Rabbi's Sermons

Shabat Shalom!

Approximately twenty five years ago, the concept of SPAM E-Mail was not yet conceived, and automatic filters for this kind of ugly E-Mail chains was not yet integrated into our modern E-Mail applications. In those days I used to receive lots of chain messages from my own contacts and friends, promising a large list of blessings from heavens, that I could receive only if, I would resend the same message to at least ten or more people, remember this chain letters? You may easily forget about it and delete the message, BUT, the same message would also say that if you would not forward the same message in less than one hour, a large and terrible list of curses and bad luck, would fall upon you or even worse, your operating system. Many of the naive users would automatically select ten or more addresses from their contacts list, creating an immense traffic of rubbish overloading the networks and servers.

This week, Parashat Ki Tavo took me back to those years, of chain letters and SPAM effect. The Torah text contains one of the most frightening chapters of the Torah. Deuteronomy 28 begins with fourteen verses that outline all the good things that will happen to us if we faithfully obey God and observe all the divine commandments. Those are the good news and blessings. But, right after those verses come 54 verses (15–69) of curses that will befall upon us if we do not observe all the commandments. This is the most terrifying litany portraying various kinds of sufferings. Because of its content, no one wanted has ever wanted to have this Aliyah, corresponding to this passage (by the way, tomorrow I will ready them like this!). In traditional practice, it is chanted at super-high speed in a very low voice, loud enough to hear yourself.

I suggest you to read these verses, but to give you an idea, the punishments explicitly threatened in this chapter include terrible diseases, conquest by merciless foreign enemies, exile and dispersion throughout the world, leading to idolatry and enslavement, and the most terrible of all, famine to the point where parents in an attack of cannibalism will eat their own children. These verses remind me, as well the scene of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy’s description of hell. All this written in our sacred Torah, of which we sing during the Torah service, “דְּרָכֶיהָ דַרְכֵי נֹעַם♫ וְכָל נְתִיבוֹתֶיהָ שָׁלוֹם♪ - Its ways are ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace” (Proverbs 3:17). Not much pleasantness and not much peace, in these 54 verses, is it?

Not surprisingly, there is a fascinating history of interpretation for each individual verse, in this litany of horrors. But the macro question is: What do we to understand from this extraordinarily powerful and disturbing text, indicating the most severe punishments imaginable, both in the Land of Israel and in exile from the Land, for Jews who fail to fulfill their part of the covenant, by observing all of the commandments? How can we understand this text, if we accept, like in the Orthodox belief, that every word in this passage was God’s literal revelation? Is this really God that indicated these horrifying natural and historical terrors as a punishment for failing to eat kosher food, or even failing to give charity to the needy? Is this the God that we worship?

On the other hand, we may hold the most liberal and modern academics Jewish theology, that the Torah was written by Moses and other human beings, presumably, out of the sincere belief, that this was consistent with the substance of the covenant between God and the people of Israel. If so, how should we understand the intention of an author that wrote these terrible ideas? It seems to me, that there are two possibilities:

1) The first is Pshat, as-is, meaning the author God or human, intended this passage as it is presented: a future warning to the people, a serious of fearsome threats that the mind could imagine, in order to impel the people to remain faithful to their God. “Do what God wants” the author says, because “otherwise you and your children, and future generations, will suffer punishments more grievous than you can ever imagine!” same as the SPAM mail chain.

But, is this a valid way, to motivate a religious life? Can the terror of threatened punishments, produce a sustained commitment to piety or to goodness? The noblest achievements of human beings are impelled, not by threats that produce anxiety and fear, but rather by providing positive models of piety, commitment and holiness.

2) A second explanation for the passage, is that it was written not primarily as a warning about the future, but as an actual description of the past. A terrible experience of the people of Israel in those biblical times, presented as a terrible lesson. Anyone living in the Kingdom of Judea, knew about what had happened to the northern Kingdom of Israel — how the Assyrian armies had swept through the Land, destroying city by city, and finally the capital city of Samaria, imposing massive deportations of the population and bringing in other peoples to settle the land, scattering the exiles, the ten lost tribes of Israel, throughout the Assyrian empire, prohibiting them from maintaining their own religious institutions. Jeremiah described the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel: “ט וְהַאֲכַלְתִּים אֶת בְּשַׂר בְּנֵיהֶם, וְאֵת בְּשַׂר בְּנֹתֵיהֶם, וְאִישׁ בְּשַׂר רֵעֵהוּ, יֹאכֵלוּ; בְּמָצוֹר, וּבְמָצוֹק, אֲשֶׁר יָצִיקוּ לָהֶם אֹיְבֵיהֶם, וּמְבַקְשֵׁי נַפְשָׁם” , “9 And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege and straits with which their enemies and they that seek their lives shall straiten them.” The book of Lamentations 4:10 that we read on 9th of Av, describes: “With their own hands compassionate women, have cooked their own children, who became their food when my people were destroyed”.

