Stuff Doesn’t Just Happen: A Drash for Parashat Ekev, Friday 15 August 2014

This week, Clara and I attended an interesting seminar on conflict resolution.  It’s something I wish we’d taken four months ago!  The truth is that anytime you learn something new about conflict resolution, it’s too late.  After all, our lives are essentially a string of conflicts.  There’s always one that just passed.  On the other hand, conflict resolution skills are always timely.  This, because there’s always another conflict around the corner!  So you can’t win.  But on the other hand, you always win.  Makes perfect sense, yes??!

          So we sat in this seminar all day Tuesday.  And we didn’t learn anything we didn’t already know.  But it’s always good to confirm things you do already know.  To be reminded.  Because in the business of living, it is easy to forget truths that we’ve already learned.

          One thing that’s easy to forget is the rule of causation.  That is, that things don’t just happen.  There’s always a cause.  Sometimes multiple causes.  But things don’t happen in a vacuum.  There’s always a proximate cause.

          This rule causes us no small amount of discomfort.  Because when stuff happens to us, we don’t like to trace it back to its source.  That’s because, the source is often – usually – ourselves!  Oh, I don’t mean that bad things happen because we’re necessarily bad people.  I’m not saying that we intend for bad stuff to happen.  I’m only saying that bad things don’t just happen.  No more than good things just happen.  To every event, there’s a proximate cause.

          Our sacred literature is full of causative statements.  You know:  if-then kind of statements.  If ‘A,’ then ‘B.’ Some scholars, pointing out that the Book of Deuteronomy in particular is full of such statements, call this causative mindset, Deuteronomistic Theology.  Now that’s a mouthful.  All it means that this particular book of the Torah, consisting of Moses’ swan song sermons, repeatedly uses causative reasoning.

This week’s Torah portion, Ekev, starts out with one.  If only you keep these laws, safeguarding and keeping them, then Hashem will keep the covenant and love with which He made an oath to your ancestors. Moshe Rabbeinu is asserting that God’s love is not unconditional.  At least, God’s favour is not.  It’s quite conditional.  If we keep God’s laws, then God will keep the covenant of Moses.  If so, the corollary is also true:  If we do not keep God’s laws, then God will not keep the covenant with us.  Does that make you uncomfortable?  I’m guessing that it does some of you hearing or reading these words, because we have been conditioned to understand that the truest love is unconditional.

Our Christian neighbours after all, believe in a God who loved humanity so unconditionally that he sacrificed Himself to let us live despite our iniquities.  If that’s not unconditional love, I don’t know what is.  Okay, it isn’t really unconditional.  You have to believe it in order to benefit from it.  But belief is a small price to pay for a love that is given otherwise without condition – not based at all on the merit of the recipient.  No wonder there are more than two billion Christians in the world, and a ‘paltry’ eighteen million or so Jews!  How can a theology that offers unconditional love not have great appeal??!

Okay, I’ve simplified to make a point!  Not all Christians believe in unconditional love, but many do.  And they will tell you that a child’s mentality in this regard is a good thing.  It makes it easier to achieve salvation.  Being adult-like is an impediment.  But that’s not the Jewish way of looking at it.

Dennis Prager has some choice words to offer about the concept of unconditional love.  He tells us that unconditional love, such as that of a mother towards her child, is something worthy only of a child.  When we grow up, we should outgrow the notion that anybody owes us unconditional love.  An adult should be ready to earn someone else’s love.  An adult should understand that love is not free.

That’s a bitter pill for some to swallow.  Let’s be honest; there are adults who are little more than overgrown children.  And one of the hallmarks of such a man-child or woman-child is a need to be loved unconditionally.  But Deuteronomistic Theology informs us that God’s love is not unconditional.  God’s love transcends that of any of us, is capable.  So if God does not love unconditionally, then we should certainly not expect unconditional love from one another.  We should be ready to earn someone else’s love.

 So life is causative.  Not always in the deliberate sense; that’s self-evident.  If the young woman hadn’t left the house exactly when she did, she would not have been killed by that drunk driver.  She didn’t consciously decide to be killed by that drunk.  But on the other hand, it didn’t just happen.  There was a chain of events that caused the tragedy.  Likewise, a chain of events and decisions causes virtually everything that happens to us.  That doesn’t mean that we should blame the victim.  Perhaps, it means that we should not be so quick to see ourselves as victims everytime something goes wrong.

This causative effect is especially true in human relations.  It is unrealistic to expect everybody to act rationally all the time.  If you do expect this, you’re setting yourself up for deep disappointment!  Because we human animals tend to be emotionally driven.  Emotions are not necessarily irrational.  Rather, they’ve a-rational; they simply have nothing to do with rationality!  But despite this a-rational aspect of human interactions, we can still have a lot of control regarding outcomes.  Emotional responses cause us to say and do things that we later regret.  So when someone thus responds to us emotionally, we can let it pass and not take offence.  Because often, no offence was meant.

From this week’s Torah reading, we can understand the causative nature of just about everything in life.  But from our understanding of human nature, we can choose to not hold others to an absolute standard.  Because if we do, we will constantly be in conflict with others.  Some conflict is inevitable.  But some, at least some, can be averted.  If we, in understanding human nature, will just cut others a bit of slack.  Think about it.  Shabbat shalom.