D'var Torah

This week’s Torah portion, Bechukotai, is a tricky one.

Bechukotai means “by My laws” (or literally, “in My laws”), and it contains a deceptively simple proposition: if we follow the laws given to the Jewish people at Mt. Sinai, a number of wonderful things will happen. (And if we don’t, a number of terrible things will happen.) 

What kinds of wonderful and terrible things? We might think, since so many of the commandments in the Torah are about building a just society, that the wonderful and terrible things Bechukotai promises to those who follow and disobey the mitzvot, respectively, would be obvious natural consequences. (For example: wonderful — if you make sure everyone has access to food (as the Torah commands us in a number of places), no one in your society will be hungry; terrible — if you fail to establish a just court system (as we are commanded in Deutronomy 16:18-20), people will mistrust the courts and might try to go around them.) 

But that’s not exactly what Bechukotai is about … instead, Bechukotai promises that if we follow the Torah’s instructions, we will have all the rain we need (but not too much), yielding good harvests from the earth and the trees; peace in the land, for all who dwell in it; and most of all, God will be with us, present in our midst. 

This sounds so great! But also, what a thing to say!! If we light Shabbos candles (and do the other 612 mitzvot, too), we’ll avoid droughts and floods?? And wars will cease?? This seems like a sticky prediction, to say the least.

It would be easy to just let go of Bechukotai, and other passages like it in the Torah. After all, for many of us, this is not really our theology. What are supposed to get out of it?

However, Jewish tradition offers us a number of other possible ways in. Today, I’d like to share two of them with you — one ancient, and one quite modern. (And I should say that our two b’nai mitzvah students this weekend came up with some wonderful interpretations as well … so tune in to their speeches on Saturday morning!) 

First, the ancient approach: the ancient rabbis who put together the Mishnah and Talmud (which, much more than the Torah itself, at least alone, shaped much of what would become Jewish practice today) were deeply committed to the idea that the Torah contains commandments we should follow … but the exact meaning of many of these commandments was not a settled or literal thing. Rather, the meaning of the commandments (what we should do, how we should do it) is something that each of us, in every generation, have the opportunity to interpret, and discover, with past interpretations as an important guide, but not our only guide. If we apply this rabbinic approach to Bechukotai’s promises about rain, and peace, and having God in our midst, it might lead us to say something like: okay, Bechukotai is a testament to the human intuition that if we all work together, we can solve really big problems. What might this look like in our world today?

This leads to a discussion of one of the more modern approaches to Bechukotai: in recent years, Bechukotai (and other Torah portions that make similar promises) have been reclaimed/reimagined by the Jewish environmental movement. Since we actually do now live in a world where our actions can impact the weather, some say, portions like Bechukotai can be a kind of message for our times: thanks to the brilliance of many scientists and policy folks, amongst others, just like the Ancient Israelites had the Torah, we now have a number of national and global policy recommendations, and if we follow them, we might be able to get closer to a world where rains (and other weather phenomenon) fall in their seasons — no more and no less. 

This perspective has led some Reform Jews to reclaim some liturgy, for example, that our movement as a whole has let go of. For example, our (Reform Movement) prayerbook Mishkan Tefilah omits the second paragraph of the V’ahavta (Deuteronomy 11:13-21), which asserts, similarly to Bechukotai, that if people love and follow God, God will give us “rain upon [our] lands in its due season,” and bountiful harvests (but if we turn away from God … “the skies will close up"). But some Reform communities have reclaimed this part of the V’ahavta, at least as an option. Siddur Sha’ar Zahav, a prayerbook composed by Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, in San Francisco, includes the second paragraph, with a note on the side:

“The middle paragraph of the Shema articulates a theology of divine reward and punishment that many Jews do not accept. However, this warning has ecological significance in today’s world. [Failing to love God] could be interpreted as serving the gods of greed, ambitioon, and short-term profit at nature’s expense; “the skies will close up, the rain will not fall, and the land will not produce” would be an accurate prediction of the effects of pollution. If we abuse God’s creation by abusing the environment, then we will lose the gifts of nature - clear air, clean water, fertile land - that we have heretofore often taken for granted.” (Siddur Sha’ar Zahav (5769/2009), p. 159)

What do we do with this stark awareness, whether we apply it to our earth or to some of the geopolitical challenges that exist in our current world between human beings? (Don’t forget that Bechukotai promises us peace if we follow the commandments, too.) Maybe one thing we can do, inspired by Bechukotai, is continue to believe in (or entertain the idea of) positive possibilities. There is a world with rain in its season and peace in the land, Bechukotai promises … we just need to work together to get there. One of my takeaways from Bechukotai is that human beings have long been overwhelmed by natural disasters, and war … and long wished they were more in our control. Because of this impulse to heal our earth and our human communities, we are now the beneficiaries of decades and decades (or maybe centuries and centuries, depending on how you look at it) of research on questions like “how do we resolve conflicts?” and “how do we heal our earth?” Bechukotai encourages us to pay attention not just to all of the ways our world might spin into disaster but also to all of those decades of research on healing, too — to all of the knowledge and wisdom we have received, that we can harness in this moment, not (just) as individuals but as a collective. 

Bechukotai is the very last portion in the Book of Leviticus. When we come to the end of a book of Torah, we say, hazak hazak v’nithazek: be strong, be strong, and let us strengthen one another. This Shabbat, may we lean into all of the ways we are strengthened by one another, and by the accumulated knowledge of so many people in our world. And, may we continue to believe in our own power to strengthen one another going forward — to find our way, together, to a place of healing and growth.

Shabbat Shalom!