The King of the Forest (And the Story of Everything) (RH 5787)

The King of the Forest (And the Story of Everything)

Rosh Hashanah 5787

    Once upon a time, the trees of the forest decided that they needed to appoint a king. First, the Tree Committee decided to approach the Olive Tree. “Rule over us,” said the trees. But the Olive Tree replied: “I am not finished with yielding my oil, through which even God is honoured. Why should I go and wave above the forest?”

    And so the trees said to the Fig Tree: “You come and rule over us!”

    But the Fig Tree replied, “Am I done with yielding sweet and delicious fruit? Why should I go and wave above the trees?” 

    And so next they tried the Vine - but the Vine was busy yielding grapes for wine; she too was unwilling to rule over the forest.

    And then the trees asked the Thornbush: “Will you come and rule over us?”

    And the Thornbush accepted: “If you want me to rule over you, then come and take shelter in my shade. But if not, then I will bring a great fire, and it will consume the forest whole.” 

    Don’t worry; I have not confused this with the Children’s Service. 

    The Thornbush accepts the kingship by generously inviting the forest to sit under its shade - but what shade does a thorny shrub even provide? And if its subjects should be unsure that they want their Thornbush King, it begins its reign with a threat of forest fire. 

    This story of the King of the Forest is an ancient parable deeply critical of power and rulership. It appears in the biblical Book of Judges, from a time before Israel had kings. It is no children’s story; it is shouted from a hilltop by the only surviving brother of Israel’s first attempted king, Avimelech, who has crowned himself over the people. Spoiler alert: it did not go well. Actually, kingship in Israelite history generally did not go well. Out of 42 kings, 4 had mixed reviews, 6 were good, and 32 were unmitigated disasters. 

    But the parable of the King of the Forest is not only a polemic against King Avimelech, the Thornbush. The trees who rejected kingship did so because they were too busy contributing; they describe being the King of the Forest as “waving above the other trees”. There was no need for the trees to crown the Thornbush in the first place. The story is therefore making a much bigger claim than simply “bad kings make bad kings”: it is questioning the idea that one human being should stand above everyone else and treat their power as absolute. This is a sharp criticism against hierarchies of power that reads like it could have been written for a modern audience. 

    So how is it that a 3,000-year-old story was so cutting about the idea of human power? 

    Well, the story of the King of the Forest makes perfect sense in its own time and place when we understand that it is about something much bigger than kings. It is a story about what happens when you believe that no human being is God. 

    Once upon a time, the Jewish people told a story. And then kept telling it, over and over again, in countless different ways - and kept living it, within prayers and practices and traditions. 

    It was, and is, a Story of Everything. 

    The Story of Everything does not begin with the forest. Actually, it begins two days before there were any trees. It begins: B’reishit bara E-lohim et-hashamayim v’et-ha-aretz; in the beginning of God’s creation of the heavens and the earth. 

    It is a Story of Everything not because it is a story of where the world came from, but because it is a story about what the world means. The meaning behind the beginning - the meaning behind what we are celebrating today - was revolutionary. It undermines the ideas at the heart of every surrounding culture. There was no war between gods trying to place themselves at the top of a hierarchy; one lonely God spoke everything into existence. And everything that follows is a consequence of that subversive idea, including what drives the political criticism of the King of the Forest: that if there is One God, then nobody else gets to be God. 

    This is how Dara Horn describes it in her new book The Final Solution to the Jewish Question:

    "In the ancient world, societies had many gods. In the Egyptian Empire at ancient Israel’s doorstep, as was later true of other empires like Rome that conquered ancient Israel, the dictator was considered one of the gods. … When the Jews said they do not bow to other gods, this also meant that they do not bow to tyrants. This was a radical idea in the ancient world. It is still radical now."

    In other words: the theological claim that only God is God becomes a political claim about human beings. We told a story about a committee of trees desperate to crown a thornbush in a context in which kings were seen as semi-divine, in which gods could father children, in which a tribe could claim their ancestors were gods. And then along came the Israelites, with the absurd notion that actually, divine power belongs only to the One God Who is the power behind everything. Men can wear crowns, but they are not gods, and there is a King of Kings. 

    Nobody is God. Nobody has absolute power or absolute authority. These are consequences of the Story of Everything, the story that we told the world about itself. Here is another consequence: humans can only be godlike in the way that all humans are godlike. When humankind is created, it is B’tzelem E-lohim, in the divine image. All of us. 

