Congregation Netivot Shalom

Parashat B'hukkotai. 5763
May 24, 2003,

Cathy Shadd

I am giving this drash in honor of Iris Greenbaum, who, together with a small group of Netivot Shalom parents, started Shabbat B'Yachad five years ago, and whose wisdom and spirit continue to inspire the Shabbat B'Yachad program.

Shabbat B'Yachad is our program here at NS for families with children under the age of 5. We gather twice a month for a child-friendly Shabbat prayer service including a Torah story, kind of the equivalent of the Torah reading and the drash. Last year I volunteered to tell the Torah story for parasha B'hukkotai. As I read in Chapter 26 the detailed descriptions of the blessings and punishments in store for the Jewish people depending on whether or not they follow God's commandments, I immediately decided to edit out the punishments. I told a story focused on God's promise to protect and take care of us. We don't introduce the scarier aspects of the Torah to children under the age of 5 for obvious reasons. This time, when I volunteered to give a drash on B'hukkotai, I didn't really have the option of editing out what amounts to 2/3 of chapter 26 (the chapter of the parasha which I am speaking on) although I learned in my reading that in many synagogues, there is a tradition of reading the tochechah (the verses containing the curses) in a whisper or even of leaving the room altogether to avoid hearing them. As adults, we should try to make sense of the harsher parts of the Torah as well.

As I read and reread chapter 26, I heard echoes from my childhood of the voice of my mother, of blessed memory, and then, more poignantly, of my own parenting voice:

"Guess what? We're driving to Davis on Sunday to see Mommy's old friends, the Foxes. Nancy's been a little sick recently, so I think a visit from us will really cheer her up. And they're really looking forward to seeing how big you've gotten!"

"But I don't want to do that. I want to go to Fairyland with Sarah."

"Oh, come on, it'll be fun. We can invite them for ice cream at that little ice cream shop you like."

"But I can get ice cream at Fairyland. I don't want to go. You go! I'm staying here! I won't go!"

"Oh yes you will. We are going, and if I hear one more word about it, forget about going to Fairyland for the rest of the summer!"

It is very tempting to view God's treatment of the ancient Israelites through the lens of a parent, especially if you are a parent. Like a parent, God switches from rewards to threats pretty quickly. And like a really frustrated parent, He threatens some pretty drastic things. He uses both the carrot and the stick, as a lot of us do. But does this analogy of God as a coaxing and threatening parent really hold and does it help us to understand this parasha? I think we have to look not only at the actual rewards and punishments, but also at the reason God states them to answer this question.

In summarizing the blessings and the punishments in parasha B'hukkotai, scholars have divided them into categories. There are five blessings promised as a reward for obedience to God: fertility of the land; peace inside the land; victory over external enemies; abundant life including an increase in population and economic prosperity; and lastly God's presence in Israel. There are six curses threatened as punishment for disobedience: pestilence; famine; wild beasts; war; total defeat; and lastly, exile. The pattern of laying out the law, promising a reward for obedience, and then threatening a punishment for disobedience exists elsewhere in the Torah: in Exodus chapters 23 and in Deuteronomy chapter 28. No sooner does the listener feel bathed in the warmth of God's love, than he feels in danger of losing that very protection if he misbehaves. It is quite unsettling.

One question I have grappled with is how God can be both an all-loving and merciful parent and a stern and at times even vengeful judge? The Talmud tells of the Holy One saying, "If I create the world only with the attribute of mercy, sins will multiply beyond all bounds; if I create it only with the attributes of justice, how can the world last? Behold, I will create it with both attributes; would that it might endure." But the Talmud also teaches that God's mercy outweighs his judgment. "During three hours of each day, He sits and judges the whole world. When He sees that the world is deserving of being destroyed because of the prevalent evil, He arises from the throne of justice and sits upon the throne of mercy." In other words, while God could, in a more literal reading of the Torah, inflict punishment, He prefers to be merciful and loving.

