“Walk with Me”: What are the curses in Bechukotai teaching us?

The book of Leviticus comes to a close with a list of blessings “if you will walk in My statutes…” (Lev 26:3-13), followed by a much longer list of curses that will befall the people “if you will not listen to Me and you reject My statues…” (Lev 26:14-43).

What do these curses and blessings mean, and what can they teach us? The answer to that question is embedded in the progression of those curses. But it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees and get lost in the myriad curses, which end in exile from the land.

Here’s why it’s easy to get lost: when the blessings and the curses are each introduced, it sounds like they come upon us because of disobeying all the commandments. They appear divided from the previous parshah, Behar, which is all about the Shmitah, the Sabbatical year when the land rests, and the Jubilee year, the seventh Shmitah of radical land reform. However, at the end of the whole section, the Torah makes clear what the most important commandment is when it tells us the purpose of exile:

I will desolate the land… then the land will enjoy תרצה her Sabbaths… All the days of her desolation she will rest what she didn’t rest in your Sabbaths when you were dwelling on her. (Lev 26:34-35)

In other words, the most critical commandment is to give the land rest, through the observance of Shmitah שמיטה years, every seventh year, years of release when the land would not be farmed.

The Torah makes clear through the order of the curses what is at stake: the relationship between the people and the land. The curses proceed in stages: if you won’t listen then the first curse will happen, and if you still won’t listen, then the next curse will happen. Since the fundamental aspect of our relationship with the land is that she feeds us, the curses describe the unraveling of that relationship, marked by how we eat and who eats whom.

It’s easy to overlook this progression, since this thread gets woven together with other threads, but here’s what it looks like when we pull those elements together:

1) “You will sow your seed for emptiness, for your enemies will eat it.” (Lev 26:16)

2) “You will completely use your strength for emptiness, and your land will not give her produce and the tree of the land will not give his fruit.” (Lev 26:20)

3) “I will send out against you the wild animal of the field (who according to Lev 25:7 was supposed to share in the Sabbath produce of the Shmitah year) and she will make you childless.” (Lev 26:22)

4) “You will be gathered (like a harvest) into your cities. . . and I will break the staff of bread against you. . . you will eat, and you will not be satisfied.” (Lev 26:26)

5) “You will eat the flesh of your sons and your daughter’s flesh you will eat.” (Lev 26:29)

6) “You will be lost in the nations and the land of your enemies will eat you.” (Lev 26:38)

In summary: your enemies will eat your food, but your land will still produce. Then, your land will stop producing. Then the wild animals, with whom you didn’t share your land and food in the Sabbatical year, will instead eat you. Then you will be gathered like a harvest into the city, instead of your grain, and there you will be unable to satisfy your appetite. Then you will eat your children. Then a strange land will eat you.

Because the Jewish people was in exile for so long, the last curse doesn’t seem like the worst one; because we love our children, the fifth curse sounds the worst. But symbolically, if the land eats us, that represents the final step: a complete reversal of the right relationship between the people and the land.

Unlike the curses, the blessings paint a simpler picture of what it looks like to be in right relationship to the land: the trees and the land will be fruitful, we will live on the land sustainably, lavetach (securely), and the land will have peace (Lev 26:4-6).

Shmitah is the fundamental observance that makes this possible – all other commandments, even though they are important in themselves, also have the ultimate purpose of creating a society capable of observing Shmitah. We even practice for Shmitah every single week on Shabbat. And the Torah tells us in the previous portion, Behar, exactly what the lesson of Shmitah is:

“The land you may not sell permanently לצמיתות (latsmitut), for the land is mine כי לי הארץ, for you are strangers and settlers by/with me כי גרים ותושבים אתם עמדי. So in all the land of your tribe-possessions you will give redemption גאולה to the land. (Lev 25:23-24)

Redemption, which usually means the future we hope for for ourselves, is in this verse what the land needs from us. If we don’t give the land her redemption, the Torah tells us what will happen. And if we do give the land her redemption and the blessings take hold, then:

I will set peace in the land. . . and I will make you fruitful. . . and I will make myself walk in the midst of you and I will become Elohim for you and you will become my people. (Lev 26:6,9,12)

All of it is about the three intertwined relationships: between the people and God, between the people and the land, and between God and the land.

But if the curses unfold, and these relationships unravel, the Torah also says that God will also not sell us לצמיתות, permanently:

Those of you who are left. . . I will bring them into the land of their enemies. . . their uncircumcised hearts will be bent-to-shape. . . and I will remember my covenant. . . and I will remember the land. (26:42)

In all this, we can find the answer to a famous midrashic question:

Why does the section of the Torah about Shmitah begin with the words: “YHVH spoke to Moshe in Mount Sinai saying (Lev 25:1)”? Weren’t all the commandments given on Sinai? Why is Shmitah singled out as special?

And since the section of blessings and curses ends with: “These are the statutes and judgments and which YHVH set between him and between Yisrael’s children in Mount Sinai by Moshe’s hand” (Lev 26:46),* we can also add a parallel question: why does this part of the Torah we are discussing end with “Mount Sinai”?

And the answer, simply, is this: the purpose of Sinai was to create a new kind of relationship between the people and the land, a relationship created through Shmitah, rest and redemption for the land.

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* Note: there is one more chapter in Leviticus, which similarly ends, “These are the commandments that YHVH commanded Moshe to Yisrael’s children in Mount Sinai by Moshe’s hand” (Lev 27:34). That chapter is also about the Shmitah cycle, specifically about the seventh Shmitah, called the Jubilee. So the pattern described above repeats itself there as well: Shmitah and Jubilee are the purpose of Sinai.

There are two more instances where the phrase “behar Sinai” occurs, describing the priesthood and sacrifices, which were enacted immediately at Sinai (Lev 7:38 and Num 3:1). In all other instances where the Torah mentions something happened “behar Sinai” (at Mount Sinai), the verse is describing the actual story of being at Mount Sinai.