This week’s Torah portion, Bechukotai, has a very simple message: do good, don’t do bad.
Our parsha begins with a basic Deuteronomistic theology: do good, and things will go well for you; do evil, and evil will befall you.
Simple enough.
As we come to the end of the book of Leviticus, it would make sense to include this formulation: All these laws we’ve been focused on for weeks, I was serious… and if you don’t listen, there will be consequences.
Are we really all such petulant children that we wouldn’t do right but for the sake of promises of reward and punishment?
Maimonides teaches us that the Torah speaks to us in a language we can understand.
So how do we understand a loving God who extends 10 verses worth of positive promises for good behavior at the beginning of Parshat Bechukotai, following up with 30 more enumerating the curses in store for us if we fail to keep our end of the covenant?
Perhaps reading these verses exemplifies a negativity bias.
Our rabbis were want to interpret them otherwise. We read in the Midrash (Vayikra Rabba 35:1) the words of Rabbi Abba son of Rabbi Ḥiyya. “[He] said in the name of Rabbi Yonatan: I calculated blessings, I calculated curses; the blessings are from alef through tav, (essentially God’s overflowing blessings encompass the entire aleph-bet,) the curses are from vav through heh. Moreover, they are reversed.” Rabbi Avin elucidates: [this is God’s way of saying,] ‘If you merit, [if you try to do good] I will transform [even] the curses into blessings for you.”
In the Talmud (Bava Batra 88b), Rabbi Levi compares God’s description of blessings and curses in this week’s parsha to Moshe’s description thereof at the end of the Torah. He said, “The Holy One blessed the Jewish people with twenty-two [letters] and cursed them with only eight… Moses, our teacher, blessed them with eight letters, and cursed them with twenty-two.”
Our sages give God the benefit of the doubt: surely punishment is not the will of the Divine.
They also demonstrate a fundamental human frailty: we are harsh and quick in judgment.
Therefore, in the name of blessing rather than curse, let us endeavor to be gentle with one another, especially when we are most passionate or when we feel we have been wronged.
May we find within ourselves the divine capacity to give each other the opportunity to do good, and, even more radically, the permission to fail and try again. As we close the book of Leviticus, with its myriad mitzvot, expectations and obligations, let us say to one another: Chazak Chazak v’Nitchazeik - We shall be strong and together we shall all be strengthened.
