Fresh Fish

August 22, 2008
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

This week, we read Eikev, a part of Moses' last sermons to the Israelites. In this sermon, Moses says we are responsible for keeping God's covenant. God will never turn away from us, Moses says, but it is all too easy for us to turn away from God. The covenant is, of course, a pledge, a promise we make. And we make promises all the time -- small promises and large promises.

You promise to take a child to the playground and then discover that you have too much work to do. The child will just have to learn to live with disappointment. After all, life is disappointing, so this will be a good lesson for the child. You can take the child to the playground some other time, so you reason that no one is being hurt. Except that when a promise is broken, two people are hurt. The child, of course, is hurt by the knowledge that parents cannot be trusted. But the parent, too, is hurt. The parent has deceived himself or herself, has lost face, and lost moral ground.

Of course, the greatest deception, the greatest breaking of a promise, is the negation of the covenant with God. In every case, this forces God's hand. God wants to reward the people for their faithfulness, but when they are faithless, God must continue to be faithful, so God is forced to punish the people. Moses says, the punishment follows because Israel has lost faith with God. But the situation is not so clear-cut. You cannot blame every disaster on humans being faithless.

If a great and righteous sage walks through the forest and is devoured by a lion, you cannot say it was because the sage broke the covenant with God. If a city is destroyed by an earthquake, you cannot assume that the people in the city were evil. If a hurricane strikes Florida, you cannot assume that it is because the State of Florida has engaged in sinful behavior. On the other hand, you also cannot ask why didn't God stop the lion, why didn't God prevent the earthquake, why didn't God send the hurricane out to sea where it could do no harm? If God kept changing nature, then we could no longer rely on the sun to rise in the morning or the stars to appear at night. Nature must be reliable for reliability and inevitability are elements of God's wisdom.

By now, you may realize that we are in a logical bind. Moses promises that God will be ever-faithful to the Israelites and the Israelites are responsible for keeping the covenant. But the covenant cannot control the weather or the way nature works. God promises that if the Israelites keep their promise, there will be rain in its season and if they break the promise, there will be drought. But there will obviously be times when bad things will happen even to good people. Keeping the covenant is no guarantee that bad things will not happen. So what good is the covenant, after all?

There is a story about a man who opened a fish market. He hung out a sign that said "Fresh Fish Sold Here Today." His very first customer said to him, "What do you need with the word "Today," what day do you expect people to think it is?" So the owner took down the sign and changed it to read, "Fresh Fish Sold Here."

But the next customer who came in said, "Smart guy, what do you need with the word "Here"? Your sign hangs above a fish market, do you think people will read it and go across the street to the tailor's shop?" So the owner took down the sign and took off the word "Here," and when he put the sign back up, he was happy with it. It said, "Fresh Fish Sold."

A woman came in and said, "Do you have any old fish?" The owner said, "Only fresh fish." The woman said, "Nu, of course, only fresh fish, what else? So, why do you need the word ‘Fresh' on your sign?" He took down the sign and removed the word "Fresh." Now the sign read only "Fish Sold." The woman looked at it and said, "Sold? Of course, it is sold, do you think that people will imagine you are giving it away?" The owner shrugged and took off the word, "Sold."

Now he hung up his sign and it said, "Fish."

But the next customer who walked into the store said to him, "For what is the sign that says, ‘Fish'? Walk up and down the street. You are the only place that sells fish. Everyone knows you sell fish. And, anyway, you can smell this place from a mile away."

The covenant is a promise. The outward signs, like rain in its season and drought as a punishment, are totally unnecessary. When the covenant works, it brings light into our hearts and breaks the logic of our minds with its wisdom. When we keep the true commandments of God, it is to our benefit. All the responsibility for keeping our promises to God rests on us and on no one else, not even on God. God only knows why God makes promises to us; and God only knows how God keeps promises to us. We can only sense what God has in mind by looking at history. Four thousand years later, the Israelites are still a people, we still worship God, we still read the Torah, we still survive.

We are like the fish market. There is no need to hang a sign above us that says "God's Eternal People," anyone can see that we are God's eternal people. And we will remain God's eternal people, so long as we keep  the covenant. As it says in the portion called Eikev, "What does Adonai your God demand of you? Only this: to revere Adonai your God, to walk only in God's paths, to love God, and to serve Adonai your God with all your heart and soul," and why? As it is written, because if you keep "keep Adonai's commandments and laws," it will be "for your own good." Make no mistake: Whenever we keep a promise, it is always "for our own good." And let us say, Amen.