[Dedicated to the memory of the late Ephraim Kishon.]
In a commentary on last week's parsha, I discussed the term machaneh and a definition of sinat chinam. The Jew's encampment in the desert, the machane, was seen as a place in which every Jew, with his unique, individual chein (charm, beauty, personality), had his niche, and was appreciated and loved by all the other Jews. Sinat chinam was defined as "hatred of their chein". This week, I would like to examine one consequence of this definition.
If sinat chinam is hatred of chein, then the inescapable conclusion is that ahavat chinam means "love of their chein". This has monumental consequences. When told that Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook said that if sinat chinam is what caused and is continuing the Exile of the Jewish people, then the antidote can only be ahavat chinam, most people conjure up images of 1960s-style hippie communes and "free-love" (which is the literal translation of ahavat chinam). But that's not even close.
"Love of their chein" is the mechanism that established the machane: seeking out and appreciating the chein of every other Jew, and furthering the others' interests. Once all the Jews were functioning on this wavelength, they truly were worthy of that meeting with the Divine Presence called Matan Torah (the giving of the Torah on Sinai). In their everyday lives, they were already tuned into the Divine, that which exists in each and every Jew - his soul. For chein is nothing other than the cheilek eloha mima'al, that little piece of the Divine that exists in every one of us, making us what we are.
On a practical level, one can see this at work is the various laws of this week's parsha, Mishpatim. One law in particular, that of monetary interest, is very relevant to chein. I would like to discuss it in the light of the teachings of two giants of Jewish philosophy, Rabbi Matis Weinberg and Rabbi Zalman Sorotzkin.
On Chol Hamo'ed Pesach, the Torah reading includes the lines from this week's parsha: "If you have money, lend it out... but not with interest." (Shmot 23:24) The comma appears in the Torah as a p'sik, a vertical bar, and is explained thus by Rabbi Sorotzkin in his Oznayim L'Torah, as elaborated upon in his Ha'deiah V'Hadibur (vol. 2, D'ruah 9, p.91):
If you have money beyond your real needs, then you are obligated to share it. This money is not yours, for "The money is mine, sayeth the Lord." (Haggai 2:7- and significantly, see 2:5) Thus, the rich is obligated to lend, to get the poorer on his feet. And the employer is to honestly and fully pay wages in a timely fashion; the worker is to do his work honestly and efficiently, even cutting short his Grace after Meals and afternoon prayers in order to deliver his full day's amount of work. But if the system breaks down, and the shoemaker refuses to make shoes for the baker, and the baker to bake for the accountant, if the banker lends on ever-rising and compounding interest, if the employer cheats on salaries and robs pension funds, and if the workers strike, then chaos ensues.
And that is what distinguished the Exodus and the encampment in the desert from your average successful slave or "proletariat" uprising: there was no anarchy nor bloodletting. That is why a Torah section on banking is read on Passover. And, significantly, the section concludes: "For I [the Almighty] am the One of Chein."
In the writings of Rabbi Matis Weinberg, chein appears prominently in the life of Yosef, the son of our Father Yaakov. Yosef is the ba'al chein, possessor of chein, par excellence; indeed, the Torah constantly says that "Yosef found chein" in the eyes of Potiphar, Pharoah, etc. Yosef is not only physically beautiful himself, and possessed of spiritual height (he is therecipient of the Torah insights of his father), but he is dedicated to the furthering of the chein of all he meets, including, literally, Egypt and all of mankind: "And Yosef developed their All." (Bereishit 41:56-57) In Bereishit 37:2: "And he is the na'ar [youth] of his brothers." Yosef possesses not only the beauty of youth, but he is a youth; like a child who has "all the potential in the world," who thinks he can grow up to be a fireman and a policeman and a cowboy, etc.
Yosef embodies and develops potential. His, and everyone's. And that is what leads us to money. For money is potential; it is potentially anything you want to buy with it. And around money swirls the arguments with the brothers, who say to the "dreamer": "Ma betza?" (Bereishit 37:26) - "Where is the profit?" What is the tachlis? (Replace Yosef with " settler", and his brothers with "leftists" and ask: "Whereby do we profit by having these dreamers living out beyond the Green Line?" A modern morality play.)
