BO 1996

The Torah portion Bo begins in a strange fashion.  It starts, "And G-d spoke to Moshe.  Come to Pharaoh."  The rabbis all comment, why does G-d tell Moshe to come to Pharaoh?   Why doesn't G-d say to Moshe to go to Pharaoh?  They answer it by saying every time Pharaoh was out of his palace G-d told Moshe to go to Pharaoh, but when Pharaoh was in his palace, in his home, G-d told him to go to Pharaoh.  The rabbis say that it was because of Pharaoh's palace and later on Nebekenezer's palace that they acted in the way that they acted, that they both tried to bring destruction upon the Jewish people.  Why would the rabbis say such a thing?

Perhaps the reason why they would say such a thing is because we all know that when a person is outside his home, then a person understands how sometimes he has to wield power unjustly and, therefore, maybe then he is not such a goo person, but when a person is in his home and he is surrounded by beautiful things and objects of good taste and people of talent and he also gets to flaunt his secular education, therefore, he may confuse this with goodness.  Both Pharaoh and Nebekenezer thought they were doing a goo thing by enslaving the Jewish people.  They did not at all when they were home realize that they were doing something that was wrong.

Unfortunately, many people have confused beauty with goodness.  In fact, that is what the rabbis say the Greek's great sin was.  The Greeks thought that if things were beautiful they had to be good, and this is not necessarily so.  In fact, they tell a very famous story about an Athenian general who went over to Spart.  Spart and Athens were constantly fighting.  He led the Spartn armies against Athens and Athens incurred a great number of casualties.  In the course of that war he was captured and was brought before the senate in Athens and was accused of being a traitor because he had gone over to the side of Spart and had fought against his own city state, Athens.  The prosecutor before the Athenian senate presented all the evidence how this man was guilty.  Then when it came time for him to make a defense all he did was to remove his robe and he was a very handsome man.  Immediately the Athenian senate found him innocent.  They said, "How could such a beautiful man do anything evil?" It is not true that beauty is synonymous with goodness, and it is not true that if a person surrounds himself with things of goo taste and people of talent that he, himself, has the finest secular education and he, himself, enjoys all the arts and sciences, that he is going to be a goo person.

We learned that, of course, from Nazi Germany.  Every one of Hitler's cabinet was a Ph.D.  except for one and all of them enjoyed the arts and science and things of great beauty, and we all know that in order to be a member of the SS you had to be either a lawyer or a doctor.  You had to be from the finest families of Germany and have an appreciation of the finest cultural creations of Germany, and, yet, they did such terrible, terrible things.

When Moshe was told to come to Pharaoh's house he was told to come to Pharaoh and confront him with the fact that he was not a good person.  He had to let the Jewish people go if he was to be a good person.  In this week's Torah portion also we learn how the Jewish people have to have a Seder in their home surrounded by their family.  We all know that the difference between a human being and an animal always eats alone.  An animal cannot leave his prey for a moment if he wants to still gobble it up, but a human being is not an animal.  To us a dinner table is a social event and it is much better to eat with people than to eat alone.  We all know that there are all sorts of intricate manners which have to do with the act of eating.  That is, of course, so that we will enjoy the company of other people.  We know that social conversation is very important around the dinner table, and we know that we can have an experience of great beauty at a sparkling dinner table.  But, the rabbis say, that is not enough.  At a dinner table we also have to transmit values.  In fact, they have done a study of the best students in the United States, those who get the top grades and the only thing that they all have in common is that they all eat dinner together with their families, that one meal a day is always eaten together with the family because it is at this one meal that parents can influence their children and children can speak their mind and get insights into how they are to behave and in which there is an interaction between generations.  The social intercourse around the dinner table is especially important for children who are just learning values.  It is not true that people are born good.  We do not believe that people are born naturally good.  We also do not believe that people are born naturally evil.  We believe that individuals will tae the path of least resistance, like water, that they will do that which is easiest for them, that in order for a person to be a moral, upstanding person, that person has to be trained and that person has to be trained especially by his parents and grandparents and his extended family and the greatest amount of training is actually conducted around the dinner table.  And that, of course, is what the Jewish people were being taught when they were told to have a Seder and every year we are to commemorate the exodus from Egypt by a Seder because it is not enough to have a meal in which you have good food and good conversation.  You also must have the ability to transmit values.  You must talk about people's activities and about what they did and did not do, and it is through the Seder that the Jewish people have perpetuated their values because the most important thing to teach to a child is how to be goo, and unless parents are wiling to teach their children how to be good they are not going to learn it.  It is not something that is learned naturally.  You have to make an effort to teach children how to be good.  Therefore, it is very important that our homes contain not just beautiful things, not just objects of good taste and that they reflect a great amount of secular education, but that the home should not only be beautiful but they should also be informative of Jewish values.  Of course, that is why Jewish education is so important, too.  Jewish education must lead the child to ask the right questions around the dinner table so that the parents can give them appropriate answers.  We must constantly be concerned about teaching our children how to be good.

In fact, that is why a bar mitzvah is called a bar mitzvah because we teach a child that he must be interested in doing mitzvahs.  It is not just important for him to understand and appreciate beauty or to have good taste or to get a good secular education; he also has to gain values.  Where is he able to gain these values?  He is able to gain these values from around the dinner table with his parents.  That, of course, is one of the most important lessons of the exodus was to teach the Jewish people, and that was how to transmit their values once they were free and how not to be fooled by the example of Pharaoh and other worldly people who have great wealth and power and many times, as they say in "Fiddler on the Roof", "He must be right, he is a rich man."  That is not necessarily so.  Just because a person is rich and surrounds himself with beautiful things does not mean that he is right.  In fact, sometimes he can be very, very wrong, as Pharaoh was and later Nebekenezer was.  Many times a person's appreciation of beauty can blind him to the fact that he is morally deficit, that he is a moral dwarf even though he may be a giant when it comes to appreciating beautiful things.
This is a very important lesson, and that is that we must make sure that we train our children to do good and to appreciate good and to be good.

I am reminded of the story they tell about a junior partner in a law firm who called together all his staff, half of them lawyers and half of them secretaries, and he said, "I have bad news and good news for you.  What would you rather hear first?"  They sad, "Well, tell us the bad news first."  He said, "Well, our company is downsizing so as of tomorrow half of you will not have a job and the other half will have reduced salaries."  They were all, of course, shocked and astonished and one of them piped up and said, "All right, what's the good news?"  The lawyer, beaming, sad, "I have been made a senior partner."  We, of course know that many times in life things are not always fair, but we always have to remember to be good and to try to do goo and no matter what our education or our appreciation of beauty or what type of beautiful things we have or what good taste we have or what talent we have, all this is wasted unless we also want to be goo.  It is important to have a beautiful home.  We should all have a beautiful home but it is more important to have a home filed with positive values.  In the olden days when our families were poor and came here as immigrants there was not much in the way of beautiful things in the home but there was a loving atmosphere which taught positive values.  It is good to have these lovely, wonderful things as long as we still have that loving, positive atmosphere.  Let us all hope that all our homes will it so the Mashiach will come quickly in our day.  Amen.