Shabbat-Table Talks: Perashat Shoftim
By: Rabbi Ralph Tawil
<tawil@bezeqint.net>
Value: Rejecting superstitions.
There are people in our society
for whom superstitions and fortune telling prevail over rational thinking. It
is worthwhile educating our children to be on the guard for superstitious ways
of thinking. The Torah expressly forbids trying to know the future and doing
any kinds of magical practices to affect it. Most of us do not engage in these
practices, however, they appear in popular culture and sometimes even under the
guise of Judaism. It is important to make our children aware that these
practices are against our Torah values.
Context: The Canaanite inhabitants of the Promised Land
engaged in many behaviors that were antithetical to Torah. Some of those
behaviors included the use of sorcery to know the future. Moshe warned Bne
Yisrael to not be interested in such behavior.
Text: Devarim 18:9-15
When you come into the
land that the Hashem your God gives you, you shall not learn to do the
abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you any one that
makes his son or his daughter to pass through the fire. Or that uses
divination, or an observer of the omens, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a
charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard or a necromancer.
For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord: and because of
these abominations the Hashem your God drives them out from before you.
You
shall be wholeheartedly perfect with the Lord your God.
Analysis: These verses contain a long list of kinds of
sorcerers. Although we cannot identify all of them today, what the Torah is
objecting to is the magical way of thinking; the belief that by performing the
appropriate ritual behavior, the future will turn out as desired. Such thinking
has even led some people to sacrifice their children in times of great anxiety.
The Torah forbids it because it goes against the ethical and spiritual
foundations of the Torah. God is not affected by such behavior because God
cannot be manipulated.
People who are anxious or
uncertain about their future might resort to all kinds of irrational means of
relieving their uncertainty. They might even try communicating with the dead.
Necromancy was practiced in Biblical times and is still practiced today. The
Torah forbids any kind of attempts to contact the dead or any kind of prayers to
the dead. The first book of Samuel (chapter 28) describes how a distraught King
Saul, fearing an imminent military defeat, sought the assistance of a
necromancer to raise the dead prophet, Shemuel. The sorceress is able to
contact the prophet, who complains about being disturbed and then converses
with King Saul. The Torah’s message is
not necessarily that these practices don’t work. The message is that even if
one thinks that they work, they are prohibited. Additionally, these practices
were often associated with idol worship.
[In Torah practice we never pray to the dead. At times we pray to Hashem
to have compassion upon the souls of those who have died. This differs markedly
from addressing the dead in prayer.]
Discussion: Why do you think that the Torah does not want a
person to go to a fortuneteller? (The Torah does not want people to rely on
non-Torah ways of knowing about the future. Rather we should follow God
wholeheartedly and not stray to these foreign ways.)
Rashi commented on the last verse
quoted above:
Walk
continually with God in perfect [commitment], put your hope in Him and do not
seek out the future. Rather, accept in perfect [commitment] anything that
occurs to you. Then you will be His nation and portion.
We accept whatever the future
brings upon us with belief in God. We beseech only Him and use only the methods
allowed by the Torah to “overturn” the evil decree. As our wise sages have
taught us, “Three things annul the [harsh] decree, prayer, charity, and
repentance.” (Bereshit Rabbah chapter 44).
Resorting to other means might be a way of skirting the real issues. If
we are anxious about the future our sages have shown us the way. We must pray
to Hashem, give of our possessions to the needy and we must investigate our
actions and repent. Especially by
repenting, the person sees what in his past behavior might have led to his
current dilemma. A person who goes through this process grows spiritually
because of his anxiety and becomes a better person. Contrast this spiritual
behavior with those who thrust at us red strings, hands, rabbit’s feet and
other amulets.
This might be a good time to
discuss the problematic themes in some popular children’s books. Books whose prominent
figures are sorcerers and ghosts proffer a worldview that is occultist and
antithetical to Torah. They should be explained as imaginary and as having no
basis in reality. Problems are not solved through magic but through real steps
to improve the situation. These include thinking about the problem, improving
oneself, and of course praying for Hashem’s guidance.
There is another problem with
resorting to fortune-tellers and others who use magical means of dealing with
life’s problems. There are unscrupulous people who would prey upon the
vulnerable sufferer. There have been those who even donned Rabbinic disguises
to mislead, defraud and abuse people. These scoundrels feign contact with dead
spirits by using hidden amplifiers and microphones.
We should teach our children the
problem with relying on success stories. Every fortune-teller has his or her
success stories. These could be things that happened to work out the way they
called it. Or that gullible people (who very much want to believe that someone
they know has this power) have accepted the fortune-teller’s reinterpretation
of his original prediction. We should be very wary of such “success” stories.
Even if they are true, we should realize that we are not getting a full and
honest record. We are just getting the successes and not the failures.
Happy are those who follow the
Torah and who keep far from these things.
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