But the Almighty turns the tables on the non-dreamers. The men of the bottom-line end up starving, and Yosef is the one who, by chein alone, rules the world and is the money-master, even playing games with the brothers' money. It is the brothers who nearly kill their father with grief, and Yosef who revives Yaakov (as surely as the Left facilitated terrorist murders, and callously referred to the dead as "sacrifices for peace", while the settlers proved that "the ones who loved the land" were the ones who really cared about and ensured the security of the people). And to remember all this, we give Chanukah gelt on the holiday of chein, Chanukah. To show that we, too, are baalei chein, masters of "money-potential", who further the potential and chein of others.
Finally, Rabbi Matis considers the matter of charging interest on a loan. In the society of chein, one would personally "take interest" in someone in need, and lend him the money he needs, rather than "taking interest" as measured in percentage points. If the machane was truly functioning, then it would be with the loving touch of a helping hand that the venture capitalist, with his personal stake in the business endeavor (see the rules of Heter Iska), would assist the less fortunate.
All this is very theoretical, so I would like to propose a practical exercise in creating a machane and ahavat chinam. We are all familiar with the words in the Shacharit (morning ) prayer, in which we, like the angels, are "notenim reshus zeh la'zeh," giving the other guy respect, breathing-space, the benefit of the doubt, etc. So, tomorrow morning, when you are davening, think of this: "That guy sitting opposite me, who, every time he's chazzan (cantor), stretches out the service in that whining voice of his - I won't get aggravated with him. No. I'm going to noten reshut zeh lazeh."
Or those twenty guys who waste our time when the Torah is carried out to be read, and instead of just touching the Torah with their hand and kissing it, they embrace the Torah with a hug that would put Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn to shame - don't be annoyed with them. Noten reshut zeh lazeh.
Or the guy who sits behind you, who insists on doing a 30-minute vidui on Yom Kippur while sobbing like a baby. Don't say, "How am I gonna concentrate on that New York Times best-seller I've got hidden between the pages of my Machzor, in order to while away the hours killed by whiner #1 above, with this guy bawling in my ears (and this off-Broadway performance has more curtain-calls than Sir Lawrence Olivier in Othello, for it's repeated no less than ten times in the course of the day)." Again, no, no, no. Notenim reshut zeh lazeh.
Now think of what Israeli society would look like if we were all practicing exercises like this, notenim reshut zeh lazeh, on a national level.
In a commentary on last week's parsha, I discussed the term machaneh and a definition of sinat chinam. The Jew's encampment in the desert, the machane, was seen as a place in which every Jew, with his unique, individual chein (charm, beauty, personality), had his niche, and was appreciated and loved by all the other Jews. Sinat chinam was defined as "hatred of their chein". This week, I would like to examine one consequence of this definition.
If sinat chinam is hatred of chein, then the inescapable conclusion is that ahavat chinam means "love of their chein". This has monumental consequences. When told that Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook said that if sinat chinam is what caused and is continuing the Exile of the Jewish people, then the antidote can only be ahavat chinam, most people conjure up images of 1960s-style hippie communes and "free-love" (which is the literal translation of ahavat chinam). But that's not even close.
"Love of their chein" is the mechanism that established the machane: seeking out and appreciating the chein of every other Jew, and furthering the others' interests. Once all the Jews were functioning on this wavelength, they truly were worthy of that meeting with the Divine Presence called Matan Torah (the giving of the Torah on Sinai). In their everyday lives, they were already tuned into the Divine, that which exists in each and every Jew - his soul. For chein is nothing other than the cheilek eloha mima'al, that little piece of the Divine that exists in every one of us, making us what we are.
On a practical level, one can see this at work is the various laws of this week's parsha, Mishpatim. One law in particular, that of monetary interest, is very relevant to chein. I would like to discuss it in the light of the teachings of two giants of Jewish philosophy, Rabbi Matis Weinberg and Rabbi Zalman Sorotzkin.
On Chol Hamo'ed Pesach, the Torah reading includes the lines from this week's parsha: "If you have money, lend it out... but not with interest." (Shmot 23:24) The comma appears in the Torah as a p'sik, a vertical bar, and is explained thus by Rabbi Sorotzkin in his Oznayim L'Torah, as elaborated upon in his Ha'deiah V'Hadibur (vol. 2, D'ruah 9, p.91):
If you have money beyond your real needs, then you are obligated to share it. This money is not yours, for "The money is mine, sayeth the Lord." (Haggai 2:7- and significantly, see 2:5) Thus, the rich is obligated to lend, to get the poorer on his feet. And the employer is to honestly and fully pay wages in a timely fashion; the worker is to do his work honestly and efficiently, even cutting short his Grace after Meals and afternoon prayers in order to deliver his full day's amount of work. But if the system breaks down, and the shoemaker refuses to make shoes for the baker, and the baker to bake for the accountant, if the banker lends on ever-rising and compounding interest, if the employer cheats on salaries and robs pension funds, and if the workers strike, then chaos ensues.
