"Ninety-five percent of the American people answered "yes" to a survey question: ‘Do you believe in God?’ Another question in the same survey read: "Would you say your religious beliefs have any effect on your practice in business or politics?’ To this question a majority answered ‘no.’ Their beliefs did not influence their conduct."
These survey results ring all too true. We find all too many people who claim to hold a belief but do not act on the logical conclusions of their beliefs. Whenever our beliefs and our actions, or different aspects of our beliefs, fail to match, we experience a sense of disorientation. We cannot be at one with ourselves while we live with such contradictions. We want to have a sense of being whole, but we remain stuck, so to speak, with split personalities.
A Hasidic interpreter finds in the opening words of our Torah portion a lesson about creating a holistic identity. The reading begins, "Re’eh anokhi noten lifneikhem hayom berakhah ukellalah, See, I set before you today a blessing and a curse." Moses tells the Israelite people that they can choose. "A blessing: if you obey the instructions of Adonai your God, which I offer you today. [Or] a curse: if you do not regard the instructions of Adonai your God, but turn away…and follow other gods."
Our commentator points out that the verb "to see," in Hebrew is in the singular, re’eh. But the verb’s object, "before you," is in the plural: you can’t hear this in English, but in Hebrew, the word lifneikhem is a plural. In the Jewish interpretive tradition, we have to ask why the Torah’s language switches between singular and plural in the same sentence. One Hasidic writer finds meaning in the shift.
He suggests that the use of the singular verb reminds us that, though the Jewish people consists of many individuals, they all share a basic unity. All their varied souls originate in the same place, the Holy One of Being, the one God. In many places, our commentator writes, the Torah refers to Israel in the singular when it speaks of their loyalty to God. When they worship the one God, the people of Israel, too, is one.
Our writer goes a step further by quoting a famous saying in Pirkei Avot, the collection of early rabbinic aphorisms. Rabbi Halafta teaches that "When ten people sit together and study Torah, the Shekhinah, the Presence of God joins them." R. Halafta goes on to show that the same is true of five people, of three, of two, and finally, even of one. Though people are many and various, God is one. When people join themselves to God, they become one. This applies to groups of people, who can unite in God’s service, and it applies equally to individuals, who can be at one with themselves by being at one with the source of all being.
Now we understand that Moses wanted the people of Israel to serve only God. He warned them to avoid the temptations of the contemporary pagan cultures. Throughout the biblical age, we know, our ancestors often succumbed to the blandishments of the groups among whom they lived. In our Torah portion, Moses reminds them that the only way they can hold together as a community of Israelites is to maintain their singular loyalty to the God of Israel. Much later, the prophet Elijah would challenge his contemporaries: "If Baal is god, serve only him; and if the Lord is God, serve only God."
The Torah’s lesson is that serving many gods fragments the individual personality. This lesson holds true for our day, too. For while we like to think that there is no idolatry in the contemporary world, a closer look will show us that we do serve many false gods. A magazine cartoon several years ago illustrated probably the most common form of idolatry in our world. It showed two cigar-smoking, well-dressed men relaxing in huge upholstered chairs. One confides to the other: "It was terrible! I dreamed the dollar was no longer worth worshiping!"
Modern society still worships the dollar. Or it might be more accurate to say that our religion is consumption: we devote ourselves to acquiring material goods. Remember the bumper sticker, "The one who dies with the most toys wins?" I’m not convinced everyone who displayed one meant it as a joke.
Perhaps not everyone engages so deeply in the culture of materialism. But we seem immured in the culture of celebrity. Americans crave nothing so much as entertainment. We enshrine as heroes anyone who provides entertainment, whether from the world of showbiz or the world of sports. Their actual qualities do not matter. As long as they can divert us, we forgive them all manner of sins and crimes.
Another temptation for us is the American culture of individualism. We long to know and to help other people, but our society tells us to look out for number one and be rugged about it. A person cannot help feeling fragmented, when these conflicting messages pull us in opposite directions. You wind up serving too many masters and pursuing too many, mutually incompatible goals. All this leaves you without a sense of who you really are. We are fragmented and fractured when we yearn to be intact and whole.
Making ourselves whole requires a degree of self-knowledge, which we can achieve only by honestly examining ourselves. I recall a comment of General de Gaulle, when he heard that a speaker had compared him to the revolutionary figure Robespierre. De Gaulle’s reaction was, "I always thought I was Joan of Arc and Bonaparte. How little one knows oneself!"
Many of us in truth know ourselves less well than we ought. If we stop to consider carefully who we truly are, how we became the people we are, then we can discover where our true loyalties lie. We can return to first principles.
The first principle is that we are members of a people with a tradition of more than three thousand years of seeking justice and righteousness. "Collectively and individually, we Jews embody a long and continuous history of religious ideas and teachings for which we have struggled to gain the world’s recognition throughout the ages.
"Deep within the consciousness of each Jew burns the awareness of this unique spiritual destiny. Our personal existence as Jews is bound up with the history and aspirations of our people. We are not lonely individuals on an endless road." We need not merely "look out for number one," for we are part of a whole.
Jews who live with this sense of roots and history is aware of his or her identity. We are fully cognizant of ourselves and our place in the world. This awareness organizes all we do. It provides a single principle that grounds our identity, regardless of the varied roles life may call on us to play.
For the genius of Judaism is that it does not confine itself to the synagogue. Instead it embraces the whole of life, and all the places where life is lived. No longer can we afford the 19th-century idea of being a Jew at home and a person out on the street. That route leads to fragmentation. Holding fast to the unifying principle of serving God through Torah, wherever we go, whatever we do, builds integrity and wholeness.
Moses’s words remind us that the goal of life is to pursue this kind of oneness. Devoting ourselves to the values and ideals of Torah brings us into harmony with the one God, the source of all that lives. It allows us to be at one with ourselves and with our people; it links our past with our present and guides us toward the future. As Moses urged our ancestors, we can all make a choice to link ourselves with the one unique path that belongs to us as an inheritance.