Menachem Mirski
Thoughts on Parashat Eikev
Why do good people suffer? Why do bad people flourish? This question pondered rabbinic and philosophical minds for centuries. It bothered their minds because this experience directly contradicts one of the pillars of our faith: the oldest and the most fundamental Jewish doctrine of justice – doctrine of reward and punishment, which we express every day in the second paragraph of our V’ahavta prayer, that is included in this week’s Torah portion:
If, then, you obey the commandments that I enjoin upon you this day, loving the LORD your God and serving Him with all your heart and soul, I will grant the rain for your land in season, the early rain and the late. You shall gather in your new grain and wine and oil—I will also provide grass in the fields for your cattle—and thus you shall eat your fill. Take care not to be lured away to serve other gods and bow to them. For the LORD’s anger will flare up against you, and He will shut up the skies so that there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its produce; and you will soon perish from the good land that the LORD is assigning to you. (Deuteronomy 11:13-17)
One of the answers to the aforementioned question is says that the full, complete version of this doctrine of justice not only tells us that good people/actions will be rewarded and bad people/actions will be punished; it also tells us that if you suffer you are punished because you must have sinned, and conversely, if you thrive it means that your good deeds outweigh your bad ones, or – if someone is a really bad person – it’s the Divine patience for the sinner that delays/nullifies the punishment. Sounds logical, right? Absolutely not. At first that kind of reversal of implication seems illogical and without additional premises in reasoning it indeed falls short of logic. However, there are verses in the Torah that justify this reversal, at least on the pragmatic level – the verses of Deuteronomy 32, known as The Song of Moses:
The Rock!—His deeds are perfect, Yea, all His ways are just; A faithful God, never false, True and upright is He. Children unworthy of Him—That crooked, perverse generation—Their baseness has played Him false. (Deuteronomy 32:4-5)
This text defines our default moral position as of very bad people. We are all sinners, terrible sinners, and whenever we think we deserve something we are wrong. We don’t deserve anything but punishment and this theologically justifies all kinds of extreme punishments for relatively small transgressions. An expression of that kind of theological mindset can be found in the rabbinic text Avot de Rabbi Nathan (700-900 CE). The text contains a story that recounts the death of a young scholar. His distressed wife visits the synagogues and study houses in search of an explanation. The text provides no answer until the sudden introduction of Elijah the prophet, which may be a sign that the reasons for such a death lie beyond ordinary minds. Under Elijah’s prolonged interrogation, the woman admits that she and her husband had once slept in the same bed during the last three days of her menstrual cycle, though she was fully clothed so as to preclude intimate contact in accordance with the law. Elijah responds, “Blessed be God who killed him, for thus is it written in the Torah: Do not come near a woman during her period of uncleanness to uncover her nakedness. (Leviticus 18:19)
What does it teach us? Let me start with what this story doesn’t teach us. It teaches us nothing about God. A God who would authorize such cruelty would not be worth believing in. This theological mentality, on the other hand, tells us a lot about the historical and ideological context of some of the principles of our religion, especially those principles that seem to us to be taken too far, even to the point of absurdity and contrary to common sense. If a relatively minor sin can incur a Divinely enforced death penalty, no wonder the rabbis instituted so many fences around the Torah. It doesn’t mean that these fences are bad or wrong, whether we feel bound by them or not, they are also here to teach us something. But whenever we think we are in position to judge others because they are not strict or not “kosher” enough we should keep in mind that the very doctrine delineated above was the context of many halachic regulations and that the people who are not keeping the laws as we do may not be ‘sloppy’ or ignorant – they may have some serious reasons for doing the things their way.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Menachem Mirski
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