Does God Punish?

This week we read two Torah portions: Behar, on the mountain, and Bechukotai, my decrees. Tonight I would like to focus on the second, Bechukoti. This portion begins with a conditional sentence: If you will follow my decrees and observe my commandments and perform them, then I will create blessings for you. The many blessings include rain at its proper time, fruitfulness of the land, peace, and prosperity; success in battle and a special relationship with God. The next conditional sentence starts what is known as the Tochacha, the admonition, and begins, But: if you will not listen to me and will not perform these commandments. Or you consider my decrees loathsome and if your being rejects my ordinances…then I will do the same to you.” What follows is a litany of terrible suffering that increases in its severity: privation, illness, war, exile, calamity, and famine. The English translation of the portion goes on to say that if after a first series of misfortunes we do not listen, “then I shall punish you further.” The question I would like to address tonight is: does God punish? The Hebrew word, Ya’s’ra more literally means to admonish, discipline, or correct: that God is actually communicating with us through the things that happen to us, in an attempt to being us back to a more productive state and relationship. In the Zohar, “R. Jose commented on the verse: My child, despise not the chastening of the God, neither be weary of God’s reproof (Prov. III, 11). Israel, he said, are beloved to God, and therefore God desires to reprove them and to lead them in the right path as a loving parent leads their children, and because of this love God always has the rod in his hand to keep them in the right path and to prevent them from straying to the right or the left.” But we can go deeper into this question.. The sages say that the Torah speaks in the language of human beings. When it says, “with a strong hand” God took us out of Egypt, or we read, “you have found favor in my eyes,” we know that God does not have hands or eyes, and it is just a metaphoric way of speaking. But this is also true about punishing or disciplining or correcting. It is not that God punishes us, but that we experience the results of our acts as punishments. The metaphor I like best is the glass of water. If all of creation is a glass of water and we put dark dye into the water by our actions, then the water will become darker and things will look bleak. If each of us is a source of dark dye, then it will look very dark around us. But say that if, by our good, ethical, and worthy actions we could remove some of the darkness around us? Then the water would lighten and all the water would improve. It’s a good metaphor because it shows how interconnected we all are, that one action really does affect the whole, both positively and negatively. Rabbi Sarah Sager makes a similar point in The Torah, a Women’s Commentary. She writes: “The catalogue of threats and promises is a biblical way to explain how intimate the connection of the natural realm of the universe is to the moral realm. The two realms do not function independently of each other. There is a moral order to the universe as surely as there is a more easily observable natural order….And it is in the moral realm where God cannot function alone. God...kept looking for partners. What did we expect of a God who created the natural universe? That the moral dimension was as afterthought?...God did not neglect the moral realm. On the contrary, humankind did. God kept expecting humankind to behave morally and was constantly disappointed.” In Bechukotai, we are being frightened into compliance, but more importantly, we are being given vital information: that the Universe is all of a piece, a Oneness, that is inescapable. It is not that we are being punished, or disciplined, or corrected; but that we if we choose not to obey the commandments, we are acting against the way the universe is constructed: like jumping up and expecting gravity not to pull us back down. Rabbi Gelberman also teaches that God does not punish. He feels that we do things to ourselves. And this view is borne out in a quotation from Noah. “God saw that the badness of man was great upon the earth…and God had heartfelt sadness.” Not anger, not the impulse to punish, but heartfelt sadness. God would much prefer to bless us and send us blessings. When we get along with each other and help each other, we unlock the Shefa, the flow of blessings for us all. Bechukotai is not about a punishing God. It is about a God who is trying to give us a fighting chance to understand how to be whole and to create wholeness. The Zohar comments about this section of the Torah, “The two, statute and judgment, are connected both on the higher and the lower planes. All the commandments, decrees, and sanctifications of the Torah are attached to these…. Both are intertwined and form one entity, and this is the sum of the Holy Name, so that the one who transgresses against the commandments of the law in effect impairs the Holy Name…the one that gives charity (zedakah) to the poor makes the Holy Name complete as it should be above since zedakah is the tree of life, and when it gives to Zedek (righteousness) the Holy Name becomes complete. Hence he who sets this activity in motion from below, as it were, fully makes the Holy Name.”(112a) There is another metaphor that I have found to be useful in understanding how the Torah is attempting to teach us. If you buy a new piece of electronic equipment: a TV, VCR, DVD player, watch, or camera, and you don’t read the manual, you won’t know how to program it or use it so that it will do what you want it to do. If we fiddle with the thing ourselves, it is unlikely that we will be pleased with our purchase, until we read how to operate it. The Torah is the manual for living. It tells us how to operate the universe, how to operate ourselves in a sense, to experience good outcomes. God has given us free will, because there is no spiritual attainment without free will. God has given us the manual, as Moses says, for our benefit, not to threaten or punish us, but to impress upon us what works and what will not ever have the possibility of working. Our moral life is one of God’s central concerns, and we have been dignified by God allowing us the choice of choosing a loving, giving, ethical life. In Bechukotai, the choices are laid out for us starkly and clearly. Choose blessing, choose plenty, choose knowingly and choose lovingly, so that God’s universe will respond, and as it says, do the same to you.

