Am Yisrael Chai
Welcome to Venturing Into the Parsha, a weekly(ish) e-mail (that just took an unintentional two year hiatus, oops) intended to provide insights from the Jewish holidays and weekly Torah portions that impact and uplift our roles as investors, founders, and operators. These are intended to be ~5 paragraphs and intentionally brief. Questions or comments are always welcome in response.
Although the following has already been posted publicly on Twitter, it is all I’m capable of sharing this week. I have added a brief Parsha thought at its conclusion regarding the Jewish connection with the land of Israel.
There are no words.
There are pictures. Tears. Screams. But no words.
Many of us learned something this week that we have always known. For years, we hid from it. For years, we ignored it. Assimilation into secular society helped in reducing it to a passive whimper. We followed the lead of our parents and grandparents to play by the rules, to fully immerse in enlightened society; doing so, they implied, they demanded, would protect us, keep us safe in a world that had cultivated a genocide of six million during their lifetimes. We listened. We ran. We hid. We assimilated. And we lived in the comfortable, shade of safety.
This week we learned what we have always known.
We learned that we cannot hide from one simple, undeniable, irreducible, biological, and spiritual fact. That we are Jewish. That we face thousands of terrorists who would murder us in cold blood, decapitate us, violate us – not because of a crime nor a belief – but merely for the inescapable reality of our souls.
Worse, we learned that so many of our peers were simply masquerading as friends, ultimately electing to endorse a philosophy that would have us exterminated merely for existing. A philosophy that is so obviously wrong, so obviously evil, that the sound of its bias has finally pierced the veil of our self imposed naivety. Each of us has been to a holocaust museum. We’ve been taught the myriad signs perilously ignored. We of course try to hide, denying that this is actually the reality of our pluralistic lives. But the signs are here. The signs are now.
What our non Jewish friends do not understand, what we struggle to articulate even to ourselves is that the visceral, emotional, violation each of us experienced this week is a reflection of yet another truth we have tried to silence over the years. That in spite of our assimilation, in spite of our modernity, our liberalism, we know there is fundamentally only one place in the world we are truly safe. Unconditionally welcomed. Where our peers will unilaterally put their lives at risk to protect us.
The State of Israel.
This is why so many of us have, for the first time in our lives, found a voice on this issue. Found an unexpected strength to stand up to the crowd. It is not rooted in hate, nor vengeance. It is rooted in self defense. Israel must exist, must be safe so that we can exist; so that we can be safe. As President Biden shared so powerfully in yesterday’s speech, a “secret” related to him by our national hero Golda Meir, “we have no where else to go. We have no where else to go.”
This week our delusions were shattered. But our souls found their true home.
It is only fitting that as this week brings a new cycle of the Torah reading, its opening Parsha, Breishis (Genesis) — in fact its opening word — brings an emphatic endorsement of our lifelong connection with the land of Israel.
The most famous Torah scholar of the past millenia, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, better known as Rashi, is bothered by the first word of the entire Bible. And with just cause. It is grammatically incorrect. Although English translations have smoothed it over, the Torah literally begins: “In the beginning of, G-d created the heavens and the earth.”
The beginning of what? The verse forgot to identify a subject.
The easy resolution here is to remove the word “of.” But life doesn’t work that way. If it’s a divine document (or even a human one), an author clearly had an intent — all the more so with an opening verse. Why begin a book — arguably the most famous text in human history — with a simple grammatical incongruity.
This, it turns out, is the launching pad for all of Talmudic and Rabbinic textual exegesis. The Torah is littered with grammatical mistakes to which Rashi responds: “This text demands nothing other than to be interpreted.”
On this word, “In the beginning of” he offers multiple explanations. One in particular pierces our hearts, this week in particular. The Torah, he explains, is not a history book. G-d had zero obligation to outline the history of creation and the early development of civilization. The Torah/Bible is a book of laws. Why on earth then, does a book of laws, begin with a historical account of the creation of the world and early civilization? (The American Constitution, for example, offers no such historical record, other than a one sentence “preamble” of forming a “more perfect union.”) Rashi, writing in approximately the year 1090 CE, explains:
For should the peoples of the world say to the people of Israel, “You are robbers, because you took by force the lands of the seven nations of Canaan” [the land of Israel], the people of Israel may reply to them, “All the earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He; He created it and gave it to whom He pleased. When He willed He gave it to them, and when He willed He took it from them and gave it to us.”
Wishing everyone a Shabbat Shalom and prayers for the safety and security of our Israeli soldiers, the return of our hundreds of hostages, and immediate peace and comfort to all of Israel’s neighbors.