This lecture continues chapter 41 of Bereshit Rabbah at the moment when G-d speaks to Avraham once again, “after Lot had parted from him,” and promises him descendants compared to the dust of the earth. The midrash unfolds this comparison in three senses: dust stretches from one end of the world to the other; the earth yields its fruit only through water; and the earth wears out every metal tool while it itself endures. The lecture adds the harshest sense of all — earth that is made to be trampled. The question it raises is twofold: what becomes of a teaching when a disciple takes it only to his own measure, and why does the earth remain indispensable to everything one claims to draw from it?
Rav Raphaël Benizri starts from the commitment made at the foot of Sinai, and from the element of coercion the midrash adds to it, in order to show that free will is never complete — yet complete enough to engage responsibility. From this he concludes that no one can, on his own, receive the whole of an infinite teaching: it is the community that brings it to fulfilment, through what each person contributes. To reduce the Law to recipes for living is to stifle it — and that is precisely the fault of Lot.
The lecture then follows the midrash’s three readings of the dust, the question of walking the land as an act of ownership, and then opens the next chapter: the war of the four kings against the five, presented as the embryo of the war at the end of days and illustrated by the story of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanos and his father. The closing questions concern the quarrel between the shepherds, what it means to walk the land, and what Rabbi Eliezer means to share with his brothers.
What this lecture teaches
Free will does not exist in the absolute — and yet that is enough. The people declared of its own accord, “We will do and we will hear,” and nonetheless the midrash adds that the mountain was held over them like a tub: either you accept, or here will be your grave. The commentators puzzle over this element of coercion. But free will is sometimes an illusion: man does not gauge the social, family and professional pressures that weigh on him. It plays only a partial role — yet enough to engage his responsibility.
No one receives the whole of the teaching by himself. We do not start out with the same faculties or the same sensitivities, and we approach spiritual teaching at different levels. Hence the tendency to shrink that teaching to the measure of each person’s abilities — a dangerous thing, for it exposes the Law to becoming nothing more than each individual’s personal perception. Just as G-d is infinite, His teaching proceeds from that infinity — and one can only embrace it as a group. It is the community, through each person’s own contribution, that brings the whole of the Law to fulfilment. To compartmentalize the Law is to stifle it. Those who put up barriers or reduce the teaching to recipes for living commit a grave error, for they prevent it from attaining its dimensions — not merely universal, but cosmic. At the beginning, the text highlights the earth plunged in chaos — and one wonders what the heavens were at that time. The heavens appear at the giving of the Torah, which is, in a sense, the complement of creation.
That is Lot’s sin: a narrow perception. He has his assets, he is Avraham’s disciple, and he will not lose them — when one passes near Sodom and sees the pillar that was his wife, one says the blessing of the true Judge, and adds another, blessing the One who remembers Lot. Lot’s merit is not overlooked. But for the time being he represents a danger, and it is against that danger that a society protects itself. Orthodox or not, it seeks to live within its own limits, because it fears that involvement with the wider group might harm it and the education of its children. A temporary withdrawal is possible; it is permitted. But it risks depriving Avraham of his constant inspiration, and sometimes one must admit it: when the world becomes so strict that it breaks with another part of the Jewish people, or even with the non-Jewish world, the indispensable ventilation no longer takes place.
Lot is the man who wants to use Judaism for his own comfort. Entering the religious world commits one to nothing, as long as one wears it as an extra garment, a coat, a raincoat: well, it does offer protection. That is the error. This Judaism must not be a garment but a part of oneself; the inside must reflect the outward appeal, and what is visible must bring out what the person truly carries within.
Purely pragmatic thinking is cut off from the poetry of life. Lot chose a society where morals are loosened and where thought aims to be practical and realistic. Yet thought that is nothing but pragmatic is cut off from song, cut off from the elevation of the soul. It is after this separation that G-d speaks to Avraham again and promises him all the land he sees, with descendants “like the dust of the earth.” The first sense of the comparison is dispersion: the dust of the earth reaches from one end of the world to the other, and so your children will be scattered from one end of the world to the other. In other words: you are part of the whole of creation without being part of it on the level of ideas and thought. It is a way of taking hold of the earth from one end to the other and making those lands habitable — and that is why, like it or not, these children will be scattered.
