Gidon and Doubting God (Chapters 6-9)

First, a quick note---I have a draft or two of big ideas covering all of Sefer Shoftim, quoting prooftexts, etc., but I can't quite find the time to ever post them.  That, of course, is not helpful to me or to you, (dear readers).   Dr. Michael Loren suggested I just put out short blog posts more frequently, and get the long ones out when and if I am able.    So here it goes:


I am always struck by Gidon.  Here is a leader who rescued the Jewish people from Midian.  Yet he seems to exemplify the difficulties modern man has with faith:
1) When the angel says to him, "God is with you," Gidon responds "Is God with us?  [If so} why has all this befallen us?   And where are all of His wonders that our fathers told us about, saying, 'didn't God take us out of Egypt', and now God has abandoned us and put us in the hands of Midian." (See Chapter 6, verses 12-15)

Not very frum.  Yet God chooses him.

2)  Gidon asks God for a sign in order to show that God is actually talking to him (contrast with Avraham, for whom God's communication was sufficiently self-evidently from God that he was willing to sacrifice Yitzchak).

3) Perhaps not related to faith, in Chapter 8, he turns down an offer of Kingship from the people. 


Gidon's lack of simple faith is helpful for me personally.  I have a skeptical personality that does not really fit the certainty that seems to be de rigeur in religious circles today.   But Gidon shows that faith is broader and deeper than that, that there is room for me as well.  (Perhaps more on this in a future post-- I think Rabbi Norman Lamm's essay on Faith and Doubt (in the book of the same name) is a must read and perhaps I'll post on it in the future).

On another level, there is Gidon's humility.   In Chapter 6, he states that he is unworthy of the task of leadership because a) he lacks yichus and b) he is not so great himself.   Is this connected to his faith issues?  Is it that he simply lacks confidence generally, (in both himself and others, including God), and therefore his faith is not so certain?

1) Conquering fortified cities and 2) The Sin of Achan

As we approach the end of Sefer Yehoshua, I realize I have not accomplished in blogging on all the things that I should have.

Thus, I will throw the following ideas out, in undeveloped form, which struck me over the course of the book (largely by virtue of listening to Rabbi Menachem Leibtag's excellent shiurim):

1) Logistics

Rabbi Menachem Leibtag notes that in the first part of the book (dealing with conquest of Israel), the big logistical challenge for Joshua is the walled cities.  It is one of the details that 40 years earlier Moshe had asked his spies to look for (are the cities fortified).  A walled city is naturally very hard to conquer, and must be conquered by a long, beleaguering seige, or a bloody storming of the walls with unthinkable losses to the attacking army.   Thus, the whole first part of the book is a pattern about how the Jewish people conquered these fortified cities:

a. with Yericho, God made a breach in the wall.

b. with the Ai, God gave Yehoshua a battle plan where they pretended to retreat, and then drew the army of the Ai out of their city, where they were easier to defeat.

c. The Givonim came and tricked the Jews, claiming to be from far away.   But ultimately Yehoshua and the elders honored the treaty (or modified it by cursing them and making them water drawers and tree cutters).  This treaty led the next set of Canaanites to fear that the Givonim had ceded strategic territory to the Jews.  These 5 kings took their armies to attack the Givonim, and the Givonim called to Yehoshua for help.   Again, 5 kings with their armies outside of their fortified cities.

2) Early on, in Chapter 7, after the victory over the city of Yericho, Achan took from the spoils of war, the cherem, which was to be designated for God.  In later battles, we see that they are allowed to take spoils.   Furthermore, Achan's sin is described as the sin that causes the loss at the hands of the Ai.    What is so bad about Achan's sin that the entire people are punished?

Rabbi Menachem Leibtag points out, in a shiur on the OU website, that the Navi describes the entire people as having sinned against God.  How can this be, if only one person did it?

He suggests that the reason that the people couldn't take from the spoils of the battle of Yericho is because God did most of the work, and they had to learn to acknowledge God's role in helping them.   When the spies, fresh from the victory over Yericho, said that the Ai were easily defeatable, and didn't mention God's help, and indicated they only needed 3,000 soldiers, not the whole army for the job(i.e. it would be purely by the might of their hands, not through God's assistance), they evidenced a failure to properly acknowledge God's providence over them.

