It may be the most poignant question asked in the entire Bible, although asked by someone not distinguished for his wisdom. In the haftorah this week, after an angel appears to a barren woman and promises a child, her husband Manoah begs for another appearance of the angel. For he wishes to know, “What shall we do with the child to be born to us?” (Judges 13:8)
What parent has not wondered the same, looking at a child and trying to understand how to raise that child to adulthood responsibly and well? The difference here is that the child born is Samson, whose life illustrates a deep truth that is also contained, in veiled form, in the Torah portion.
Samson is pledged to the life of a Nazir. A Nazir forgoes certain physical experiences – drinking wine, cutting one’s hair and coming into contact with a corpse, which would render him impure (more about that in a moment.) This denial is at odds, however, with the nature of the child born to Manoah and his wife.
Samson is a prodigy of physicality. He sees a woman and decides he wants her. He punishes those who offend him by catching 300 foxes and affixing torches to them to burn his victim’s fields. He sleeps with a prostitute, and upon arising, tears the gates off the city off their hinges. No character in the Bible so represents the muscle-rippling heroism of Hollywood movies and Greek myth as does Samson.
His strength, however, is not strength of character. He is a reverse of the saying, “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” For Samson, the flesh is strong but the spirit is weak. He is consistently unable to deliberate, to be measured, even if his impetuousness involves simply removing an annoyance. Delilah essentially nags him to reveal the secret of his strength, which he finally confides. Cue the barber: The same man who can conquer a city cannot conquer his own impulses.
What education did Manoah need from the angel, to offer to his children? One powerful answer exists in the Torah portion which ties both to the life of Samson and to a deep idea that Judaism introduced to a pagan world.
The Torah portion tells us that a corpse defiles, makes one ritually impure. We learn from the Rabbis that a corpse is av tumah, the most defiling of all impure things. Rabbi S.R. Hirsch comments that the reason a corpse is av tumah is that a corpse is a human being as just a body. The greatest profanation is the belief in pure physicality. There is no spirit, just stuff.
Israel entered a world in which the visible reigned. In Egypt, even the dead were mummified and cities built for them. The very afterlife was made visible. Along comes a people, Israel, that insists the greatest reality, in an idolatrous world, is not what you can see but what you cannot see. What you cannot even imagine. Even in human beings, what is most central about them is not their material presence, but the immaterial essence.
We know how overwhelming the temptation is to put faith in the material world. We all crave things and believe on some level that the proper arrangement of stuff will keep us happy and keep us safe. It is analogous to Samson’s adolescent certainty that if he was strong enough nothing bad could happen.
Naso tells us, “On the day Moses finished setting up the tabernacle” (Numbers 7:1). Of course, we have been told Bezalel built the tabernacle, not Moses. But the Rabbis say that Moses’s merit coaxed God’s presence into the tabernacle and thus he built it. Here is what Samson needed to learn, and what parents need to teach: even material blessing is built on the intangible. God’s presence made the tabernacle; compassion creates a community; love makes a home. The most important things to see are those which cannot be seen.
The writer is Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and the author of David the Divided Heart. On Twitter: @rabbiwolpe