Second sense: the earth yields its fruit only through water. No land produces without it. In the same way, Israel will bear fruit only through the Torah, and that is what will make it distinct. Otherwise it would be destined to vanish among the nations. The third sense, finally: the earth wears out every metal tool and endures. It does not merely hold on; it persists, while the tools that work it end up worn away. So it is with those who serve the stars: they will become incidental, and the people will endure. There are, moreover, several ways of naming idolaters, and one of them calls them servants of the stars — yet the Jewish people is itself compared to the stars, without being their servant. It is not a race for the stars: it is about being a star oneself. And that is why the blessing varies — at times the dust of the earth, at times the stars of the heavens.
A fourth sense, the harshest: the earth is made to be trampled. So too your children: at certain moments they bear responsibility for the other nations, and for that reason they become objects of persecution. Such is the lot of the teacher, who is not accepted by his class from the outset, who needs time to adjust and must prove himself. Even then, a few disciples will follow him, while a large part will break away from him, disparage him, and found their own school.
Avraham’s kindness is not ours exclusively. The Judaism founded on that kindness is found in Christianity and found in Islam; it cannot be dismissed, and we are not its exclusive holders. But we are the purists of that kindness at its source — the kindness that has not been cheapened through a loosening of morals or an abuse of the riches offered by creation. When the midrash adds, “I will put it into the hands of your tormentors,” one may dispute this explanation of the midrash, but it says something true: the objections, the challenges, the refusal to take in the whole of the teaching compel the teacher to search further, to find the substance and the manner of his answer, to innovate. It is the role of the other nations not to let the Jewish people rest on its laurels, nor to let this teaching become mummified.
“Bow down, that we may pass over”: the Jewish people became a bridge. Those who demanded it asked it to make itself small so that they could walk over it. But that bridge served the other nations to pass from one level of thought to another, and this is how its children will wear down those who serve the stars — all who seek to shine through what they do or what they preach. The chief virtue of the Jewish people is that it survives all its ordeals.
This struggle is not only external. We must also wage it within, since we are the representatives and the samples of the various nations: we carry within us all these elements, from the far left to the far right. Must we then renounce national identity and keep only what makes the beauty of Judaism — its thought and its mitzvot? No. The divine command is “Arise, walk through the land”: never give up the land in order, supposedly, to preserve your Judaism. It remains the core around which the fruit of all thought gathers. Walking the land is, moreover, an act of acquisition, and opinions differ on its measure: Rabbi Eliezer holds that walking suffices to establish ownership; the Sages reply that one acquires only if one has walked the field along its length and its breadth. And whoever has walked it lengthwise and crosswise has acquired only the place he himself has paced out. If we limit our walking, we limit our influence as well.
The chapter of Lot is not closed: it will return. Just as remedies can be found in the humblest vegetation, there is always a molecule to be extracted that is indispensable to the balance of the universe and to human life — and this holds for all of humanity: disparage no one, cast contempt on no one. Although Lot left his path, Avraham does not abandon him and will seek to bring him back. Lot is a veil of Adam, sharing his numerical value: an outer garment that must not be thrown away. And the letters of Adam spell Adam, David, Mashiach — from the first man to his fulfilment in David, and from David to his universal projection.
The messianic idea is neither domination nor a general conversion. It is impossible to fall back on a Jewish people confined to its national life, for that would be to say there is a population chosen arbitrarily, unrelated to the others. We do not present ourselves as wishing to govern and dominate the nations: that idea must be discarded, and it has nothing to do with the messianic idea. Nor does the messianic idea include the conversion of all humanity to our values — whoever truly wishes to join the Jewish people must know that he will face challenges to his own mission, a phenomenon of rejection that may stretch over generations before he is accepted.
The war of the four kings against the five is the embryo of the war at the end of days. Four petty kings against five: on one side the four letters of the Name that speaks of love, on the other the five letters of the Name that speaks of justice — the partisans of rigor. Those who set justice against love and rigor against kindness are waging the war of the end of days, and we are in it. For knowing where kindness ends and where justice ends, so as to hold the two Names one within the other as we do in our blessings, demands a certain maturity. Amraphel, who leads the battle, is, according to our Sages, the one who had condemned Avraham to the fiery furnace.
The midrash introduces this war with the story of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanos. The verse says that the wicked have drawn the sword, and that their sword shall enter their own heart. The accompanying story is that of the son of a great landowner, charged with plowing the family’s lands, whose cow breaks its leg — and he sees good in it, since he runs away rather than face his father’s anger, and joins the academy of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai. His father comes to disinherit him and finds him expounding a text before the most eminent figures of the land, who listen to him. He then offers him all his property; Rabbi Eliezer refuses and declares that he wishes to benefit from it only in equal share with his brothers.
