This lecture continues the commentary of Bereshit Rabbah on the first verse of Lech Lecha, moving on to the midrashim that introduce the call addressed to Avram through verses taken from Kohelet, from Yirmiyahu and from Psalms. The central question is that of wisdom: what wisdom is meant when the text says that it is a stronghold for the wise man more than ten rulers of the city, and why does this particular wisdom call forth a revelation, when ten generations received no word at all? The lecture answers by setting thought that sets out on a journey against thought that has come to a halt — which is the very mark of the idol. It ends with the figure of the rasha (the wicked one) and with the question of what is to be done with him.
Rav Raphaël Benizri first recalls that this midrash was compiled between the sixth and the twelfth centuries, after the Talmud, and that for this reason one finds in it very different approaches of the Sages to one and the same verse. The three texts read here bear this out: one reads Avram’s call from the angle of wisdom, another from that of the failure of the message addressed to Babel, a third from that of a dialogue in which Avraham reproaches G-d for His way of judging.
The development passes through several thresholds: the distinction between chochmah (wisdom) and binah (understanding), the value of the number ten, the four names of man — Enosh, Gever, Ish, Adam — and a reading of the letters of the word rasha. The questions from the audience concern the apparent contradiction between the withdrawal the Rav recommends and the Haggadah’s formula about the wicked son, and then the absence of justice in the Shoah.
What this lecture teaches
Ten generations separate Noah from Avram, and throughout that time the word is eclipsed. The midrash introduces the parashah with a verse from Kohelet: wisdom is a stronghold for the wise man, it is his strength, more than ten rulers who governed the city. Then it states the bare fact: from Noah to Avram there are ten generations, and of all of them, none received a word. Throughout that whole interval, He spoke with no one. And now He reveals Himself to Avram, telling him to begin his journey.
Rabbi Azariah introduces the same call with a verse from Yirmiyahu about Babel. “We sought to heal Babel, but she was not healed; abandon her, and let us go each man to his own land.” The midrash applies the phrase to three successive failures: the generation of Enosh, the generation of the Flood, and then the generation of the dispersion, that of the Tower of Babel. Each time there was an attempt to remedy, each time there was no healing, and each time the conclusion was the same: to withdraw and rebuild elsewhere.
A third midrash reads the call through a dialogue in which man calls his G-d to account. Rabbi Azariah, in the name of Rabbi Acha, opens with the verse “You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore G-d, your G-d, has anointed you with the oil of gladness above your companions,” and applies it to the moment when Avraham pleads for mercy on behalf of the inhabitants of Sodom. Rabbi Acha then places these words in his mouth: You swore that You would bring no more flood upon the world, and here You are using a ruse with Your own oath — a flood of water You will not bring, but a flood of fire, yes.
Rabbi Levi turns the question into a statement: the Judge of all the earth will not do justice. The sentence is usually read as a question; here it is taken seriously as an observation. You are holding the rope by both ends: You want the world and You want justice, and one of the two must be let go. If You want the world, there cannot be justice; if You want justice, the world cannot endure. This is what a man of faith, a man of intense spirituality, allows himself to say — and what the text records: without a concession, however slight, the world would not endure.
The wisdom in question is a sister, not a brother. Shlomo invites us to say to wisdom “You are my sister,” and not “You are my brother”: the word is feminine, and this term will return when Avram presents his wife and asks her to say she is his sister — say that you are my inspiration, say that you are my purpose in life; it is through you that I give a reason to my existence. What is meant, then, is a love free of all carnal desire, borne by spirituality, an inspiration toward knowledge that accompanies a person like a twin sister. Chochmah is the masculine principle and binah the feminine; binah is nourished by chochmah, and the one without the other is a catastrophe.
It is through wisdom, and not through numbers, that Israel stands out among the nations. What others will come to recognize is that this people is a people steeped in wisdom, the bearer of a knowledge: therein lies its greatness, independently of a population that is insignificant compared with humanity as a whole. The nations will stream toward it, seeing it as a focal point and as a source of inspiration for religions and philosophies. This is what Avram manifested at all costs, and this is what accompanies his lech lecha: a knowledge that is exhausted by no limit, that each time gives birth to a new direction of thought, and that thereby touches the infinite and becomes an object of revelation. If G-d speaks to Avram, it is because such an attachment to wisdom cannot remain unanswered.
The beginning of wisdom is fear, not love, because fear restrains. One might have expected the verse to speak of the love of G-d. But fear allows one to walk step by step, gently, crushing nothing along the way, whereas love urges and pushes one forward. The first fruits of wisdom must be seen in their purpose: they drive one on toward further revelations, toward an entirely new perspective of thought. That is how Avram escaped the idols, for idols are precisely thoughts that have come to a halt, so structured that they no longer move.
