How the Torah understands the power of human action and the often destructive results we may cause.
By MICHAEL BALINSKYArt by Pepe Fainberg(photo credit: PEPE FAINBERG)
READING CHAPTER 26 of Leviticus can be quite a theological challenge. There is good news….“If you walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them; Then I will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield her produce, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit.”And bad news… “But if you will not listen to me, and will not do all these commandments; and if you shall despise my statutes, or if your soul loathes my judgments, so that you will not do all my commandments, but that you break my covenant; I also will do this to you; I will appoint over you terror, consumption, and fever, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart; and you shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it.”Many of us find the theology of these verses difficult to accept. While we would like to believe that if we lead a proper life, we will receive only blessings, we are generally more hesitant to believe the warnings about the consequences of failing to observe the covenant.However one makes sense of this chapter, and its contents have disturbed since time immemorial, it is part of Torah and read every year, although many read the doom and gloom verses in an undertone. And because it is part of Torah, we cannot ignore its challenges.There is a debate between the medieval Sephardi commentators Ibn Ezra and Nachmanides that may be helpful to our thinking about these questions.The chronology of the events taking place at Sinai, including the giving of the Ten Commandments, the command to build the sanctuary and the episode of the Golden Calf, has been a matter of rabbinic debate.All agree on the general framework: the question is whether the Torah records the events in the order in which they happened, or whether some elements may be “out of place” and why.Although Chapter 26 concludes with, “These are the statutes and judgments and laws, which the Lord made between him and the people of Israel at Mount Sinai by the hand of Moses,” Ibn Ezra and Nachmanides disagree as to when these admonitions were given and became a part of Torah.For Ibn Ezra, these admonitions are an integral part of the original covenant at Sinai.The people’s willing acceptance of Torah includes acceptance of the consequences of failing to uphold the Torah. The covenant includes both responsibilities and an explicit understanding of what will happen if the people do not live up to them.Nachmanides argues that these admonitions are not part of the initial covenant, but the second one established or renewed at Sinai. The first covenant at Sinai is described in Exodus. “And he [Moses] took the Book of the Covenant, and read it in the hearing of the people; and they said, All that the Lord has said will we do, and obey. And Moses took the blood, and sprinkled it on the people, and said, Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord has made with you concerning all these words.”The admonitions of Leviticus 26 only come after the Golden Calf episode and the shattering of the first set of tablets, the literal and metaphorical breaking of the initial Sinai covenant. It is only with the second set of tablets that the Sinai covenant is renewed.While the content of this renewal includes the original commandments, there is no ceremony of acceptance as before. In place of this, Nachmanides suggests that God “wanted to make this second covenant with them with greater stringency and it should be upon them by means of oaths and curses.”These admonitions of “terror, consumption, and fever, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart; and you shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it” as an integral part of the covenant are a direct result of the people making the Golden Calf.The need for the admonitions is the consequence of sin. The covenant, which initially was agreed to through a ceremony of sacrificial sprinkling of blood is now accompanied by the fear of punishment.Whether or not one actually accepts that the tragic and sometimes cruel events that happen in our lives are a direct divine consequence of our actions may be, in the end, beside the point. What is significant is how the Torah understands the power of human action and the often destructive results we may cause.We are caught between wanting to strive religiously to fulfill an optimistic covenantal vision of being a holy nation, and having to remind ourselves of the bleak consequences that our failure to fulfill that vision may cause, whether through human or divine intervention. Rabbi Michael Balinsky is Executive Vice President of the Chicago Board of Rabbis
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