Parashat Naso

Thirty years ago, a teacher of mine, Ed Greenstein of Tel Aviv University, suggested a fascinating theory regarding the biblical figure of Samson. Destined in utero for greatness as Israel’s savior, Samson would grow up to be an irresponsible and uncontrollable Hebraic Rob Roy. Unlike the other Judges of Israel, Samson never led his people in combat. He seemed to ignore his Nazirite vows, always telling riddles. He married a Philistine woman and otherwise showed little interest in being a role model. Outsmarted by Delilah, he is blinded and degraded. Famously, the story concludes with Samson summoning his remaining strength to bring the Philistine temple down upon his enemies. Samson dies a martyr, impulsive, flawed and full of surprises to the very end.

Professor Greenstein theorizes that the story of Samson is not just a great tale, but actually a riddle itself. The answer to the riddle is the realization that Samson is not only a person, but a nation: Samson is Israel personified. Samson’s birth, rise, fall and martyrdom is actually an inner biblical critique of ancient Israel. His straying from the faith of his parents, his attraction to alien culture and Philistine women is all, writes Greenstein, an allusion to Israel’s unfaithfulness to God. Only at the very end does he call out to God in his hour of need, and, in spite of Samson’s many infractions, God does redeem him. The backsliding, the affliction, and ultimately death of Samson is all an allegory, an epitomization of ancient Israel. Today, thirty years later, Greenstein’s theory remains fully as plausible and authoritative as it did when first published.

This morning, I want to take Greenstein’s theory in a new direction, by drawing Samson into conversation not with ancient Israel, but with contemporary Israel, with a special focus on the Haftorah reading. Having returned from the synagogue’s adult learning trip in Israel some 24 hours ago, having attended the AIPAC conference in Washington, DC last week, and having witnessed, as has everyone in this room, the non-stop press coverage regarding Israel over the last few weeks, I see in Samson a useful prism through which to understand our own moment vis-à-vis the modern state of Israel.

I’ll ask you to bear with me – this sermon was written on a plane – but I promise you, that while there may be a few bumps en route, if you stay in your seats and keep your cell phones off – we will arrive safely at our destination.

I think it is altogether significant that the only part of Samson’s life that we read about today is a scene that actually precedes his life, the scene of his parents being given angelic notice that a son would be born to them, a son who would save his people. It is this scene, I believe, that holds the key to the subsequent trajectory of Samson’s life. This is a child born into the world with rather high, if not overwhelming, expectations – a life of piety and service to God and his people, and a promise of heroic leadership. Imagine what it must have been like for Samson growing up. Every hope, every ideal, every aspiration of his family, of the other kids in the neighborhood, of his nation, all resting on his shoulders. It is not at all surprising to me that he bristles under the weight of it all. He does what any kid would do in such a situation – he rebels. Because for all the hype, Samson is, at the end of the day, altogether human. He has good days and bad days. Sure it may be nice to be the center of attention, the object of national hope, but he puts his pants on one leg at a time just like everyone else, and sometimes the pressure of his promise gets to be more than Samson can bear.

It is this disconnect, this dissonance between the propped-up version of how his life is supposed to be and the reality of who he really is, that is the driving force of the story. I imagine – and maybe I am speaking here as a parent, or as a child, and I gladly defer to the therapists in the room (or us people in therapy) – that embedded in the Samson saga is an intergenerational transmission of expectation and disappointment. Samson wasn’t just born, he was annunciated, oracle and all. This was the long awaited child. His parents projected all their hopes on him, that he would fulfill the prophecy, would show that he was heads and shoulders above others or, as is often the case with parents, would realize all their unfulfilled wishes for themselves. Samson’s parents, like many Jewish parents, parented in a compensatory way. I am reminded of the old joke about how we know that Jesus was Jewish: he lived at home until he was thirty; he went into his father’s business; and his mother thought he was God. But in Samson’s case the story didn’t turn out so well. In the end, it was not just the Philistine temple that collapsed on him. It was the weight of such outsized expectations on his human frame that proved to be too heavy to hold.

If you haven’t caught on yet, I am not talking just about Samson; I am talking about Israel. If ever there was a country that came into being with a set of high expectations, it is the modern state of Israel. For 2000 years, while the Jewish people lived in exile, we prayed for Israel, fasted on her behalf, recalled her at all times. “How can I sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither, let my tongue cleave to its palate.” (Ps. 137) No matter where we stood, in the east, west, north or south, ever since the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, our spiritual center has always been Israel. Less than 72 hours ago, I stood at the Kotel on Yom Yerushalayim, the day marking Jerusalem’s reunification in 1967. Looking at “the Wailing Wall” and thinking of that historic day, I recalled the final stanza of Haim Hefer’s poem, “The Paratroopers Cry.”

How does it happen that paratroopers cry?
How does it happen that they touch the wall with great emotions?
How does it happen that their weeping changes to song?
Perhaps because these boys of nineteen, born at the same time as the state,
Perhaps because these boys of nineteen carry on their shoulders two thousand years. 

