Israel Folau: a lesson from the Torah

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Sydney’s The Great Synagogue’s congregation received a sermon on Shabbat from its spiritual leader Rabbi Dr Benjamin Elton proffering his view on the message on social media from rugby giant Israel Folea that hell awaits member of the LGBTI community.

Rabbi Elton’s sermon:

Rabbi Ben Elton

“Last Tuesday the Prime Minister addressed the annual conference of the Hillsong Church, and he spoke out in defence of religious freedom. He said, ‘there’s a lot of talk about our freedoms as Christians in this country and they should be protected…Australia is a free country. There’s nothing more fundamental than the freedom of belief, whatever that belief might be, whether you have one or you don’t.’

I think that is uncontroversial, and a position we would all agree with. I am always concerned when I see restrictions placed on religious expression. Last month a ban came into force in Quebec against public employees wearing religious symbols. So a woman could not teach in a public school wearing a headscarf, and a man could not wear a kippah or a turban. That is an outrageous infringement of religious freedom, and if I was in Montreal I would be advocating civil disobedience to resist it, as my Quebec rabbinical colleagues are doing.

But the Prime Minister’s statement was not made in the context of the Quebec ban, but of our own Australian debate. It began in earnest at the time of the same sex marriage plebiscite, and it reached a peak when Israel Folau wrote that homosexuals were destined for Hell. He was fired for making that statement and his playing career is now effectively at an end. Rugby Australia asserted that Folau was dismissed for vilifying people on the basis of their sexuality, which is forbidden under his contract. Folau’s supporters retorted that he was the victim of religious persecution. He clamed he was merely restating the words of the bible, and that was the reason he had been sacked.

I had not intended to discuss the Folau incident and the question of religious freedom this week, or perhaps at all. But sometimes the parasha draws you back to current events and gives you a new insight. That, of course, is why we have the Torah, as the Rabbis say, turn it, and turn it again, for everything is in it.

In a famous incident we read this morning, the Israelites complained about a lack of water, and Moses was commanded to speak to a rock which would cause it to bring forth water. Instead, Moses lost his temper with the People, he castigated them: Listen up rebels!

Moses struck the rock, out of which water started to flow. God rebuked Moses, ‘because you did not believe in Me, to sanctify Me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land which I have given them’. God’s punishment was that Moses was banned from entering the Land of Israel.

God’s accusation is difficult to understand, because Moses clearly did believe in God, and he still managed to sanctify Him because a miracle did occur when a dry rock produced water. Rashi, our greatest commentator, makes a comment that seems to imply that Moses fell short because he could have made the miracle even more impressive by simply speaking to the rock. Rashi comments, that God was really saying to Moses:

For had you spoken to the rock and it had brought forth water I would have been sanctified before the whole congregation, for they would have said: What is the case with this rock which cannot speak and cannot hear and needs no maintenance? It fulfils the bidding of the Omnipresent God! How much more should we do so? 

Are we dealing here simply with the scale of a miracle? That is one interpretation, but a Hasidic teaching takes our understanding in a different direction. Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev was a founder of Hasidut in Poland, a friend of the first Rebbe of Chabad, and was active in the second half of the eighteenth century. He wrote a classic of Hasidic thought called Kedushat Levi, and in one essay he analysed the nature of Moses’ sin at the rock.

R Levi Yitzchak did not see Moses’ exclamation that the People were rebels, and his action in striking the rock as separate events, but as fundamentally connected, and that the second was the consequence of the first. He wrote that when you want to influence people in a religious sense, in a way that is connected to their souls and to God, there are two ways of doing it. A person can speak harshly, they can rebuke, castigate and condemn. To some extent that might even be effective. If you yell at a naughty child, or even beat them – God forbid – you might change their behaviour, at least in the short term. But the problem is this. You have not changed their essence, you have simply forced a schism between the inner state and the outer action, you have forced them into a state of self-alienation. They feel one way and they act another. You have coerced them, and their actions are against their will.

But there is a different way of dealing with any situation when you want to have religious influence. And that is to speak gently, with love and encouragement. If you do so, then you do not enforce behaviour upon them, rather you change them internally. Or to be more precise, you release their inner nature which is to be good, and do good, and perform the Will of God. If you speak softly, there is no need to carry a big stick, still less to use it. According to the Kedushat Levi, Moses struck the rock physically because he had already struck the People verbally. They were two expressions of the same impulse. And they had an effect, but not in the beneficial and wholesome way that was the ideal.

According to R Levi Yitzchak this might be what Rashi meant when he talked about a rock fulfilling the bidding of God. In a deep mystical sense, not only people but everything in the world, whether animate or inanimate wants to do God’s will. They just need encouragement. If you do not believe that, you lack faith in God.

Had the rock simply been spoken to, it would have fulfilled its mission to perform the Divine Will, instead of being literally bludgeoned into it. The same is all the more true of people. At the most fundamental level there is no such thing as religious coercion, because while you can change external actions through force you cannot change the internal state. Preventing a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf or a Jewish man wearing a kippah is obnoxious but ultimately futile. You will not create a secular individual or a secular society. The remarkable spiritual and cultural resilience of indigenous peoples in Australia is testimony to that.

You certainly will not create a religious individual by telling them they will go to Hell if they do not change their ways. But you will create miserable and bifurcated individuals, and that is very dangerous. A few weeks ago a young Jewish man from South Africa killed himself during a trip to Israel, because he could not reconcile his religious and his sexual identity. That feeling was fostered by every hateful statement that boy heard and read, especially when it came from the Jewish community and its religious leaders. He was the subject of harsh words, of verbal blows, and they alienated him from himself, they created a fissure in his soul that he could not endure, and that is why he took his own life.

That is why the language used by Israel Folau, and all similar language, is inappropriate. It is futile, it is irreligious and it is dangerous. As people of faith, our hallmark should be speech with is loving, caring and compassionate, whoever we are talking to, and whatever we are talking about. That is the teaching of R Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, and that is the tikkun, the correction, for Moses sin when he berated the people and struck the rock. He paid a high price in his generation, let us not pay a high price in ours.”