THE UNITY FACTOR

                                                                                By Rabbi Aryeh Carmell, זצ"ל

 The Spark of Love and Truth

Love for other people is for some people such a difficult emotion to engender, nevertheless every human being has a spark of love in the depth of his being which can be developed. Similarly, although the attainment of truth is so enormously difficult, it’s still possible because every human being has a spark of truth in his make-up. That spark is there in order to be fanned into a flame. If we did not have that spark, we would not be human. If a person did not have a feeling for truth, have a feeling for the spiritual goal of mankind, we would be talking to a blank wall. Every human being knows in his heart of hearts there is an absolute truth, there is absolute evil, and I have the power to choose between them.

In this city of Jerusalem we, the Jewish people, judged Eichmann, the mass murderer. By what right did we judge him? Eichmann said, “I was acting under orders. The law of Germany said that the Jews were to be massacred. They were public enemies, they did not have a right to live, and we go rid of them. It was a law. How could you expect me to go against the law of the land?” How did we condemn Eichmann, and Goering, and all these criminals to death? Because the above argument has no basis. Every human being knows that in the heart of man there is absolute knowledge of truth. It is against the law of absolute justice to massacre a nation, to unjustly kill any man, woman or child.

A law does not change the absolute insights of the human heart. By that law we judged Eichmann and his like. By that declaration, the nations of the world accepted the thesis of the Torah, that every human being knows the truth. He can submerge it, he can cover it over with all kinds of fancy prejudices, distortions, dirt, lies, filth, but he cannot extinguish it. It will come out sooner or later. The whole structure of the Torah and the Mitzvot, the practical and theoretical commands of the Torah, are to encourage the growth of that spark of truth within every one of us.

All-embracing Network 

How do we set about it? The precepts of the Torah subsume every interest and activity of human life. There is no activity of humanity which is not covered by a Mitzva. Eating, family, marital life, home, clothing, cutting one’s hair, business, social activities, sport, agriculture, industry – every one of these human activities, and more, is sanctified by a Mitzva, so that the network of the Divine Torah is spread over all human affairs. That’s why we believe in the Torah of the kitchen, the Torah of the bedroom, the Torah of industry, the Torah of the land. The purpose of each one is to raise the activity up to a level of truth.

We say in the Shema, “G-d is one”, and therefore “you should love Hashem, your G-d bechol levavecha, with all your heart, bechol nafshecha, with all your life, bechol meodecha, and with all your possessions.” The emphasis is on the “all”. Since G-d is one, there is only one power in the universe which demands all our attention, all of our interest, all of our service, with no fragmentation. The idea of unity which we have been promoting for over 4000 years is the central core of our faith.     

It is not just that we believe that there happens to be one G-d. It goes much deeper than that. Since we believe the universe is unitary, and there is One Power which created all things – spiritual and physical, apparently good and apparently bad, fortune and misfortune, happiness and misery – all have their source in One Power, therefore it follows that our lives must also be unitary – directed towards one goal.

This is really a statement; not so much about Divine life but about human life. The corollary is: “therefore you should love that Supreme Power”; that means, devote all your forces, all your interests, all your affections to this one purpose, to bring out the truth and the best in every human being. It says, “bechol levavecha, with all your heart” – that’s your mind. “Bechol nafshecha, with all your life” – with all your interests. “Bechol meodecha”, with all your possessions”. Your having is thereby transformed into being.

Sanctifying an Insurance Form

How for example can one serve G-d in business? I had a Rebbe, a teacher, when I was much younger who was a London businessman, a scrap merchant. His office was in the frontroom of his house, where he gave orders, dictated telegrams, dealt with ships, delivered scrap metal and made contracts. My father, of blessed memory, arranged that I should learn with this businessman a couple hours each afternoon. We went through the Chumash with the Ramban, and other commentators. In between he sometimes had to do business. He showed how business can be used as a Mitzva for the glory of the Almighty.  He once had a burglary in his home and received the insurance papers from the company to fill out the claim. The way he filled out that claim was rather unusual. Even the best of us are prone to take a little liberty with an insurance claim. We say to ourselves, they will probably knock off a little bit anyway, so you know, we boost up the price a bit, You know. The law of the Torah demands absolute honesty in all our dealings. So he, on the contrary, worked out every item and every article at its present-day cost, allowing for how many years of usage it had, its second-hand value. He worked it out to the penny. He sent in the form explaining under each item how he derived the figures he gave. Three or four weeks later, a large Rolls-Royce came wending its way through the streets of North London looking for the house where this gentleman lived. Out of it there stepped the president of the insurance company. He had been shown that form. He said, “Never in all my 45 years experience of insurance, have I seen a form like this. I want to see the man who wrote it.” So he saw the man who wrote it! The man who wrote it told him that this is not my policy, not my character set down here, but because we have a Divine law which enjoins upon us absolute honesty, this is what our G-d demands of us. He made what we call a Kiddush Hashem. He sanctified the name of the Almighty with his business endeavors. That should be our future, that should be our aim, in all our endeavors, to sanctify the name of the Almighty. That means, if somebody sees how you act in any given situation, he should be able to say, “Ah, so that’s how a person who learns Torah behaves.”          

Torah for a Society

The Law of G-d was addressed in the first instance G-d to an organized nation; and G-d, in His Torah, decreed the origins of a nation and a state. “This is how your judiciary shall be; this is how your police shall be; this is how your rulership shall be, your government. This is how your business relations shall be; this is how your economics shall work.” The Torah decrees how to structure a society. In this we differ from other cultures which consider religion as the affair of the individual, for the purpose of gaining salvation for “my” soul. You’ll never find in all our Talmudic literature, any reference to “the salvation of my soul.” It’s not an individual concern; it is not just “your” affair. We are to work for the salvation of Israel and all mankind.

Israel – The Opportunity

This is the opportunity of living in the land of Israel, in the state of Israel, because it is in our hand to remold this state into a just state. If we think Torah and Mitzvot are confined to synagogue affiliation or keeping of Sabbath and the dietary laws, then we have made a very grave mistake which comes from being so long in the Diaspora, in which matters of social justice, social affairs, business and industry are taken over by the society in whose niches we are able to live. So we forget the Torah has its own laws about society. There is an enormous jurisprudence which has grown out over thousands of years about how to run society.

The Responsa Project

One of the greatest achievements of Torah life is the Responsa literature; that is, contemporary questions addressed to the Rabbis about problems of living, to be decided according to the principles of the Torah. There are hundreds of thousands of these Responsa on our bookshelves.

There is at this moment, an ongoing project, of putting all the Responsa on computers. If you want to know what the decisions have been over the last 2000 years on a certain problem, you just punch in the key words that refer to your problem, and you will have delivered out to you a list of all the relevant decisions in that matter. This is an enormous achievement because no human being has ever been able to hold in his mind all that has been said in our history about certain problems. We know the main decisions that have been given, but all the decisions?! This has only become possible at the present time.

This was referred to by someone, not an Orthodox writer, as “tooling up for the future.” The future of Israel is certainly going to tend towards Orthodoxy, towards Torah culture. More and more thinking people see that secular culture has failed. It has not succeeded in producing the great society, “the just society,” that it is set out to be. Therefore, more and more thinking people are tending towards delving into our own heritage, which has made this goal of society, the just society a reality. This computer project which is now into its, I think, 400,000th responsum, is “tooling up for the future.” When we face the challenge of all modern problems which exist in industry, in business and in agriculture, we will have our precedents to guide us.

This is what we call the structure of a Mitzva society. For the individual it is a torch in his hand to guide him through the jungles. The Mitzvot provide the structure which keeps a person on the path of Torah.