The number ten is a unit of creation, of thought and of revelation. Each time we count from one to ten, we go from the singular to the plural; beyond ten, everything becomes singular again, and one must pass the mark of a hundred to find the plural once more. For in each set of ten, the same unitary measure recurs. Now there are two movements of ten generations, from Adam to Noah and then from Noah to Avram, and they did not function in the same way: the one according to love, the other according to fear. As for the ten rulers to whom wisdom is compared — they dictate. The shalit already has a fixed law; he does not budge, he governs by decree. That is no way to govern man, because man is in a movement of walking, and walking and law share the same root. The steps one takes in life are each a sign, a marker one places along one’s route for the generations to come, and not only for oneself: it is the only way not to know death.
When the message does not carry, one must withdraw and question oneself. It happens that we persist in speaking a language to people who want none of it, and there is no response; then one must not persist. To abandon Babel and go each man to his own land is to withdraw into oneself and rebuild oneself, recognizing that one has not yet found the way to share, to give, to make the other a partner in one’s message. And if the other insists on having his own experience, one must let him. This also applies to anyone who claims to play the emissary of Judaism in nightclubs or private clubs: if our language does not carry, it is we who must be re-examined.
Every journey has three movements, contained in a verse of three words. The first is the posture of prayer, facing the other as one faces G-d: I ask for Your help, Your assistance — for without faith in a Master of the world, if everything is a matter of chance or of a causality that turns back upon itself, I am lost; and one must know that a change can occur at any moment. The second is commitment: I do not fold my arms waiting for rescue; I bring my own contribution. The third reverses everything: it is not for myself that I ask, it is in Your name; You are enclosed within the consciousness of every being You have created, and I would like to set You free.
Babel is the world of confusion, and order itself must be transcended. We are devotees of order, and the first manifestation of our existence is the seder; but to shut oneself up in it is serious — one must manage to get beyond it. The transcending of order no longer takes place in the exchange of speech; it takes place in song. That is why, on the eve of Pesach, the evening that began around a dialogue ends in song: we sing together, with different intonations, and that is precisely the beauty of all these voices joined as one.
Man bears four names, which are four stages. Enosh is little man, like the small child who discovers his existence by putting everything into his mouth: everything is to be eaten, everything consumed — this is the consumer society and smallness of mind. Gever is adolescence, which wants to show its strength and its ability, with its beauty and its defiance, and which also has its feminine form. Ish is the mature man, the man of morality and principle, and Ishah with him, in a union that is achieved not through perpetual struggle but through the effort of mutual understanding. Above them all there is Adam: he has no feminine, no plural, no qualifier; he is the spiritual dimension of the human being, and man usually reaches it only at an advanced age, once he has risen above his drives.
The word that designates the wicked man can be read in its letters. The rasha is the man of defiance, the one who will under no circumstances admit any truth whatsoever, because for him only reality counts. Now his name joins the head, articulated by the shin, which is the tooth: whoever has lost his teeth can no longer articulate, and he articulates his thought only in relation to the eye — the two eyes connected to the optic nerve. He is willing to consider only the practical world, the world of reality, without a shred of poetry or any movement of transcendence. He abhors the man carried by a will to share.
The oil of gladness is not ordinary joy; it is cheerfulness. The expression is strange: we know the oil of anointing, the oil with which kings were installed, but an anointing of gladness is a beautiful combination — and a combination with fear. The word does not mean simchah but good humor, that way of seeing things which we carry in the name of Yitzchak, which means laughter. This is what makes this people so full of humor, what has allowed it to live through the greatest tragedies of humanity and still be here.
Avraham pleads for people he does not know, and he pleads on a specific ground. He did not live in Sodom, he did not associate with its people, they are strangers to him; and yet, when he learns of the plan to destroy it, he says he wants first to go and see. For the one who today laughs at everything is not always at fault: I myself, he says, had idolatrous parents, I received nothing; I can be regarded as a child held hostage by a situation. One cannot judge someone who has received no education, neither at home nor at school, and whose ideas are the fruit of that absence — and this holds for all the nations, not for the Jewish people alone.
The verse is then reread: You love to justify, and not merely to love justice. You love to find in Your creatures some merit that will save them from the disastrous situation to which they expose themselves. If You want the world to exist, one must stop seeking justice at all costs; there must be mercy in judgment; one must know how to set the truth aside somewhere and keep it in reserve. We close our eyes to our children’s foolishness, to what is said behind our backs — without for all that entering into a battle of caricatures. And G-d concedes it to him: you hated only the elements of wickedness, you did not hate the man who practices it, and that is why, from Noah to you, over ten generations, I spoke to no one else. What a Jew is, in short, is one who seeks to defend the indefensible.