And that is what distinguished the Exodus and the encampment in the desert from your average successful slave or "proletariat" uprising: there was no anarchy nor bloodletting. That is why a Torah section on banking is read on Passover. And, significantly, the section concludes: "For I [the Almighty] am the One of Chein."
In the writings of Rabbi Matis Weinberg, chein appears prominently in the life of Yosef, the son of our Father Yaakov. Yosef is the ba'al chein, possessor of chein, par excellence; indeed, the Torah constantly says that "Yosef found chein" in the eyes of Potiphar, Pharoah, etc. Yosef is not only physically beautiful himself, and possessed of spiritual height (he is therecipient of the Torah insights of his father), but he is dedicated to the furthering of the chein of all he meets, including, literally, Egypt and all of mankind: "And Yosef developed their All." (Bereishit 41:56-57) In Bereishit 37:2: "And he is the na'ar [youth] of his brothers." Yosef possesses not only the beauty of youth, but he is a youth; like a child who has "all the potential in the world," who thinks he can grow up to be a fireman and a policeman and a cowboy, etc.
Yosef embodies and develops potential. His, and everyone's. And that is what leads us to money. For money is potential; it is potentially anything you want to buy with it. And around money swirls the arguments with the brothers, who say to the "dreamer": "Ma betza?" (Bereishit 37:26) - "Where is the profit?" What is the tachlis? (Replace Yosef with " settler", and his brothers with "leftists" and ask: "Whereby do we profit by having these dreamers living out beyond the Green Line?" A modern morality play.)
But the Almighty turns the tables on the non-dreamers. The men of the bottom-line end up starving, and Yosef is the one who, by chein alone, rules the world and is the money-master, even playing games with the brothers' money. It is the brothers who nearly kill their father with grief, and Yosef who revives Yaakov (as surely as the Left facilitated terrorist murders, and callously referred to the dead as "sacrifices for peace", while the settlers proved that "the ones who loved the land" were the ones who really cared about and ensured the security of the people). And to remember all this, we give Chanukah gelt on the holiday of chein, Chanukah. To show that we, too, are baalei chein, masters of "money-potential", who further the potential and chein of others.
Finally, Rabbi Matis considers the matter of charging interest on a loan. In the society of chein, one would personally "take interest" in someone in need, and lend him the money he needs, rather than "taking interest" as measured in percentage points. If the machane was truly functioning, then it would be with the loving touch of a helping hand that the venture capitalist, with his personal stake in the business endeavor (see the rules of Heter Iska), would assist the less fortunate.
All this is very theoretical, so I would like to propose a practical exercise in creating a machane and ahavat chinam. We are all familiar with the words in the Shacharit (morning ) prayer, in which we, like the angels, are "notenim reshus zeh la'zeh," giving the other guy respect, breathing-space, the benefit of the doubt, etc. So, tomorrow morning, when you are davening, think of this: "That guy sitting opposite me, who, every time he's chazzan (cantor), stretches out the service in that whining voice of his - I won't get aggravated with him. No. I'm going to noten reshut zeh lazeh."
Or those twenty guys who waste our time when the Torah is carried out to be read, and instead of just touching the Torah with their hand and kissing it, they embrace the Torah with a hug that would put Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn to shame - don't be annoyed with them. Noten reshut zeh lazeh.
Or the guy who sits behind you, who insists on doing a 30-minute vidui on Yom Kippur while sobbing like a baby. Don't say, "How am I gonna concentrate on that New York Times best-seller I've got hidden between the pages of my Machzor, in order to while away the hours killed by whiner #1 above, with this guy bawling in my ears (and this off-Broadway performance has more curtain-calls than Sir Lawrence Olivier in Othello, for it's repeated no less than ten times in the course of the day)." Again, no, no, no. Notenim reshut zeh lazeh.
Now think of what Israeli society would look like if we were all practicing exercises like this, notenim reshut zeh lazeh, on a national level.