The Forest for the Trees: A Reflection for Parashat Bechukotai, 22 May 2015

In the past few months, we had two occasions where I felt compelled to cancel the Friday evening service because of rain.  In both cases, we weren’t experiencing a little rain.  It was massive amounts of rain that left roads impassable.  And which prompted the local council to ask people to stay off the roads unless there was a very compelling reason to go out.

I like to tell the story of how, a long time ago, I spent an entire Shabbat in the Chabad House in San Antonio, Texas.  As the summer Friday afternoon began its late transition towards evening, there was a rain shower.  This was a gentle rain, nothing like the two aforementioned storms on the Gold Coast.  This Chabad was an old mansion built in the southern style, with larger covered verandahs from and back.  As I was standing on the front verandah, watching the rain sweep across the suburban landscape towards us, I realized that Rebbetzin Chani Block was standing next to me.

“This is what Rashi says Hashem is talking about in the Torah,” she said.

I asked for clarification.

“Where it says I will bring the rain in its season, be’ito in Hebrew,” she explained. “Rashi says be’ito means on Erev Shabbes, because it forces us to slow down and tells us that we don’t have to leave the house for our errands.”

Now I don’t know whether Hashem really meant be’ito to mean ‘Erev Shabbat.”  But I can say that, on the two occasions when it rained all day on Friday, the result was that Clara and I felt far more relaxed than usual on Friday night.  And whilst we missed meeting with our community, at the same time we enjoyed a rare treat of a Shabbat evening at home, and a relaxed dinner with blessings and song and good conversation.  So maybe, just maybe, Rashi had a keen insight on this matter.

This week’s Torah portion, Bechukotai, begins with the same promise:  If you keep my commandments, I will bring the rains in their season.  And a lot of other good things.  Good produce from the land.  Our enemies will be vanquished.  We will see fertility and increase in our numbers.  And then the converse is threatened.  If we don’t follow G-d’s commandments, then every bad result will befall us.  We’re reading it this week in the 26^th chapter of Leviticus.  The other place where such promises are made, which is one of the three passages in the traditional Shema, is the 11^th chapter of Deuteronomy.

The chapter in Deuteronomy is not so familiar to Progressive Jews, because the early reformists removed that passage from the Shema leaving only the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy, and the final two verses from the third part of the Shema, Numbers chapter 15.

When I was first introduced to Reform Judaism, as Progressive is called in North America, I asked my Rabbi, Joel Schwartzman, why Reform had removed Deuteronomy 11 from the Shema.  He told me it was because the sentiments expressed – that everything good was a result of following the commandments and everything bad from not following them – was abhorrent to the reformists.  Imagine, he challenged me, if every time the rains came in necessary measure and time, thinking that it was G-d responding to our merit.  And imagine thinking that every childless woman we met, was so afflicted because of her sins?  So the reformists had decided that this wasn’t a passage of Torah they wanted their members to be most familiar with through repetition.

At the time I accepted Rabbi Schwartzman’s words, because they made sense.  I’d read Harold Kushner’s wonderful book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People and was therefore sensitive to the issue of ‘blaming the victim.’

But just as most of us experience an evolution in our thinking over time, I’ve come to where passages like this no longer repel me.  As I have come to understand the Torah better over the years, I realise that many objections to passages of Torah are a result of not seeing the forest for the trees.

I think we all know this expression, not seeing the forest for the trees.  It means, focusing so much on details that one misses the whole.  In the case of the Torah, it means focusing on individual verses of short passages so that we tend to see them in isolation.  In isolation they can look far different, than in the context of the whole.  This is one of the reasons why, in Jewish life, we do not tend to memorise certain verses in order to use them ‘as weapons’ when engaging in an argument.  Like some of our neighbours do.  Oh, I think that there is a place for verse memorization.  It would be good to have in one’s memory, various verses of comfort and encouragement to use as armour when things are not going well.  But verse memorization is not a common Jewish way to engage in polemics, when we do engage in polemics.

To grasp what the Torah is trying to tell us it helps to have a good understanding of the Hebrew of the original.  That way, one is not held hostage to some translator’s take on a particular passage or word.

When we read these passages about what will result if we follow G-d’s law or not, we tend to think in terms of reward and punishment.  But that’s not what the text is saying here.  It is not promising reward and threatening punishment.  It is simply listing predicted consequences.  The image of a vengeful G-d sitting in judgement – You didn’t follow my law, so here’s what will happen! – is simply a superimposition of a notion that is not contained in the text.  It is a result of adding our own commentary.

I remember, when I was a child, reaching for the stove whilst my mother was cooking.  “Don’t touch the stove,” she warned. “Or you’ll get hurt.”

Now of course, as soon as Mum had turned her back, I reached again for the stove.  And was burned.  And it hurt.  When my mother warned me, she wasn’t telling me that, if I touched the stove, she would hurt me.  She was simply warning me of the likely consequences if I ignored her.

Passages like this are like that.  Hashem has devised for us a complete way of life with a set of laws to live by.  Some have to do with preserving life by carrying out reasonable safety measures.  Build on your roof a parapet.  Some have to do with maintaining healthy relations with your fellow, avoiding publicly shaming him and therefore risking his ire that could lead to quarreling.  Some have to do with how to behave vis-à-vis one’s enemy in war so as to keep the warfare within certain bounds and not causing an unnecessary escalation.  Some have to do with keeping a personal balance, and therefore better ensuring one’s ultimate happiness.  These are the laws, not of a harsh Divine Judge, but of a benevolent God who only wants the best for us.

But what about those who, by all reasonable appearances, keep G-d’s law yet it doesn’t go well for them personally?  The woman who lives according to Torah and yet experiences the pain of childlessness, for example?  The mistake we often make, is to think that Torah is always talking to us as individuals.  Instead, consider that it is, for the most part, an instruction book for a people.  If we follow G-d’s laws, we will be fruitful in the collective.  Someone is always going to be the exception, prospering when they don’t personally merit it or suffering when they’ve been good.  But when the Torah predicts good things as a result for following the law, it means to the Jewish people as a whole.  And even more specifically, to the Jewish people living together in their land.  Hashem can’t give the Jew, living among non-Jews, rain whilst withholding it from his gentile neighbours.  G-d is not omnipotent to that extent!

If we keep all these things in mind, and keep our context straight, then the G-d who comes to us through the Torah text begins to look quite different.  And the text itself looks different.  It is not something to repel us.  If we avoid superimposing a meaning that isn’t there, then the Torah sings to us.  Then there is no ambiguity in the statement all its ways are pleasantness, and all its paths are peace.  Shabbat shalom, and chag sameach!