To the Haggadah’s formula about the wicked son, the answer is that he should be sent to the dentist. “Blunt his teeth” does not mean to break them: the tooth is the articulation of speech, and this man still has a muddled, confused thinking, too attached to reality to know how to express itself. One must therefore change his discourse, educate him and re-educate him. The rasha is intelligent, very intelligent in fact: he is the neighbor of the wise son and his antithesis, and if he is entitled to his place at the family table, it is because that is where his place is and he is not pushed away. The four degrees, moreover, have no age: one can have remained Enosh at seventy, when what matters is the restaurant and the glass of beer. Education is the lifeblood of this evolution, and that is what is lacking today, since people are now trained according to what their studies will bring in and not for the formation of the person.
In the Shoah, there was no judgment at all. The question raised is that of the justice one does not find in the world, and the answer first rules out any explanation given offhand. But what can be said is that there was a total absence of din (judgment) there: a world in which neither justice, nor love, nor kindness exist, a world of confusion and disorder in which one seeks to establish a new order governed by terror, which is not fear of Heaven. What fed it was jealousy, the passions and the will to dominate, the refusal to let a people bearing a culture flourish — and German Judaism carried lights within the Jewish community. The great question remains the silence of G-d, and not only the silence of the Church.
Full transcript of the lecture
Manu, can we begin? Yes, let’s go. Good evening, everyone; it is a pleasure to be together again. We are going to try to move a little faster in our commentary on this first verse of Lech Lecha, because one could stay on it, dwell on it, perhaps even two or three months, and I would nonetheless like to move on to other subjects, to other aspects. So let us begin. This text we have already seen — please move on to the next one. That one too we commented on last time. There. We are in Bereshit Rabbah, on Avraham, on Lech Lecha. And here the introduction to the parashah is made through a verse from Kohelet: “Wisdom is a stronghold for the wise man” — or: it constitutes the strength of the wise man — “more than ten rulers who were in the city” (Kohelet 7:19).
So what does this mean? Asarah dorot mi-Noach ve’ad Avraham — the ten generations from Noah to Avraham — mi-kulam lo dibarti im echad: “of all of them, I did not speak with a single one.” The Holy One, blessed be He, is saying that there was an eclipse of the word. Throughout all those generations, He spoke with no one. And now — now He reveals Himself to Avraham, saying to him: “Begin your journey.” Lech lecha, “go for yourself” — we have already seen certain aspects of it, we will not repeat them for now, and I will continue with the next midrash, because it forms a single unit of thought. Rabbi Azariah patach — Rabbi Azariah opened with a verse from Yirmiyahu, chapter 51, verse 9: “We sought to heal Babel, but she was not healed. Abandon her, and let us go each man to his own land.”
Rippinu et Bavel — we sought to heal, to remedy Babel, in the generation of Enosh (I will explain this shortly), and she was not healed for all that — in the generation of the Flood. “Abandon her” — in the generation of the Dispersion, that of the Tower of Babel. “And let us go each man to his own land.” Midrash number six, and there I will stop: Rabbi Azariah, in the name of Rabbi Acha, patach — he offered the following introduction in the name of Rabbi Acha: ahavta tzedek vatisna resha, “You have loved righteousness and hated resha.” How should we translate rasha, resha and so on? We will see how to translate it; for now let us render it, in a popular, everyday way, as “wickedness.”
Al ken meshachacha Elokim Elokecha shemen sasson mechaverecha — “therefore G-d, your G-d, has anointed you with the oil of gladness above your companions” (Tehillim 45:8). Rabbi Azariah applied this verse to Avraham, to the hour when Avraham pleaded — when Avraham stood to implore G-d’s mercy for the inhabitants of Sodom. What is written there? “Far be it from You to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous should share the fate of the wicked” (Bereshit 18:25). Rabbi Acha said: the discourse, the dialogue between G-d and Avraham, went as follows. You swore, You said that You would bring no more flood upon the world.
U-mah ata ma’arim al ha-shevu’ah? — and what are You doing here? You are using a ruse with the oath, with the commitment You made. It is astonishing: a flood of water You will not bring, but a flood of fire — yes, that You bring! Then You have not discharged Your oath. Amar Rabbi Levi: ha-shofet kol ha-aretz lo ya’aseh mishpat. Rabbi Levi invites us to translate the verse not as a question — “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?” No; he tells us: ha-shofet kol ha-aretz lo ya’aseh mishpat — the Judge of all the earth, behold, He will not do justice. Why? Because if You want the world to endure, there is no justice.
