What Does God Hate?

The stones are everywhere.

Go to any Jewish cemetery and you will see them, small and gray and unremarkable, sitting on top of the matzeivos. Two here. A handful there. On some graves a whole pile, years of them, the older ones darkened by rain and settled against the granite. We put them there almost instinctively. Ask why, and most of us will say that it shows that someone was there.

But if the point is only that someone came, one stone would do.

This week’s parsha uses that same word. The Torah has just commanded us to appoint judges and to chase after justice,” tzedek tzedek tirdof”. Almost immediately after, it says this.

ולא תקים לך מצבה אשר שנא ה’ אלוקיך

Do not erect a matzeivah, because Hashem your God hates it.

Hates.

The Torah has a whole vocabulary for the things it forbids. This is not that vocabulary. What is so bad about a matzeivah?

The matzeivah here is not a gravestone. It is a stone erected for bringing sacrifices. So the verse is not contrasting worship with something secular. It is contrasting two ways of serving God, and rejecting one of them.

The Ramban explains that a matzeivah is one single standing stone, while a mizbe’ach is many stones built together into a structure. Rav Hirsch hears everything in that. A matzeivah is one stone from God’s world, essentially as He gave it to us. A mizbe’ach requires human beings to gather stones and build.

God gives us the stone. Our job is to build with it.

And once you look at it that way, you stop thinking about stones.

Because a single stone is not only a way to build an altar. It is a way to live.

One of the easiest things to do in life is to become one kind of Jew.

Basketball knows this problem well. Every team has a shooter. That is his skill, and it is a real one, good enough to get him into the league. But if it stays the only thing he can do, the game finds him out. Teams scheme around him. The minutes go somewhere else. Not because he was never good. Because good at one thing stopped being enough.

We do the same thing to ourselves, and we do it with the parts of our avodah we are proudest of.

I am a chesed person. I am a learner. I am serious about tefillah. I am the one who takes care of everybody.

All of those things can be real. They can be beautiful. That is what makes this so hard to catch. The danger begins when a strength becomes a definition, when the thing I do well becomes the explanation for why I no longer have to grow anywhere else. Ask me to grow somewhere else and the answer comes fast. That was never my area. That is not who I am.

The word itself says it. Matzeivah comes from matzav, to stand fixed, to remain in one position. The Ma’or VaShemesh hears the warning there. A person can be doing everything right and still not be moving. The tefillah is there. The mitzvos are there. The learning is there. Nothing is falling apart, and nothing is changing either. This is not a life of sin. It is a life that has decided it has arrived.

Which raises an obvious problem. Our avos built matzeivos. Yaakov set one up at Beis-El. Moshe set up twelve at Har Sinai. If Hashem hates the matzeivah, what exactly were they doing?

Rav Kook, whose yahrtzeit falls this week, answers it in a way I cannot stop thinking about. Avraham established chesed with extraordinary purity. Yitzchak, gevurah. Yaakov, emes. They were laying the foundations of a nation, and foundations are established through singular, powerful ideas.

That was their work. We are not laying the foundation anymore. We are standing on it.

The children of Avraham cannot say, I have my thing. We were handed chesed, gevurah and emes and asked to build something whole on top of them.

The stone is not the problem. Stopping at the stone is.

Which makes one other matzeivah in Sefer Bereishis especially striking. When Rachel dies, the Torah says “vayatzev Yaakov matzeivah al kevurasah”. Yaakov erected a matzeivah over her grave. Thousands of years later we still use that word for the stone over a kever.

Which brings me back to the pile of stones.

My friend Rabbi Yechiel Shaffer taught me to look at this custom differently. We say the stone we leave shows that someone visited. But look at what you are actually doing. You come to one standing stone and add another. Then someone else comes and adds another. A child. A grandchild. A friend. The stone marking the end of a life slowly gathers evidence that the life did not end there.

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin tells a remarkable story about his friend Zalman Bernstein.

The world knew him as Sanford Bernstein, the investor. He returned to Jewish life in middle age, and soon after he began learning with Riskin he asked him to arrange a burial plot on Har HaZeisim. Riskin found one. Bernstein flew to Israel to see where he would one day be buried, took one look at the plot, and became furious. You could not see the Temple Mount from it. He wanted another grave.

Rabbi Riskin could not understand him. After a hundred and twenty years, what difference would the view make? Bernstein was not going to be looking out from where he was buried. But he would not let it go, and he searched the cemetery himself until he found what he wanted, a plot with an unobstructed view of the Temple Mount.

There was only one problem. It sat very close to Rav Kook, and the chevrah kadisha considered that inappropriate for Bernstein at that stage of his religious life. He left Israel deeply disappointed.

The following week Rabbi Riskin received a letter from Zalman Bernstein, He apologized and explained himself. The view was never for him. He wrote that before he began learning Torah he had made a mess of parts of his life and had failed to give his children what he wished he could had given them. But perhaps after he was gone they would come to visit. Perhaps they would stand there and look up at the Temple Mount. Perhaps he could still give them after his death what he had not managed to give them while he was alive.

Rabbi Riskin translated the letter into Hebrew and brought it back to the chevrah kadisha. His argument was not that they had misread Bernstein. It was that they were reading him too early. By the time that grave was needed, he told them, Bernstein might be a very different man.

They agreed to sell him the plot. Bernstein began studying Rav Kook and stayed with it for the rest of his life.

That is the part that stays with me. A group of serious people looked at Bernstein and made a fair judgment about who he was that afternoon. Rabbi Riskin looked at the same man and asked who he might still become.

That is the difference between a person and a matzeivah. A stone can be finished. A person cannot be declared finished while he is still alive.

And the person we make that mistake about most easily is ourselves.

I think I know where my own matzeivah is. There are parts of my avodah that are real and good and have been standing for a long time, and that is exactly why they are hard to see. It is much easier to recognize what is broken than what is good and no longer growing.

Teshuvah does not always mean tearing everything down and starting again. Sometimes it means refusing to call the structure complete. It means asking what I am going to add this year.

One more stone.