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NUMBERS — 32:22 clear

NUM386 The Reubenites and Gadites made it clear that they were willing to be in the front line of the troops and would not return to the far side of the Jordan until the land had been fully conquered. Moses accepted the proposal, saying that if they kept their word, they would be "clear [veheyitem nekiyim] before the Lord and before Israel" [this verse]. This phrase entered Jewish law as the principle that "one must acquit oneself before one's fellow human beings as well as before God" (Mishna Shekalim 3:2). It is not enough to do right. We must be seen to do right, especially when there is room for rumor and suspicion.

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NUMBERS — 35:28 refuge

NUM416 Homicide is never less than serious in Jewish law. But there is a fundamental difference between murder--deliberate killing--and manslaughter, accidental death. To kill someone who is not guilty of murder as an act of revenge, someone who is responsible for the accidental death, is not justice but further bloodshed; this must be prevented--hence the need for safe havens where people at risk could be protected. The prevention of unjust violence is fundamental to the Torah. God's covenant with Noah and humankind after the Flood identifies murder as the ultimate crime: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man" (Genesis 9:6). Blood wrongly shed cries to Heaven itself. God said to Cain after he murdered Abel, "Your brother's blood is crying to Me from the ground" (Genesis 4:10). Here in Numbers we hear a similar sentiment: "You shall not pollute the land in which you live, for blood pollutes the land, and the blood can have no expiation for blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of him who shed it" (Numbers 35:33). The verb H-N-F, which appears twice in this verse and nowhere else in the Mosaic books, means to pollute, to soil, to dirty, to defile. There is something fundamentally blemished about a world in which murder goes unpunished. Human life is sacred. Even justified acts of bloodshed, as in the case of war, communicate impurity. A priest who has shed blood does not bless the people (Berakhot 32b; Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Tefilla 15:3). David is told that he may not build the Temple "because you shed much blood" (I. Chr. 22:8). Death defiles. ... However, not all acts of killing are murder. Some are bishgaga, that is, unintentional, accidental, or inadvertent. These are the acts that lead to exile in the cities of refuge. Yet there is an ambiguity about this law. Was exile to the cities of refuge considered a way of protecting the accidental killer, or was it itself a form of punishment--not the death sentence that would have applied to one guilty of murder, but punishment nonetheless? Recall that exile is a biblical form of punishment. Adam and Eve, after their sin, were exiled from Eden. Cain, after killing Abel, was told he would be "a restless wanderer on the face of the earth" (Genesis 4:12). ... In truth both elements are present. On the one hand the Torah says, "The assembly must protect the one accused of murder from the redeemer of blood and send the accused back to the city of refuge to which he fled" (Numbers 35:25). Here the emphasis is on protection. But on the other hand, we read that if the exiled person "ever goes outside the limits of the city of refuge to which he fled and the redeemer of blood finds him outside the city, the redeemer of blood may kill the accused without being guilty of murder" (Numbers 35:26–27). Here an element of guilt is presumed; otherwise, why would the blood-redeemer be innocent of murder? (See Amnon Bazak, Cities of Refuge and Cities of Flight," in Torah MiEtzion, Devarim (Jerusalem, Maggid, 2012), 229-236.) … The desire for revenge is basic. It exists in all societies. It leads to cycles of retaliation… that have no natural end. Wars of the clans were capable of destroying all societies. The Torah, understanding that the desire for revenge is natural, tames it by translating it into something else altogether. It recognizes the pain, the loss, and the moral indignation of the victim's family. That is the meaning of the phrase goel hadam, the blood-redeemer, the figure who represents that instinct for revenge.… Yet the Torah inserts one vital element between the killer and the victim's family: the principle of justice. There must be no direct act of revenge. The killer must be protected until his case has been heard in a court of law. If found guilty, he must pay the price. If found innocent, he must be given refuge. This single act turns revenge into retribution. This makes all the difference. People often find it difficult to distinguish between retribution and revenge, yet they are completely different concepts. Revenge is an I-Thou relationship. You killed a member of my family so I will kill you. It is intrinsically personal. Retribution, by contrast, is impersonal. ... Indeed the best definition of the society the Torah seeks to create is nomocracy: the rule of laws, not men. Retribution is the principled rejection of revenge. It says that we are not free to take the law into our own hands. Passion may not override the due process of the law, for that is a sure route to anarchy and bloodshed.