And if You want justice, then the world cannot endure. See what a man of faith, a man of intense spirituality, can allow himself: to challenge the Holy One, blessed be He, to challenge his G-d and say to Him: You are holding the rope by both ends — at ba’i alma u-ba’i dina, You want both the world and justice — sav lach chada minayhu, take one of the two for Yourself: You must let go of one of them, give up one of them; and if You make no concession, even the smallest concession, the world could not endure. And here we come back to the application of the verse: you are a partisan of justice, “you have loved righteousness and hated wickedness,” and therefore you will have an oil — the oil of gladness — mechaverecha, above all your companions: mi-Noach ve’ad etzlecha asarah dorot — from Noah to you there are ten generations — mi-kulam lo dibarti im echad ela imcha.
“And of them all, I spoke with none but you.” There — I have translated. I hope I translated well and that you followed the translation. We will now return to our text and see what ideas are set forth in it. You know that this Midrash dates from between the year 600 and the year 1200 — from the sixth to the twelfth century. After the Talmud, various aspects of biblical exegesis were compiled in the Midrash Rabbah. That is why we see different approaches of our Sages regarding this Midrash. So let us start with the first: ha-chochmah ta’oz le-chacham me-asarah shalitim asher hayu ba-ir. First of all, it says that wisdom is the stronghold of the wise man more than ten shalitim.
More than ten rulers. What is wisdom? Is it science, the knowledge of nature? Is it moral conscience? Is it both at once? Is it a wisdom of the mind? A wisdom of the heart? Emor la-chochmah achoti at — “Say to wisdom: you are my sister” (Mishlei 7:4). This is how Shlomo invites us to reflect on the very concept of wisdom. A sister is not a brother. He could have said achi atah, “you are my brother” — no: achoti, “my sister.” Chochmah is feminine, it calls for achot, and we have already touched with our fingertips this term achot, which will come back, because when Avraham presents his wife he will say to her: imri na achoti at, “Say, please, that you are my sister” (Bereshit 12:13) — say that you are my inspiration; that is what he means to tell her. Say that you are, in short, my purpose in life, and that it is through you, ultimately, that I give a reason to my existence.
Well, this term achot denotes a love — a love, you see, that is free of all carnal desire. It is carried by a pure love of spirituality, and it is a true inspiration toward da’at, toward knowledge. This knowledge is my twin sister; she accompanies me. She accompanies me, and that is chochmah. We will see that this chochmah is the masculine principle, whereas binah, understanding, is the feminine element. But beware: binah is nourished by chochmah, and the one without the other is a catastrophe. The two truly need to unite harmoniously. So then, what makes the people of Israel stand out among all the nations — and this is what they seek throughout this uninterrupted journey of lech lecha — is the fact that all the others will come to recognize: am chacham ve-navon ha-goy ha-gadol ha-zeh, “this great nation is a wise and understanding people” (Devarim 4:6).
This people is a people steeped in wisdom, a bearer of wisdom, a bearer of knowledge. That is its greatness, and it is in this way, so to speak, that this people could indeed stand out among the other nations, independently of its population, which is insignificant compared with humanity as a whole. Ve-naharu elav kol ha-goyim — “and all the nations shall stream to it” (Yeshayahu 2:2): the nations will flow toward the Jewish people, regarding it as the focal point of all humanity and as the source of inspiration of all religions, of all philosophies. […] This is what Avraham held to at all costs and manifested, because this chochmah accompanied him in this lech lecha, in this journey which means that this knowledge is exhausted by no limit, and each time it generates another direction of thought; and because it generates this new direction of thought, it touches the infinite, it becomes an object of revelation.
Va-yomer Hashem el Avram — “And Hashem said to Avram.” Why? Because he displayed an attachment to chochmah such that the Holy One, blessed be He, could not but reveal Himself to him. Reshit chochmah yir’at Hashem — “the beginning of wisdom is the fear of Hashem” (Tehillim 111:10); the first fruits of wisdom are yir’at Hashem, the fear of the Eternal. Why fear? One would have expected ahavat Hashem — reshit chochmah ahavat Hashem, the love of G-d. No. Even when one explains, even when one is supposed to give an answer, one does not want to stop there: that answer is valid hic et nunc, here and now; it is valid for us. Tomorrow it may already be superseded, because it will have been stirred and worked through differently. But this is it — this is the communication with the infinite through the world of the ma’amarot, the world of the utterances of creation, and the world of the dibrot, the words of revelation. Yir’ah restrains; ahavah, on the contrary, mobilizes. What is said — reshit chochmah yir’at Hashem — means that the first fruits of wisdom must be seen in their purpose: they will urge one even more to pass on to further revelations, to an entirely new perspective of thought. That is what he did, that is what Avraham did. And that is how he escaped the idols. We have said that idols are precisely thoughts that have come to a halt, structured in such a way that they do not move. No — they can be set in motion only when one has begun with ahavah and has arrived at yir’at Hashem, at the fear of G-d.
