Growing up, I always knew that the Haftorah was less important than the weekly Torah portion. That’s why it was called the half-torah. It was only “half” as important (and half as long) as the Torah reading!

How wrong I was!

Those of you who have been studying Torah Table Talk for the past several months know that I’ve used this column to explore the weekly Haftorah. While there’s a great deal written about Parshat Hashavuah, few people take the time to understand the significance of the prophetic portion we read each week. These sections are not only deeply meaningful in their own right, but they also contain a unique message when read in conjunction with the weekly Parshah. Contrary to what most people think, the Haftorah does more than reiterate a message from the weekly Torah portion. These passages expand and even challenge what the Torah has to say. In a sense, there is a dialogue going on here in which the prophets and the Torah seem to be addressing one another.

Today’s Haftorah is a good example of this.

If we were to focus on only a single verse from today’s Haftorah it would be the final one: “What does the Lord require of you: to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with God.”

In these few words we have our religion’s most enduring lesson. It’s that simple. For all the complexities of theological thinking and speculation, the bottom line is that obvious. The 613 mitzvot can be reduced to just three: be good, be kind, and be humble. That’s all God really wants of us - and it’s the least we can do in return for life’s blessings. It’s no accident, then, that Micah’s words were chosen as this week’s Haftorah. They serve as a kind of response to the story of Balaam.

Balaam is a gentile prophet, a powerful man of God. His name is said to come from the Hebrew expression b’li am, literally ‘without a nation.’ Despite his ability to talk to God, Balaam has no personal commitments. He knows how to tap into the grid of divine power and use it for his own benefit. He’s a hired gun whose job it is to serve the other nations no matter what they ask of him. His commitments are for sale and he thinks God’s are too. Just as he could be bribed, Balaam believes God can also be bribed.

When King Balak’s representatives come to Balaam and ask him to curse Israel, the prophet refuses to go without hearing what God has to say. God tells him: “Do not go with them. You must not curse that people because they are blessed.” Balaam, however, keeps asking and asking until God says “OK – do what you want.”

Balaam just doesn’t get it. The irony of this story is that the seer is blind – he doesn’t understand his relationship with God. When his faithful donkey refuses to remain on the path to Moab, Balaam beats him and threatens to kill him. Only then does he see what the donkey has seen all along – an angel who threatens to kill Balaam and tells him how blind he is. The angel instructs Balaam to go to Balak but to only say those things that God places in his mouth. Still Balaam deludes himself into believing that he can bribe God. He instructs Balak to offer dozens of sacrifices as if the sacrifices will placate God and convince him to acquiesce to Balak’s requests for a curse.

Generations later the prophet Micah told the people what Balaam didn’t get: You can’t bribe God. It’s right and not ritual that God asks of us. Micah says, “With what shall I approach the Lord, do homage to God on high? Shall I approach Him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Would the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with myriads of streams of oil? Shall I give my first born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for my sins? He has told you, O mortal, what is good and what the Lord requires of you: only to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk modestly with your God.”

All the offerings in the world cannot change the truth. That’s not to say that we should ignore the rituals and rites of our tradition – it’s just that the bottom line is that God is more concerned with how we treat one another than he is about how we treat Him.

It’s easy for us to sit here in synagogue, to greet one another piously each week and offer words and thanksgiving to God. But that’s not what God wants of us. Too often we falsely believe that the reason we’re here is to change God when the real purpose of our presence in synagogue is to allow God to change us! If we stop and think about it we would realize that we are more like Balaam than we care to admit.

Justice, Kindness, and Humility – how central are they to the way we live, both personally and communally?

About six months ago I stood on the bimah and spoke about the crisis that is taking place in Sudan: Thousands were dying, entire villages were being burned to the ground, millions were homeless and an entire people were living in terror for their lives. A few people responded by sending donations for humanitarian aid but most of us shook our heads and failed to hear just how serious the situation was. One person even wrote sent me a note asking – why should we be so concerned about Sudan?

