Rabbis For Human Rights - North America

Divrei Torah

“A certain non-Jew came before Shammai and said to him, ‘I will convert to Judaism, on the condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.’ Shammai chased him away... He came before Hillel and said to him, ‘Convert me.’ Hillel said to him, ‘What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; go and learn it.” (Shabbat 31A)

Going to the Dogs

A D'Var Torah for Parshat Mishpatim 2012/5772 by Rabbi Ruth Gais

Chavurat Lamdeinu, Madison, NJ

 

For the darshan (interpreter) interested in social justice and activism, parashat Mishpatim offers a such a rich array of laws from the first, freeing the captive Hebrew slave, to the last, not boiling a calf in its mother's milk – it is almost too much. So with that richness in mind, I've decided not to focus on a particular law and its relevance to the many ills of our society but to think for a few minutes on our overarching obligation to act ethically and let this d'var quite literally go to the dogs. But I'm not going alone; my guide in this is the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.

 

Levinas' well-known essay, "The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,"¹ begins with his commentary on Ex. 22:30: "You shall be a holy people to Me: you must not eat flesh torn by beasts in the field; you shall throw it to the dogs." As Levinas points out, unlike God's holy people, dogs are content to eat traif; it is part of their doggy nature which does not discriminate between good or bad flesh – for Rover or Fido, it is food, plain and simple, there is no problem for them. Here in this text dogs behave like dogs but then Levinas takes us to a place not so far from Sinai when the dogs' behavior is unusual enough to warrant notice. In announcing the tenth and final plague, Moses tells Pharaoh, "And there shall be a loud cry in all the land of Egypt, such as has never been or will be ever again; but not a dog shall snarl at any of the Israelites, at man or beast – in order that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel" (Ex. 11: 6-7). Levinas comments:

[The dogs] will not growl! But around them a world is emerging... A rabble of slaves will celebrate this high mystery of man, and 'not a dog shall growl.' At the supreme hour of his institution with neither ethics nor logos, the dog will attest to the dignity of its person. This is what the friend of man means. There is transcendence in the animal!

 

The dog has an intuition of godliness – but do we? Suddenly Levinas' tone which had been playful and ironic changes as he recounts his bitter time as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany where "the other men, called free.., and the women and children who passed by – stripped us of our skin. We were subhuman, a gang of apes." Their humanity, however, is briefly restored to them by a stray dog, whom they name Bobby, who appeared for a few weeks until chased away by the guards. Each day, he met the prisoners, barking and jumping up and down with delight, as they returned from their harsh labor. "For him there was no doubt that we were men." Bobby, in Levinas' famous words, was "the last Kantian in Nazi Germany." The irony is palpable, a poignant and powerful indictment – a dog, an irrational being, knows how we are to treat each other far better than human beings. The only being who behaves ethically is a dog who, like his ancestors on the banks of the Nile so long ago, has an innate sense of the Divine and what it means to perform the simple holy acts of caring for another.

 

¹This can be found in the collection Difficult Freedom, tr. by Sean Hand, (English Ed. Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1990), 151-53. All Levinas quotes are from this article.