Drash for Shabbat Behar-Bechukotai

Australian Dairy Farm

That it May Go Well for You

Here in this Lucky Country, in this land of plenty where we are blessed to live, it is hard to really appreciate the grinding poverty and hunger of other parts of the world.  But it exists.  Always somewhere over the horizon.  Out of sight…but hopefully not out of mind.  Because one would have to be heartless not to acknowledge that the kind of poverty I have in mind does exist.  The kind where children – and adults – routinely die of malnutrition.  The sort of places from which we see haunting images of distended bellies and discoloured mouths.  Of listless people who don’t even swat as flies buzz around their heads.

The fact that such hunger is limited to specific places, begs the question:  what is it about these places that causes such a shortage, or imbalance of resources?  Why do some places experience disaster after disaster that causes famine, with not only hunger but lasting physical and social devastation?

With that question in mind, we read today’s Torah reading from Leviticus 26.3-14, that promises abundance and plenty if we will only obey God’s laws and commandments.  If we are obedient, things will go well for us.  Had we read further in the chapter, we would also have read a vivid description of the kind of disaster that the Torah predicts, should we not follow God’s laws and commandments.  If we fail to obey, things will not go well for us.

So are we to look upon places that prosper, and assume that their inhabitants are following God’s laws and commandments?  And to look upon places that suffer poverty and famine, and assume that their inhabitants regularly transgress God’s laws and commandments?

Obviously such an assumption, even when cloaked in genuine concern, can and does come off as being arrogant.  But if we are blessed to live in a land of plenty, a land without hunger, shouldn’t we assume that we’re doing something right?  Lucky as this country may be, it still requires good stewardship to keep it ‘lucky’!  And if it is okay to think that, then isn’t the corollary – that the countries chronically suffering are doing something wrong – also valid?

In Progressive Judaism, we have traditionally had a problem with passages in the Torah such as this one for this very reason.  They are part of Torah and we cannot excise them.  But we must somehow make sense of them.

We can write them off as expressions of the theology of a God whom we reject.  We can say that this is not God was we understand Him.  And I would not disagree with that sentiment.  I do not believe that God, incensed at a nation’s non-compliance with His law, smites that nation with His wrath.  That’s not within my own understanding of God’s nature.  Even though the latter is really beyond understanding...

When we think of the phrase ‘God’s laws and commandments’ today, we tend to automatically think specifically of ritual law.  Keeping kosher.  Avoiding forbidden activities on the Sabbath.  Rendering the proper documents in their proper forms – for example, the ketubah and get – at the prescribed times of our lives.  Mourning in the prescribed way.  It is hard to make a moral connection with our compliance – or non-compliance – with these statutes, and how much we prosper or do not.  If we do focus on such things only, then we’re looking at a very limited part of God’s law.

But God’s law as presented in the Torah includes rules that make simple good sense.  For example, in agricultural law.  The Torah demands practices that are common in successful agricultural economies.  These are practices that care for the land and help ensure sustained successful harvests.  These are practices that are often ignored in places where crops fail or are marginal year after year.  Places that cannot feed their inhabitants.  Places where famine has changed the very weather patterns over the years, drying up seasonal rains.

Although ostensibly caused by a protracted drought, it was bad farming methods that largely caused the ‘Dust Bowl’ of the American Midwest of the 1930’s.  That resulted in devastation which depopulated large swaths of a number of US states.  But Americans learned the lesson from their misfortune.  The government today encourages farmers through financial and other incentives to institute a number of practices that have led to sustainable farming.  They have restored the fertility of the land.  American farmers are once again feeding the huge US population and other large parts of the world as well with their massive grain harvests.  They were not looking to the Torah for guidance in how to effect this restoration.  But much of what they did, came from wisdom already stated in the pages of the Torah.

Another good example is the State of Israel.  The Ottoman Province of Palestine, part of which became the modern Jewish State, was an impoverished backwater of the late Turkish Empire.  Its hillsides were seriously eroded.  Its lowlands were covered in malarial swamps.  When the Jews began settling and cultivating the land, they used scientifically-proven methods.  These settlers were largely secular Jews – they weren’t necessarily looking to the Torah for guidance.  But their methods were already largely found in the wisdom of the Torah.  And look at how the land has blossomed!  Long-time residents tell of how the microclimate has changed over the decades – of how it has cooled and become wetter – thanks to the successful cultivation of the land.  Good methods, used for years, bring change that ultimately becomes self-sustaining.

So we can look upon the successes of agricultural economies and admit that the Torah contains wisdom in this area after all.  And if we can make such an admission, then we can ‘mine’ the Torah for wisdom in other areas as well.  And we can admit – and even celebrate – that the Torah serves as a compendium of wisdom in various disciplines.  Thus we can read the prediction of success and prosperity if one follows its law – and disaster if one does not – less in terms of Divine reward of punishment.  Rather, perhaps such phenomena simply represent the prosperity that follows from good sense decision-making.  And the poverty that follows from poor stewardship.  To put it another way:  perhaps God has no ‘need’ to reward or punish us for our compliance or transgression of His law.  We create our own reward or punishment.  Because God’s law, at least much of it, has proven to be sensible and plain good practice.

Perhaps this does not help us to have compassion for places that do not put into effect the Torah’s wisdom.  Or does it?  If we are blessed with success and prosperity, then that gives us a responsibility to assist other places in learning the wisdom we possess.  This is why Australia is so quick to send assistance, technical and otherwise, when disaster strikes elsewhere.  As, I’m proud to say, does the United States.  But I’m most proud to point to Israel, and the way she responds when disaster strikes in far-away places.  Despite being a tiny country with a relatively-small population and economy, despite her own ongoing security problems, despite being particularly reviled among the nations of the world, Israel is usually the first to offer, and then provide assistance.  I’ll never forget seeing the Israeli flag flying over the very first aid hospital set up in the wake of Haiti’s devastating earthquake in 2010.  In America’s backyard – but the Israelis were the first to assist.  

If we accept the premise that there is abundant wisdom inherent in God’s law, then we should look for good consequences if we live according to it.  And bad consequences if we do not.  It’s only logical.  And if this book that we lovingly take out and read every week does have intrinsic value and wisdom, then we aught to share that wisdom with the world.  We have a fount of wisdom to share with the world.  To share with others the means to live and prosper.  That’s the Torah’s universal message.  That humanity should live and prosper. 

And that is up to us.  Do thusly – establish good, healthy practices based on timeless wisdom – and it will go well for you.  Fail to do so, and it will not go well.  Those are the choices.  May we make the right one, and influence other peoples to do likewise.  That it may go well for all.