HeritageandHistory Zurich

This week’s reading of the parasha, Pinchas, drew my attention to the moral and circumstantial duality of our judgment: Pinchas is rewarded with the honor of eternal priesthood for his family for a murder. In today’s world, we cannot relate to this fact. The daughters of Tzelofchad are benefited with their father’s inheritance. They seek Moses who goes to God for consultation. And God finds it fair that they, in the absence of a male heir, receive the inheritance. God thus establishes this law with which we can relate very well today. 

A sign that our approach to the text of the Torah is tied to our time and our space. A Jew who read this parasha in the year 230, in a closed and macho culture, might have thought the opposite of what we think here today: the rights of the daughters of Tselofchad is an affront and Pinchas got a very fair “fondle”. 

Intrigued, I looked up the haftarah. Usually from a prophet, the haftarah ties up the week’s parasha, either by an explicit conclusion or simply by mentioning one or another word that relates to the text. For this parasha, there is the instruction that when we read Pinchas after the 17th of Tammuz, we should read the haftarah from the book of Jeremiah (1:1-2:3). On the 17th of the Hebrew month of Tammuz, the Babylonians invade the Kingdom of Judah and besiege Jerusalem. They then breach the city walls and, on the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av (Tisha B’Av), they destroy the First Temple and begin the great exile of the Israelites.

Jeremiah is the prophet who announces this great tragedy that is approaching the people. Or rather, the word of God is manifested through the mouth of the prophet. For this reason, Jeremiah also becomes, as described in his book, persona non grata among the elite of Jerusalem. Jeremiah, read on this Shabbat, is a temporal/historical landmark: It was during Jeremiah’s time that the Babylonian Empire invaded Jerusalem. He describes the events, draws parallels between cause and effect, gives the reader a general plan of what was happening and what was to come in that region, and helps to understand what was occurring there at that time. And it is also a landmark of Memory: beyond the facts, both the person of Jeremiah and the vulnerability of the people are decanted in possibilities of reproduction and multiple experiences. The fact that the First and Second Temples were destroyed on the same day is not simply a fact, it is an instrument of Memory. 

The prophet is not a fortune teller, nor does he have magical or premonitory powers. In the Jewish tradition, the prophet is inspired or affected by the manifestation of the One and Abstract God. Faced with the vulnerability of the people of Israel, their distance from the Covenant with the One and Abstract God, Jeremiah goes to them and, through words, wants to bring them back to the path of the One and Abstract God. More than a divine intervention, Jeremiah’s words here aim to “shake up” the people, which borders on a cutting psychological intervention. 

In Jeremiah 7 we read: “Do you not see what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead the dough to offer wafers to the queen of heaven and to pour out drink offerings to other gods, to provoke Me. Do they provoke Me?” says the Eternal. “Or do they provoke themselves, to shame their faces?” 

Later in Jeremiah 9: “They bend their tongues like a bow to shoot lies; they have strengthened themselves in the land, but not in the way of truth; they follow from one evil to another and do not know Me at all,” says the Lord. “Let each one take heed to his neighbor, and let him not trust in any brother; for one brother will deceive another and will surely spread slander about his neighbor.” 

And in Jeremiah 9:24, the words sound like a sentence: “The days are coming,” says the Lord, “when I will punish those who are circumcised in body but not in heart.”

In the spirit that the next three weeks until the 9th of Av impose on us and based on the exchange of ideas and experiences, over many years, with friends, acquaintances and relatives who live in Israel, it is inevitable to draw parallels between today and what Jeremiah tells us. Not the facts themselves, but in the realm of Memory. Attacked on October 7, we were all able (from near and far) to access a set of sensory, emotional, hereditary and circumstantial elements. Since the 6th century BCE, in the time of Jeremiah, we have known and felt what it is like to be invaded and have our people torn from our homes and taken to enemy territory. 

You cannot defeat the invisible! You can kill people, but not the God who lives in them. You can conquer a people, but never their spirit

It was in the midst of the First World War, serving in the Austrian army, that the Austrian Jew Stefan Zweig, the most widely read writer in the first half of the 20th century, consolidated his pacifist stance in an indisputable manner. And he draws his inspiration and expression from the prophet Jeremiah, with his play “Jeremiah, a dramatic poem in nine acts”, written between 1915 and 1917, and first performed on February 27, 1918, here at the Municipal Theater in Zurich. 

