I begin this talk today with a mixed sense of excitement and trepidation. Preparing for a talk such as this is a humbling experience in many ways. One is made acutely aware of the limits of one's own knowledge and one is impressed by the tremendous potential for misrepresenting the word of God, whether by ignorance or hubris. In an attempt to avoid this pitfall I will not undertake to explain the word of God, only the actions of men and in any case I promise to ask many more questions than I answer.
As I mentioned before BeHukotai can be neatly divided with chapter 26 for the most part comprising a list of blessings and curses and chapter 27 presenting a relatively straightforward system for the valuation and redemption of gifts to the temple. I found nothing really troubling in chapter 27 and as such I will not deal with it. Chapter 26 on the other hand I found strangely disconcerting although at first I could not identify exactly what about this list bothered me.
Was it the numerical excess of curses over blessings or the gruesome nature of the former? Those of you who know me well should know that numerology or gematria have never appealed to me so we can dispense with the former, whereas the events of our collective lifetimes and their treatment in film and print media make the imprecations of chapter 26 seem positively tame, making the latter an unlikely cause of my disquietude. Was it the fact that God, so clearly present at the Exodus, seems strangely distant since then? I think not. Although not a Jewish author, C. S. Lewis in his collected essays, God in the Dock, has dealt with this problem far better than I ever could, so for those of you troubled by this apparent difficulty I refer you to his work. Also not the primary focus of our discussion today, the Deus ex machina objection deserves at least passing mention. God’s interventions in the Bible often appear to abruptly stop the flow of the narrative and change the course of the action with little or no foreshadowing. Any author or screenwriter will tell you that these are not the characteristics of good drama. But God probably doesn’t really care about what the critics say and at any rate my life has always seemed to be more like a “B” movie than a feature film, this talk being a prime example. (Well Stanley this is another fine mess you’ve gotten me into!)
After considerable reflection I concluded that what bothered me most about this week’s parsha was not the individual blessings and curses themselves so much as the whole concept of judgment, although again, I was at a loss as to why. I am reasonably sanguine about God’s judgment of me as an individual, hopefully at a date in the distant and indefinite future, but the idea of God judging an entire society I find unsettling at a visceral level. Could it be that I have lived in a permissive and at least nominally nonjudgmental culture for so long that very idea of judgment on such a grand scale is foreign to me?
After a brief examination of the doctrine of Multiculturalism, I found very quickly that my belief in it was more a matter of manners than of conviction. While it is clearly impolite to criticize another culture simply because it is different, I had no trouble concluding that a society that supports suicide bombers and preaches genocidal war against nonbelievers is fundamentally inferior to the one in which I live and deserves to be punished. Was my problem Job on a grand scale and the concept of divine collateral damage? As grizzly as the Bible’s description of starvation and cannibalism, I concluded that this was not the fundamental difficulty either. It was only when I considered my relationship to the condemned that I began to see the roots of the problem. These were not some nameless, faceless pagans of unquestioned iniquity, but rather my biological and philosophical ancestors. Were they really worse than the people who destroyed their culture? The answer is obviously no. However, just as I believe that God holds me to a standard which is in some ways more rigorous than his standard for other people, it is clear that God holds Israel, his chosen people, to a higher standard than the other nations.
But does all of this really justify the destruction of a whole civilization, as occurred during the first and second centuries of the Common Era? Perhaps justify is too strong a word, since God does not really need justification in the human sense. Was the destruction of Judean civilization at that time a historical necessity? Now there is a question. At this time Judea was a seething cauldron of religious, political and social unrest. The total Jewish population of the Mediterranean world at that time has been estimated at between 3 and 6 million people, with only about 40% living in the area of greater Judea. The relationship between those Jews living in the land and those living in Egypt, Assyria and the Parthian Empire was strained to say the least. The former group viewed the later groups as barely Jewish while those living outside of the land viewed those living in the land and in Jerusalem in particular as religious extremists, out of touch with the modern world. The geographic divisions within the land were at least as divisive as those already mentioned. The urban dwellers of Jerusalem viewed the Am Ha’Aretz as not only uncultured but as intrinsically impure because of their disregard for, or lack of access to the various Temple rituals. The Jews living in rural areas viewed the urban dwellers with corresponding suspicion. Within the city, Sadducees and Pharisees eyed each other with hatred and distrust. Add to this the religious friction created by the growing number of messianic and apocalyptic sects such as the Essenes, Jewish Christians, formerly pagan Christians and Gnostics and one can conclude that in Judea, religion was a divisive factor as opposed to a unifying force.
Politically things were, if anything, even worse. Despite his many serious moral and personal shortcomings Herod the Great had been an extremely capable administrator, trusted and respected by Rome. During his reign he had succeeded in deflecting many of the more oppressive burdens of empire from the Jews. Judea enjoyed a relatively protected place within the Empire as can be seen by the edict of Augustus on Jewish Rights of 1 BCE and I quote.