But even if God prefers to be merciful, does He at other times really inflict punishments? Especially in earlier times, some commentators have read the blessings and punishments quite literally, seeing historical evidence of both. In Sifra, the oldest Rabbinic Commentary on Leviticus, we read of the ancient Israelites, "All the goodly gifts that were given them were taken from them." Others discourage any questioning of what seems to be injustice. The Talmud contains lines like, "There is no suffering without iniquity," and "All the judgments of the Holy One, blessed be He, are on the basis of measure for measure." This just doesn't sit well with me. It is very hard for me to view the ills of the world as divine retribution. I just can't see victims of tragic car accidents, floods, and wars as somehow deserving of their fate. Likewise, what can we make of the fact that evil people often seem rewarded? Bad things do happen to good people and it feels to me like a dead end to see these things as acts of God. Where can one go with the view of God as, to use the words of Harold Kushner, a "heavenly puppeteer," when things just don't add up, other than to say as some commentators do, that the score will all be evened out in the world to come, or that the ways of God are beyond human understanding? I find more comfort in accepting that while there is an overall order in the universe, there is also randomness. But if all suffering isn't evidence of God's punishing us, then what sense can we make of His detailing of punishments in this parasha?

One possibility is to read them as metaphors, with the idea that when we treat people kindly, help the needy, and try to live a moral life, we feel close to God, and likewise when we don't do these things, we don't experience God's presence. As it says in Isiah (59:2), "Your iniquities were making a separation between you and your God." Rabbi Tzadok ha-Kohen of Lublin wrote that God's threat to walk contrary to us means that "He will hide His face from us and then we will have no place to turn when we are in trouble." I like to think that while we may not literally have, in the words of our parasha, "rains in their season," we can appreciate the wondrous majesty of nature. Likewise, we may never live to see "peace in the land," but we can work for a peaceful world. And we may not ourselves be "fertile and multiply," but we can experience the joy and blessing of children in our midst. Similarly, while we might never "flee though none pursues," our lack of a connection with God may cause us to feel frightened and overwhelmed. We may never "eat and...not be satisfied," but we may be hungry for something deeply nourishing. We will definitely never "eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters," but we may feel disconnected in a meaningful way from our children or from our parents. Reading B'hukkotai in this way can prompt us to try to strengthen our bond with God, to try to bring Him more deeply into our lives.

I think that hearing these rewards and punishments can be a positive experience for us if we see them as evidence of God reaching out to us. At the very beginning of verse 3 of chapter 26, God says, "Im behukkotai teileikhu v'et mitzvotai tishmeru," (Literally "If you walk in my laws and keep my commandments"), then blessings will accrue. Rashi understood the phrase im behukkotai teileikhu to mean more than keeping the commandments, because that is expressed in the next phrase. He understood teileikhu to mean laboring in Torah. Teileikhu, which our chumash translates as "follow," literally means, "walk." Jewish law is called halakhah, literally the way or the path. God has given us rules to follow, a path to guide us to a more meaningful and spiritually rich life. And while we may not observe all of the commandments, we can try to follow the path of Torah. In the Jewish Theological Seminary's booklet, Emet Ve-Emunah: A Statement of the Principles of Conservative Judaism, the ideal Conservative Jew is defined as a striving Jew. This resonates deeply with me and again echoes my mother's voice. The most enduring lesson I learned from her was to always try my best. Before a hard test or any new experience which seemed scary, she used to comfort us with the words, "Just do your best. That's all anyone can ever expect. Try!"

God is asking us to strive to stay of the path He has laid out. He gives us a road map. But no road is perfectly straight and no one can walk tiredlessly forever. We stumble and fall, even lose sight of the road ahead. Sometimes the journey seems too long and hard. The Hasidic Bratislaver Rebbe taught that "Service of the Lord in its perfect form appears to be a heavy burden, but a man will be able to endure it if he bears in mind that it is only for the immediate day he must make the uphill struggle...think only of today, nay, of the immediate hour." God wants us, in my mother's words, to do our best to stay on the path which He clearly laid out for us, and He may even have built into the system of halakhah a little help. Throughout the years, rabbis have noted that observance of one mitzvah naturally leads to observance of another. Ben Azzai said, "Run to perform even a minor precept, for one good deed leads to another." Eventually, a life of mitzvot becomes its own reward. This, then, is the carrot, the internalized reward.

