Rabbi's Derasha

We altered the fifth Aliya this morning to have it end in the paragraph before the inverted letter Nuns.  This is the suggestion of a commentator from a few hundred years ago.  The general principle is that Aliyot are supposed to end on a positive note.  The normal place we end that Aliya does not seem like a terrible moment but it does fall in a space where the commentators say things have already started to go sideways.  

This Parasha begins with a lot of optimism about how smoothly things will go on the way to entering the Eretz Yisrael.  There is as yet nothing foreboding about the trip.  Explicitly, things don’t go south until the sections right after the inverted letter Nuns.  But the Midrash says that even the day of leaving from Har Sinai was problematic.  The people left “like children running away from school,” which was not ideal.

The paragraph before that, on the other hand, is all hopeful expectation.  And the next Aliya, as we read it this morning, begins that way too.  As Moshe tries to convince his father-in-law to accompany the people to Eretz Yisrael, no fewer than five times he uses a form of the word “Tov.”  The trip will be exceedingly good, he tells his father-in-law.  In the following section, there will be five matching variations on the word “Rah,” for things have turned quite bad.     

Though the formal catastrophe in this journey will not happen until next week with the sending of the spies, Moshe already senses that things are lost.  In one of his most famous informal Derashot, R’ Soloveitchik spoke in Boston on a Motzai Shabbat after this Parasha.  He described the feeling Moshe had in terms of something he, the Rav, experienced during his wife’s illness in the mid-60s.  She had been sick for a while, with ups and downs.  Her prognosis was guarded, which was not positive, but the Rav said they still held out hope.  Then, on Yom Kippur in 1966, a Sefer Torah in the Aron fell.  Not on the floor, but someone was negligent about how it was put into the Aron and it fell to the side.  There was a gasp in the Shul and the Rav said that he knew then that she would not survive her illness.  She passed away before Purim.  He said, sometimes you just know that things will not go well.  That is what Moshe knew at this point.

Moshe did not know now that they would not make it.  That would be impossible.  But he knew that he would not make it.  He knew then that the path would not be straight, that it would take another generation and another approach.  The road to Eretz Yisrael is not straight and not straight-forward.  This is true when we are wandering helplessly, and it is true when we are encamped and defended with one of the strongest armies in the world.  It will be full of times that public opinion will be negative.  War is rarely popular -- in this country or any other -- but there can be times when it is tolerated.  That’s not the world right now.  Nor can we be sure that this will go quickly, as it did with Hezbollah or Syria.

For battles like this, one must be fortified.  We have many illustrious alumni.  But none more so than Yisrael (Jonny) Aumann, the great master of game theory.  After he won the Nobel Prize, we asked him to speak at our annual Gala.  At the afternoon event that day, someone asked about the use of game theory in war, a subject Jonny has spoken about many times.  He emphasized that war works like any other game in that everything revolves around incentives.  That means that concessions are discouraged because they disincentivize peace. The only way to avoid unnecessary concessions is to maintain an unbreakable will. The source of such a will is not arms, he said, but faith.  

In saying this, he was really bringing out something once can see in the Amida.  There are only two times in the Amida that one blessing is connected to the next with a Vav.  Almost all of the blessings stand on their own, as they should.  There is a Vav at the beginning of the request that Hashem vanquish the heretics because that blessing was added later.  The only one of the original 18 blessings that begins with a Vav is the blessing for the rebuilding of Yerushalayim.  That Vav links it to the preceding blessing, which requests support from Hashem for the Tzadikim (the righteous)..

Why are they linked?  The blessing for the rebuilding of Yerushalayim invokes King David because it is messianic.  His descendent, the person we call the Mashiach ben David, will rebuild Yerushalayim.  Who is the Jew the Torah calls a Tzadik, which is the subject of the blessing before that?  It is Yosef, and the blessing is referring to what we call Mashiach ben Yosef, which does not involve a specific person but an epoch.  It will be an era like that of Yosef and his brothers, where the brothers are in complete confusion as to what is happening.  In such an era, we will be perplexed about events, and there will be distress because of that.  The quality that will get us through this distress is Emuna, or the strong faith of the righteous.  We ask Hashem for support during that time because only faith wills out at that time.  But if we can have that kind of immoveable faith, we can see the rebuilding of Yerushalayim.  They are linked.  

Jonny Aumann urged us to have faith.  That will sustain us in the times of distress, and that very strength, more than our armies, can bring us to the positive end of the Aliya. With that strength, we will see the rebuilding of Yerushalayim, Bimheira Bimeinu.