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DEUTERONOMY — 1:16 fairly

DEUT9 At beginning of Deuteronomy, Moses reviews the history of the Israelites' experience in the wilderness, beginning with the appointment of leaders throughout the people, heads of thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. He continues: [this and following verse]. Thus at the outset of the book in which he summarized the entire history of Israel and its destiny as a holy people, he already gave priority to the administration of justice, something he would memorably summarize in a later chapter (Deuteronomy 16:20) with the words, "Justice, justice, shall you pursue." The words for justice, tzedek and mishpat, are recurring themes of the book. The root TZ-D-K appears eighteen times in Deuteronomy; the root SH-F-T forty-eight times. Justice has seemed, throughout the generations, to lie at the beating heart of the Jewish faith. ... Three features mark Judaism as a distinctive faith. First is the radical idea that when God reveals Himself to humans He does so in the form of law. In the ancient world, God was power. In Judaism, God is order, and order presupposes law. In the natural world of cause-and-effect, order takes the form of scientific law. But in the human world, where we have free will, order takes the form of moral law.… Second, we are charged with being interpreters of the law. That is our responsibility as heirs and guardians of the Torah Shebe'al Peh, the Oral Tradition.… Third, fundamental to Judaism is education, and fundamental to education is instruction in Torah, that is, the law. ... To be a Jewish child is to be, in the British phrase, "learned in the law." We are a nation of constitutional lawyers. Why? Because Judaism is not just about spirituality. It is not simply a code for the salvation of the soul. It is a set of instructions for the creation of what the late Rabbi Aharon Liechtenstein called "societal beatitude." It is about bringing God into the shared spaces of our collective life. That needs law: law that represents justice, honouring all humans alike regardless of colour or class; law that judges impartially between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, even in extremis between humanity and God; law that links God, its giver, to us, its interpreters; law that alone allows freedom to coexist with order, so that my freedom is not bought at the cost of yours. Small wonder, then, that there are so many Jewish lawyers.

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DEUTERONOMY — 6:5 love

DEUT234 The love of husband and wife – – a love at once personal and moral, passionate and responsible--is as close as we come to understanding God's love for us and our ideal love for Him. When Hosea says, "You will know the Lord," he does not mean knowledge in an abstract sense. He means the knowledge of intimacy and relationship, the touch of two selves across the metaphysical abyss that separates one consciousness from another. That is the theme of Song of Songs, that deeply human yet deeply mystical expression of eros, the love between humanity and God. It is also the meaning of one of the definitive sentences in Judaism: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all of your strength" [this verse].

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DEUTERONOMY — 6:18 good

DEUT298 The difficulty is obvious. The preceding verse makes reference to commandments, testimonies, and statutes. This, on the face of it, is the whole of Judaism as far as conduct is concerned. What then is meant by the phrase "the right and the good" that is not already included within the previous verse? Rashi says that it refers to "compromise [that is, not strictly insisting on your rights and action within or beyond the letter of the law [lifnim mishurat hadin]." The law, as it were, lays down a minimum threshold: this we must do. But the moral life aspires to more than simply doing what we must. (see Lon Fuller, The Morality of Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University press, 1969), and Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein's much reprinted article, "Does Jewish Tradition Recognize an Ethic Independent of the Halakhah?" in Modern Jewish Ethics, ed. Marvin Fox, (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1975), 62-88.) The people who most impress us with their goodness and rightness are not merely people who keep the law. The saints and heroes of the moral life go beyond. They do more than they are commanded. They go the extra mile. That, according to Rashi, is what the Torah means by "the right and the good."

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DEUTERONOMY — 8:17 my

DEUT394 In early 1990s, one of the great medical research exercises of modern times took place. It became known as the Nun Study.… Researchers were able to test whether their emotional state in 1930 had an effect on their health some sixty years later.… The results… were startling. The more positive emotions – – contentment, gratitude, happiness, love, and hope--the nuns [had] expressed in their [1930] autobiographical notes, the more likely they were to be alive and well sixty years later… So remarkable was this finding that it has lead, since then, to a new field of gratitude research, as well as a deepening understanding of the impact of emotions on physical health. What medicine now knows about individuals, Moses knew about nations. Gratitude – – hakarat hatov – – is at the heart of what he has to say about the Israelites and their future in the Promised Land.… This is what he warned: [verse 11-this verse]. The worst thing that could happen to them, warned Moses, would be that they would forget how they came to the land, how God had promised it to their ancestors and taken them from slavery to freedom, sustaining them during the forty years in the wilderness. This was a revolutionary idea. The nation's history, it asserted, should be engraved on people's souls and re-enacted in the annual cycle of festivals; the nation, as a nation, should never attribute its achievements to itself--"my power and the might of my own hand"--but should always ascribe its victories, indeed its very existence, to something higher than itself: God. This is a dominant theme of Deuteronomy, and it echoes throughout the book time and again.

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DEUTERONOMY — 10:19 stranger

DEUT468 What is the Torah telling us about morality? First, that it is universal. The Torah places God's covenant with Noah and through him all humanity prior to His particular covenant with Abraham and His later covenant with his descendants at Mount Sinai. Our universal humanity proceeds our religious differences. This may well be the single most important contribution of monotheism to civilisation. All societies, ancient and modern, have had some form of morality but by and large they concern only relations within the group. Hostility to strangers is almost universal in both the animal and human kingdoms. Between strangers, power rules. As the Athenians said to the Melians, "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 5.89) The idea that even the people not like us have rights, and that we should "love the stranger" [this verse], would have been considered utterly alien to most people at most times. It took the recognition that there is one God sovereign over all humanity ("Do we not all have one father? Did not one God create us?"; Mal. 2:10) to create the momentous breakthrough to the principle that there are moral universals, among them the sanctity of life, the pursuit of justice, and the rule of law. (Continued at [[GEN636]] Genesis 8:21 evil SACKS 13-14)

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