Rabbi Breit's Blog

Our Haftorah this week is the famous story of King Solomon and the baby. Two women each birth a son. One of the infants dies. Each woman claims the remaining living infant as her own. They come to Solomon locked in argument. Solomon sits in judgment of their dispute and decides to cut the baby in half; half will go to each. One mother cries, “Give her both babies! Just don’t kill the child!” The other says, "If I can't have him, neither will you!" And so Solomon decrees that the first is the real mother.

This passage in the book of Kings demonstrates Solomon’s immense wisdom. And it has been used an age-old litmus test for whether someone cares more about winning a fight than the survival of whatever it is they are fighting over. This message reverberates deeply in our world, where polarized sides of zero-sum conflicts fight tooth and nail over who should be vindicated and who should be demonized, both sides abandoning the issue or people they love in the process. And this desire to win, or not to lose, translates from public to private sphere. We see a painful struggle in relationships when one or both partners wants to be right more than they want to save their family.

It can be easy from the outside, smug with our knowledge of Solomon’s decree to cut the baby in half, looking at a foreign conflict or someone else’s marriage, to read the haftorah in didactic simplicity. We might feel that the conflict we are outside of has an obvious, tidy, easy solution. We see ourselves wise judges like King Solomon. But Solomon’s wisdom is described as exceptional. The people of Israel stood in awe of the “wisdom of God” that guided him to make a ruling.

Too often we look from the outside at our friends’ relationships, or at our own loved ones' behavior, and we think we see the issue with the clarity of distance:  oh, he or she just wants to win this argument, how petty! Too often people look at conflicts and think, “Well if only x would do y the whole thing would be solved!” But nothing is so simple to solve. But wisdom is not obvious. And in some cases even the inverse of Solomon's ruling, destroying whatever the conflict is over, can be the solution; many parents are familiar with resolving two kids bickering over a prized object by proclaiming, “FINE THEN — NOBODY GETS IT!” We shouldn’t be tempted to play King Solomon with our friends and neighbors. True wisdom, the divine capacity to find an elegant solution to conflict, is exceedingly rare.

So what can we learn from this story of Solomon? The first verse of the haftorah reads: “Then Solomon awoke: it was a dream!” (3:15) We know context of Solomon's ruling. The two mothers approached him right after he woke from a dream. In his dream, God had offered him any gift he should choose. And rather than choose long life, wealth, power, or vengeance, Solomon asked God for wisdom. It is this humility alongside the desire to seek God’s wisdom to care for and to rule his people justly that is the lesson display in our haftorah. We are not naturally wise. Wisdom is not intuitive. Before appointing ourselves judge over anyone else, we must first give up on the rewards of riches or glory and ask God for the wisdom to do right.

This Shabbat, as we find ourselves craving rulings, looking for severe decrees or maybe Solomonic solutions, may we remember first to ask for wisdom and good judgment — to have the humility not to seek riches or fame in our judgments, but the wisdom to see and to protect what is at stake.