Inner Fine-ness

This week’s Torah portion is Emor, which means, speak. God asks Moses to speak to the priests about contamination and ritual purity. Priests are not to come into contact with the dead except for the necessity to bury very close relatives. People with certain blemishes or disabilities are not to serve as priests; contaminated people may not eat the sacrifices and blemished animals may not be sacrificed. The cycle of yearly holidays is described and the law that the punishment must fit the crime, almost always applied as monetary damages, is restated, similar to its first appearance in Exodus.
This is a difficult portion for us moderns to read. We don’t agree with excluding people with blemishes or disabilities. So the task is: how to find meaning in a section of the Torah that speaks about a society long gone, a priestly class and sacrificial system abolished 2,000 years ago, and values we no longer affirm? The sage, S’fat Emet quotes Psalm 12:7, “the words of God are pure words, like purified silver, clear to the world, refined.” This verse speaks of purity, refinement; of having standards and of using our powers of discrimination to make certain distinctions. It is, for me, understandable that God would not want us to offer blemished animals for sacrifice. Giving up animals that no one wanted because there were sick, lame, or defective is not a sacrifice at all. It would be giving our worst and not our best. So God wishes us to give our best. The Eternal is asking us to give only that which has value to us, only that which represents the highest in us; and this holds true on a deeper level as well as on the simple, physical level. We are asked to develop standards for ourselves but not necessarily for others; to develop a certain inner fine-ness and to maintain standards of behavior and practice, judging ourselves but not falling into the trap of judging others. There are at least two reasons to develop standards. The Torah says, (Levit 22:9) “They shall guard my safekeeping and they shall not bear a sin over it. And die because of it, for they will have defiled it. I am God who sanctifies them.”
The first reason seems to be protection – our protection. The priests had a dangerous job to do. They worked among the Holy objects in the Tabernacle, upon which the Divine Presence rested. It was important for them to know how to protect themselves. Aaron’s two sons had died perhaps because they had not known how to keep themselves safe from contact with God’s holiness. So when we are indignant about the rules in Emor, one thing to remember is that they may be there for human protection; so that the priests did not make fatal mistakes that would have caused them to come into contact with more power or purity than their humanity could handle.
The second, deeper reason for developing standards is an inner one. A standard can be exclusionary, excluding certain people or groups, or it can be inclusion-ary, a personal goal to strive toward. Now that there is no Priesthood, we are all meant to be priests, as it says in Exodus, “You shall be a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.” Our standards can bring us to find our inner fineness, our inner perfection. When we use our ability to make distinctions to sanctify ourselves by setting inner goals, we do as the S’fat Emet wrote: we bring the precious out of the ordinary. This process of self-refining is holy work. It is the way to make contact with the Godliness in ourselves and the universe. Awe: inner fineness is that quality that Rashi calls accepting upon oneself God’s Divinity. In the Zohar it says, “Wholeness comes to those who have awe of God.” When we strive to express what is highest and finest in ourselves, we cause completion; a wholeness to flow from our actions. Then we feel connected to God and to each other, the deep connection that is really there. There is so much work for us to do in the world: tears to dry, smiles to bestow, love and help to give. To be open to that work heals us and helps us. God asks us to give of our best, for our own benefit. Should we really give anything less?