Yir’ah restrains a person; it is yir’at ha-kavod, reverence: it allows me to walk step by step, gently, crushing nothing along my way, whereas ahavah, on the contrary, urges me on, pushes me forward. And then there is always this principle of ten — ten. Why? Because the notion of ten we have already seen as a unit of creation, a unit of thought, a unit of revelation. And it is a fact that each time we count from one to ten, we count from the singular to the plural; once we pass ten, everything becomes singular: shteim esreh shanah, arba esreh shanah, chamesh esreh shanah — twelve “year,” fourteen “year,” fifteen “year.” One would have to pass the mark of a hundred to find the plural again.
Why? Because in the tens we find, each time, a unitary measure. So: asarah dorot from Adam to Noah, asarah dorot from Noah to Avraham — there are two movements of ten generations. Now we know very well that these two movements of ten generations functioned [differently]: the one according to ahavah, the other according to yir’ah. The love that there was between the sons of the Elohim and the daughters of men […] — a love that knows no limit, that knows no trial, that operates in pleasure […]. Then, when the survivors of the Flood saw what had happened, [they said]: before it comes upon us again, let us build ourselves a city, a rampart, and let us put things in order.
Asarah shalitim. The shalit, the ruler — he dictates. His way of doing things: he already has a fixed law, and nothing moves; he governs by decrees. Now that is no way to govern man, because when one is in the movement of lech lecha, one is in a movement of halichah, of walking — of halachah: al tikrei halichot ela halachot, “do not read halichot, ways, but halachot, laws.” The walks are indeed the steps one takes in life, and each step is a sign, a marker that one sets, that one places along one’s route for the generations to come. Not only for ourselves — it is always the lech lecha: it is the only way, truly, not to know death; it lies in this lech lecha — we will come back to this.
And that is why Rabbi Azariah says: listen — rippinu et Bavel ve-lo nirpatah. It sometimes happens that we insist at all costs on holding forth to people who want none of it. Bavel ve-lo nirpatah: we try to speak a certain language around us, and there is no response — then one must not persist. Izvuha ve-nelech ish le-artzo — izvuha, abandon her. Why? Let us withdraw into ourselves; nelech ish le-artzo, let us rebuild ourselves. [If there is no response,] it is because we have not yet found the way to be mashpi’a, to have influence — to share, to give, to make the other a partner in my message. And he, the other, wants to have his own experience at all costs: let us leave him be. And in this way, through this freedom — because lech lecha implies a freedom, and this bears repeating — there are three things, three movements, three movements in every journey. And they are, as I like to say, in the verse li-shu’atcha kivviti Hashem (Bereshit 49:18) — a verse of three words.
[A participant: “We can no longer hear you, Rav Benizri — you’ve been cut off.”] What is its meaning? The first is that one must always be in a posture of prayer toward the other, as toward G-d. Li-shu’atcha: I ask for Your help, I ask for Your assistance — li-shu’atcha kivviti Hashem. Of course, without this faith in a Master of the world — well, if everything is the work of chance, and if everything falls within a law of causality that turns back upon itself, then I am lost. I must be convinced that the free electron that is there is this possibility of change which could occur at any moment; whereas if I take comfort in this causality, one day or another all my plans are, so to speak, thwarted — as we unfortunately see nowadays with this coronavirus […]. So the text says: [do not] persist in sharing something with the other when he does not want it and does not take it in. One must know how to let things ripen, and not simply overwhelm the other.
Ve-nelech ish le-artzo: let us look a little at ourselves, let us reconsider things by ourselves. Rippinu et Bavel — be-dor Enosh. We have the world of Babel: it is the world of confusion, where everything is mixed up. We, for our part, are devotees of order — that is why […]. The first manifestation of our existence is the seder; but one must not shut oneself up in it. That too is serious. One must manage to come out of this seder […] — to go beyond order, the transcending of order. The transcending of order no longer lies in the exchange of dialogue, in the exchange of speech; it lies in song. That is why, on the eve of Pesach, we end — we conclude the evening — not with the dialogue with which we began around the [Seder table], but with song.
We sing in chorus; there are different intonations in this singing, but that does not matter. On the contrary, that is where the beauty lies — the harmony of all these voices united. So I return to Babel, which is the world of confusion. And the world of confusion we know well. And that was dor Enosh. I have told you that there are, after all, four stages of life in man. Enosh, little man — little man is like the small child: everything he finds, the way he experiences his existence, is by putting it into his mouth, isn’t it? For him everything is to be eaten, everything to be consumed. The consumer society — that is Enosh; it is smallness of mind, isn’t it?