This, too, was the sin of Achan.  He took from the spoils (the cherem) because he felt he could--he did not adequately realize that God had really won the battle of Yericho for them.   In fact, the idea is that Achan's sin was just a symptom of the failure to show gratitude and recognition to God that was common throughout the nation.    Thus, the entire people sinned, and they sinned in such a way as to undermine their very purpose of existence in the land of Israel--to be a people representing and serving God.  Thus, they lost to the Ai.

That's all for now.   In the next posts, I hope to deal with: 

1) the moral issues involved in the wars with the Canaanites

2) a textual support for a position of the Rambam which we will look at,

and

3) the cities of refuge.

Equal Rights versus Equal Value

Rabbi Gil Student has an interesting post over here titled Equal Rights.  He quotes from a compilation called Otzar Ma'amarei Chazal, and cites a number of sources indicating that the Torah views as equal various groups: Men, women, children, Jews, non-Jews.

I think his post is very important.   Though it would seem obvious, sometimes, as Mesillat Yesharim points out, the obvious can be forgotten for lack of attention.

Here's why:

The sources, with the exception of the source he quotes from Bereishit Rabbah, do not really speak about rights, they speak about existential value.   In other words, they all seem to say that God views the Jew, the gentile, the man, the woman, as equal in His eyes.    But that doesn't mean everyone is treated the same way.

Now, it has become part of the orthodoxy of American thought to affirm Brown vs. Board of Education's rejection of Plessy v. Ferguson's "Separate but Equal" doctrine, stating that separate is never equal.   And indeed, I think we can all agree that "separate but equal" in American racial relations was never equal.

However, that doesn't mean that the principle must always be true.   Thus, we accept that men and women, Jews and non-Jews, are all equal before God.   But Jewish male Kohanim have a few more mitzvot than non-Kohanim, Jewish men in general have several more mitzvot than Jewish women, and Jewish people in general have more mitzvot than non-Jewish people.    While mitzvot are obligations, not rights, the fact that some groups might be excluded from a particular mitzvah (non-Kohanim from the priestly blessing, women from putting on tefillin or counting in a prayer quorum) can make one feel like he or she does not have equal rights.

In other words, while there isn't really an inequality of rights, it can certainly feel that way, especially when Jewish society adds layers of honor to mitzvot that relate to certain groups.

It is at that point that we need a spiritual redirection to the sources that Rabbi Student collects in his post. If we (men) come to disregard the needs, rights and value of women, if we (Jews) come to disregard the needs, rights and values of non-Jews, then perhaps we have come to confuse differing levels of obligation (approved by the Torah) with different levels of value (disapproved by the Torah).   We have taken the Torah's different obligations (separate but truly equal in value), and turned it, in our small-mindedness, into a "separate but unequal", the kind rightly condemned in American law by Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka.

Since we are learning Sefer Yehoshua, the question arises:  What about the Canaanites?  Are they not equal in value in the eyes of God?  And if so, why did God command their annihilation?

It just so happens that a new edition of the journal Tradition came out (online here, subscription required), featuring a critique by Dr. Alan Jotkowitz of the theology of Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of Britain (who with this mention makes his second appearance on this blog, in almost so many days).  He discusses Rabbi Sacks' universalist theology, quoting Rabbi Sacks' The Dignity of Difference:

"[T]he truth at the beating heart of monotheism is that God is greater than religion: that he is only partially comprehended by any faith.  He is my God, but also your God.  he is on my side but also on your side.  he exists not only in my faith but also in yours."

In the revised edition, this was softened to:

"the truth at the beating heart of monotheism is that God transcends the particularities of culture and the limits of human understanding.  He is my God but also the God of all mankind, even of those whose customs and way of life are unlike mine."