This story describes the war we are living within the people. The father could not accept that a son should abandon work in the fields: for him, that was not Judaism; a country is built only on a solid economy. On one side, those who at all costs want to found their independence on labor alone, like the people of Sodom, and not on fine theories; on the other, those who seek their spirituality from gurus, in sects where one detaches oneself from this world because it does not elevate man. Between these two extremes stands the intervention of Avraham — and that of Rabbi Eliezer.
On the shepherds’ quarrel, the Rav notes that Avraham does not deal with them. Neither with his own nor with Lot’s: he addresses Lot directly and tells him that their paths do not meet and that they must part. The shepherds are the disciples of each, and their disagreement is this: Lot reasons that G-d promised the land to Avraham’s descendants, that Avraham has no child, that he is therefore the heir — and that, holding these lands from the Creator, he may go and take possession of other people’s. This is a current issue: there are certain abuses, but one cannot dispossess people who are settled there and have made those lands fertile for a century; one may encourage them to sell, one may acquire, but one cannot simply come and settle by saying that the land is ours. The text specifies precisely that the Canaanite and the Perizzite are dwelling in those lands.
A utilitarian use of the Law becomes oppression. If the Law is put to personal, individual use, it becomes a form of oppression for others; one must therefore keep away from any philosophy of life that disparages others or strips them of their rights. One must love purity of heart, respect the other’s sensitivity, and know that gracious speech toward one’s fellow has royal power. Better a language of persuasion and freely given conviction than the use of force — otherwise we become like the others, who waged crusades and holy wars on a far greater scale. The Jewish people cannot do so, not even within its own borders.
In answer to the final questions, the Rav clarifies what walking the land means, and what Rabbi Eliezer shares. The verb is used indiscriminately today in political demonstrations; it must be tied back to Lech Lecha, to that continuous walking, that way of taking in hand what one seeks to acquire. What matters is not to own properties beyond our reach, which in the end we abandon to the thorns while depriving others of their use: take what you can truly work with your own strength, and leave the rest to others. As for the sharing, it concerns first of all the balance achieved at the level of society: society needs a core that thinks for it, dispenses teaching and forms its youth, and the others must benefit from the values this core draws out and perpetuates. It is a solidarity in goods both spiritual and material — and when the Torah requires the setting aside of the portions due, it asks one to part with a fraction of one’s goods and give them to others, something our taxes express today in their own way.
Full transcript of the lecture
Good evening, everyone. Let me remind you that we are still in the chapter of Lot — that member of Avraham’s family who followed him of his own accord in his travels, who likewise broke with his past in order to discover Avraham’s way and set out for the Promised Land. And it turns out that, later on, there are nonetheless some differences of outlook between the practice of Avraham’s way and a more utilitarian practice of that spiritual way — of that Judaism — by the other, and a separation becomes necessary. We took as our basis for reflection — since together, each time, we should always bring the word of the text back to the reality of our own era — the commitment the people was bound to at the foot of Mount Sinai. The people declared of its own accord that it was entering the covenant by saying, “We will do, in order to hear” — and yet the midrash tells us that there was afterwards an element of coercion in the acceptance of this Torah: G-d held the mountain over them like a tub, like a vat, and threatened the people, saying: either you accept My Torah, or here will be your grave. And naturally all the commentators puzzle over this element of coercion in the Torah, for in a sense the Jewish people was stripped of its free will in accepting it. There is, of course, a small lesson in passing: since the Torah is a word of life that brings man to freedom of action, he would need to strip himself of his conditioning — because sometimes free will is an illusion. It belongs to man’s imagination; he does not realize all the social pressures he is subjected to, family pressures, professional pressures, and so on. We cannot say that we always act in complete freedom; in the absolute, this free will does not exist. It plays only a partial role — and that is enough to engage man’s responsibility. So, as I told you, we do not start out with the same intellectual quotients; we do not have the same faculties, and consequently we do not possess the same sensitivities. Our very approach to spiritual teaching takes place at different levels, and there is a tendency to reduce this teaching to the measure of each person’s faculties and abilities — a dangerous thing, because it exposes the Torah, exposes the teaching in the absolute, to each person’s personal perception and to its limitations. Now, just as G-d is infinite, His teaching proceeds from that infinity; but one can truly embrace it only as a group. No single person can take on the whole of the spiritual teaching; it is through the community as a whole, through each person’s own contribution, that the entirety of the teaching of the Torah is brought to fulfilment.