The play “Jeremiah” uses texts from the prophet’s book to portray the moral and ethical decline in which the people were at that time. However, it is not a depressing work. In both the play and the prophet’s book, Jeremiah makes it clear that God will protect his people, will redeem them if they take the path of returning to his Commandments and teachings, and will lead them back to the land he gave to their ancestors. Stefan Zweig’s play ends with an inspiring sentence: “You cannot defeat the invisible! You can kill people, but not the God who lives in them. You can conquer a people, but never their spirit.” (“Man can’t be lost! Man can be a people, but not the Lord, who lives in his own heart. Man can be a people, who has no Spirit.”) 

Our generation and the last two or three have, at the same time, the historical privilege of the Promised Land and the circumstantial weight of exile, of the diaspora. The drama of conscience that arose with the reestablishment of Israel, no longer an ideal and distant land, but a modern and thriving state, may have led to a fraying of our human capacity to deal with the paradox. The impetus of the chalutsim (pioneers) or the urgency of Holocaust survivors or refugees from Arab countries sustained the “Israel” project for decades. And now? Is Israel the home of the Jew of the 21st century? Does Israel reflect our yearnings? Who shapes this land, which is less and less historic and promised, and more and more modern and compromised?

It is in Stefan Zweig’s autobiography “In Yesterday’s World” from 1942 that the Romanian-Brazilian journalist, writer and translator Nelson Vainer (1910-1997) finds the right words for the book he edited in memory of the fiftieth anniversary of Theodor Herzl’s death, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1954 by the Unified Zionist Organization. His choice was not at all fortuitous. Stefan Zweig writes: 

“When ‘The Jewish State’ — that small pamphlet, but with the force of a steel arrow in flight — appeared, I was still in high school, but I remember well the general perplexity and indignation it caused in the Jewish bourgeois circles of Vienna. What — those Jews asked sullenly — got into the head of this writer, who is usually so sensible, funny and cultured? What crazy things is he doing and writing? Why should we go to Palestine? Our language is German, not Hebrew; our homeland is beautiful Austria. Are we not well off under the rule of the good Emperor Franz Joseph? Do we not have our convenient prosperity, our secure situation? Are we not citizens of the State with equal rights with others? Are we not domiciled and devoted citizens of this beloved Vienna? Do we not live in a progressive age, which in a few years will cast aside all religious prejudices? Why does he, who speaks as a Jew and wants to help Judaism, provide arguments for our worst enemies and try to segregate us, when every day he unites us more closely and intimately with the German world? The rabbis were excited in the pulpits; the editor of the newspaper “The New Free Press” (Neue Freie Presse) forbade even the word Zionism to be mentioned in his “progressive” newspaper.”

Stefan Zweig finds accurate and conciliatory words for Herzl: “At first Herzl felt misunderstood; Vienna, where he had thought himself safer, had abandoned him or even laughed at him, given the esteem he had enjoyed there for many years. But then the response suddenly resounded with such violence and ecstasy that he was almost frightened: with a few dozen pages he had provoked such a powerful and far-reaching movement in the world! The response, without a doubt, did not come from the bourgeois Jews of the West, who lived comfortably and were well off, but from the vast Jewish masses of the East, from the proletariat of the ghettos of Galicia, Poland and Russia. Without realizing it, Herzl, with his pamphlet, ignited the core of Judaism, which was burning under the ashes of the foreign land, with the millennial messianic dream of the promise, confirmed in the Holy Books, of returning to the Promised Land — this hope and, at the same time, religious certainty — the only feelings that still made life useful for those millions of trampled and enslaved beings.” 

The publication’s preface ends with Zweig revealing his admiration for Herzl and his intimacy with Judaism: “Whenever an individual, prophet or impostor, in the two thousand years of the curse that weighs on the Jewish people, has struck the string, the soul of the entire people has vibrated, but never with such a loud, resounding resonance. With a few dozen pages, a single man had transformed a scattered and disunited mass into a unity.” 

And I ask myself again in these three weeks in which we are so vulnerable: What now? Is Israel the home of the 21st century Jew? Does Israel reflect our aspirations? Who shapes this land, which is less and less historic and promised, and more and more modern and compromised? How can we deal with this paradox?