Indeed why? With acts of terror taking place in London and Nentanyah - places with which we can so easily identify - why should we worry about strange people who seem so far removed from our daily lives?

Yet the world is too small for us to ignore charges of genocide and torture wherever they take place because no one is too distant from us today. I recently read that if we could shrink the earth’s population to precisely 100 people, it would look something like this: There would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, and only 14 from the western Hemisphere north and south. 8 members of this global village would be Africans; 52 would be female and 48 would be male.70 would be non-whites and only 30 would be white. 6 would possess 59% of the world’s wealth and all would come from the United States. 80 percent would live in substandard housing and 50 would suffer from malnutrition.

The bitter irony is that our government has been quick to intervene in Iraq, long after the genocide had taken place there, but Sudan is barely on our nation’s moral radar. It seems to me that our priorities are skewed and our efforts are misdirected.

Consider the facts: the number of people who have died in Sudan since I last spoke about this topic on Chanukah has doubled. Close to 400,000 people are now dead. In the last month alone 15,000 people have died of hunger disease and violence; that is 500 hundred people every day. Countless women and girls have been raped. Almost 3 million people are now homeless, their villages burned to the ground, and their very last resources depleted. Darfurians are prisoners in refugee camps with no place to go and no hope for the future.

If we have learned anything it should be that hopelessness breeds terror – yet we seem to have forgotten these people.

This weekend has been declared a weekend of prayer for the victims of Sudanese genocide by the Senate and the House of Representatives. One year ago the congress voted to declare the terror and warfare taking place in Sudan as genocide. But what the people of Darfur need today is not our prayers or declarations but our humanitarian efforts. These people need our assistance and they need the intervention of our nation and all nations of good will in stopping the genocide.

What’s a stake beside the lives of some Sudanese people: our own humanity. Abraham Joshua Heschel has said. “In a free society where terrible wrongs exist, some are guilty, and all are responsible. We cannot turn away because to do so is to ignore the most essential teachings of our religion. We cannot say we are Jews and ignore the suffering of others. We cannot say we are proud of our identity and pretend that things are OK. What is the true sign of our identity, asks the Rabbi Moses Maimonides? He said that what proves a Jews lineage is not who his mother is but whether he lives his life with compassion. We are Rachmanim, b’nai Rachmanim, we are (or ought to be) compassionate people, children of compassionate people. To ignore human suffering is to impugn our very lineage as Jews!

So what can we do? If you have a computer at home I would suggest that you visit “savedarfur.org.” Not only will you receive the latest news on what is happening in Sudan today but many suggestions on how you can address this issue. You might want to visit the web site of the AJWS – the American Jewish World Service which is also doing important work in addressing this crisis on behalf of the Jewish community. In the back of the chapel you will find a information sheet which contains the basic information on Sudan as well as a number of suggestions about how we can make a difference.

Can we change the world? Maybe not; but we can raise our voices and cry out against injustice so that we don’t loose our souls. We must remember the prophet who came to preach in the evil cities of Sodom and Gomorrah – when asked if he thought he was making a difference, he said: “When I first came here I thought I could change the world; after a few years I realized the most I could hope for is to change the people of this city, and now I preach and cry out so I won’t become like them!”

A 20 year old woman from the village of Dasa village in Darfur is now living in a refugee village in East Chad. She recently said: “I was taken away by my attackers…we were beaten and the Janjaweed told us: “You, the black women, we will exterminate you; you have no god.” We were taken to a place in the bush where the Janjaweed raped us several times. For three days we did not receive food and almost no water. They told us: ‘Next time we come we will exterminate you all; we will not even leave a child alive…”

How will we be remembered? Will we be the generation of the Sudanese genocide – or the people who did their best to live by justice, compassion and humility? Will our religion be that of Balaam or Micah? The choice is ours.

Shabbat Shalom