From the Rabbi’s Study
Come the High Holidays, I can almost hear the argument:
Libertine: "Why should I change? I follow human nature."
Prig: "If that's human nature, then fight it."
In this debate, the Torah takes neither side. It doesn't worship nature, as the Libertine does, nor reject it, as the Prig. Its approach is entirely different.
Do we follow human nature, or do we suppress it? There is a much better option.
Consider something not so intimately close to us as our own human nature. Consider the nature of the Land of Israel.
We know that the Land of Israel is entirely good, because the Torah calls it, no less than fifteen times, "a land flowing with milk and honey."
But those words hardly describe the land that our ancestors first came to know. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all Jacob's sons left the land from famine. By the time the Patriarchs descended to Egypt, we had become very familiar with the Land of Israel. We loved it, and we longed to return to it, but still we might never have recognized it from the Torah's description. Milk and honey? On the contrary, we learned repeatedly that when famine strikes Israel, we leave to seek food.
This condition lasted far beyond ancient times, into the modern world. We can follow it in traverlers' accounts throughout the centuries, suggesting that the nature of the Land of Israel is not milk and honey, but inhospitable desert.
In the words of Mark Twain, "Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince.... The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and despondent.... It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land."
A British survey in later years called a portion of the land simply "uninhabitable."
Today, though, that "uninhabitable" portion of Israel is called Kibbutz Sdeh Boker, and if you go there right now you might pick yourself an orange off one of its trees.
What is the nature of the land? For many centuries it was hidden, and the Torah's glowing description seemed absurd. But the Torah's voice wasn't declarative, it was imperative. It didn't describe, it commanded, and its summons to "a land flowing with milk and honey" was a clarion call for us to make it so. The Torah saw the land not as it was but as it would become through mitsvot.
The milk and honey were always there, just waiting for us to scratch the soil. Then out it gushed like oil in the lands of our neighbors. Throughout the desert years, we were commanded to bring out the real nature of the land. When we gave it our loving attention, the land responded.
So what do we do with our human nature? We don't follow it, and we don't fight it. We bring it out. Our humanity is there, waiting for us. Over the course of the coming New Year we have a chance tto express it and live by it.
To quote the late Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, we are none of us yet human-we are candidates for humanity.
Over the High Holidays, we do not stifle our nature, we set it free. Our real nature is neither the one that we were born with nor the one that we have now. It's the one that we develop over the course of our lives through practice, good deeds and study.
As Israel's nature flows with milk and honey, so may our nature be set free and bring us all a good and sweet New Year.