Then, after that, he is Gever — Gever […]: adolescence. He wants to show that he is the strongest, that he is capable. Adolescence, as I have said, is wonderful, it has its beauty, but it is defiant, and sometimes, unfortunately, one gets lost in it — and that is why it is followed [by the next stage]. After Gever comes Ish. Ish is a man of morality, of principle — a mature man. […] enoshut […] — that is humanity, isn’t it? That is the common crowd. The term gever is also declined — gveret: woman too claims her share of gevurah, of strength; the women’s liberation movement is here, and we must respect it. That is woman in her rightful place. […] That too is valid. Then comes Ish, Ishah. Ish, the mature man, the moral man; Ishah likewise.
That is when she enters into a union, and so on. It is done together, as two — not in perpetual struggle, but on the contrary in an effort of mutual understanding, of harmony, of love. But above, above Gever [and Ish], there is the word Adam. Adam — is there a feminine of Adam? Is there a plural of Adam? Is there a qualifier of Adam? There is no feminine, there is no masculine, there is no plural; there is no qualifier of Adam. Adam is the spiritual dimension of the human being. Unfortunately, that one he generally comes to know only at an advanced age — when he is above his drives.
He can no longer eat whatever he wants, whatever he finds; he no longer wants to “have a blast,” as they say today, does he? He becomes — he is imbued with a certain wisdom. So in this world of confusion, these are the characteristics of dor Enosh, the generation of Enosh, where man is small. Man is a consumer society. And in a consumer society, of course, there are, for the most part, nothing but idols. And even though they had seen that the generation of the Flood ended in bankruptcy, it did not [change them]; they did not learn the lesson […]. “Abandon her, abandon her” — be-dor ha-Plagah: behold, in the end there are going to be divisions within humanity. What they themselves had conceived, and what had motivated their union, would become the source of their division. And we remind anyone with spiritual aspirations who would like to play Tarzan in nightclubs, or in private clubs, or in chutz la-aretz, abroad, saying, “Well, I am the emissary of Judaism in the place where I live”: beware — a movement of withdrawal is needed. We need it. If our language does not carry, let us question ourselves.
But it means being called into question. Avram is the object of a revelation, and here he has reached that degree of Adam, to whom G-d spoke first of all, hasn’t he? Now we know very well that the subject of G-d’s first communication with man was the Tree of Knowledge. The Tree of Knowledge — […] — do not rush to eat its fruit. You will get indigestion if you do not prepare yourself properly for the consumption of this fruit. Hold on, hold on to life — that is what Rabbi Azariah said; that is Avraham’s merit. Avraham’s merit is that he drew the conclusion that in Aram Naharayim, in Charan, he had nothing more to do.
One had to leave them — “and let us return each to his own land” — and try first of all to give body to our spirituality. For that one needs a makom, a place; one always needs a makom — Baruch ha-Makom, baruch Hu; I will have occasion to come back to this. […] But here I remember that I did not complete for you the idea of li-shu’atcha kivviti Hashem. We ask for G-d’s help — but the second reading, when we say kivviti Hashem li-shu’atcha, kivviti Hashem li-shu’atcha, means: I commit myself, I engage my own person. It is not that I fold my arms and wait for Your rescue; no, I want to bring my contribution — but You, help me. Kivviti Hashem li-shu’atcha. The third: Hashem li-shu’atcha — it is not me, it is not Your being that I want for myself, it is not for me; it is in Your name. I want to support You; I want to free You from Your enclosure. You are enclosed within the consciousness of every being You have created; I would like to bring that to light — and that is why I implore Your being. So the notion of lech lecha is a self-transcendence that is demanded, and that is why Rashi — to take up the term of the Midrash — says le-hana’atcha u-le-tovatcha: it will be for your benefit, for your good.
One must know that spiritual joy has no limit. All other joys fade. [Such joy] ages, grows weary; one becomes like a contented animal. But there is the spiritual thing, which is an extraordinary stimulant for man. And that is why — and see how the ideas of the Midrash follow one another — Rabbi Azariah, in the name of Rabbi Acha, introduces [the call] in this way: ahavta tzedek vatisna resha, al ken meshachacha Elokim Elokecha shemen sasson mechaverecha. You love, you love justice. Vatisna resha — what is the rasha? The definition of the rasha — you know […] — what is the rasha? Whom do we call so? The rasha is the man who defies everything.
He is the one who indeed refuses under any circumstances to admit any truth whatsoever. Why? Because for him only reality counts. He is attached to the world of reality — yes, today there are reality stars. But, in a way, the rasha — look at the word: resh, that is rosh, the head; just the letters by themselves: the head, articulated by the shin. Shen means teeth. You see, in the shin there are three kinds of teeth. The shin — one who has no teeth cannot articulate; when one has lost one’s teeth, one indeed cannot speak properly. But the articulation of his thought, of his rosh, is solely in relation to the ayin. Ayin is — how shall I put it — two eyes connected to a nerve, to an optic nerve, isn’t it?
