The Great Secret
The Torah commands us “to love the L-rd, your G-d, to walk in all His ways and to cleave unto Him” (Deuteronomy 11:22). Concerning the final words, “and to cleave unto Him,” the great Biblical commentator, the Ibn Ezra, writes: “And this is a great secret.” And the Ibn Ezra concludes right there, leaving us with what is, by now, a great secret, indeed. For what did he mean by declaring these words “a great secret”?
The commentary on the Ibn Ezra, the Avi Ezer (Rabbi Shlomo Hakohen of Lissa), takes pains to explain in words that should be engraved on the heart of every Jew:
“The secret of the L-rd is given over to those who fear Him and cleave to His attributes.… And in the cleaving itself there is a tremendous secret, not to exchange the essence of one for the other and to hold onto pity at a time when there is a need for anger…or to hold onto humility when one should clothe oneself with pride or with vengeance, as in the case of Pinchas. And few are the men of stature who can seize the attributes faithfully and not stumble over them. Lo, they are the great ones in the land.”
How great are the words of the master. How incumbent is it upon each of us to kneel and study diligently and drink in his every word! For here is, indeed, the secret and foundation and basis and the very aleph of Judaism, without which we can never become religious Jews but remain, instead, only practitioners of Jewish ritual, members of the Moderdoxy.
The fatal disease of our times remains the insidious shaatnez, the forbidden admixture of holiness and the profane. The impurity of gentilized culture and concepts – of Hellenism and foreign values – has seeped into the sanctity and polluted the uniqueness and isolation of the Temple of Jewish Ideas. Through our failure in the Exile to leave that Exile, and by our refusal in the Land of Israel to lock the doors of the Jewish state to the spirit of the Exile, we have created a generation of dichotomy, of Jewish schizophrenia. Part of us is unto the L-rd, and part unto the goy.
The Jew, faced with the terror, the terrible realization, of contradiction and stark opposition between fundamental concepts of Torah and modern liberalism, hastily seeks escape in intellectual fraud and ideological perversion of those concepts. Unable to accept the consequence of cleaving, of totally subordinating his personal feelings to the will of the L-rd, he sets about perverting and corrupting and counterfeiting those concepts. In essence, each day of the year, the Moderdox Jew – that shaatnez Orthodox product of the Western world – sets about to celebrate his own Shavuot by taking Torah from a Sinai that he created, a Torah that he set about rewriting in a way that would soothe his fearful mind, stroke his tired intellect, and eliminate the awful contradictions.
Of this did the Avi Ezer and the Ibn Ezra and the verse in Deuteronomy speak. Of those who refuse to cleave and who can thus never understand the great secret.
We find Judaism’s concept of justice and mercy unpalatable? The fault, dear Jews, lies not in the heavenly stars but in ourselves. We cannot bear the Torah concepts of equality and democracy since they so contradict those we drank with our foreign milk? The solution is to switch the Jewish baby’s formula. Above all, if the Moderdox cannot accept the yoke of heaven, let him be honest and go his own way. But never, never counterfeit and deliberately distort, pervert, and twist Judaism.
Concerning the law of the false prophet who must be killed, the sainted Ohr HaChaim (Deuteronomy 13:5) quotes the Sifri explaining the basis of the crime to be the fact that he counterfeited the Torah, and he declares: “And for this counterfeiting does he die.” Should those who daily pervert and counterfeit Torah not tremble to their very roots at these words? Shall those who are so overly righteous, and who cannot accept the mercy and justice of the L-rd, not contemplate very carefully the gravity of their sin of counterfeiting, a crime of which there is none greater?
Justice? Mercy? Jew and gentile? Democracy? Equality? Vengeance? Violence? All these are defined and set down by the L-rd, not man. He decides what and when and why they are, and it is our obligation “to cleave unto Him,” and not “to exchange the essence of one for the other.” To bow our heads in joyous acceptance, in total cleaving.
And of the Moderdox who cannot accept His decrees, the words of the Ramban echo throughout the ages. Concerning the verse (Deuteronomy 7:16), “And thou shalt consume all the people which the L-rd thy G-d shall deliver thee, thine eye shalt have no pity on them,” the Ramban declares: “For through the mercy of fools, all justice is lost.”
G-d in heaven, what wisdom and what truth!
The Jewish Press, 1985