Ki Tavo

Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 14 September 2020

Steven Andrew is, I suspect, the self-appointed pastor of the ‘USA Christian Church’ which seems to exist only on the internet. Sadly, like other evangelicals, he has some pretty uncomplimentary things to say about LGBTQ people, saying their behaviour is responsible for hurricanes, earthquakes and terrorist attacks. I don’t suppose you would be surprised to hear that in March he said that obeying God will protect the USA from Coronavirus. I wonder if he’s still saying that now?

Maybe he’d been reading today’s sidra, which seems to imply that if you do good you will enjoy a good life; whilst doing bad means there will be a heavy price to pay. But if the connection was, indeed, that obvious, we would have to be incredibly stupid ever to do anything wrong! Why ever would we if it was almost guaranteed that we would suffer because of it?

Unfortunately but obviously, we know that life isn’t like that. And nor, I assume, was it like that when the Torah was written. Jews must have been as troubled then, as we are now, by the gap between what the Torah says and their observable experience. Good people suffered; bad people prospered. Misfortune struck indiscriminately then, as it does now.

So how did Jews in the past respond to this dilemma?

The Jewish thinker, David Hartman, suggests that the rabbis didn’t, on the whole, ask theological questions like, “If God is good, why do good people suffer and bad people prosper?” For the problem with suggesting direct divine intervention in human affairs is that we end up oscillating between elation and depression, “God loves me, God loves me not, God loves me, God loves me not….” depending on whether good or bad things are happening to you.

Hartman suggests that the rabbis asked different questions altogether, such as: “How do we respond to events that call into question our whole identity as God’s covenant community?” “Do we have the strength to open ourselves to a personal God in a world filled with unpredictable suffering?” (Cohen/Mendes-Flohr Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought pp940- 94I)

If you’ve experienced the death of a loved one, you’ll know that you tend not to ask abstract, theological questions about God; but you do ask: what will life be like now? how will I cope? do I have the emotional strength to risk loving somebody again? and so on.

The range of responses throughout Jewish literature is staggering. The Talmud recognises the strain that suffering puts on a person’s relationship with God (eg Mishnah Taanit I.7) Some interpretations suggest that the reward for doing good in this world waits for us in the world to come. That sounds like Christian teaching, but the idea is never entirely absent from classic Jewish thinking – how could it be when it seems a logical way of making sense of the bad things that happen to us? Quoting the last 3 verses of what we read this morning, Maimonides suggests that the carrot of reward and the stick of punishment were needed by a people only recently emerged out of an idolatrous system, where such carrots and sticks were the norm. (Moreh Nevuchim 3.30)

Another Talmudic rabbi asks, “why are evildoers not punished?” and suggests that they know punishment awaits them – but current enjoyment outweighs deferred punishment. It’s a sort of heavenly Hire Purchase: “enjoy now – pay later.”

Pirke Avot suggests that the reward for a good deed is the good deed itself; the punishment for a bad one is the punishment.(4:2.) In other words, the knowledge of having done good should be reward enough. It recognizes that doing one good deed makes it easier to do the next one; just as doing one bad deed makes successive bad ones easier. You can get habituated to doing good – or bad. The blessings and curses in our Torah reading become a sort of incentive, then, an invitation to do good.

Another collection of responses argues that the blessings and curses speak to us about valuing life. We probably do take too much for granted, imagining that what we have achieved is the result purely of our own work and effort. Only loss, or the threat of loss, wakes us up to what we do have.

“Why is it,” the Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler observed sardonically, “that we blame God when bad things happen to us; but seldom lose faith or thank God when good things come our way?” Maybe we would deal better with those bad things if we were able to appreciate those good ones more?

In the end what is being discussed might be akin to a deep personal relationship. When one partner in the relationship starts acting strangely, the other might respond by saying, “my partner still loves me, even if they are doing some very strange things.” But eventually they might say, “what my partner is doing shows that they’re not committed to our relationship any more.” That’s the breaking-point in the relationship. This can happen between human beings – and between us and God. And everybody has their particular breaking-point.

Rabbi Hugo Gryn walked out of Auschwitz with his faith confirmed and strengthened; others emerged from the same place feeling totally abandoned by God. For some, the bad things that happen to them prove there is no God. For others, it is only the belief that God is, somehow, behind everything that happens, however appalling, that enables them to continue. All we can do is negotiate our own path through these terrible questions, and what they say or don’t say to us about God and our relationship with God.

What then should we make of these sections of blessings and curses? Not warnings – not incentives – not promises – but, maybe, the blessings and curses we bring on ourselves through choosing a particular path. Look at the list – especially of curses. Idolatry – relationships – property rights – mistreating the disabled, the weak, the defenceless in society etc. If we needed a shorthand way of covering basic rules of decent human behaviour we need look no further.

So many of these aren’t curses that come down to us from on high – they’re the ways in which we blight our own lives, by our own deeds. We can blame God, fate, destiny, the government, the LGBTQ community, whatever. But blaming others for our misfortune is the behaviour of children, not mature adults. Last Shabbat’s Torah reading emphasized just that: actions carry consequences, and we are each responsible for what we do.(eg. Deut 24:16)

Today is the 16^th of Elul, so we’re just a fortnight away from Rosh Hashanah. This is the month of preparation for the Days of Awe, a time to examine, amongst other things, our blessings and curses – our self-created, self-inflicted ones; what has happened to us; what others have inflicted on us – and what we’ve inflicted on them.

May we use this time well to look at those blessings and curses and get as realistic a grasp as we can of our lives and what we do with them, and in them.