But of course, those who put up barriers, or who compartmentalize the Law, or who reduce all this teaching to recipes for living, commit a grave error, because they stifle the Law; they prevent it from having its cosmic dimensions — not merely universal, but cosmic. For at the beginning, at the creation, the earth is highlighted: “In the beginning G-d created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was plunged in chaos.” And one wonders: and the heavens — what were they when G-d created the world? How did the heavens appear? The heavens appear here, at Matan Torah, at the giving of the Torah; it is, in a sense, the complement of that creation.
And one must not reduce its cosmic dimension to a narrow, individual, personal perception — that is Lot’s sin. Lot has his assets; he is Avraham’s disciple, and he will not lose those assets. For when one passes near Sodom and sees the pillar that was his wife, one says Baruch Dayan ha-Emet — one indeed pays homage to the One who decrees His truth — and one accompanies it with another blessing, Baruch Zocher et Lot: blessed is He who remembers Lot. Lot’s merit is not overlooked; but for the time being he represents a danger. And it is against that danger that, unfortunately, society itself — whether Orthodox or otherwise — tries to protect itself and to live within its own limits, because it fears that involvement with the wider group would cause it harm, not only for itself but for the education of its children. And yet, even if a temporary withdrawal is possible — it is permitted — it risks depriving Avraham of his constant inspiration. And unfortunately we are sometimes obliged to acknowledge it: when the world becomes, halachically speaking, so strict as to break with another wing of the Jewish people — and, let us say it, even with the non-Jewish world —
— whereas an indispensable ventilation ought to be maintained. So Lot is the image of the man who wanted to use Avraham’s Judaism for his own comfort. There is nothing to lose; it commits one to nothing today to enter the religious world, as long as one wears it as an extra garment — like a coat, like a raincoat. Well, it does protect. That is where the error lies. The error is that this Judaism must not be a garment; it must be part and parcel of oneself. It must truly be tocho ke-baro — its inside like its outside: it is the inside that must reflect all that outward appeal, and the outward appeal must truly be a way of bringing out the virtues and values the person carries.
So there is a need for a separation limited in time, and that is what the midrash is going to say. G-d speaks to Avraham after Lot has parted from him and has opted for a society where morals are loosened, for a way of thinking that is practical — pragmatic, rather — and realistic. Kol ha-aretz asher atah ro’eh, “all the land that you see.” A pragmatic way of thinking is cut off from the poetry of life; it is cut off from song, cut off from the elevation of the soul. So He tells him: take note — “All the land that I give you, to you will I give it, but your descendants must be like the dust of the earth.” Ka-afar ha-aretz: mi-sof ha-olam ve-ad sofo — just as the dust of the earth reaches from one end of the world to the other end, so your children will be scattered, mi-sof ha-olam ve-ad sofo, from one end of the world to the other.
In other words: you are part of the whole of creation, and you are not part of the whole of that creation on the level of ideas, on the level of your thought. That is not what I ask of you. It is a way of taking hold of the earth from one end to the other, of making this earth habitable. And that is why, whether you like it or not, your children will be scattered. […] but through the Torah. Just as, then, all land yields its fruit only thanks to water, Israel will bear fruit only thanks to the Torah — that is what will make it distinct. Otherwise it would be destined to disappear, Heaven forbid, among the nations. And this is what the midrash says in the third place — u-mah afar ha-aretz mevaleh klei matachot ve-hu kayam le-olam: just as the earth wears out every metal tool and yet endures forever — it persists forever —
so it is with Israel: all those who serve the stars will become null, incidental, insignificant, while they themselves will endure. In other words — how are the idolaters named here? There are many expressions that name or characterize idolaters: either ovdei elilim, servants of petty gods, of petty powers, or else ovdei kochavim, servants of the stars. But careful: the Jewish people itself is compared to kochavim, to stars — yet they are not ovdei kochavim; they are not there to serve them; they are there to be stars themselves. It is not a race for the stars; it is the star fulfilling itself as a star. And that is why the blessing varies between ka-afar ha-aretz, “like the dust of the earth,” and ke-chochvei ha-shamayim, “like the stars of the heavens.”
We are at once like the sand of the earth and like the stars in the heavens. But there is here a grave sin, which could also be our undoing: just as the earth is trampled — it serves to be trampled, it is made for that — so too your children will have this particularity: at certain moments they are indeed the bearers of responsibility for the other nations, and for that reason they are objects of persecution. I have said it before: the teacher is not accepted by his class, by his audience, from the very beginning; he needs time to adjust, he must prove himself, and so on. And even then, some disciples will follow him, and sometimes a large part will break away from him, disparage him, set up its own school, and so on.