    I hope these things feel obvious and natural. But they are not inevitable ideas. It took thousands of years for the profoundly harmful ideology of “scientific racism” to develop, and it was able to dress hierarchy and human inequality up as science. This is a story that needs to keep being told.

    And we so believed in this notion, that no human being is inherently more valuable than another, that while some societies told stories about their ancestors being gods, we proudly accepted and retold our national story as being the descendents of slaves. We built our identity around that story in a world in which slavery was widespread and deeply embedded, because in our Story of Everything, slaves and kings are all made in the same divine image. 

    Once we have rejected the idea that some human beings are naturally more godlike than everyone else, the idea that some human beings are infallible and divine in themselves, we are left as a people with another question: 

    Who gets to speak for God? 

    This consequence takes longer to unfold. At first, Moses is tasked with bringing the Torah to the people. And then there are prophets, and the Jewish world is centralised around a Temple, and there are priests and Levites running the service. But each element of that is disrupted. Moses is only a man; he cannot live forever. The words of the prophets are, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel says, “a scream into the night”. The Temple is a physical structure and therefore it can be torn down. And so we slowly enter the period of time that the historian Prof. Shaye Cohen calls “the democratisation of religion”. 

    In short, we make ordinary Jews participants in the process of interpreting God’s word. No one person gets to have absolute authority over the word of God. We interpret revelation through study and literacy and debate. The Torah belongs to the people, and the people - all of us - get to participate in its interpretation. 

    Hakham Jose Faur, a Sefardic rabbi of the 20th century, takes this idea a step further. He points to the mechanics of Hebrew as a written language. The Hebrew that we see in the text of the scroll is consonantal. It only records the consonants; it does not provide the vowels. This is what makes what our teens did so spectacularly today such a challenge; it requires literacy and learning and skill and hard work, because the scroll itself demands participation. 

    The sounds that are needed to bring the words into speech, to make sense of them, must be provided by the reader. Hakham Faur argues that this is symbolic of the entire system: the Torah needs us to complete it. The Torah is not just the consonants in the scroll, it is the consonants given voice by us. In Jewish tradition, the answer to “who gets to speak for God” is “all of us, if we’re willing to put in the work”. 

    This is an example, also, of how the Story of Everything is not only a story told through words. It is a story told through action, through what Jewish tradition demands of us. Our tradition asks us to give voice to Torah. We are commanded to rest on Shabbat - why? Because everyone deserves rest, deserves the precious gift of time, and not only the most privileged; and because restricting the exercise of our power reminds us that ultimate power is not ours. We are commanded to restrict the way we eat - why? Because the world is not simply ours to consume. We are challenged to build skills and literacy - why? Because this tradition is not something we are expected to passively receive, it is an inheritance we are expected to develop and to transmit. 

    And this is not an abstract idea. It has been such an honour, these last two days, to witness so many of our teens in leadership roles. There is nothing passive in the way that you’re receiving this tradition. You’re phenomenal, all of you; watching you take ownership of our tradition and challenge yourselves to be more involved is inspiring. 

    And you are the reason that I wanted to speak about the subversive history of our tradition, the way that the most precious elements of it run against the grain and challenge society. Because the world you are learning to be Jewish in, the world we are all always learning to be Jewish in, seems to be only getting louder about asking us to be a bit less Jewish. A bit quieter about it; maybe entirely quiet about it. And if we do have to be Jewish, can’t we at least caveat it heavily to make other people more comfortable? 

    When the world tells you that you would be more comfortable, more acceptable, more sophisticated, or more safe if you made yourself a little less Jewish, I want you to understand what it is actually asking you to give up. 

    Because yes, it would be more comfortable for much of society if we were less anti-idolatrous and anti-tyrannical, less argumentative, less insistent about the fundamental equality of humankind, less intellectually demanding, less unwilling to conform. 

    But I think we should probably be more instead. More fearless in resisting tyranny. More willing to argue for what matters. More stubborn in our commitment to human equality. More resistant to easy answers. More difficult to domesticate. Because the very things that make our tradition difficult are also what make it precious. Because all of the things that the world might not want to hear from our Story of Everything are the things that need to be said, again and again, l’dor vador - from generation to generation.

    We do not need to make Judaism popular. But we do need to keep telling the story. The story that the forest does not need to make the thornbush king. The story that no human being is God. That no human being is worth less than any other. 

    The world needs the story we have spent 3500 years telling. 

Shanah tovah.