April 1999 The Dual Message Of The Cherubs By Rabbi Alvin Kass According to the Bible, God commanded the ancient Israelites to build a mishkan, a sanctuary, that would accompany them on their trek through the desert as they made their way from Egypt to the Promised Land. The purpose of the mishkan was to serve as a place where our ancestors could go in order to encounter God and godliness. The most important part of the sanctuary was the Ark which held the tablets on which God's word was inscribed. Without the Ark and its contents, the whole enterprise would have been pointless. The Ark was to have a gold cover with two objects, called cherubs, also made of pure gold, one at either end. We don't know much about these enigmatic figures. We are not even sure what they looked like. Some picture the cherubs as angels; others as human beings, birds, children, male and female, and a host of other forms. Regardless of how we conceive of the cherubim in our imagination, the Bible reveals two facts about their positioning which teh Midrash affirms as the most important religious and moral lesson of the Torah. The cherubs were to "have their wings spread out above" and "their countenances should face one another." The message is that while we must always strive to rise higher and higher in the spiritual realm of life, we must never forget to have our faces look at one another. The great tragedy of Jewish life today is that too many Jews are pursuing their particular religious goals and aspirations, often with great enthusiam and feeling; but, they have turned their faces away from other Jews, especially those who differ in their beliefs and practices. The Talmud articulates the principle: talmidei chachamim marbim shalom baloam, religious leaders and scholars increase peace in the world. However, as Professor Jack Wertheimer points out in a brilliant and incisive article that appeared in the February issue of Commentary magazine, often the opposite is the case. Both in Israel and the United States, social and religious interaction among Jews of diverse points of view has too frequently come to a screeching stop. Self-righteousness rules the roost, resulting in a total incapacity to appreciate the erudition, sincerity, and honesty of people who have come to a different conclusions about certain aspects of Jewish culture and Jewish living. There has even been physical violence among our co-religionists at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the holiest religious site in the world to all Jews. The Torah knew whereof it spoke when it warned that even if, like the cherubs, we soar to superlative spiritual heights we still transgress God's commandments if our faces are turned away from our brothers and sisters. Like Hillel and Shammai, we also need to learn how to say: "Both these and these are the words of the living God." The attitude of some religious leaders toward those of different opinions reminds me of the House Managers who during the recent impeachment fiasco denounced President Clinton with such blind passion and zeal that their behavior wholly lacked proportionality, humaneness, and mercy. Isaiah Berlin, the eminent British philosopher and historian, cautioned that absolute certainty about the rightness of your position and inability to see virtue in the views of others is the precursor of the most egregious manifestations of totalitarianism. It is reassuring that the preponderance of the American people had the good judgment and common sense to reject the thinking of those who have no doubts or questions and who refuse to allow themselves to be confused by the facts and complexities of the real world. At the very outset of Jewish history, we were taught through the paradigm of the cherubs that the only way to ascend to God is to take care of your fellow human beings. The word "religion" comes from a Latin root meaning to "connect." Indeed, ligament, the substance that connects muscle to bone, comes from the same root. At present time, however, too many have had enough religion to hate one another, but not enough to love one another. We will have truly scaled the celestial heights only when the words of the Rabbis become a factual description of Jewish communal life: talmidei chachamim marbim shalom boalom. May our rabbis, sages, and teachers truly increase the peace of the world.