Two thousand years on the shoulders of such a young, miraculous and altogether normal country. Because 63 years ago, when the long-anticipated and hoped-for state did come into being, it, like Samson, turned out to be both miraculous and ordinary. There were wars, armistice lines, politics, minorities, majorities, immigrants, scandals, traffic jams, mistakes, fumbles and bumbles, infighting and infrastructure – in other words, everything that makes a country normal. I am reminded of Ben Gurion’s quip: "We will know we have become a normal country when Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes conduct their business in Hebrew." In the past 63 years, Israel has fulfilled Ben Gurion’s vision and then some! This past week’s congregational trip to Israel was special because it was designed for congregants who had previously been to Israel. We spoke to officials about some of the most prickly and intractable problems facing the Jewish state: the security fence, the status of Jerusalem, refugees, and societal divisions between Jews and Arabs, ultra-orthodox and secular, Ashkenazi and Sephardi. What about religious pluralism? What exactly do we make of the bitter irony that the only country in the world where the status of one Jew can be denied by another Jew is the Jewish state? Israel is full of contradiction and promise, hurdles and blessing, pitfall and potential – not altogether unlike any other country. The difference is that Israel, like Samson, was never intended to be ordinary. When we prayed for her, we didn’t think about sewage systems, when we fasted for her, we never thought about minority rights, when we dreamt of her for 2000 years, we certainly never imagined that she would turn out to be a nation just like every other nation. Aside from whatever problems Israel faces, I think a good deal of her anxiety stems from the fact that as Jews, we have not yet struck a healthy balance between our 2000 years of national expectation and the mundane realities of being a modern nation state.

Rabbi David Hartman, probably the most thoughtful voice when it comes to Israel, has explained that there are a few possibilities when it comes to approaching the Jewish state. You can – as some in the religious Zionist camp do – see in Israel the fulfillment of the divine plan. Israel’s decisions, right or wrong, are always right; after all, they are a reflection of providential design. Our child, as it were, will always walk on water. Another possible response – characteristic of the secularist camp – celebrates the normalization of society in Israel. Israel was created “to be like all other nations.” Prostitutes, thieves, Hebrew-speaking and otherwise, are to be accepted, whether or not they reflect any Jewish values. The goal, after all, is not to be a Jewish state, but a state where Jews can be normal. By this thinking, anyone who holds Israel to a higher standard than any other country forgets that the very point of Israel is to be like any other country.

But as any parent will tell you, be your child Samson or otherwise, neither option one nor option two is really viable. It is both unreasonable and, for that matter, unhealthy to think that our children, in all their flawed humanity, should live up to some idealized standard disconnected from who they are. At the same time, it hardly seems responsible to parent without setting expectations – expectations to which our flawed children can aspire. In other words, good parenting (and I am only 10 years into it) involves a constant process of idealism and recalibration, in which we set expectations and then back off, in order to let our children aspire toward goals without inflicting on them unreasonable anxiety brought on by trying to attain the unattainable. And, of course, the most important part of all: we never, ever – even when they stumble, even when they fail, even when they disappoint – we never leave the side of our children. Perfection is not a pre-condition to loyalty. We can say what we need to say in private. But whether it is done in public or private, that criticism must always come from a place of love, a place of support, born of a belief that while our child may stumble, they can and will grow up to be the person they know they can and want to be.

And when it comes to Israel, that is the only option with which to move forward. If we want to break the cycle of expectation and disappointment, then we need to, at one and the same time, allow for Israel to strive towards self-expression on her own terms, and yet all the while we must never give up the belief that Israel presents a momentous opportunity to give national expression to historic Jewish values. There are those in this world who hold Israel to a double standard, who distort Israel’s record, all the while forgetting the existential threats that Israel faces, threats emanating from nations whose track records make Israel look positively princely. Their hypocrisy, nevertheless, does not excuse us from our own obligations. As lovers of Israel, as ardent Zionists, when Israel does stumble, which she will, we pick her up off the ground, dust her off, tell her not to run so fast, and then watch and pray as she finds her stride once more. To do otherwise –to hold Israel to an impossible standard, or to simply write off her shortcomings as the cost of doing business – is unfair to Israel, unfair to us and unhealthy for our relationship.

This past week in Israel, I went to a place I had never been, a place that I recommend you go next time you visit: Trumpeldor Cemetery, situated in the heart of a downtown Tel Aviv. From a single spot, you can see the graves of Israel’s founding fathers – Max Nordau, Ahad Ha’am, Saul Tchernikovsky, Meir Dizengoff, Hayim Nachman Bialik among others. It is the pantheon of dreamers without whom the state of Israel would never have come into being. I stood there with my congregants, looking at those names, thinking of their dreams, with the hustle and bustle of modern Tel Aviv all around. The juxtaposition said it all. In that sacred space between the dream and the reality, the expectation and the actuality, Israel lives and Israel struggles, and there the secret to Israel’s vital future will be found.