So there are these tensions between Avraham and Lot, and the tension of the Jewish people with those who have been nourished — like it or not — by Avraham’s teachings. And take note: that is the particularity of Avraham’s hesed, his kindness. The Judaism founded on Avraham’s kindness is found in Christianity, it is found in Islam; one cannot simply dismiss it. We are not its exclusive holders; we are the purists of this notion of kindness at its source — kindness that we have not cheapened through a loosening of morals or through any abuse, for our own needs, of the riches offered by the nature of creation. Hence […]: “And I will put it into the hands of your tormentors.”
You may indeed dispute this explanation of the midrash — namely, that this antisemitism, let us call it that now, in the pupil’s refusal to take in the whole of his master’s teaching and in his harassing him with objections and challenges, in fact hardens the teacher further in his search for the substance he must impart, for the way to answer, for innovation in his research, and so on. Well, that is what they do: it is the role of the other nations not to let the Jewish people rest on its laurels, not to let this Torah become mummified. Then, “your tormentors” — the text explains […]: it is a way of making you pay your debts, of making you pay your obligations, your debts.
As it is said […] what they demanded of you: “Bend down, bow down, make yourself small, that we may pass over.” Mah hayu osim lahem? What would they do to them? Hayu marbitzim otam ba-pelatiyot […]. So in reality they […] — they persecuted them. Is there a question? No? Marbitzim ba-pelatiyot: he struck them — he would beat them with slabs, and they ruled over them; they sought to silence them, to crush them. Rabbi Azariah, in the name of […], said: siman tov hu — it is a good sign. Just as this street is crossed by everyone and endures for everyone,
so your children are crossed by everyone, and they endure for everyone. Rabbi Azariah, in the name of […], said: siman tov hu — this sign is good, because it is this bridge that served the other nations to make the passage from one level of thought to another. Well, it is in this manner that your children are going to wear down — to overcome by attrition — all those who serve petty powers, all those who seek to shine through what they do or what they preach; and the Jewish people’s chief virtue is that it survives all its ordeals. So all of this is indeed contained in this promise of the land, through Lot’s challenge to the pure path chosen by Avraham — a challenge that has not ceased to pursue us to this day, and that we are in the midst of fighting.
The problem is that we do not fight it only outside; we must fight it within. For, as I told you, we are the representatives of the various nations, we are samples of those various nations, and therefore we have within us all these elements, from the far left to the far right — mi-sof ha-olam ve-ad sofo, from one end of the world to the other. So must we therefore renounce this primary national identity and keep only what makes the beauty of Judaism — that is, the Torah, its thought, its mitzvot, and so on? No. The divine command is kum hit’halech ba-aretz, “Arise, walk through the land”: never give up the land in order, supposedly, to “preserve” Judaism.
The land itself, the Land of Israel, remains the core around which the fruit of all thought gathers. So one must always remain attached to the land — not only from the practical standpoint of adapting the mitzvah to the reality of the day, without for all that changing it according to circumstances, according to the evolution of living conditions. You must walk in the field, whether lengthwise or crosswise; but whoever has made this walk, lengthwise and crosswise, through his field has acquired only the place he himself has paced out. Let him know it: there is no real possession of the Promised Land […] — and it will remain, like the Jewish people, a sample for the other nations: the Land is a laboratory for all the other countries.
But we must know that if we limit our walking, we also limit our influence, our concrete […]. That is what Rabbi Eliezer teaches, because Rabbi Eliezer says that the way we walk the field is an act of acquisition: according to him, a walk alone would suffice to establish ownership of the land. Va-chachamim omrim: lo kanah — and the Sages say he has not acquired: not as long as he has not walked the land in all its length and in all its breadth. That is, if he has bought a field, the way to mark, to take hold of his ownership, is first of all to walk it lengthwise and crosswise. That is the meaning of Rabbi Eliezer; that is what Rabbi Eliezer meant: go and walk the land.
One might think that we have here closed the chapter of Lot. That is a mistake. We have not closed it; it will come back, it will rebound. It will rebound because we start from the principle that, just as one can find remedies in some small plant and in every element created by G-d, there is always a molecule to be extracted from it that is indispensable to the balance of the universe, indispensable to human life. That said, this holds, once again, for all of humanity — and please, disparage no one and cast contempt on no one. One never knows. Lot — although he left Avraham’s path, Avraham does not abandon him.