But what if we have gotten sidetracked, or have somehow left the path altogether? There is a very powerful story in the Talmud about a king's son who fell into evil ways. The king sent him a message saying, "Return, o my son." The son sent a message in reply, "With what can I return? I am ashamed to come before you." So the father sent another message saying, "Return as far as you can and I will come to you the rest of the way." This is echoed in Tanakh many times with lines like, "If you return unto me, I will return unto you" (Malachi 3:7)."

Even in this parasha, I think God is waiting for us, holding out His hand to welcome us. He stops four times in the punishments section to say, "and if you still disobey me...," pausing before spelling out the next punishment to give us yet another chance to come to Him. This feels to me like the parent of a misbehaving child who, before acting on a threatened consequence, counts 1...2...3... (My daughter recently asked me to go all the way to 4).

We can, at any moment, stop and make a fresh start. All we have to do is to repent. The Talmud is full of lines on the power of repentance such as: "There is nothing greater than repentance;" and "The Holy One, Blessed be He, said to Israel, my sons, open for me an aperture of repentance as narrow as the eye of a needle, and I will open for you gates through which wagons and coaches can pass." All we have to do is accept that we have behaved wrongly and change our conduct. In the words of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, "Man is not forever doomed to the errors and consequences of his past conduct. He is free to repent and through repentance to nullify the evil influences of his past over him." And Rabbi David Wolpe wrote, "Repentance is the mechanism for rebalancing lives that have been distorted by mistakes."

And when we walk in God's ways, God promises He will "walk about" (chapter 26,verse 12 of this parasha) in our midst." Rashi understands this to mean that God's presence will be felt so strongly that it will be as if God is literally dwelling among us. Matthew Berkowitz, a Rabbinic fellow at JTS, wrote that when we observe mitzvot like clothing the naked, visiting the sick, comforting mourners, and learning Torah, we not only draw near to God, but we draw God nearer to us. As we say in our Kiddush for Shabbat evening, "God's mitzvot add holiness to our lives."

We ultimately want our children, as God wants us, to be internally motivated to be good and to do good in the world, to live a life of Torah. The carrot and stick part of this parasha can be viewed as a way to motivate us to stay on, or to get back on, the path that leads to this kind of life. We want the same thing for our children. At some point, we will no longer be in a position to spell out consequences, so we need to help them get on the right track now. In our Shabbat B'Yachad program here, we are trying to bring families together to do just that: to help the children feel a connection with God and with Torah, to encourage them to try their very best to be good and to do good things, to let them know that God loves them no matter what and that He is always there for them. We are also trying to build a strong community of parents who are struggling with the issue of how to do this and are looking to our tradition and to Torah as a guide.

Not only does God wait for us and repeatedly stop to offer us another chance, but at the very end of chapter 26, after stating the final punishment (exile), He says, "Yet, even then, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or spurn them so as to destroy them, annulling my Covenant with them; for I the Lord am their God." We are left with His ultimate promise to always be with us, the theme which I chose to focus on last year when I told the Torah story in Shabbat B'Yachad for this parasha. This time, even without my editing out the entire tochechah, this promise still stands out for me as the overall message of parasha B'hukkotai- that we may leave God, but He will never leave us, no matter what we do. Our children will grow up and leave us, but in a way we will never leave them. I haven't heard my mother's voice since she died in 1991, but it is still very much with me. We will always hear God's voice if our ears and hearts are open. The comfort which our children can gain from connecting with an ever present and loving God, is available to us grown-ups as well. For me, this parasha has a happy ending. Hopefully as we live our lives and raise our children to try their best to observe mitzvot and to live a life of Torah, they and we will experience this comfort and live rich and rewarding lives filled with many blessings. As it says in Deuteronomy (30:19), "I have placed before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Therefore choose life!"

Note: I have used the male pronoun for God, not because I think of God as a man, but for simplicity's sake.