The Art of “What About the Deal?”

Deuteronomy—including this week’s Torah reading, Ki Tavo—proposes a stark incentive system for the Israelites.

Obey the revealed laws of God, and you and your descendants will prosper in the land of Israel (Deuteronomy 28:1-14). The other nations will admire and respect you.

Disobey, and you will be crushed and humiliated by the hostile forces that surround you.

That is the Deal.

The system seemed flawed even to the ancients.

Kohelet, the preacher, Ecclesiastes, saw little comfort in material prosperity and despaired at the prospect of individual oblivion (Ecclesiastes 2:18-21). No consolation for him that you would leave something to your offspring; they might squander everything you worked for.

Job, the righteous, asked why he was afflicted; God, from the whirlwind, says “you, finite mortal, cannot understand” (Job 38:1-4).

The Talmud says why the innocent suffer and the wicked prosper is not for us to know (Berakhot 7a). Best to do God’s work without hope of reward, for the sake of righteousness.

Other faiths found other forms of squaring the circle between doing good and doing well. Christianity, originally a religion by Jews for Jews, eventually settled on the promise of an afterlife in return for the mortifications of the flesh in this world (Matthew 5:12). Some branches of Judaism, including some of the Mitnagdim in the 19th century, would similarly devalue the life of the body on earth in the expectation of serenity and blessing in a world to come.

The ultimate proof that the Deal is broken was the Shoah. The invasion path of the enemy ran through the bloodlands, where millions of Jews lived, many of them the most strictly observant of biblical law. European Jewry was almost eliminated; it appears to now continue on the path to extinction at the hands of its Jew-haters. The state of Israel might be viewed as a miracle, but it would be insane to view the Shoah as the price that a just and merciful God would tolerate.

Let us look at the parties to the incentive system.

There is the Creator, who out of benevolence or curiosity, has endowed one of his creations, humankind, with the capacity to make moral choices.

Simply compelling obedience is not satisfactory to him. Perhaps he partnered with the Jews because they were by nature a people who somehow were marked by an astonishing inclination to question and challenge the authority of all kinds.

You could be God himself and the first Jew would question whether you should wipe out all of Sodom and Gomorrah if there were some righteous among it (Genesis 18:23-25).

Your greatest Prophet, Moses, is always arguing with You – about how you should give the Israelites yet another chance after their latest lapse, whether you should permit Moses himself to see the promised land.

God’s emissaries on earth are often reviled or at least disrespected. You could be the greatest of all prophets, Moses, and your own brother and sister, the high priest himself and prophet himself, could be jealous of your unique ability to channel the will of God (Numbers 12:1-2).

Perhaps God found a special meaning in developing a relationship with a nation among them whose spirits were not easily overcome by superior power and authority. God chooses the Jews for the mission, but the Jews choose to accept it; the condign acceptance of a less troublesome people might have meant less to God, might have disqualified them to be a light unto nations.

God says that he chose the Israelites because they were the smallest of nations (Deuteronomy 7:7) and placed their homeland in the invasion path of three continents. They were by numbers and place especially likely to be crushed. Many times, they were. Perhaps God was fascinated by the experiment of gifting his highest truths to a people who are challenged with the most basic survival.

God wants this people to maintain a distinct identity. He is constantly warning them not to mix with the idolaters (Deuteronomy 7:2-4). God does not want the carriers of his message to assimilate out of existence. He is willing to help them with their physical battles with the neighbors – but only if the Israelites live up to their destiny as being the exemplars of his moral order (Deuteronomy 20:1-4).

Deuteronomy constantly urges us to respect identity. Seeds of different plants should not be planted in the same patch. You can wear linen, you can wear wool – but not the two together (Deuteronomy 22:9-11).

Is identity itself a gift?

Throughout the Torah, there is an explicit link between life itself and the existence of a structured and distinct order. The starting condition of the universe is formlessness. It takes creative energy to produce distinct forms, from the celestial objects all the way through to human life. The rituals of Leviticus are suffused with the idea that distinctness and separation – of peoples, spaces, times – are part of a cosmic affirmation of life on the part of the Creator in which the Israelites join. In Deuteronomy, God asks the Israelites to affirm the covenant – with all of its commitment to justice and righteousness in all aspects of human existence – as equivalent to choosing life.

And life, says God, right in the book of Genesis, is good.

The existentialists artfully evoke the at-sea feeling to which we are prone—to feel isolated, homeless, alienated in a world where people and things seem to be placed arbitrarily, without any inherent structure, order, and meaning. People want to find a defined place in an orderly world, not experience the formless chaos that is described at the beginning of Genesis. Judaism gives people a place in the cosmos, a place in history, a place on the map. It gives them a well-defined program to follow – a detailed set of instructions on specifically what to do to make the chaotic or meaningless kaleidoscope of life experiences fit together into a coherent whole.

