The brutal murder of Rabbi Eitam and Naama Henkin in the presence of their four young children shocked us all. Our thoughts are with their children, and with their parents, Chanan and Hila Armony and Rabbi Yehudah and Rebbanit Chana Henkin, two of the great Jewish role models of our time.
We ask, Zu Torah vezu sechorah – Is this the Torah and this its reward? But we know better than to wait for an answer. In the end all we can do is to join the bereaved in our prayers. These words are dedicated to the memory of those who were killed.
At the end of his life Moses set out the great choice faced not just by Jews but by humanity as a whole: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Therefore choose life so that you and your children may live.”
Why did Moses need to say such a thing? Did we not know, without his telling us, to choose life? Is it not obvious that, given the choice, we would choose the blessing, not the curse? The answer is given in the book we just read in our synagogues, Kohelet (Ecclesiastes).
The keyword of Kohelet is hevel. It appears no less than thirty-eight times, five times in a single sentence: “Vanity of vanities,” says Kohelet, “vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Hevel has been variously translated as “meaningless, pointless, futile,” as well as “vanity” in the seventeenth century sense, when it meant not excessive self-regard but rather “worthless.” Yet none of these is the primary meaning of the word.
Hevel means “a shallow breath.” The Hebrew words for soul – nefesh, ruach, neshamah – all have to do with the act of breathing. Hevel is a short, fleeting breath. What obsessed Kohelet was how fragile and vulnerable life is.
We are biological beings of bewildering complexity, yet what separates being from non-being, life from death, is not complex at all. It is mere breath.
Kohelet is, among other things, a midrash on the first two human children. It is no accident that the victim of the first murder in the Torah was called Hevel (Abel). Hevel represents the fragility of life. All that separates us from the grave is the breath God breathed into us.
That is all we are: hevel, mere breath. But it is God’s breath. What eventually killed Hevel was Kayin (Cain). The Torah says explicitly why he was given this name. Chavah said, “I have acquired [kaniti] a man with God.”Kayin means “to acquire, to possess, to own.” In the end, unavoidably, this leads to conflict. The more you have, the less I have. Since we all want more, not less, the result will inevitably be violence.
That is why, fundamental to the vision set forth in the Torah, is the principle that we own nothing. Everything – the land, its produce, power, sovereignty, children, life itself – belongs to God. We are mere trustees, guardians, on His behalf.
Kayin means: I am what I own, and what I own gives me power. His religion was the will to power. That is why God rejected his offering. The sacrifice God accepts, that of Abel/Hevel, is one that comes from the humility of mortality. “Ribbono shel Olam, I am mere breath. But it is Your breath I breathe, not mine.”
When religion becomes the pursuit of power, the result is bloodshed. To this, God says, “Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.”
The great choice faced by humanity in every age is between the will to power and the will to life. No country in the world today is more eloquent testimony to the will to life than Israel. It represents the collective affirmation of the Jewish people after the Holocaust that “I will not die, but live.” Almost everything in which Israel has excelled, from agriculture to medicine to life-saving technologies, has been dedicated to enhancing, protecting, or defending life.
Surrounding Israel, however, have been countries and cultures willing to sacrifice life to the pursuit of power. The result has been devastation for all those caught in its vortex be they Jews, Christians, Muslims, Yazidis, Kurds, or other innocent human beings. The end result will be, as described by Shakespeare:
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.
Those who worship at the altar of power in the end destroy themselves.
The day will come when the world will see that the will to life must defeat the will to power if we are to survive at all, our humanity intact. Only when this happens will the children of the world have a future of hope.
Until then, we cherish the memory of two beautiful human beings who lived and taught the sanctity of life. May their example live in all our hearts.