Shabbat B’chukotai. What do we do when we don’t
like, when we don’t agree with, what we read?
B’chukutai, with its litany of blessings and curses, draws attention to
this seemingly simple question, a question that increasingly causes folks to
distance themselves from Torah and from worship.
B’chukotai
opens innocently enough, “If you follow my laws, guard my commandments, and do
them,” God tells us, in short, that all will be well in our world. A virtually utopian vision of peace,
abundance, virility and strength is imagined if only we follow God’s law. Lovely, until we continue reading. If we spurn God’s commandments, misery,
however, and heartache will be wreaked upon us, a misery and heartache that is
painstakingly detailed in our text. There is little room for error, let alone,
compassion in this literary precursor to the full expression of the
Deuteronomic notion of Divine retribution that awaits us in the book of
Deuteronomy. If bad things happen, it must
be because we failed to abide by God’s laws?
Which brings me back to the question: what do we do with text, sacred text
– our Torah, no less – when we simply don’t agree with what it says? What do we do when the theological notions
laid out don’t comport with reality?
We have a number of options.
1)
We
could follow the lead of Rabbinic tradition and create commentary that raises
the text up, or dare I say offers an apologetic for a difficult passage. For instance, the medieval Ibn Ezra argues
that the focus shouldn’t be on the curses but rather on God’s bounty of blessing. He points out that the enumeration of the curses
was intended only to deter recurrent bad behavior. The curses are carried out, according to Ibn
Ezra and others, only for the repeated and constant rejection of the
commandments. An earlier midrash on the text, goes further,
by virtually dismissing the wealth of attention paid to and perhaps even the
substance of the curses by noting that they begin – bear with me here: with the letter vav and end with the letter hey
(two letters that are next to each other in the alphabet ) whereas the
blessings began with aleph and end with tuf (the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet). From A to Z the
blessings reach us. The midrashist
reminds that there is nothing between vav
and hey.
2)
Or,
we could take the historical approach and read the text less as sacred doctrine
but rather as a window into the ancient world from which our sacred traditions
came. Philip Kitcher, a professor of philosophy at
Columbia University and the author of the forthcoming book Life After Faith:
The Case for Secular Humanism who was interviewed this week by The New
York Times op-ed contributor, Gary Cutting, reminds us that “important ideas of major religions have [often] been
introduced in response to the political requirements of some historical
situation.” Remember, as I mentioned last week, in the
ancient world, there was no separation between religious and civil
authority. Obedience to God was enmeshed
completely with communal and civic duty.
Even Kitcher, a self-proclaimed “soft-atheist,” who views God today as
little more than a distracting “religious gesture,” recognizes that the idea of
God was a central and consolidating force in the pre-modern world.
3)
There is a
third option to dealing with our question of what to do when we disagree with
what is in Torah. We could simply remove
our literary traditions from the mantle of sacred canon. We could simply toss out that which is disagreeable.
Of course, then we risk severing our ties to the very history that
defines us.
I don’t view any of these three
options by themselves as entirely satisfactory responses to the question of
how we deal with sacred traditions with which we don’t agree. Perhaps that is why so many choose to
disengage; because, to remain so demands attentive reflection and grappling with
difficult and unsettling ideas that are easier set aside. However, I’d argue, as our modern day
liturgist, Richard Levy, writes, “If
we can hear the words from Sinai
[– acknowledge them --] … and [then] serve
with all of our intellect [as well as] passion…then we can do all that humans
can do” to allow religion to guide us towards making the world hospitable and
bountiful for all. Perhaps that is too
difficult a task to demand from most. I
hope not.
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