That is the rasha. The rasha is one who is willing to consider nothing but the practical world, the world of reality. Not a shred of poetry, not a single movement of transcendence. And what he abhors is the man who carries — who is carried by — a will to share, because ahavah is a will to share. And that is why, in reality, we are the friends of all humanity; we are the friends of all of G-d’s creatures, are we not? And there is shemen sasson — this oil which indeed floats above all liquids. Shemen sasson — do you know what sasson is? How do we say “joy” in Hebrew? Everyone knows that: it’s simchah, isn’t it?
But sasson — what is it? Cheerfulness; it is good humor; it is, indeed, a way of seeing things. They stole it from us, they stole this idea from us — this smile of — tell me, remind me — we carry it in Yitzchak: we already laugh at everything that can be said. We have — we carry — this joy; it dwells within us. That is shemen sasson, the oil of gladness. You have never come across this expression, “oil of gladness” — whether such a thing even exists or not. The oil of anointing, yes, we know it, don’t we? That is how kings were installed on the throne. But no — here it is the anointing of gladness. It is a beautiful combination — but together with fear. And that is what makes the Jewish people full of humor as well; and it has never given in. It has lived through the greatest tragedies of humanity, and it is still here; it has kept its sasson.
He does not know Sodom and Gomorrah; the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah are, after all, strangers to him. He did not live among them, he does not know them, he did not associate with them. Yet when Hashem tells him that He intends to destroy these two cities, he says to Him: No — first I will go and see, I will search […]. Because the rasha of today, if he laughs at everything, it is sometimes not his fault. “I myself,” says Avraham, “had idolatrous parents; I received nothing. I can be regarded as a child held hostage by a situation. Why do You judge him?” Today one cannot judge a Jew who has not had the benefit of a Jewish education, neither at home nor at school.
And the ideas he displays are the fruit of an absence of education at the root — he did not receive, he did not have. So Avraham says: this holds not only for the Jewish people; this holds for all the nations, for all humanity. So what is a Jew? He is one who, despite everything, seeks to defend the indefensible. For in the end, when He decided to wipe out Sodom and Gomorrah, He had weighed all the parameters; but the fact is that Avraham, despite everything, does not rejoice and does not yield to the idea that two important cities could be destroyed by Hashem. He says to Him: ha-af tispeh tzaddik im rasha — “Will You indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” (Bereshit 18:23) — will the innocent perish together with those who have clung to the reality of this world? And this discourse between Avraham and G-d, as I told you a moment ago, exists only within the Torah. It is as though G-d shares with His people the responsibility for everything He does in this world; and for everything His people does in this world, [He too] takes responsibility. That is ahavta tzedek.
Ahavta tzedek does not mean “you loved justice.” Ahavta le-tzadek: you love to justify the deeds of the creatures and to find in them some merit or other that will save them from the disastrous situation to which they expose themselves. If You want the world to exist, then one must stop seeking justice at all costs. There must be rachamim ba-din, at least a measure of mercy within judgment. One must, at all costs, cast the truth aside somewhere and keep it in reserve, because if You want the world to endure, one must sometimes know how to close one’s eyes. We close our eyes to our children’s foolishness. We close our eyes, very often, to what is said behind our backs — but never mind. And yet that does not mean one should enter into a battle of caricatures. No — we are […] ha-shofet kol ha-aretz: im din atah mevakesh, ein olam — if You seek justice, there is no world.
If You want justice [alone, it does not work]. We gave birth to two great religions: Christianity is love, Islam is justice. So one cannot entirely separate the one from the other; otherwise the world does not exist. But what one can do — I will skip further down, if you will allow me — […]. So the Holy One, blessed be He — look — as if He were convinced, in short, by Avraham’s words, says to him: “Very well: ahavta tzedek — I take into account the fact that you hated only the resha, the deed, the elements of resha; but you did not hate the rasha, that is, the man who practices rish’ut, wickedness.
Him you did not hate; but wickedness itself you detest, you abhor. That is very good. So — meshachacha shemen sasson mechaverecha, I have anointed you above your companions. Mi-Noach ve’ad etzlecha asarah dorot: of all of them, I did not speak with a single one.” And so it is that the words — the ma’amarot of creation — are the utterances which, little by little, are distilling the revelation, which will pass first from particular to particular through the Avot, to culminate in the revelation of the dibrot. And that is the difference between the ma’amarot [and the dibrot]: it is fear that imposes them; it is the brake imposed upon this process of creation, since G-d, who created the world, renews every day the universe of His creation. Well, let us hope that we too may truly benefit from this second [kind of] speech, and that we may give new breath to our discourse, to our word, so that it can have an impact on ourselves, on those immediately around us, our families, and on the surrounding society.
