September 4th: Ki Tavo
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich
The most famous part of this week’s Torah portion is the self-identifying history that ancient worshippers recited when they brought their first fruits to the Lord:
“My father was a wandering Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation. The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us; they imposed heavy labor upon us. We cried out to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our plea and saw our plight, our misery, and our oppression. The Lord freed us from Egypt with a mighty hand, an outstretched arm, and awesome power, and by signs and wonders. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. Wherefore I now bring the first fruits of the soil which You, O Lord, have given me.” (Deuteronomy 26.5-10)
Later, as part of the ritual, the worshipper would pray, “Look down from Your holy abode, from heaven, and bless Your people Israel and the soil You have given us, a land flowing with milk and honey, as You swore to our fathers.” (Deuteronomy 26.15)
The notion is that the good things that happen to us in life are at the direction of God—as rewards for obedience to the Divine Will. Later, in Chapters 27 and 28, we have an elaborate liturgy of blessings and curses declared by Moses and the Levites to all the Israelites. IF we obey God’s instructions, everything will be good: weather, agriculture, health, foreign relations, personal safety, and general prosperity and happiness. However, if we disobey God’s instructions, all those things that could be good will instead be calamitous. Here, the picture of the pastoral ideal becomes a nightmare—with plenty of poetic imagination about how bad things can be. Among the most striking: “The Lord will strike you with consumption, fever, and inflammation, with scorching heat and droughts, with blight and mildew; they shall hound you until you perish! The skies above your head shall be copper and the earth under you iron. The Lord will make the rain of your land dust, and sand shall drop on you from the sky, until you are wiped out.” (Deuteronomy 28.22-24)
Again, the ancient mentality was that good things are rewards from God, and bad things are punishments from God. This Deuteronomic Theology was and remains a pillar of many people’s worldview. Something in our minds drives us to be very solicitous in re God, hoping for goodness and feeling guilty when life goes badly. The problem, however, it that this understanding of the world does not seem to be accurate. Too often, we see the good suffer and the evil prosper. Flying in the face of this Deuteronomic thinking is reality.
Many scholars think that this disparity between Deuteronomy and life is the reason for the Book of Job. Written in the style of a Greek drama, it seems to be an extended philosophical work of fiction—based perhaps on an actual man named Job, but dramatized by the writer to highlight various approaches to the problem of theodicy (how an All Powerful and All Good God can allow evil to happen). Though Job is given an answer—that human understanding is so much lesser than God’s that we cannot fathom Divine justice, many apparently did not feel that the question had been resolved.
Enter the Pharisaic sages—later called Rabbis—who put this question at the center of their religious reforms (beginning around 200 BCE). They believed fervently in God’s justice, but their experience of this world seemed to deny it. Thus did they intuit (or deduce) that there must be a realm in which true justice reigns—a world after this one, after we die. Their Olam Haba, the World-to-Come, is the place where wrongs are righted and where the moral accounts of this world are balanced. The good are rewarded for their piety and obedience, and the evil get their just deserts. As Rabbi Judah teaches (Pirke Avot 4.16): “This world is like an anteroom before the World-to-Come. Prepare yourself in the anteroom so that you may enter the banquet hall.” Or, as we sing in Yigdal (a poetic setting of Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of the Jewish Faith): “Gomel l’ish chesed k’mif’alo / God deals kindly with those who merit kindness, Noten l’rasha ra k’rish’ato / and brings upon the evil the evil they deserve.”
It is curious how little detail the Rabbis provide about this Olam Haba—perhaps because no one had ever gone there and come back with a report. There are speculations, but the basic belief is that God will take care of us both in life and after we die. Trust is the salient factor, and the many voices of the Tradition reflect various possibilities of the way that God will take care of us.
Rabbi Stephen Wylen summarizes many of the views in this piece we include in our own Siddur B’rit Shalom (page 146):
“Judaism permits a variety of beliefs concerning life after death. Some of our Talmudic Sages believed that the souls of the righteous are kept in a treasury under the throne of God. Others believed that the righteous sit on thrones, enjoying the heavenly light that shines from the Blessed Holy One. Many of our forebears anticipated sitting at the table in the Yeshiva on High, where the righteous of all ages discuss the teachings of Torah. The Pharisees taught that at the end of time all the dead would be resurrected to earthly life, while other Jewish movements, including the modern Reformers of Judaism, taught that the soul separates from the body at death and, after submitting to judgment, goes to its eternal reward. The various Jewish teachings agree that we live on in some manner after death and that there is reward for obedience to the Torah.”
Thus does the Tradition affirm—with a little interpretation— the message of the Torah: the Judge of all the earth will do justly, rewarding morality and punishing evil. As is our Jewish way, we read the Torah and interpret it through our observations of and our experiences “b’alma di-v’ra chir’utay,” in this life created by God.