My grandfathers both were survivors of persecution in Europe, lost all of their European family to the Shoah, and lived a large part of their lives in poverty in Canada. Yet…

Every day, they said the prayers as God Himself commanded. They had the dignity of knowing, believing that it mattered to the Supreme Master of the Universe that they followed His  revealed laws and praised his mercy and goodness. They might not have prospered in the land of Israel, but every day they could feel, at least for some moments, that they had a place in a nation of priests (Exodus 19:6) – a nation  that not only dwells on earth, but also connects with the heavens.

There is a third party in the incentive-reward system. It is the rest of the world. The mission for the world is to be a “light unto nations” (Isaiah 42:6) – by example, by preserving the revealed order of God’s mind, to inspire the rest of the world.

Which we have. It is not only about modern-day Nobel prizes won. Judaism gave us not only the fundamentals of two world religions – Christianity and Islam – but of the core ideas of modern-day tolerant democracies – which is the inherent moral equality of every human being (Genesis 1:27).

There was an intense debate in the American Congress a few weeks ago when Senator Tim Kaine said that rights do not come from God, but from governments and laws. His idea was that religious ideas can give rise to intolerance.

But the framers of the human rights movement – in the times of the Enlightenment – were inspired by the Jewish Bible. The idea that “all men are created equal” – that this dignity is inherent, regardless of how those in power disregard it – had its roots in ancient Judaism.

So do many of the best ideas in our world.

The idea that the world is created by an intelligent mind that created an inherently orderly world – that was the theology under which modern science emerged.

The idea of the ancient Israelites – the “first historians” – that history is a story of progress, not merely the repetition of patterns, is the basis for our best reflections on the past and best hopes for the future.

Yet we are widely hated.

Much of that hate stems from fulfilling our mission.

Our texts, practices, and key ideas are the basis for Christianity and Islam. Yet having the authority of being the parent religion, our refusal to join in the newer ones is a source of resentment for them. Our Jewishness makes our holding out seem not merely like loyalty to ourselves, but a reproach to those who claim to be our spiritual replacements and successors.

Our loyalty to our identity can seem disruptive to the building of national cohesion or bigger nation.

Our insistence on righteousness and justice can seem like antiquated obstacles to other ideals, such as nationalistic glory.

Our accomplishments in the secular world – by applying our traditional love of learning and search for coherence and rationality to new areas – can trigger envy and jealousy that this little people produced so much, rather than gratitude.

Our survival in wars as a small people can make our military enemies feel humiliated.

We are hated because we have been hated. It is not only that the poisonous myths and false accusations from the past still circulate. It is that our neighbours have acted on them. The past persecutions, above all the Shoah, can create an uncomfortable feeling of guilt on the religions and national movements that inflicted it. What easier way to cleanse their consciences than to portray a restored state of Israel as guilty of the same crimes that they inflicted on the Jews? As Clint Eastwood’s character says in “Unforgiven”, “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.” Nor does factuality. Guilt, willful ignorance, sanctimony, and the continuing status of the Jewish people as among the “smallest of nations” – all have everything to do with it.

Have the people of Israel done well by maintaining their side of the covenant? Those of us who persist feel we must honor those who came before by continuing; that we can find a sense of community with our fellow Israelites; that we have an individual and collective identity that can give us some sense of meaning and wholeness.

Have the people of the wider world benefited from our light? By any objective understanding of the Jewish contribution, we have shone bright and illuminated many areas of darkness.

Has God benefited? We maintained the covenant long after the rewards were there, we maintained it when it brought martyrdom, and many of us even now wish to pass on the legacy. Our God has been silent so long, though, that we cannot be sure.

I cannot offer you a rational answer to the problem of evil in general and the failure of the covenant in particular.

But I can offer three thoughts about responses that transcend reason.

First, the davka principle.

Many times—likely in fact, certainly in fiction, as in Elie Wiesel’s play The Trial of God—groups of Jews have tried God for his breach of the covenant.

The ending is always the same.

As I said in the closing couplet of an unpublished sonnet I wrote over forty years ago:

“They found Him guilty though the trial was fair / And then they went to say their evening prayers.”

The same contrarian defiance that marked the Israelites from the beginning, in the best of us, abides.

Second, “kmo” (כְּמוֹ)—“as if.”

The Passover Seder says we should conduct it “as if” we were personally liberated from Egypt (Pesachim 116b).

Whether your rational side says, you can imagine or hope yourself—aided by techniques such as repetition of the insanely optimistic daily prayers and rituals of Judaism—redemption will come.

Third, “in every generation” (בְּכָל דּוֹר וָדוֹר).

If realism is so reasonable, why are there still Jews, why is there still Israel?

But enough questioning and answering.

Time for davening.

Let me recite what may be the most transcendentally hopeful passage in all of scriptures, who knows, in all of human literature.

A few weeks ago, we read in the synagogues the spiritual selection that accompanies the section from the book of Moses.

It is from the book of Isaiah, chapter 60:

“Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.”

קוּמִי אוֹרִי כִּי בָא אוֹרֵךְ וּכְבוֹד יְהוָה עָלַיִךְ זָרָח