Watch Tower, Kibbutz Maoz Haim
Wearing a green uniform and two braids, one innocent lookout
Reported what was happening out there, and all the generals and commanders
Laughed in her face and didn’t reply.
Terrorists broke through the fence, and one, innocent lookout reported and asked “why?”
And all the generals & commanders, and all the “shush, shush” sayers and all the leaders stood pale faced and didn’t reply.
The lookout in this version by Idit Gilor from October 2023 asks the same question that the girl in a red dress asked in the original song by Ruth Sifroni and Yair Rosenblum in 1969: Why?
It’s been 55 years, and she still hasn’t received an answer.
Approximately a month ago, when I started reading the Torah portion to prepare this drasha, I was quite surprised to find the lookouts staring at me from within the text. In one place they asked a question and another they gave an answer, but to a different question.
The question, “Why?” reverberates from the table of values in Leviticus chapter 27 that states:
When anyone explicitly vows to the Eternal the equivalent for a human being,
the following scale shall apply… If the age is from five years to twenty years, the equivalent is twenty shekels for a male and ten shekels for a female (verses 2,5; Revised JPS 2023).
Could it be that the commanders and leaders did not take the lookouts’ report seriously because they were young women? Some of them were not even 20 years old and according to the verse they would still be evaluated as girls, as children. I can’t answer that question, but it causes me tremendous anguish.
It’s insufferable to think that perhaps the Torah contributed even a miniscule amount to the devastating belittling of their reports. Moreover, the very existence of a price list for people in the Torah is mind boggling. In the human context of compensation for the inability to work as the result of injury (which appears in Parashat Mishpatim), the Torah sets out guiding principles but not monetary amounts. But here in a context related to Divine service there are prices. Why? God created humans – both male and female – in God’s image and likeness. How can we possibly set a monetary price for a human being? [1]
On the second reading, there are signs that the Torah itself, if it may be said, has doubts.
1. Chapter 27 reads like an appendix to the Book of Leviticus. The previous chapter has obvious signs of being the conclusion: blessings, curses, and a summation: “These are the laws, rules, and instructions that the Eternal established, through Moses on Mount Sinai, with the Israelite people” (Lev. 26:46).
2. Moreover, the opening of chapter 27 does not contain a command, but rather “When anyone explicitly vows.” As if God were saying, “If you open your mouth, these are the rules but I didn’t ask for this.”
3. Later, verse 8 explains that if the person who made the vow is too poor to pay the stated amount, they can go to the priest who may lower the price. The sections that deal with real estate and livestock have no such provisions. Those things have market values, and their price is fixed. In the case of humans, the payment is symbolic, making it possible to be flexible.
Thus, we can understand the discrepancies in value by age and gender as a compromise with the human tendency to value people according to their productive ability, and not as a purely Divine statement. That leaves me asking, together with Prof. Ronit Irshai in the Torah commentary Dabri Torah : Thousands of years after the Torah was given, shouldn’t the table of values presented in this chapter undergo substantial change? Why do we continue valuing the industrialist, high tech worker and general more than the teacher, nurse, social worker, or lookout? [2] The latter are the ones whose work provides the social foundation that makes it possible for others to function.
I wish I had an answer to those questions.
I did find an answer to a different, future-facing question, in the final verse of the blessing, “I the Eternal your God…. made you walk erect קוממיות kommemiut” (26:13). “ Kommemiut” appears only once in the entire Bible and twice in most modern prayer books: once in the blessing immediately before the Shema and once in the Prayer for the State of Israel (in the version written by Shai Agnon and adopted by the Rabbinate, VeAni Tefillati,p. 285).
In the first century CE, Onkeles translated kommemiut into Aramaic as “in liberty.”
Midrash Sifra (3 rd century CE) presents several interpretations. On the peshat straightforward level, it reads kommemiut as “standing upright,” and then adds “and not afraid of anyone.” Perhaps the anonymous author considered the second part a continuation of the simple meaning. I don’t. A lack of fear is not always a sign of independence. Sometimes it’s a symptom of dangerous obliviousness.
Rabbi Judah gives a homiletical interpretation, “ kommemiut – 100 amottall, like primordial Adam.” Taking advantage of the linguistic connection between kommemiut and komahin the sense of “height,” he links the verse to the midrashic motif of primordial Adam’s staggering height, prior to eating the fruit. The technical level is clear enough, but what does it mean? An amah is approximately 40cm so this is a truly tremendous height. What is Rabbi Judah trying to tell us?
Perhaps that primordial Adam was a walking watchtower? That the meaning of our freedom is the ability to look into the distance in both time and space?
The imaginary lookout stationed in my head said, “Yes, exactly.”
Our ability to stand erect, in freedom and liberty, is dependent on our ability – as individuals and as a society – to see and analyze our environment with precision; to value each person within our society in order to preserve our internal strength; and never to forget that the people on the other side are also human. Some of them desecrated their humanity when they planned and executed so many horrendous acts; they don’t deserve our pity. But there are others. Even in justified, defensive war, rational considerations must control firepower.
If as “an eternal people” we truly “aren’t afraid of a long journey,” [3] we have no choice but to take a long-term view and plan for the day after, being careful to forge a path that will lead to blessing, not a curse, for us and everyone who lives in this land.
Shoshana Michael Zucker, Hod veHadar
[1] My teacher, Rabbi Shai Held: “Many years ago, a close friend of mine, a promising young rabbinical student named Matthew Eisenfeld, was murdered in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem. His parents eventually sued the Iranian government, which had funded Hamas… I will never forget the shock I felt when I entered the courtroom. An actuary had constructed an elaborate chart spelling out in great detail just how much Matt was likely to have earned over the course of a career as a rabbi—and there it was, intended to be exact down to dollars and cents, a number attached to my friend’s life. Appended to that number were punitive damages so steep that they effectively rendered that first estimate irrelevant. But all these years later the horror of that first number still startles and repels me. A human being is not a commodity. (Judaism Is About Love, p. 29)
[2] In the Hebrew original, the genders of the professions alternate.
[3] “The eternal people aren’t afraid of a long journey” Rabbi Yehoshua Weitzman, inspired by Rabbi A. I. Kook.
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