He will try to bring him back, because the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself told him: even if I can justify a personal withdrawal — because you were afraid that these lands might be divided to your detriment — we nonetheless hold at all costs to the conquest of the whole of the Land. It is indivisible: just as man is indivisible, so is the Land — His Land is indivisible too. The people too is indivisible; it cannot be compartmentalized. It is a mistake to keep wanting, within the people, to politicize it or to spiritualize it in a fragmented way. It is a grave mistake, because every being — each being may indeed hold one letter of the Torah, and the Sefer Torah, the Torah scroll, is the whole of the Jewish people.
And if one letter within that Sefer Torah is cut off, the scroll becomes unfit until it is corrected, until that letter is restored. Let us understand it in this way. And that is why we already pointed out last time that Lot is a veil of Adam. The numerical value of Lot is 45, like the numerical value of Adam. He is an outer garment, but one that must not be thrown away or abandoned either; one must be able to bring it back — how to bring it back is a later task. But in any case, the third stage: you know very well that the letters of Adam stand for Adam, David, Mashiach. That is, we start from the first Adam and his plan of fulfilment in David, in King David.
And the plan — the universal projection of David — is Mashiach. There is no falling back on a Jewish people that would confine itself to its national life and go no further. It is impossible. It is impossible because that would amount to saying, Heaven forbid, that there is a chosen people, a population chosen — arbitrarily chosen — from the outset, which has nothing to do with the others; and what would the others be in relation to us? So we move on to this third dimension, the messianic dimension. Thus, if we have not learned to live from one end of the earth to the other, to give resonance — another teaching and another presence — beyond the limited borders of Israel, which are limited only in time, only in the space of a laboratory: for afterwards comes the promise, ve-hayah zar’acha ka-afar ha-aretz u-faratzta yamah va-kedmah ve-tzafonah va-negbah — you shall spread out toward the sea, toward the east, and so on.
The holy Zohar says: careful, this expansion must not be taken literally. It is neither “Greater Israel” nor — how does one put it — I am speaking of that book which presents the Jewish people as the ruler of the world. We are not — we do not present ourselves, Heaven forbid, as wanting to govern and dominate the nations. That is an idea that must be discarded, and it is not connected with the notion of messianism either. The notion of messianism does not include the idea of converting the whole of humanity to our Jewish values. Whoever truly wishes to join the Jewish people must know that he will suffer the torments and the challenge of the very mission he will have to fulfil — that is, a phenomenon of rejection that may indeed stretch over time, across generations, until he is accepted.
So we move on to this chapter in which Avraham undertakes his first war — his only one, in fact: against the kings who took Lot captive, as a hostage. It turns out that Lot is indeed the image of the Jew who, little by little, by settling at the gates of Sodom, chose the path of emancipation, of assimilation, and afterwards kept nothing of Avraham’s heritage, of his values. And yet Avraham does not abandon him: he is part of his family; he must be defended to the end. One does not weigh or measure Lot’s spiritual worth when it comes to freeing him from his persecutors. So: va-yehi bimei Amrafel melech Shin’ar, “And it came to pass in the days of Amraphel, king of Shinar” — and we come to this war, which is the embryo of the war of Gog and Magog: four petty kings against five petty kings — the partisans of the four letters of the Name of love on one side, and on the other the partisans of the five letters of the Name Elokim, the partisans of justice. Those who set justice against love, rigor against kindness — that is the war of the end of days. We are in it. For where does kindness stop, where does justice stop? To arrive at the Name joined to Elokim, as we pronounce it in our blessings or in Shema Yisrael, integrating the one into the other — rachamim ba-din, mercy within justice — requires a certain maturity, a real maturity. It is the world given over to these divisions between Hashem and Elokim that Amraphel will lead into battle.
Who is Amraphel? Our Sages say: he is the one who condemned Avraham to the fiery furnace. Unfortunately, that was the first crematorium — Nimrod’s. So the one who leads the battle, Nimrod, is a movement of rebellion. Rabbi Yehoshua de-Sichnin be-shem Rabbi Levi patach. So how is this embryonic war of the end of days introduced? Rabbi Yehoshua of Sichnin, in the name of Rabbi Levi, introduces it thus: cherev patechu resha’im — the wicked have drawn the sword, have declared war by the sword. Charbam tavo ve-libbam — their sword shall enter their own heart: those who ultimately cling to a life of rigor will end up the victims of that rigor. Now, this is a verse from Tehillim (Psalms) that the midrash quotes, and strangely it illustrates it with the episode of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanos, whose brothers were plowing […].
