For over a week, as I’ve watched friends, both here in Israel and abroad, write and share thoughts, I have remained mostly silent, posted nothing. That is okay. The Torah (Vayikra 10:3) tells us that Aharon’s response to the unimaginable tragedy of the loss of his two sons was silence, because sometimes saying nothing is understandable. But I was asked to formulate my thoughts, so here is an attempt. “LeAdam Maarechei Lev, UMeiHashem Maaneh Lashon – The thoughts of the heart are man’s, but from G-d comes the utterance of the tongue” (Mishlei 16:1). I barely know what I am feeling yet I trust Hashem to give me the words.
Time has moved differently since the security team interrupted our vatikin minyan before Tefillat Geshem. Since then, time has crawled slower than I can remember. On that first Tuesday, I turned to a colleague and asked him, in all honesty, what day it was, as it felt like so much time had passed. My emotions, like everyone’s, have swung between fear of what is and what might be, and moments of relative calm and confidence. As an oleh who came after draft age, I have pangs of guilt that my friends and neighbors are risking their lives, and can only try to assuage them by finding ways to help, small as they are. We try to continue our normal lives to the extent that we can, remembering that normal life is what we are fighting for, and as Zecharia (8) notes, is a manifestation of idyllic prophecies. Even living can be scary, and I’ve started saying tefillat haderech to commute to work, but if those around me can risk so much to protect us, then I must find the resolve to do that bare minimum.
Last week, as I read the parsha, one thought kept coming to mind. While it was popular among many Jewish thinkers to divide the world into distinct categories of creation, domem (inanimate), tzomeach (plant-life), chai (animals), and medaber (speaking beings, man), the Rav in The Emergence of Ethical Man offers another read. Bereishit seems to indicate that man is part of the animal world, and more surprisingly, the plant world. Man, like plants, emerges from the earth and thus returns to it (Bereishit 3:19). Man’s connection to the land is such that when Adam, and later Kayin, sins, the land itself is affected (3:17, 4:10-11). The Torah returns to this theme when later forbidding various sins (Vayikra 18:25, 19:29, Bamidbar 35:33). With this idea, the Rav explains the importance of having a land and the tragedy of galut.
With a land, man is [quasi-literally] rooted. Without it, “man-plant is incapable of meeting his destiny as an uprooted, abstract spiritual being… The state commits man to the soil, to nature, chains him to a bounded specific environment, enabling him to take root in an ancient soil out of which the primitive clan emerged, and within whose confines he experienced the unusual encounter with G-d” (Emergence, p. 62). Amidst all the terror, I have felt grounded here, part of a people that will do anything to protect our ability to live our lives in our own daled amot. This thought is not comforting, but it gives me some language for our desperation. As scared as we are, we feel drawn to the very earth beneath our feet, especially as it has been defiled with blood. As we as a people unify, temporarily forgetting our internal turmoil to help each other, I glimpse G-d and find some hope.
