Parashat Rə’eih: הַיָּשָׁר | hayashar
In these little essays, I’ve often been quite harsh on the whole Divine Plan. It’s a plan that’s full of genocidal dispossession; I think it’s largely an evil plan and I’m glad that there mostly doesn’t seem to be any historical basis for it. But the texts, obviously, don’t agree with me. They are very much on G-d’s side here.
So, OK. This week I want to take them a little more on their own terms, but I’m going to do it by radically changing the terms at hand.
Dəvarim is a book on the threshold. From the text’s perspective, the Israelites are just about to enter into the place where they belong. They’re not there quite yet, but they’re gonna be, and Mosheh is using his last long oration to prepare them for what’s ahead.
There are going to be changes. The Torah may have been given at Sinai, but it doesn’t seem to have been fully implemented yet, as it were, and Mosheh cautions his people that לֹ֣א תַעֲשׂ֔וּן כְּ֠כֹ֠ל אֲשֶׁ֨ר אֲנַ֧חְנוּ עֹשִׂ֛ים פֹּ֖ה הַיּ֑וֹם אִ֖ישׁ כׇּל־הַיָּשָׁ֥ר בְּעֵינָֽיו׃ | lo ta’asun kəkhol asher anáḥnu osim poh hayom ish kol hayashar bə’einav. | “‘You will not do just what all we do here today, a man doing any straight thing in his eyes’” (Dəvarim 12:8). This is a phrase that will return to cap off another moment of transition, at the very end of the book of Judges, where we read בַּיָּמִ֣ים הָהֵ֔ם אֵ֥ין מֶ֖לֶךְ בְּיִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל אִ֛ישׁ הַיָּשָׁ֥ר בְּעֵינָ֖יו יַעֲשֶֽׂה׃ | bayamim haheim ein mélekh bəYisra’eil ish hayashar bə’einav ya’aseh. | “In those days there was no king in Yisra’eil; a man did the straight thing in his eyes” (Shofətim 21:25). Our texts may be more ambivalent about kings than they are about G-d, but they’re hardly a uniform paean to republicanism, and I think here, too, this phrase marks a threshold, a transitional moment when the Israelite body politic is about to shift into a condition that the text thinks of as superior to what they currently have going on.
I don’t have to agree with our texts’ notions of what the ideal polity looks like to share their sense that things could be a whole lot better than they are now. I don’t believe in a posthumous or messianic Olam haBa, but I do believe that we can change things for the better, that we do not have to accept them as they are. And so I can join these texts here on their own terms, reading them as prophecies about entering a world of true, sustainable justice for all. Things will be different. We won’t be able to do all the things we do here, now.
I’ve been translating the last clause of these sentences a little clunkily. Doing “the straight thing in one’s eyes” is a fairly simple idiom for doing whatever you want, whatever seems good to you. I’ll get to why I’m being so clunky about it in a moment, but first I want to take a little detour. Because very shortly after we’re told that we can’t just follow our own desires, we’re told that we can just follow our own desires when it comes to the occasions on which we can eat meat. Dəvarim 12:15 tells us we can eat meat whenever we want, but it uses a different phrasing for it. Instead of hayashar bə’einav, we get אַוַּת נַפְשְׁךָ | avat nafshəkha | “your soul’s desire”. And this, to me, suggests that what this text is prophesying in the shift from the unacceptable present to the ideal future is a shift from yashar to avah.
And this is why I’ve been translating hayashar bə’einav so clunk-literally. The link between straightness and correctness is a common one (think, in English, of the concept of moral rectitude), but I think it’s worth not eliding here. The image of moving in a straight, unyielding line resonates with me. I regularly feel that the societal milieu I move thru encourages a kind of geometric isolation, a reduction of people to linear abstraction, to points charting an unhindered path across a featureless plane, intersecting with others briefly, perhaps, but not truly interacting with them, not being changed by them, not weaving together with them in any way beyond one line overlaying another.
In utopia, we will have to leave this linearity behind. No more straightness for us! We will have to bend, to let our lives be molded by those around us, to travel not along individualized paths of non-interference, but among networks of community and interdependence. And, more than that, this change won’t just be a symptom of utopia, but a cause. Building those networks is part of how we get there. I don’t know that I believe that I will live to see it, but I do know that I believe that it is possible. It could happen. We could learn to leave behind the straightness of our eyes in exchange for the desire of our souls.
[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]