Today is day 328 of captivity of our Hostages.This week has brought news of light and of darkness. The joy of welcoming back home one of our captives, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, an israeli muslim Bedouin, retrieved from a Tunnel by the IDF.The pain of receiving the translated letter, published with the authorization of his family, by one of the survivors of the Nova Festival who didn’t survive the wound of helplessly witnessing a woman get abused and killed on October 7th.
What does this have to do with our Parasha?
Everything.
One of the themes of Parashat re’eh is desire for flesh.In our context, it is meat. But we can see meat as a symbol for all types of impulsive desires for Flesh.
There is a dark desire for flesh that arises in times of War. This is what war ethics are there to frame. To protect civilians from fighters going over the boundaries.
This is what the parasha talks about, and the Mei Ha Shiloach explains to us how.
“When the LORD your God enlarges your borders, as he promised you, and you say, ‘I will eat meat,’ because your soul desires meat, then you may eat whatever your soul desires.” (devarim 12:20) "
כִּֽי־תְאַוֶּ֥ה נַפְשְׁךָ֖ לֶֽאֱכֹ֣ל בָּשָׂ֑ר בְּכָל־אַוַּ֥ת נַ פְשְׁךָ֖ תֹּאכַ֥ל בָּשָֽׂר:
One of the main themes - not the most studied and yet essential in Parashat (see) is an invitation to look at our desire for Flesh (Basar- Meat).
The theme of the human consumption of animal meat is a recurring motif in the chumash.
If meat is generally mentioned in the context of the instructions for the korbanot (offerings) or in the laws of kashrut, of which it is a central object, it is also, in the biblical discourse, a strong symbol: almost a barometer of our level of human consciousness.
After the generation of the flood, the authorization to consume meat becomes a symbol of the weakness of human nature.
From there, the consumption of meat is placed under the sign of, if we may say, human animality: the world of desire, of impulses, and all the forms of violence that accompany them.
In the story of our patriarchs, meat thus becomes an object of desire - from that of Yitzhak to that of Essav, as well as the fantasized nostalgia for abundance in a reconstructed idealized Egypt for the generation of the desert.
In our parasha, two themes that seem inverted are repeated several times, each echoing itself.
The first, that of desire, precisely, speaks of permission granted almost at discretion (devarim 12 15) to consume animal flesh:
However, in every desire of your soul, you can kill and eat meat.
רַק֩ בְּכָל־אַוַּ֨ת נַפְשְׁךָ֜ תִּזְבַּ֣ח | וְאָֽכַלְתָּ֣ בָשָׂ֗ר
Then further (12.20)-
because your soul desires to eat meat, you will be able to eat it according to all the desires of your soul.”
נַפְשְׁךָ֖ לֶֽאֱכֹ֣ל בָּשָׂ֑ר בְּכָל־אַוַּ֥ת נַפְשְׁ ךָ֖ תֹּאכַ֥ל בָּשָֽׂר:
And again 12.21 and you may eat in your cities, according to all the desire of your soul.
The second, as a corrective to this unbridled desire, forbids us the drinking of blood, and twice calls us to “pour it out on the earth like water”(12.16) רַל־הָאָ֥רֶץ תִּשְׁפְּכֶ֖נּוּ כַּמָּֽיִם:
This injunction, central to the laws of kashrut, to deprive oneself of blood when taking life, can be seen as an impulse control device.
In light of what seems to be a mechanism of regulation, verse 20.12, which the Mei Ha Shiloach chose to comment on, by making a syntactic connection between “expanded boundaries” and the “desire for meat,” seems dissonant.
After the conquest of the promised land, does the desire for meat become almost deregulated?
As if to address this paradox, the Mei Ha Shiloach opens his commentary with a corrective:
לא נאמר שיצאו חוץ לגבולם רק שגבולם יתרחב,
“It is not said that they will go out of their borders, but only that their borders will expand.”
As Israel is about to enter the promised land and move on to foods other than the manna of the desert, the text equates territorial expansion with that of the agency:
We will be able to choose to eat what we please.
What we please, as much as we want, but not any way we please.
The biblical text reminds us three times to abstain from blood, as well as of the importance of the spatial framework of killing and eating the meat. Thus, our desire is limited twice, in space, and in substance.And here the Ishbizer underlines the need to frame this symbolic and sensual enlargement of the being.
For him, it requires a process of deep inner work:
Only if we use our Koach- strength, to choose to be in service (avodah) from a place of Irah, then we can “expand” beyond the constrictions of our life in the liminal space of the Desert.
This is the meaning, the Mei Ha Shiloah tells us, of “when God enlarges your boundaries,”
וזה פי' כי ירחיב ה' אלקיך את גבולך,
meaning that He will give you such strength for avodah
היינו שיתן בך כח עבודה כל כך
Then, and only then, one will be able “also to eat meat without exceeding one’s limits”
תוכל גם לאכול בשר ולא תצא חוץ לגבולך.
It takes the inner strength of consciousness to give into our desire for flesh.
By teaching this, Ishbitzer implicitly overturns the established belief, since the story of Noah, that it is because we descended to a lower spiritual level that we can eat meat.
For the Ishbitzer, to the contrary, we need to be stronger inside if we want to play with sensual desire, the desire for flesh.
At a time when our Western consumer societies are so consumed with deregulated and disregulating encouragments to give into all our sensual impulses- sometimes in violent ways, Jewish wisdom comes to remind us once again of the importance of the middle path.
Yes, we can play with desire. Yes we can consume flesh.
But we need to do it from a place of deep Reverence for Life.
On October 7, Hamas’ fighters broke all the boundaries. They did much more than kill.
Forgetting that they are made of the same flesh, forgetting that we are all in the divine image, they proudly filmed and broadcasted themselves desecrating dead or alive human flesh.
Today within our borders, some of our brothers, out of a desire for revenge, are brutally harming the flesh of their prisoners, or attacking palestinian farmers. And when the israeli military institutions are punishing such abuses, they are not just making justice for specific cases. They are reestablishing the boundary.
They are protecting our own ethics, our own humanity.
Yes, more than ever, we need the message of Hasidut.
We are about to welcome Shabbat Mevare’him the shabbat in which we will bless the upcoming month of Ellul. Yes it seems incredible. We are about to welcome Ellul, still in this painful war, still with our hostages in Captivity.
All we can do against powerlessness is work on ourselves.As we encounter impulses to consume as well as impulses of revenge, may we, today, choose to place our desire under the sign of ‘irah, the great reverence for Life, the ethics which can perhaps save us from our human madness.
powerful reminder, always helpful, of living with irah. thank you