Parshah Commentary

This week’s parshah, Naso, offers instructions for how to become a nazirite—a person who consecrates themselves to God by taking a temporary vow to refrain from shaving their hair, imbibing intoxicants (or even consuming grapes), and coming into contact with a dead body. Given these laws, our parshah’s accompanying haftarah, from the Book of Judges, describes the origin story of Samson, an Israelite “judge” (a temporary military leader) whose mother is told by an angel that the boy must be a nazirite from birth. Samson is a strange and unsettling character. The judges who precede him lead the Israelites in battle against their enemies; Samson, who possesses superhuman strength, fights alone. The other judges, while flawed, have clear virtues; Samson is a lewd, thuggish brawler who foolishly reveals the secret of his strength—his long, never-shornhair—to Delilah, his Philistine lover who has already tried to kill him three times. Delilah betrays Samson to her fellow Philistines, who shear his hair, gouge out his eyes, and enslave him. When Samson is forced to dance for a raucous Philistine assembly, he cries out to God to allow him to avenge himself and then brings down the pillars of the temple where they are gathered, killing himself and thousands of Philistines.

What are we to make of Samson’s violence? In The Kingship of God, Martin Buber argues that Samson’s story is wedged between two ideologically opposed halves of the Book of Judges. While both sections are set during a pre-monarchic period of tribal federation, the first, anti-monarchist half describes a healthy, if flawed, system: Whenever the Israelites are threatened, a charismatic judge arises to lead the federation until security has been reestablished. The section’s core ideological thesis is epitomized by the judge Gideon’s refusal to assume the title of king after a military victory: “I will not rule over you myself, nor shall my son rule over you; YHVH alone shall rule over you,” he tells his soldiers. The second, pro-monarchist half details the gradual collapse of the system due to infighting, avarice, and idolatry. Its central thesis is summed up by its final, lamenting line: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did as they pleased.” Buber does not explain the logic of putting Samson’s rage-fueled, semi-nihilistic story between these halves, except insofar as it functions to distinguish the two.

Perhaps, however, there is a deeper political-psychological meaning to its placement. In his 1985 tome, The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction, the socialist Biblical critic Norman Gottwald elaborates on the tribal federation described in the Book of Judges. He argues that it was formed through a broad, multi-ethnic social revolt against Canaanite elites by exploited Canaanite peasants, recently escaped slaves from Egypt, nomads, “and other disaffected elements” who forged an egalitarian society. Although Gottwald’s argument may have a wishful element to it, he, like Buber, is undoubtedly right to attribute a strong, anti-monarchist stance to the earlier half of Judges, which describes a society governed directly by God, without a centralized, corruptible human power.

One of the most significant challenges facing the Israelite tribal federation was its powerful—and often centralized—adversaries. The first Book of Samuel, which follows the Book of Judges, opens with a crushing Philistine victory in which the Ark of the Covenant is captured. Although the Israelites eventually defeat the Philistines, they are clearly shaken. Fearful of an advancing Ammonite force, they beg Samuel to ask God to appoint them a king. God sees their request as a betrayal: “For it is not you that they have rejected; it is Me they have rejected to rule over them.” Nevertheless, he instructs Samuel to accede—as long as he also tells the Israelites what their fear will cost them: A king will inevitably enlist their children to fight in wars, take their property, and effectively enslave them.

God’s prediction is borne out in the ensuing years. David plots the death of one of his commanders so that he can marry the commander’s wife; Solomon imposes forced labor on the Israelites; and the subsequent Israelite kings degenerate into increasingly avaricious idolaters. Most devastating of all, the Israelites’ abandonment of their semi-egalitarian project in the service of security doesn’t save them: They are still unable to withstand the increasingly powerful empires that come to dominate them.