[…] They were plowing on the plain, and he was plowing on the hillside, and his cow fell and broke its leg. Amar: le-tovati nishberah parati — he said: it is for my good that my cow broke its leg. He ran away — rather than face his father’s anger, he fled — and went to Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai. […] He said to him: just as the breath of your mouth grew foul for the sake of the Torah you studied, so your teaching will spread its fragrance mi-sof ha-olam ve-ad sofo, from one end of the world to the other.
Le-achar yamim — I am continuing; I will come back to this afterwards — after some days, his father went up to disinherit him of his property, and he found him expounding a text before eminent figures of the land, who were listening attentively. Among them was Ben Tzitzit Hakeset — that is the name of the man who wore garments with fringes that brushed against carpets, because a red carpet was always laid out for him to walk on, since he would not walk on bare ground; these are also names of very wealthy personalities. He found him expounding this verse: “The wicked have drawn the sword” — war declared by the sword. But who are these wicked? Amraphel and his companions. Le-hapil ani ve-evyon, “to cast down the poor and the needy”: the evyon, the destitute one — that is Lot.
“To slaughter those who are upright in their way” — those who advocate uprightness, the straight path: that is Avraham. That is, to reach Avraham; so they began with Lot, in order afterwards to get to Avraham. Charbam tavo ve-libbam — their sword will turn against them: Avraham came upon them by night, accompanied by his loyal servants, and struck them. Let us go back to Eliezer and look at this criss-crossing in the midrash. His father says to him: my son, I came here only to disinherit you of my property; now I put all my property at your disposal. And he answered: let it be forbidden to me as cherem — I will not benefit from it except in equal share with my brothers. Then there is another explanation.
“The wicked have drawn the sword and bent their bow” — war by the sword, and they drew their bow: this is Amraphel and his companions. It refers to Amraphel and his companions. Well, my dear friends, that is the introduction to this embryonic war. One wonders what the story of Rabbi Eliezer is doing here. Rabbi Eliezer is the son of a man — an assimilated Jew of that time — who devoted himself to the land and was a great landowner who plowed his fields. It was a family business, and therefore the children had to be partners in it, and he could not accept — he did not accept — that one of his sons should abandon work in the fields and go take refuge with Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai in the yeshivah to study Torah.
For him, that was not Judaism; a state can only be built on the kibbutz, only on a solid economy, and so on. Other explorations must be left aside for the moment. And he wanted to disinherit him, but in the end, there he is, filled with wonder at the teaching his son gives and at the interest it arouses among the elite of the time. That is the future war of Gog and Magog; it is what we ourselves are living within the people, between the pragmatic tendencies of those who want at all costs — like the people of Sodom — to found their economy, their independence, solely on labor and not on fine theories, and those who, on the contrary, claim the opposite side: that is not what counts. Today we know very well that there are those who seek their spirituality from gurus, in sects where one detaches oneself from this world, because this world does not offer the pleasures of the spirit and of life; it does not build man, it does not elevate him. So it is between these two extremes that Avraham’s intervention takes place — that the intervention of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanos takes place: he decides to go and draw another nourishment, another way of living, and it later brings him even his father’s recognition. And yet, when it is offered to him, he says he does not want it. He does not want it; that is not why he chose the yeshivah of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai.
He chose the yeshivah of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, on the contrary, in order to share equally with his brothers. And so we will come back to this tension kept alive between the partisans of a philosophy of life and the others, with the Jewish people in the middle — we will see that next week. Next week, since we will already be entering the month of Adar, we will go through Megillat Esther together. So if you have questions, with pleasure. — Yes, I had a small question. You explained to us a little the tension between Avraham and Lot, between the personality of Avraham and the personality of Lot; but in the end Lot left for the plain of the Jordan because of the rivalry between Avraham’s shepherds and Lot’s shepherds.
Can one also draw a symbolic parallel — since between Avraham and Lot we are indeed in the realm of symbols — can one draw a symbolic parallel with that rivalry between their respective shepherds? — Well, I would point out that Avraham does not deal with the shepherds — neither with his own shepherds nor with Lot’s. When he has to speak, he addresses Lot directly, saying to him: “Listen, our paths do not meet — hipared na me’alai, please part from me — let us separate.” You know that there is always a risk of reducing the teaching one has received, that the pupil has received, if he reduces it to its minimum.
