Robert Braun, May 28, 2005
Shabbat Shalom.
A while back I was chatting with Perry Netter, and I mentioned, for some reason, something my sister had said. Perry commented that talked a lot about my brothers and parents, but I rarely mentioned my sister. There are reasons for this. My sister lives in Philadelphia, Ir HaKodesh, so I don’t see her all that often. My family is also famously non-communicative. And she’s a psychiatrist – a Jungian psychiatrist, no less -- and I tend to clam up around mental health professionals.
Sarah is also a very spiritual person and has lots of wonderful insights about Judaism and Mitzvot and things like that. So when I did happen to see her as I began to work on this d’var Torah, I mentioned that the blessings and curses in the beginning of the parasha seemed to be a reflection of the parent – child paradigm: we cajole our children into behaving by sending a stark message of benefits and detriments to good and bad behavior.
To this my sister smiled knowingly, and sadly, and said that it may be a parent-child paradigm, but it’s a really lousy paradigm!
Anyway, that caused me to cast around for some new ideas.
And this being the last parasha of Vayikra, I began to look at this parasha in the context of Vayikra in its entirety, which as we know is often referred to as the "holiness" text. During the course of Vayikra, we cover a lot of ground regarding things that, frankly, have little practical meaning for us – regulations concerning the preparation and presentation of the principal types of sacrifices; sin offerings; distributions of sacrifices to priests and to donors; the tasks of priests in purifying persons and other issues of purity; and so on.
Even the most dramatic parts of Vayikra – the deaths of Aaron’s sons and the rules of the scapegoat – are intrinsically bound up in the ritual of the Temple, the expiation of sins, and other matters which are basically spiritual in scope.
This parasha, as Baruch Levine points out, breaks with that tone. Instead of being a legal or ritual composition, the first part of the parasha – the one we read -- approaches the consequences of the code in very graphic, physical language.
The first section, just 10 verses, deals with consequences of following laws. These are not spiritual benefits by and large; these are physical benefits. We will have food, and plenty of it. We will vanquish our enemies. We will be fruitful and we will multiply; and, oh yes, almost as an afterthought, God will be amongst us. The consequence of following the laws, following the holiness code, is to benefit physically, to live an ideal, agrarian life. We will be more than blessed; we will be overwhelmed by the abundance, over-abundance, of the land, unable to keep up with our blessings.
The next thirty pesukim are, of course, the opposite. This part, which Baruch Levine calls the "Execration", is composed of escalating curses. If we don’t follow the laws, we will be punished. And if we don’t follow after being punished, we’ll be punished again. And again, and again, each time more horribly than before. Defeat and disease will be followed by natural disaster. Wild beasts will be followed by invasion, famine and pestilence. The land will be made desolate; humans will eat their own children, and ultimately, exile. As graphic as are the blessings are the curses.
And unlike the remoteness of the Holiness Code, much of which is very difficult for us to imagine, the blessings and curses are not difficult for us to imagine at all; these benefits, and these nightmares, are very close to us. Our daily newsfeed is made up of excess. We see that very same menu of "living large", of supersized portions, enormous mansions, living to excess on the one hand; and of war, disease and famine on the other. We can imagine these things better than we would like. What is difficult is for us to rationalize is the connection between the code and the results.
I submit that this combination of legal and spiritual images in the bulk of Vayikra, and the graphic, simple formulations in this parasha, are effectively designed, from a literary point of view, to emphasize the importance of the code. It would be easy to ignore these laws, particularly since we, who do not have a temple and whose priests and levites no longer have full-time jobs, do not have to see the practical relevance of the laws. We are forced to look at the laws with seriousness. Instead of ignoring these defunct laws and regulations, we find meaning and personal relevance within them.
There is, in fact, a more universal lesson here, one which extends beyond this parasha and this book and into the Torah and part of the essence of our being as Jews. Because there are blessings and curses, and because the result depends on us, there is a choice. We have the free will to decide whether or not to follow these laws. We are told about these consequences because we have the right to value the reward and punishment, and to make the decision to abide by this code or not.
It is as if God presented to us a very complex set of laws, and wanted to make sure we understood the consequences of our choices. While the blessings and curses that God presents in Bekhukotai are as graphic as the holiness code is spiritual, the lesson we learn – that we have a choice – is the most significant. God is not trying so much to scare us with the curses; God is trying to tell us that the decision is ours; it is neither the blessings nor the curses, nor even the laws themselves, that are the focal point of this parasha; it is our ability to choose which is central.
There is one other lesson that creates additional, universal significance in this parasha. Simply balancing reward and punishment is a very cold thing to do. This parasha, however, adds one other thought. After all of the curses, after the famine and disease and exile, God reminds us – he will not forget us. After all we do, after the choices, the wrong choices, we make, God will forgive us. While I would not directly contradict my sister, this is the functional part of the familial paradigm of this story; that we are forgiven, that we are always part of this family, our personal, intimate family, and our greater national family. Far from a dysfunctional model, this is a paradigm we can adopt.