Perhaps this explains the placement of the Samson narrative. On its own, it would be little more than a fantasy of physical prowess. But by situating it at the beginning of the decline of the federation, the redactor (or compiler) of the book gives it a cathartic function. Samson’s cry of rage at the Philistines becomes the redactor’s—and, perhaps, the reader’s—way of venting anger at the Israelite federation’s more powerful enemies, whose military pressure pushed the Israelites to emulate their centralized state systems. Samson seeks revenge for what the Philistines have done to him, while the redactor, perhaps, seeks revenge for what the Philistines have pushed the Israelites to do to themselves.

Despite its apparent pessimism, though, such a reading risks a certain naivete: It assumes that in the absence of outside enemies, the Israelites would have been able to maintain their utopian project. But the first obvious fractures in the federation—which appear soon before Samson’s story—seem to be the result of internal, rather than external, pressures. After Gideon dies, his son Avimelech (whose name literally means “My father is king”) preys on the Israelite residents of Shechem’s fears of decentralization, as well their nativism, to become ruler, setting off a bloody intra-Israelite conflict. And just before Samson, the text describes a brief war between the tribe of Ephraim and the city of Gilead sparked by the Ephraimites’ anger at not being invited to join a coalition against the Ammonites. In the latter half of the Book of Judges, this theme of intra-Israelite conflict is more explicit: None of the tales focus on the Israelites’ external foes. Instead, the tribe of Dan fights with an Ephraimite over who will get to control an idolatrous shrine, and the book ends with a bloody civil war in which the tribe of Benjamin is nearly exterminated.

We might conjecture, then, that the redactor uses Samson’s rage, at least in part, as a projection outward of an anger that would otherwise be directed inward. What appears as one-dimensional wrath against the Philistines is perhaps also grief, anger, and guilt at the Israelites’ inability to live up to the revolution they instigated. It suggests an even more trenchant despair: What if the Israelites’ utopian project was doomed from the start, not just because of the Israelites’ adversaries but also because of the Israelites’ own pettiness and selfishness? What if such traits are an ineradicable part of humanity? Taken together, these two dynamics—external threat and internal sinfulness—seem to leave no possibility of a political horizon. Samson’s gouged-out eyes seem to be the bloody harbingers of a foreclosed future. What hope, then, is there?

In a sermon perhaps less well-known on account of its refusal of cheap optimism, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of a similar temptation to despair—undoubtedly autobiographical in part—just months before his murder. “Life is a continual story of shattered dreams,” he lamented. ”We speak out against war, we protest, but it seems . . . to mean nothing.” As with the Israelites, this unending struggle has internal as well as external elements. “There is a Mr. Hyde and a Dr. Jekyll in [each of] us,” he declared, and we are always tempted by arrogance, envy, and hate.

King does not offer his oft-cited affirmation that “the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.” Instead, he concludes his sermon by saying, “If I can leave anything with you, let me urge you to be sure that you have a strong boat of faith.” Lest he be misunderstood, he explained that such faith was not assurance but rather the commitment to “still fight on.” In language that hauntingly prefigured his final speech, he continued: “When you get this faith, you can walk with your feet solid to the ground and your head to the air, and you fear no man.”

Perhaps King’s words help us identify the ultimate root of Samson’s despair. Samson is a nazirite from birth: He is born into a “boat of faith” rather than having to build one for himself, and he is shocked when it doesn’t guarantee his success. Maybe this is the rage, born of the hopelessness that comes with the apparent failure of God’s promise, that the redactor, consciously or not, is channeling: Did God not assure us that things would work out?

This brings us back to the nazirite vow. The Torah offers no explicit reason for becoming a nazirite and promises no reward; in fact, nazirites must bring expiation offerings for the unnecessary suffering they have taken upon themselves. This, perhaps, is the difference between Samson and nazirites by choice. Samson is shattered when his dreams are shattered. The nazirite, by contrast, knows that nothing is guaranteed by faith except faith itself. Each of us will, no doubt, have days when we cry out with Samson’s shocked despair, when the certainties we hold dear unravel before us, and the future seems neither obvious nor assured. But again and again, we must pledge ourselves to the struggle for a different world—one in which victory may never be assured, but neither is defeat.

Aron Wander is a rabbi, organizer, and writer. More of his writing can be found here.