If, on the other hand, he deepens it and seeks to reach the very depths of things, he will draw insights from it; he will develop it further. In short, who are these ro’im? Who are these shepherds? They are the disciples of Lot and the disciples of Avraham. What is the source of their disagreement? Lot says: the land belongs to me. G-d decided to give these lands to Avraham’s descendants; Avraham has no child; I am his heir; these lands are at my disposal. And if the Creator gave me these lands, then as for the others — I may go and take possession of their lands, take possession of their vineyards, take possession… Today this is a current issue. The mitnachalim, the settlers — let us say it, in quotation marks — there are certain abuses being committed. But you cannot — today there are people who have been settled here for a hundred years or so, who have made fields and corners of land fertile, and so on. You cannot dispossess them. You may encourage them to sell to you, you may acquire them, but you cannot come and settle by saying: this is our land, these are our lands. And note that the text says, ve-ha-Kena’ani ve-ha-Perizi az yoshev ba-aretz — “and the Canaanite and the Perizzite were then dwelling in the land.”
The Canaanite and the Perizzite are settled on these lands, and Avraham considers that one has no right to strip them of their property on the pretext of the promise made by the Holy One, blessed be He, to Avraham’s descendants. Now, if one wants to make personal, individual and utilitarian use of the Law, it becomes oppression for others, a form of oppression. So let us keep away from any philosophy of life that may disparage the other or strip him of his rights. Let us see how. There is a time for everything — Kohelet said so. So one would need to arrive at… In fact there is a fine passage in the midrash earlier on — I don’t think we have seen it — and it brings a verse from Mishlei (Proverbs). Yes: one must love purity of heart — purity of heart, mind you, not purity of intellect — one must respect the other’s sensitivity; and this is a matter of sensitivity.
The grace of speech used toward one’s fellow has powers — a royal power, a royal authority. It would be better to use a language of grace, a language of persuasion, of conviction freely consented to, rather than to seek to use force. Otherwise we become like the others. The others waged crusades on a far greater scale, and they waged holy wars on a far greater scale. The Jewish people cannot do it — not even within its own borders. Thank you. Another question? — I would perhaps like a clarification. — Yes. — Could you clarify the meaning of the word “walk the land” (arpenter), which you used a great deal at one point?
Is it only the place that one walks? Is it the Jewish people and the places it occupies on earth? Is it the Torah that one walks through — that is, study — this notion of limit? We are limited in any case; we cannot walk through everything either. So could you clarify this point a little? And then the second point: when you say of Rabbi Eliezer that he wants to share with his brothers — I don’t really understand; what does he want to share? Does it mean that they share — they are in work and he is in study — and there will be a great flow, like communicating vessels, from one to the other?
Or what do you mean by sharing with his brothers? — What he shares with his brothers is simply the balance he achieves at the level of society, namely that this society needs a core that thinks for it, that dispenses teaching, that forms its youth. So he is there; he has chosen this path. The other, in a sense, must also benefit from the values this person is extracting and perpetuating through the daily fabric of every life. So that is what I would call this solidarity, this community of goods both spiritual and material, in equal shares. — You mean that it is a sharing on the symbolic level: what he has acquired, he must share with his brothers, but the sharing of material goods in the other direction need not happen systematically?
— No. If the Torah said that one must set aside ma’aser, terumah, ma’aser ani, and so on — it is a way of saying what today means paying taxes; in the spirit of the Torah, one had indeed to part with fifteen to seventeen percent of one’s goods to give them to others. So that in principle it comes to about a fifth: the one who worked the land kept [the rest] for himself, and the fifth he gave away. — I see. — It’s a good share, better than taxes: they take much more. — And walking the land? — Walking the land, yes — that is a good question, because for that one would need to look at how today, unfortunately, this verb […] has become the object of political demonstrations; it is used indiscriminately, isn’t it?
Now, I believe that when we commented on Lech Lecha, we gave this lech lecha the sense of a continuous walk, a perpetual walk — a way of taking in hand the thing one seeks to acquire. The point is not to have properties that are beyond us, which we don’t know what to do with and which in the end we abandon to thorns and thistles, depriving other people of the chance to benefit from them. No: take what you can truly work yourself, with your own strength — that is your conquest, that is what you can consider as belonging to you. But what overflows, what lies beyond your capacity to walk — leave that to others. — I see. — All right? Let’s go.
— Thank you very much, Rav Benizri, thank you infinitely. — Thank you very much. — […] — Sorry? — […] — Thank you.
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