“Caesar Augustus, ponitfex maximus, holding the tribunician power, proclaims: Since the nation of the Jews and Hyrcanus, their high priest, have been found grateful to the people of the Romans, not only in the present but also in the past, and particularly in the time of my father, Caesar, imperator, it seems good to me and to my advisory council, according to the oaths, by the will of the people of the Romans, that the Jews shall use their own customs in accordance with their ancestral law, just as they used to use them in the time of Hyrcanus, the high priest of their highest god; and that their sacred offerings shall be inviolable and shall be sent to Jerusalem and shall be paid to the financial officials of Jerusalem; and that they shall not give sureties for appearance in court on the Sabbath or on the day of preparation before it after the ninth hour. But if anyone is detected stealing their sacred books or their sacred monies, either from a synagogue or from a men’s apartment, he shall be considered sacrilegious and his property shall be brought into the public treasury of the Romans.” This is pretty strong stuff.
Unfortunately with the death of Herod the Great, in 4 BCE, civil war broke out and continued with minor interruptions for the next 70 years. Within ten years of Herod’s death, the political situation in Palestine had deteriorated to the point where virtually all of greater Judea with the exception of portions of the Galilee was deprived of native rule and reduced to the status of a Roman province governed by a series of ignominious procurators with no real attachment to or feeling for the land. Zealots of every type continued to foment armed insurrection against Rome and with every uprising leaders within Judea agitated for revolt by Jewish communities from Alexandria to Antioch, completely oblivious to the political sympathies of Jews in the outside world. No less a figure than Rabbi Akiva hastened the ultimate destruction of Judea by supporting the messianic aspirations of Simon bar Kosiba, (aka. Bar Kochba), and by backing his revolt against Rome.
Economically things were scarcely any better. Class distinctions between the ruling elite and temple aristocracy on the one hand and the proletariat on the other were exacerbated by years of famine and intense competitive pressures from cheap imported goods from various parts of the Roman Empire. In many cases the very laws which sought to make Judea a kinder and gentler society were making Jewish agricultural products and manufactured goods increasingly uncompetitive. Attempts to deal with these economic problems, in turn brought religious issues to the forefront. An example of this can be seen in Akiva’s promulgation of the Prozbol, designed to alleviate the difficulties of making loans and financing crops in years close to the Jubilee. While it is unclear that the Prozbol ever had the kind of economic effects that Akiva had hoped for, his legal decision clearly subverted the spirit of Torah law and almost certainly increased the sense of disenfranchisement amongst the poor.
But as interesting as all of this may be, it doesn’t really address the question of inevitability. To use a chemical analogy, the foregoing issues represent purely kinetic factors, such as the presence or absence of catalysts, and as such can only describe the speed with which a reaction might proceed if, in fact, it does occur. To understand why the reaction takes place at all, it is necessary to understand the basic thermodynamic forces which drive the process inexorably toward its completion regardless of speed. In Hegelian terms this would correspond to the dialectical struggle between the thesis and the antithesis. During the first and second centuries of the Common Era, the focus of this struggle was clearly the Temple itself. It represented the reactionary financial, political and religious interests of the Levites and the Jerusalem elite, at a time when the practice animal sacrifice was on the decline all over the ancient world. It was extremely undemocratic on the basis of economics as well as geography. Furthermore it had proved unnecessary for more than 6 centuries to the Jews of Persia and Babylon. One can argue that without the destruction of the Temple and the shift in power it engendered, the Mishnah would never have been redacted and the Talmud would never have been elaborated. Furthermore, without the destruction of the Temple and the abolition of the sacrificial cult centered around it, it is unlikely that Judaism could ever have completed its evolution into a truly universal religion independent of geographic location. In the final analysis deciding whether God ordained the destruction of the Second Temple or whether the Jews of first and second century Judea committed cultural suicide as a result of their prolonged and repeated inability to deal with the social, political and religious problems of their day, is less important than understanding why this cataclysmic destruction was absolutely necessary for the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism and the next step in Judaism’s theological development.
So what of it? Why should anyone really care about the revisionist and probably heretical musings of a self proclaimed malcontent? Why … because we too live in extraordinary times: 2 World Wars, the genocidal murder of 6 million Jews with the attendant destruction of European Judaism, the ascendancy of America and the creation of the state of Israel, and yet most of us stumble around like sleepwalkers, narcotized by the routine of our daily lives. The blessings and curses of Leviticus are a call to action, a reminder that we too will be judged, by God, by ourselves and by history. Do the events of our lifetimes represent the beginning of another paradigmatic shift, the emergence of some Post-Rabbinic form Judaism and if so will we be remembered as having struggled heroically for a fairer and kinder society as well as a theology more in keeping with God’s expectations; or will history describe us as merely swept away by war, famine, pestilence and apathy, completely unaware of the transcendental nature of the test before us? The real significance of the blessings and curses in this week’s portion is that while the questions are God’s, the answers are ours and ours alone. Shabbat shalom!