How Goodly Are Your Tents, O Jacob. How Goodly Is Your Society, O Britain.

In this week’s double-Parasha Torah reading, the wicked Bilaam is commissioned to curse the tribes of Israel and finds himself unable to do so. Instead, he looks over the Israelite encampment and remarks Mah Tovu Ohalecha Yaacov.

What was it about our encampment, Rashi wants to know, that struck Bilaam as so good? Our greatest commentator supplies an answer drawn from Talmud Baba Metzia, “It was that the entrances of their tents weren’t directed one facing the other.” The Mishnah in Baba Metzia is concerned with how houses should be set up to ensure privacy. But I wonder if what really made the ancient society of Israel good in its sprawl of non-lined-up tents had nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with a celebration of the multi-directionality of how each of our ancestors set up their individual tent.

It’s easy to imagine that a society is at its best when everything is lined up neatly in disciplined rows. There’s a certain kind of efficiency that arises when everything and everyone is neatly arrayed. It can feel optimised. But optimisation isn’t the same as goodness. Efficiency isn’t the same as delightful and vibrant. Humans are designed to be different. I love the Mishnah in Sanhedrin which suggests that the reason all humanity began with the creation of a single Adam is to demonstrate God’s magnificence, for when a King of flesh and blood creates a coin to mint, each subsequent coin comes out the same, but when the King of Kings, the Holy Blessed One, mints a coin, each of us come out diverse and unique.

I’m just back from three days as part of the Senior Faith in Leadership Programme hosted at Windsor Castle, spending time with Christian, Muslim and even different-to-me Jewish faith leaders. I’m living in a society that is richer – both pecuniary and culturally – because of its openness to difference. Actually, I’m only tolerated here, as a Jew, because of a conception of British society that knows – even we struggle always to remember – that we are better as a society because we don’t insist everyone lines up their tents in efficient normativity. It feels a dangerous thing to claim, at a time when society seems intent in retreating away from a celebration of human difference. Indeed, I think there is something irreducibly radical about the claim. It requires a suspension of the reflex animalistic response to the outsider – fight or flight. This suspension opens up possibilities that are, perhaps, invisible in the immediate moment we are confronted by difference, but far richer not only in spite of their immediate invisibility, but precisely because of their transcending what we can immediately understand. Perhaps this is why the Mitzvah of loving the stranger sits alongside the Mitzvah of loving God and loving our fellow. We need to be reminded that goodness requires a love of that which we don’t understand in all its sprawling complexity.

Shabbat Shalom

Thoughts on a Thread of Blue

 

At the end of this week’s Torah reading comes the passage that articulates the Mitzvah of Tzitzit, fringes; a thread of blue tied into each corner of a four-cornered garment.

 

The obligation is explained this way – we are to look at the Tzitzit and remember all the Mitzvot. Tzitzit serves as a sort of physical mnemonic. It’s hard to remember everything we wish to be – so we wrap ourselves up in an aide-memoir. Tzitzit serve as a sort of CBT – cognitive behavioural therapeutic practice serving, at the very least, to inure us from, as the Torah states, “going after your heart and after your eyes which lead you astray – Zonim.”

 

That Hebrew word, Zonim, has a licentious quality picked up in a glorious – if adult-rated – moment in Talmud Menachot where a student, renowned for his particular interest in Tzitzit, is drawn to spend four hundred gold coins on a Zonah - prostitute (not recommended). As he strips off his clothes, the Talmud reports, his Tzitzit slap him in the face, and he comes to his senses. Would that all the licentious challenges of the world could be so confidently defeated.

 

But there is something very powerful in allowing Halachah – Jewish observance  - to pull us away from running after the inclinations of our heart and eyes. Observance of Shabbat should keep us aloof from an utter dependence on our phones. Observance of Kashrut should sensitise us to the values of thinking about the food we place in our bodies. Observance of prayer should remind us to be grateful for the gifts of our lives and instil in us the knowledge that our own concerns and understandings should not be confused with the greater needs and truths of the Universe. This is the ‘training’, I think, that the Talmud is offering when it comes to explaining the colour of the original thread that the Torah commands to be inserted into the Tzitzit. Techelet, a bluish ink derived from the shells of the Murex Trunculus snail,  “resembles the sea, the sea resembles the sky, and the sky resembles the Throne of Glory.” We look at the blue thread to be reminded of bigger things and the very biggest of things.

 

The point is that the individual rituals- not just Jewishly informed rituals, but I’m thinking primarily of Halachah- spill over from individual practices to shape our lives and bring our actions into line with the values we often say we want to live by – but struggle to make tangible in a world so full of distractions. Observance shapes our imagination and the impact we have in the world. Sometimes a thread of blue isn’t just a thread of blue.

 

Shabbat Shalom