*This sermon is largely based on the ideas of the late Prof. Feivel Meltzer in his short book on פרשת השבוע. 

The quality and the character of a society can usually be measured by the kind of people it chooses to honor. A nation’s heroes are normally a good index of its mores. You can know a people by observing whether it esteems bull fighters or poets, cloak-and-dagger operatives or philosophers, politicians or musicians, men of wealth and success or spiritual personalities.

With this in mind, it is instructive to inquire what kind of society Judaism envisions for us, and how successful we Jews have been, in practice, in conforming to this normative society and the ideals laid down for it by our faith.

At the end of the last portion, Be’midbar, we read the commandment נָשֹׂא אֶת רֹאשׁ בְּנֵי קְהָת מִתּוֹךְ בְּנֵי לֵוִי, to take the census and assign duties to the family of Kehat, of the tribe of Levi. This morning’s sidra, Naso, continues with the commandments of the census: נָשֹׂא, אֶת רֹאשׁ בְּנֵי גֵרְשׁוֹן גַּם הֵם to take the census and assign the duties to the family of Gershon.

Now, it has been asked: why is Kehat given precedence over Gershon, especially since Gershon is the בכור, or first born? The Rabbis of the Midrash put it this way:

אעפ״י שגרשון בכור, ומצינו בכל מקום שחלק הכתוב כבוד לבכור, לפי שהיה קהת טוען הארון ששם התורה, הקדימו הכתוב לגרשון. 

Although Gershon was older, Kehat received priority because his task was to carry the Ark which contained the Torah.

We learn, therefore, that כבוד התורה is greater than כבוד הבכורה, that scholarship in Jewish life ranks over primogeniture. 

Jewish law clearly lays down the priorities of respect and honor due to different categories of persons, and this order represents the ideal hierarchy of Jewish society. In it, primacy is given to — the sage, the wise man, the scholar. Unlike Plato, the Rabbis did not place at the apex of society the Jewish version of the philosopher-king. They did not identify the man of intellect with the man of political authority and civic sovereignty. Rather, they gave the highest esteem to the חכם, the Jewish equivalent of a philosopher, and second to him was the מלך or king.

We are taught in the Mishnah that

חכם קודם למלך, מלך קודם לכה״ג, כה״ג קודם לנביא. 

The order of priority is: sage, king, high priest, prophet. These four are the heroes of Jewish society.

Consider the Prophet. The reverence for him is clearly established in our tradition. Indeed, as part of the blessings over the Haftorah, we bless God

הַבּוחֵר בַּתורָה וּבְמשֶׁה עַבְדּו וּבְיִשְׂרָאֵל עַמּו וּבִנְבִיאֵי הָאֱמֶת וְהַצֶּדֶק.

Yet, the Prophet remains subordinate to the other three. Why is this so? Because prophecy is a response to negative conditions. Prophecy is not, as with soothsayers or magicians in other cults, a matter of forecasting or predicting the future, but primarily its task is to reproach and reprove and rebuke the people and summon them back to God and to Torah. The prediction of future consequences is but one aspect of the Prophet’s task of תוכחה. Hence, the whole office of the Prophet is called into being only when the people reveal profound inadequacies and failures and backslidings. That is why the Rabbis said:

אלמלא חטאו ישראל לא ניתן להם אלא חמשה חומשי תורה וספר יהושע בלבד.

The next in order are מלך וכה״ג. Notice that the King comes before the High Priest. Why is this so? Because Judaism does not assert a sharp dichotomy between the religious and the secular as do other faiths. We do not believe that we must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s. All is God’s realm, and the King has his role to play in it. Political leadership has a “religious” function too, namely, that of establishing social peace and harmony and justice. Indeed, the Priest has, as his main task, the ordering of the relationships between man and God, בין אדם למקום, whereas the King is charged with establishing proper relationships בין אדם לחבירו. It is for this reason that the king takes precedence over the high priest. 

But at the very pinnacle of the ideal Jewish hierarchy comes the חכם. 

