On October 6, 1948, a B-29 Superfortress crashed outside Waycross, Georgia on an undisclosed mission. About 2,600 years earlier, as recounted in this week’s Haftarah, the prophet Jeremiah bought a piece of property for his cousin Hanamel, in the territory of the tribe of Benjamin. And two weeks ago, my daughter missed celebrating Havdalah with my family. These three events had nothing to do with each other – and everything to do with each other.
Jeremiah bought the land for his cousin presumably because his kinsman had lost it, and as a relative, Jeremiah had the duty (and honor) of “redeeming” it in order to keep it in the family. This act of redemption links Haftarat Behar with this week’s parasha, which goes into detail about the mechanics of such land redemptions.
In the Haftarah, however, Jeremiah’s redemptive act contains a seeming absurdity: he executes it when the Chaldeans are laying siege to Jerusalem, and the prophet knows very well that the attackers will succeed and carry away most of the Jewish survivors to Babylon. Judah does not even control the land that he is redeeming. Jeremiah was many things, but a spendthrift he was not: so why do it?
The plain text interpretation is straightforward: even when the Jews are about to be carted into the brutal Babylonian captivity, God will ensure their eventual return. Jeremiah’s redemption represents a dramatic and justified act of faith. The prophet essentially puts the question to God about why he should undertake the redemption when Jerusalem is “at the mercy of the Chaldeans.” (32:25). God responds, “Behold I am the Lord, the God of all flesh. Is anything too wondrous for Me?” (32:27). Game, set, match.
But something more profound is going on, and it bears particular relevance for moderns. Which brings us back to the B-29 Superfortress.
The widows of the airmen who died in the crash brought suit for compensation, but the government claimed that no court should hear the case at all. It claimed that the accident report, as well as surviving crewmember statements, could not be furnished “without seriously hampering national security”. It even refused to let the trial judge – or any other judge – examine the documents privately to determine the validity of its claims. And amazingly, in United States v. Reynolds, the Supreme Court accepted the government’s position, holding that it could invoke the “state secrets privilege” for national security purposes.
Several decades later, the government finally declassified the accident report, and guess what: it contained no secrets at all. It did, however, contain evidence of the air force’s appalling negligence. The entire state secrets doctrine is built on a lie. Yet there is sits, allowing government attorneys to march into a courtroom and quash proceedings essentially based on nothing more than bland assertions. The federal government has used it dozens of times since 9/11.
So what does this have to do with our Haftarah? Simply this: Haftarat Behar suggests that no matter how severe the national security crisis, the law must be followed. Shortcuts such as the state secrets doctrine will not do. Are exigencies irrelevant? Hardly. As Justice Robert Jackson — a Reynolds dissenter — put it, “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” Instead, the question turns on the burden of persuasion: anyone claiming an exception must bear the burden of demonstrating why. And that is what makes state secrets so pernicious: it allows the government to evade the law without even having to justify it.
One might immediately object that the analogy misfires. After all, in Haftarat Behar, the problem with the law is that it appears irrelevant, whereas in Reynolds, the government claimed that it was positively dangerous. But the law exists for a reason, and in the case of Torah, for the most important and transcendent reasons. It might be somewhat easier for a government to meet the burden of secrecy when claiming danger rather than irrelevance, but meet the burden it must. And in Reynolds and dozens of subsequent cases, it did not even try.
Which brings us to my family’s Havdalah observance. Haftarat Behar’s focus on wartime goes beyond national security and into the more intimate aspects of our lives. The 19th century Scottish theologian Ian MacLaren admonished us to “be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” At times, every aspect of our lives seems to be some sort of struggle; modern life’s pressures make us face the Chaldeans at the gates on a daily basis. In such circumstances, it is all too easy to find some excuse to abandon religious obligations of the kind Jeremiah observed.
And that is okay. Judaism recognizes that we are human, and thus that we cannot always fulfill our spiritual aspirations. The Torah is likewise not a suicide pact, and the Talmud is filled with admonitions against excessive zeal: the prophet Elijah admonished Rabbi Yose to cut his prayers short if he worried about brigands on the road (Berachot 3a). But the justification principle stated above applies as well to our internal psychology. If you believe that you cannot fulfill a mitzvah or spiritual practice, stop for a moment and articulate a justification. Forget about some external authority: does this justification persuade you? Do you have the settled “feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment,” what philosopher William James called the “sentiment of rationality”? If so, then proceed. But if not, perhaps your soul is telling you something and you need to reset your spiritual balance.
My whole family did not observe Havdalah last week because my daughter had a sleepover at a friend’s house. “Save your big guns for your big battles,” my mother advised me about parenting (see? military analogies again), and I was not going to tell my daughter that she had to miss a night with her friends. But then I realized that actually, it had been a few weeks since we had observed Havdalah together. Each time, there was a reason – there always is. But was I really trying hard enough? Was it important enough to me to make sure that there was a place in the schedule for it? Was I adequately explaining to my daughter why this is important? The answer was no to all these questions; I was getting spiritually complacent. My family’s hectic life is a great battle, and so Judaism is kind in judging me. We should not confuse kindness, however, with allowing us to lose that battle. So last week we made sure to be together – and just as importantly, to try figure out a way to make sure that we can satisfy the other exigencies of the battlefield.
Jeremiah could be very sure of how to balance his competing pressures, because God directed him very clearly. The rest of us must settle for vaguer glimpses. And thus we must ask ourselves fundamental questions about the role that spirituality plays in the larger battle of our lives. Unlike the prophet, we will never answer these questions definitively, but struggling to do so in itself helps us to win the battle and sweep the Chaldeans from the field.
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