Moishe Moment - Shoftim 5778

Hi everyone! Faustine again, sending you thoughts from Paris before we enter Shabbat. I'm using Sefaria and its sourcesheets tool again this week. Please email me if you have any question, plan or thoughts about this! [email protected]

This week, amongst other things, the Biblical text gives guidelines on how to start a war. You might expect to read diplomatic or geopolitical advice. Instead is this very surprising consideration: one who has built a house and not dedicated it cannot go to war. The text goes on to dismiss people who have planted a vineyard and not harvested it and someone who has paid a dowry for a woman and not married her. (Sefaria pro-tip: if you click on the reference of the text, you can access the full version!)

Why is that? You might understand that from an individual point of view, someone might be disappointed to go to war in such conditions. But why would a collective, legal, normative text make it a requirement?! Why can't a society ask such a person to fight?

One of my favorite topics of Jewish study is the concept of home. It is perhaps why I believe so much in the work we do together at Moishe House. It is also the topic I chose for the first Jewish learning retreat I organized, a bit over a year ago in Sofia. I had invited the incredible Chaya Gilboa as our guest educator and she taught this precise text. To this day, I think it might be one of the most insightful and beautiful conceptualizations of home I have read in a Jewish text.

The first insight is that you can't ask someone to join a collective and stand for it if they don't have a very concrete individual place to ground themselves. If they don't have a place for individuality, they can't make the effort of collectivity. And collectivity shouldn't be asking you to give up on your personal identity and landmarks.

The second is perhaps more specifically about the military. Fighting is hard. It was certainly hard to fight those Biblical wars. This is also a main feature of the life of activists: stepping into the world to change its order might be necessary, but it is always a physical, intellectual and moral trial. In my opinion, the Biblical verses give an apparently simple condition, that is actually much deeper: you need a home to fight. You need memories, values, loved ones, safe spaces, intimacy to energize you to change the outter world. Whereas one might think that such a strong sense of self precludes joining a collective endeavor, the Bible flips the logic around: it is precisely the very condition of it.

That same day, Chaya also taught us the following poem by Israeli poet Avraham Shlonski.

One's home should be safe and comfortable. And what this teaches me is that such a safe and comofrtable home is also what will give you the strength and responsibility to deal with the unexpected, to see and change the world. There lies the essential importance of building homes and of giving people who have left theirs new ones.

My teachers in this are the Bible, and Shlonski, and they're also each of the Moishe House residents I've met, embracing the challenge to build strong homes that give roots and wings to change the (Jewish) world.

On this note, I'll leave you with a beautiful song you might want to sing with your people at your table Friday night! (Don't worry, I swear it's simpler than it looks: just two sentences!)