Rabbi Jotkowitz offers this critique:  How did Rabbi Sacks get this idea?   It seems, Rabbi Jotkowitz says, that Rabbi Sacks derives his theology from a close reading of the Bible.  However,  he notes, it's true you can do a close reading of the Bible and get this idea, but you can also derive the opposite from a close reading of other parts of the Bible.  It must be that a Bible-based theology, without regard for the Oral Torah, is methodologically improper, even if its conclusions are correct:

"It is hard to see how reading the story of the divine sanctioned conquest of the land of Israel in Joshua and Judges can lead one to a theology of 'the dignity of difference.'  One can just as easily conclude that the mission of the Jewish People is to destroy those who differ from them.  That this is obviously not the case is demonstrated by reading these narratives through the spectacles of the Oral Law." (Tradition, Vol. 44, No. 3, Fall 2011, p.61).

Thus far, this leaves us with a number of questions:

1.  To what extent is it legitimate to learn texts of the Bible without the insights of Chazal?

2.  Is the structure of Written Torah/Oral Torah such 

A)  that the Written Torah contains a particular set of theological data, {A-L}, for example, and the Oral Torah contains another set of theological data, {M-Z}, for example, and the sum total of Torah can only be seen when they are held together?  (as implied by Dr. Jotkowitz)  OR

B) is it such that the Written Torah and Oral Torah ultimately say the same thing, and each contain the complete set of theological data {A-Z}, but rather complement each other not in terms of message and content, but in terms of the spiritual dynamic between the individual, community and God?

3.  What about the Canaanites?   Dr. Jotkowitz leaves us, along with Rabbi Sacks, with the notion that annihilation of the Canaanites is not the goal of the Jewish people.  What remains to be seen is how the mission of conquering the land of Israel is indeed consistent with the sources brought by Rabbi Gil Student that assert the equal value of all humans before God.     I intend to address this issue in a post in the near future.

Preparation of the People

A quick post to talk about a general outline of the book of Yehoshua.   I was reviewing an audio shiur by Rabbi Menachem Leibtag (whose shiurim I find very, very useful).  He points out that the book of Yehoshua can be divided into three parts.

Chapters 1-5-- Introduction--Preparation of the people
Chapters 6-12-- Conquest of the land (battle of Yericho, conquest of the Ai, etc.)
Chapters 13-end of the book-- Division of the land among the tribes of Israel.

Unfortunately, I lost my ipod, and on my computer's lousy speakers, could not hear every word that Rabbi Leibtag said.  Therefore, in addition to my normal error-filled ways, there is additional reason to say that any errors are my ideas, and any insights are his (or follow naturally from his).

Recall that the conquest of the land of Israel was supposed to happen shortly after the giving of the Torah, but the sin of the spies caused the decree that the generation that left Egypt would have to die in the desert, and only their children could enter Israel.    The original, failed generation underwent a series of miraculous preparations--- the Exodus from Egypt, the splitting of the Red Sea, the giving of the Torah.

In light of this, it seems that the new generation that is entering Israel needed to be prepared anew.  Thus, we see a number of parallels to things that happened to their parents' generation.  For example:

1) The sending of spies in Chapter 2 (perhaps to enable them to pass the test that their parents' generation failed)
2) The spies encounter with a Canaanite prostitute, Rahav (parallel to their parents' generation's encounter with the daughters of Moav, with whom they sinned;  here, they did not).
3) The splitting of the Jordan river in Chapters 3-4 (paralleling the splitting of the Red Sea)
4) The setting up of the stones in Gilgal in Chapter 4 (see Deuteronomy Chapter 27, commanding the writing of the words of the Torah on the stones after they cross the Jordan;  perhaps this is parallel to the giving of the Torah)
5) Circumcision, which was not done during the time of the wandering in the desert, in Chapter 5--- this is parallel to the circumcision their fathers had to do in order to leave Egypt.
6) The celebration of Pesach in Chapter 5 (with obvious connection to Yetziat Mitzrayim)
7) The encounter Yehoshua has with the angel at the end of Chapter 5 is reminiscent of the encounter Moshe had at the burning bush:  "remove your shoes from your feet, because the ground you are standing on is holy"