There — if you have questions, I will be glad to take them. [A participant:] Rav Benizri, I had two questions. The first is: how do we reconcile what may seem contradictory? You say ve-nelech ish le-artzo — so it is not turning away from the problem, but letting live, letting the other live, who needs to go through his own learning. And the rasha, the rasha about whom the Haggadah says hakheh et shinav, “blunt his teeth” — so I ask myself: what should be done with the rasha? Must one hakheh et shinav, break his teeth, or else…? [The Rav:] Who said you must break his teeth? On the contrary, you have to send him to the dentist! The drill! No, no, no — careful: hakheh et shinav — I always say this to my son when he treats me, because he tells me, “Clench your teeth” […]. It simply means that one should try to change his discourse — hakheh et shinav.
We have said that the shen, the shinayim, is the articulation of speech. So this man has not yet — he still has a thinking that is muddled, confused. It does not know how to express itself; he is so attached to reality. He needs to be educated, re-educated — because that is what we are telling him. Careful: the rasha is a chacham, a wise man; that is why he was placed next to the chacham. He is intelligent, very intelligent. The rasha is the neighbor of the chacham; he is the antithesis of the chacham. But we will have occasion [to discuss this]; […] moreover, if he has the right to sit at his parents’ table, and he has not been sent away, not been pushed aside — on the contrary, that is his place: at home. He has another discourse. […] You see these four degrees I developed — Enosh, Gever, [Ish, Adam] — they have no age. There are people who at seventy have remained Enosh.
What matters to them is the restaurant, the glass of beer — that is Enosh. But there is an evolution; one should — and that is why education is the lifeblood of evolution, of a positive evolution. Education, unfortunately — education today is in a sorry state. I remember that in our day we had a half-hour of moral instruction; we began the day with half an hour of moral instruction, didn’t we? The teacher, in primary school, would give us a little moral idea each time, with the lesson it carried. And it interested us, it touched us; he would bring a little story, a news item. Today, this moral instruction is absent. This education — where is it today? People are educated only through practical studies, and studies are pursued in view of what they may bring in later, of the advancement they can secure in life, and not as the formation of one’s own person.
So the rasha is someone who has not matured his discourse: he has remained at the stage of Enosh, at the stage of Gever; he is sometimes on the threshold of Ish, but he has not reached the level of Adam. There — another question? [A participant:] Yes, you were speaking of ein din, of “there is no justice.” So, if I understand correctly, one should not look for justice — how shall I put it — here on earth, even though it is probably divine; one should indeed pursue justice, seek it for oneself, but apparently one should not hope to find it in the world. Can this be connected with the incomprehension surrounding the Shoah?
[The Rav:] That is another problem. That is ha-nistarot la-Hashem Elokeinu, “the hidden things belong to Hashem our G-d” (Devarim 29:28) — and it is not with an answer given offhand like this that I should approach this problem. But on the contrary: in the Shoah there is an absence of din, an absence of din — total. That is the world in which neither din, nor love, nor chesed, lovingkindness, exist. That is the world of total confusion, the world of disorder; there is no longer any seder, no longer any order. One seeks to establish a new order — a new order which, at that moment, is governed by terror, not by fear of Heaven; between terror and reverent fear [there is a difference] — governed by terror: the terror of letting oneself, so to speak, be subjected to or dominated by a people bearing a culture that stretches from the Renaissance to […]. And we are challenged by this. And you know very well that what fed this Shoah was kin’ah, ta’avah ve-kavod — jealousy, the passions and the will to dominate: refusing to accept that there should be people there who were indeed flourishing within a culture and showing [its worth] — and this is a fact that is still borne out today. German Judaism carried lights within the Jewish community, [a community] that has been crushed more and more by that wretched nation.
[A participant:] Thank you. [The Rav:] But there, the great question is the silence of G-d — not only the silence of the Church. So, let us meet again next week on our channel. Next week. […] Thank you very much. [A participant:] Thank you, Rav Benizri. [The Rav:] Thank you, good evening. And see you next week. [Participants:] Thank you very much. Goodbye. Thank you. [A participant:] I thank you infinitely. I am in the car, at the wheel, but I still managed to follow the whole lecture. You are a source of light — truly a source of light. Thank you very much; good evening, everyone. [The Rav:] Good evening, thank you.
Continue studying
- ← Previous lecture: Bereshit Rabbah 39, Part 2: Lech Lecha
- Next lecture: Bereshit Rabbah 39, Part 4: Terah and the Call →
- All lectures in the series: Bereshit Rabbah
- Who is Rav Raphaël Benizri?