So, rather than conclude, that this traumatic experience was simply a matter of superior military of the Assyrians over the Northern Kingdom of Israel, the author wanted to communicate a message that was consistent with God’s will, because of the religious failings of the Northern Kingdom. The message was that God is in control of historical events even when the divine presence seems hidden and inscrutable, a message that the covenant remains intact. We can understand this reading, as an historical catastrophe that occurred 2600 years ago in Northern Israel, and a warning that it might be repeated, since it did, several times in our history.

In fact, Jewish religious thinkers and moralists, have tended to explain Jewish suffering, in this way: we suffer because we have sinned, and the challenge is to identify the sins and to rectify them. It is, to be sure, a blame-the-victim approach, and this is one reaction to suffering that modern psychology teaches us to avoid at all costs! When a person suffers, the most important message is to reassure that person by saying, “It’s not your fault!” Yet this traditional response, at least, communicates, that there was a meaning to the suffering, and that what we need to do in response is to keep the faith, strengthen our loyalty to tradition, try even harder to be good Jews.

After the Holocaust, of course, this traditionalist interpretation of suffering as divine punishment has been relegated to fundamentalist theologies. It is the kind of extreme thinking, which led the Satmar Rebbe Yoel Teitelbaum to write that the Holocaust was God’s punishment for the greatest sin ever committed by the Jewish people: the sin of Zionism! (Vayoel Moshe - 1961). It is this kind of thinking that Israel’s Rav Ovadiah Yosef used nineteenth years ago, to assert that Hurricane Katrina was a punishment for President Bush’s pressure on Israel, to withdraw from Gush Katif in Gaza, and for the absence of Torah study in the largely black population of New Orleans… No comments.

Any efforts to apply the theological worldview of Deuteronomy 28 to the actual Jewish experience in history or to the suffering of human beings anywhere — from hurricanes, tsunamis, famine, bombing of hospitals, missiles, fires, or even October 7^th — seems outrageous and blasphemous, especially in a post-Holocaust world. Even the recent declarations of orthodox rabbis, that the Liberal Jews in Israel might lead to the destruction of the state of Israel and the loss of the Jewish homeland, as a divine punishment, seems appalling and absurd! I see no other way of understanding these terrifying 54 verses from Parshat Ki Tavo, but as an historical view. It is, after all, part of our Sacred Scripture, a text from which many of us will surely dissent. Neither this vision of unmitigated horrors, nor the depiction of serene enjoyment of the bounty of the land flowing with milk and honey, earlier in the Parasha, reflects our real experience of history, or our understanding of God’s relationship to our people!

Perhaps, then, it is best to conclude, not with the Parasha, but with the Haftarah, that contains a promise for a better future in a beautiful verse of Isaiah 60:18:

“לֹא יִשָּׁמַ֨ע ע֤וֹד חָמָס֙ בְּאַרְצֵ֔ךְ שֹׁ֥ד וָשֶׁ֖בֶר בִּגְבוּלָ֑יִךְ וְקָרָ֤את יְשׁוּעָה֙ חוֹמֹתַ֔יִךְ וּשְׁעָרַ֖יִךְ תְּהִלָּֽה׃”

“No more shall violence (ḥamas) be heard in your land, desolation and destruction within your borders, but you shall name your walls ‘Salvation’ and your gates ’Praise’”.

Today we pray that no more Hamas (violence and the real Hamas organization) shall be heard in Israel, no more destruction in our cities, that we may have a blessed new year that will begin within three weeks on Rosh Hashana! A year full of blessings, renewed life and the so needed… Shalom.

Shabat Shalom!

Rabbi David Laor

September 20^th 2024