out of man.”

Daringly, Hosea suggests that the making of woman from man mirrors the creation of humanity from God. First they are separated, then they are joined again, but now as two distinct persons each of whom respects the integrity of the other. What joins them is a new kind of relationship built on fidelity and trust. 

How we understand the giving of the Torah depends on how we see the relationship between God and the people He chose to be His special witnesses on earth. Inevitably, the language of Judaism when it speaks of God is metaphorical. The Infinite cannot be compassed in finite categories. The metaphors the prophets use are many. God is, among other things, artist, creator, king, master, warrior, shepherd, judge, teacher, redeemer and father. From the point of view of God-as-king, the Torah is the code of laws He ordains for the people He rules. From the perspective of God-as-father-and-teacher, it represents the instructions He gives His children as to how they should best live. Adopting the image of artist-creator, Jewish mystics throughout the ages saw the Torah as the architecture of the universe, the deep structure of existence.

Of all the metaphors, however, the most lovely and most intimate was of God as husband, with Israel as His bride. Isaiah says: For your Maker is your husband, The Lord Almighty is his name . . . (54:5)

Likewise Jeremiah: ‘Return, faithless people,’ declares the Lord, ‘for I am your husband.’ (3:14)

This is how Ezekiel describes the marriage between God and Israel in the days of Moses:

Later I passed by, and when I looked at you and saw that you were old enough for love, I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness. I gave you my solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you — declares the Lord God – and you became mine. (16:8)

From this perspective, the Torah is more than a constitution and code of laws, more than a set of instructions or even the metaphysical DNA of the universe. It is a marriage contract – a token and gesture of love.

When attraction, that most fleeting of emotions, seeks to perpetuate itself as love, it takes the form of marriage: marriage as covenant, in which both parties pledge themselves to one another, to be loyal, steadfast, to stay together through difficult times as well as good and to achieve together what neither could do alone. A marriage is created not by force or coercion but by words – the word given, the word received, the word honoured in faithfulness and trust. There are such things as the laws of marriage (the respective responsibilities of husband and wife), but marriage of its essence is more than a dispassionate set of obligations and rights. It is law suffused with love, and love translated into law. That, according to this metaphor, is what the Sinai event was.

The supreme poet of marriage was Hosea. By reading this haftarah on the Shabbat before Shavuot, we make a momentous affirmation: that in giving the Torah to Israel, God was not asserting His power, dominance or lordship over Israel (what Hosea means when he uses the word ba’al). He was declaring His love. That is why it is no accident that the words with which the haftarah ends – among the most beautiful in the entire religious literature of mankind – are the words Jewish men recite every weekday morning as they wind the strap of the hand-tefillin like a wedding ring around their finger, renewing daily the marriage covenant of Sinai:

I will betroth you to me for ever;

I will betroth you to me in righteousness and justice, love and compassion;

I will betroth you to me in faithfulness,

And you will know God.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6MxtoysjE0

In this video, the Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks discusses the importance of Jerusalem and why it is “the beating heart of Judaism”. (Video courtesy of JInsider)