Keith Raffel

July 23, 2010

Rippling Through a Thousand Generations

When Rabbi Marder asked me to speak tonight, I recklessly said yes. She enticed me by saying I could speak on this week’s parsha or any other subject I wished. “Any subject” seemed a little broad though, so I decided to take a look at the Torah portion. All that’s covered in Va-et-chanan is Moses’s instructions to the Israelites on how to live including the shema and the ten commandments along with a lengthy litany of reminders of all Adonai has done for His people. At first reading, I didn’t think that focusing on this Torah portion would help narrow things down for me at all.

And yet, in going through the portion again, three verses jumped out and slapped me in the face. In them Moses is relaying God’s answer to a question we’ve all asked ourselves: With all the rules, all the obligations that have been laid down for us, well, what happens if we stray a little?

Bad news! There’s no middle ground for Adonai, who shows commendable self-awareness when he calls Himself “an impassioned God.” Then He follows with the words of – at least these are what they sound like to me – a jealous lover, sort of a biblical version of Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction.” God warns He “instantly requites with destruction those who reject Him.”

The Israelites themselves then are given a choice that here in Silicon Valley we’d call binary. Adonai will visit “the guilt of the parents upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generations of those who reject Me, but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep my commandments.”

Good news after all! We should all still be coasting on a run of good fortune as descendants of Abraham and Sarah or of Moses or of Aaron – all of whom are well within a thousand generations of us.

But wait. What about my own parents? One of the commandments we are adjured to follow is to keep the Sabbath. My dad would occasionally work on a Saturday. And he’s within one generation of me. So which rule prevails? What’s trump? Do I get kindness thanks to Abraham or guilt and destruction thanks to Dad?

I don’t want to answer that question. As Popeye the sailor man used to say, “I yam, what I yam.” Here in my fifties, much of my life is already established for good or for ill, so what I want to do is look forward to lives whose fates aren’t quite so set yet. As I read the verses in the parsha, if I misbehave, my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will suffer for my transgressions. And if I follow God’s commandments, my descendants in the year 22,000 CE will still be reaping the benefits.

Interesting how Adonai incentivizes us with some sort of biblical equivalent to stock options. As Rabbi Wolf pointed out to me, only three or four generations suffer for our transgressions, but there are orders of magnitude times more upside on the other side of the ledger where a thousand generations benefit from our mitzvot.

Anyway….

Now my son Harry loves Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books. The conceit of the series is that demigods, kids who are half Greek god and half human, are alive on the earth today. At the risk of sacrilege, I am thinking we ourselves are something like those demigods. Isn’t there something godlike in the concept that how I live my life now, decisions I make tonight, can determine the fates and fortunes of 20,000 years of descendants? Predestination lives and we’re the ones who are do the predetermining?

We all know the lives we lead are part good and part bad. Adonai must know too and be indulging in hyperbole in this week’s parsha. God wanted to get the attention of the Israelites, to scare the dickens out of them.

Underneath the bluster, though, at the heart of the parsha, is God telling us to remember that our actions have consequences to those who follow us, whether or not we expect them to. Our lives are given more meaning because we affect those younger than us today and those not yet born. If a beat of a butterfly’s wings off the coast of Africa can lead to a hurricane in the Caribbean, imagine the effect of each action we make today on generations to come. According to the concept of tikkun olam, we try to repair an imperfect world, not really for us, but for the next thousand generations. As Rabbi Tarfon would say, “It is not for us to finish the work, yet neither are we free to avoid it.”

In this week’s parsha we are enjoined to love Adonai – but the expression of that love is manifested not by prayer or belief but by how we live, by following the commandments laid out there. Have you heard the story of the man who comes up to the rabbi after services and says, “Rabbi, I don’t believe in God.” And the rabbi’s response? “What makes you think God cares?” I think implicit in this modern midrash is that what God cares about is what we do.

Two weeks ago my daughter Philippa and I visited the Museum of Natural History in New York City. We studied models of ancient humans as they evolved. 20,000 years ago cities had not yet formed. People couldn’t even write. Of course, we look upon the humans of that time as ignorant and backwards. Now evolution is speeding up. Genetic changes are accelerating. Every decade the average IQ score goes up 10 points. How will our descendants in 22,000 CE regard us? Even more backwards than we regard those illiterates I saw in the museum, I’ll bet. Nevertheless, this parsha of Va-et-chanan promises us that over a span of time further than we can conceive, what we do in this life matters to future generations.

Think how strongly we’ve been influenced by our own parents. Any of us with kids can say something to them and then wonder where the words came from? Sometimes it’s as if the words were channeled from our own parents and we are just ventriloquists’ dummies. I again think of my own father, who was an engineer. Rebel that I was, I majored in history. But then I ended up in software anyway. I couldn’t escape his influence. Nor can any of us ever escape the influence of what our parents, grandparents, and a thousand generations before us have done.

Have you heard the joke about how you know Jesus was in fact Jewish? Here’s how. 1) Because he followed the same profession as his father, 2) because he lived with his parents until he was thirty, and 3) because his mother thought he was god.

If we are demigods in how we influence future generations, so are our kids demigods in how they will influence generations that follow them. I’ve heard said, “A man or woman without children has no future.” I don’t take this to refer to biological parents only. An aunt has nieces to influence, a professor has students, a mentor has followers . Our children, that is, the next generation, give us our future.

Adonai of course knew this, too, for in this very parsha, too, appears the famous injunction: “And these words which I command thee this day shall be upon thy heart. And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children.”

For me that’s the fundamental lesson of this parsha. If God’s commandments are upon our hearts and we do our best to live up to them, then those actions, what we do, will teach and shower kindness on the next generation and the next and the next and the next in ways we could never hope to guess.

Shabbat shalom.