Vaetchanan 5774

In honor of serving Congregation Beth El for 25 years last year, Rabbi Vernon Kurtz assembled a wonderful collection of his sermons. In a moving piece on this week’s parshat Vaetchanan, he identifies that the word ve’ahavta – you shall love, appears only three times in the entire Torah. The first two appear in Leviticus, in the context of loving one’s neighbor, or a stranger, as oneself. The third and final time is in this week’s parasha, made famous by the Shema: ve’ahavta et Adonai elohecha – you shall love the Lord your God. Rabbi Kurtz quotes a Chasidic tale, where the rabbi asks, “why is God mentioned last?” He answers, “because if you do not love people, you cannot love God.”

And yet this has been a difficult time to have an outpouring of love for others. As we have read about war in Israel and other parts of our world, I fear that the doom and destruction themes of Tisha B’Av that we commemorated this past week are a little too real.

Jewish tradition assumes that the central theme of Tisha B’Av revolves around sin’at chinam – baseless hatred. Rav Kook, possibly the most influential thinker in 20th century religious Zionism, famously wrote in his book Orot Hakodesh (vol. III, p. 324): "If we were destroyed, and the world with us, due to baseless hatred, then we shall rebuild ourselves, and the world with us, with baseless love — ahavat chinam.

At a time that is so disturbing for so many of us, we can only hope and pray that our world will start loving God by first considering how we can love and care for the lives of other people.

Rabbi Kurtz includes in his book a wonderful tale that imagines how King Solomon originally determined the location of the Temple:

“King Solomon wanted to find a place build the Temple. A heavenly voice directed him from Mount Zion to a field that was once owned by two brothers. One of the brothers was a bachelor and the other was blessed with a family. After the harvest each brother was concerned about the other. Under the cover of night the brother with a family kept adding to his brother, the bachelor's, pile because he reasoned that the bachelor had no children to support him in his old age. The bachelor added to his brother’s pile because he thought that with so many children his brother needed more grain. The brothers met in the middle of the field and embraced. This field, a manifestation of brotherly love, King Solomon reasoned this was best site for the Temple.”

This story speaks to me in particular this week, as my brother Josh was just called up to serve as a reservist in the Israel Defense Forces. The love for him and concern for his safety that I feel, and the love that I hope all siblings share for one another, will, I pray, reverberate to create a broader sense of peace in our world. In his great wisdom, King Solomon based the location of the kodesh hakodashim, the holiest place on earth, on a field of love. And so too, in the land that we all hold so dear, may we see peace and love in our days.


Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi David Russo