M’at M’at                                         Bitesize Morsels

  

   In the Book of Deuteronomy that we have just begun to read, the Torah quotes a remarkable statement from Moses.  At the start of Parashat Ekev, he tries to give his audience courage and strength to oust the Canaanite tribes.  G-d is on our side.  He is the same G-d who crushed Egypt about forty years ago; He wants you to uproot the worship of any other deity in any form. 

  

    But then in Chapter 7, Verse 22, Moses says, “The L-d your G-d will dislodge those peoples before you little by little; you will not be able to put an end to them at once, else the wild beasts would multiply to your hurt.”  [Etz Chaim, p. 1038]

  

    What is Moses’s real agenda here?  Couldn’t G-d in fact wipe out the Canaanites and move the Israelites in?  It sounds as if Moses believes that there is a limit to G-d’s power.

  

    I suggest that there are two parts to the answer.  On one hand, the Israelites had learned that they would have to work for the things they wanted.  The old slave generation that had escaped from Egypt had groaned under its daily labor, but they were presumably fed from Eqyptian granaries.  In order to live as free people in its new land,

Israel would need to learn new skills — possibly from the very people G-d had doomed to destruction.  However, quick as the battles to win control of the land might be, the learning curve figured to be a bit longer.

  

    On the other hand, G-d may have set yet another test for His people.  How were the Israelites supposed to reconcile the command to evict the indigenous people with the Commandment not to commit murder?  That Commandment is not restricted to Israelites; it means, don’t kill anybody.

 

    The laws concerning murder vs. manslaughter take up an entire chapter at the end of the Book of Numbers because of the prevailing custom of family blood avengers.  Could either G-d or Moses have been so shortsighted that they would not have expected the Canaanites to defend themselves and fight back?  Of course not.

  

    I think G-d wanted to find out how well the Israelites had learned their lessons about everything else.  Their ability to live “a Jewish life” on new soil might attract other righteous people to join them, other than fight them.  We have some reason to believe that exactly that sort of conversion may have later brought as much as 10% of the population of the Roman Empire into the fold of Judaism as one point.

  

    The parallel between ancient and modern Israel is also worth noting.  Jews began moving into the land in ever-increasing numbers after 1880.  They tried to acquire the land from the existing authorities, or sometimes simply behaved like American “squatters” in apparently vacant areas.  There was never a question of displacing the locals completely.  In fact, some of those vacant areas were populated either by the very wild beasts that worried Moses, or by mosquitoes.  The Jews had no choice but to move in little by little.

  

    I use the concept of m’at m’at in my teaching as well.  It would be foolish of me to expect one of my students, learning new words — or the congregation, learning a new tune at services — to “get” the whole thing the first time.  We break up phrases, sometimes going a word at a time, until we are comfortable with what we’re doing.  

  

    Bitesize morsels: they are my signature, with Moses as my inspiration.

                                                

—-Cantor Jay Harwitt