The Rabbis told us of three crowns:

 כתר כהונה, כתר מלכות, כתר תורה. 

And in אבות דרבי נתן we read that

כתר כהונה אפילו נותן כל כסף וזהב שבעולם אין נותנין לו. 

One can never buy the crown of priesthood. Similarly, one can never buy the crown of royalty (although the effort has been made and it has been done — but illegitimately). Actually, both the High Priesthood and Kingship go from father to son. But when it comes to the crown of Torah--כל הרוצה ליטול יבוא ויטול, one not only cannot buy it, he need not pay a penny for it. It is available to whoever desires it. All one must do to seize the crown of Torah is to spend his whole life in it, to experience sleepless nights, to suffer for it, to give up all the pleasures of the world that stand in the way of  acquiring greatness and wisdom of Torah. No wonder that ממזר ת״ח קודם לכה״ג עם הארץ. 

Of course, not all חכמה is creative and constructive. The Jewish tradition knows of חכמה להרע, or evil genius. True wisdom remains that which is based upon piety: ראשית חכמה יראת ה׳. 

Not only do I refer to piety in the conventional sense, but to any intelligence applied to the improvement of man’s life in the face of God. Thus Jeremiah told us

אל יתהלל חכם בחכמתו… כי אם בזאת יתהלל המתהלל השכל וידע אותי כי אני ה’ עשה חסד משפט וצדקה בארץ כי באלה חפצתי נאם  ה׳. 

True wisdom is the imitation of God, and God’s personality is one which seeks the establishment of love and justice and righteousness in the world. Hence, any human being who uses his mind and heart and intellect and will in order to realize and implement these great qualities, is a wise man. Judaism hence approves the חכמה of the scientist who improves life as an act of חסד, the intelligence of the philanthropist and the wisdom of the jurist and the businessman or any citizen whose goal is חסד משפט וצדקה. But, above all others, is the wise man who is learned in the ways of Torah, who exposes himself to the direct message of the will of God: the תלמיד חכם. 

Have we Jews succeeded? The answer is a fluctuating one. Generally I believe that the answer is more positive than negative. For instance, European Jewry, especially the pre-Emancipation Jewry, and the part that remained in the shtetl of Eastern Europe, as well as central Europe in some cases, was one which came close to realizing this social hierarchy of Judaism. The greatest dream of parents was not that their children become doctors or lawyers or engineers or very wealthy people, but that they become תלמידי חכמים. Jewish children were put to sleep in their cradles with the lullaby תורה איז די בעסטע סחורה. 

Israel today, with all its problems and its military needs, still reverences learning. Of the four presidents of Israel, the first incumbent, Chaim Weitzman ע״ה and the present President (ייבדל לחיים) Prof. Katzir, are both men of science. Of the other two, Dr. Ben Zvi ז״ל and (ייבדל לחיים) that great Jew, Zalman Shazar, achieved renown in Jewish scholarship.

In the United States, we were not so fortunate. It used to be that any national Jewish organization -- even the Orthodox, or perhaps especially the Orthodox, even this very day — felt that no convention meeting could be complete without a guest speaker who was preferably wealthy, non-Jewish, and either a politician or a humorist. Organizations vie with each other in getting “name” people, in the hope that by honoring them some of the honor would reflect back on themselves. But the people they chose to honor were certainly not those who could fit the prescription of the ideal Jewish structure.

Fortunately, the pendulum is swinging away from that kind of self-abnegation and unworthy attitude. A younger generation is more sophisticated, more accepting of its Jewishness, more understanding, and less sycophantic. They understand that true Judaism calls for the חכם to have the highest rank in the Jewish world.

At Sinai we were told that we were going to be and must be a ממלכת כהנים וגוי קדוש, a people who emphasized priesthood and prophecy. Yet our special pride above all else was told to us by Moses before he died

כי הוא חכמתכם ובינתכם לעיני העמים… ואמרו רק עם חכם ונבון הגוי הגדול הזה.