5th year sermon: Parashat Ki Tavo
Sometimes, because I teach 7th grade religious school, I get to use memes as an educational tool. For the uninitiated, Oxford Languages defines a meme as “an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations.”
I bet we’ve all seen something like this, but here’s an example of one with which I think we can all deeply resonate. (please reach under your chairs) This is a photograph shot through the front windshield of a car that features a cow flying through the air a la Twister…The caption reads: “I’d normally ask a question, but it’s 2020 so I’ll just keep driving.”
If my memory serves correctly, I think that would be a fair response in 2020. I also think it would be a fair and understandable reaction in 2024. For many, both of these years and the ones in between feel like they have been full of curses. For the last few years we have collectively experienced calamity, panic, and frustration. Our rain has turned to dust, we have been stricken with disease, we have been put to rout before our enemies. We are all but driven mad by what our eyes behold. It feels like our global circumstances rhyme too well with the curses in this week’s parsha, Ki Tavo. The curses rhyme, but the causes are dissonant.
In Ki Tavo, Moses and God present a short list of blessings and an extensive list of curses to the Israelites as the future consequence for how faithfully they would or would not follow God’s commandments. I do not believe that the theology of divine reward and punishment, as the Torah describes it, is true to the nature of God or the universe. Instead, I propose that there is a system of human-divine partnership through which we must act blessings into the world.
We must understand that when God, through Moses, said (and I’m paraphrasing) “If you do these commandments, you will be blessed,” it was not a promise of something that God would DO for us, but rather a true statement of cause and effect. Blessings only come by our striving to make them happen, as the natural effects of fulfilled commandments. To receive blessings takes a great deal of effort. No wonder the list of curses is so long. Curses don’t require anything of us.
Two summers ago I completed a unit of CPE at Children’s Hospital here in LA, where I saw some pretty awful curses. When my patients arrived in the hospital, often the curse that brought them there happened in an instant, and always by accident. The miraculous process by which two sets of DNA combine into one and replicate into a growing and changing human being requires near-infinite perfection and, for perhaps no real or comforting reason, things can sometimes go wrong. It is not fair nor just. It’s life, which means that sometimes, tragically, it’s also death.
During my summer at CHLA one of my long-term patients died, but I wasn’t there when it happened. She was an infant who had lived her few precious months in need of a liver transplant due to liver failure. This patient happened to be Jewish, which meant that it was my job to bring her family their weekly shabbat kit from Chai Lifeline. The last Friday before she died, I brought the kit and had a brief but meaningful chat with her father. He told me that there was good news, that there might be a liver for his daughter. She was first on the list and there was some discussion with their medical team that they should be ready to shift into transplant prep mode. He was cautiously optimistic, but very aware of the very real possibility that she might not survive the surgery. We prayed for good outcomes and for his wife’s well-being in all of their tzuris and strife, and I went home for the weekend.
As soon as I walked back into the spiritual care department on Monday morning, I learned from a colleague that there had been a liver for my patient, but that after it arrived, final testing determined that it was not a viable organ. After the physical stress of surgical prep, my patient took a turn for the worse and was transferred to the NICU, where she spent the next 24 hours until she passed away on Sunday. Sometimes, despite our best efforts at making blessings, curses come anyway. All the more so, then, blessings need us to bring them, and they are awe-inspiring to witness when they come to fruition.
During that summer another baby girl, just 20 months old, received a bone-marrow transplant from her father after eight months in the hospital waiting to be strong enough to receive it. I met with her family twice on purpose, in their room, and once by accident when I ran into them in the hallway downstairs. That time, mom, dad and baby were all together, and they had their car keys out. They were headed home from a follow-up appointment. The blessing of a child returning home healthy is monumental, and it takes a monumental effort to keep the curses at bay.
It is not lost on me that the blessings I experienced directly and vicariously as a chaplain were the sum of specifically human effort. I do believe that God is involved, in ways that are and will remain imperceptible, but I am convinced that if we want blessings, we are required to act.
How, though, are we meant to act for maximum blessing? How do we know where to start? If we were not Reform Jews, we might believe that the answer is to go right back into the text and try to figure out which commandments we are failing to properly uphold. We are reform Jews and this is not our theology…but I still think we may need to go back into Torah. However, when we look deeply in our texts it is not to find some fatal error, but rather it is to find guidance towards tangible, positive acts of blessing.
In her chapter titled “Radically Free and Radically Claimed,” Rabbi and scholar Dr. Rachel Sabath Beit-Halachmi considers the ways that Liberal Jewish theology must evolve in our time. She describes several interrelated ideas and phenomena that we must take into consideration while developing our new theology. The study of Torah is what ties all of these ideas together. She writes that, “The study of canonical texts must continue to be the ground from which all Jewish ideas spring.” This means that when we innovate new ways to participate in the living practice of Judaism, those ways must remain connected to our fundamental texts and traditions.
Rabbi Sabath Beit-Halachmi also notes the phenomenon of Reform Jewish commitment to Tikkun Olam (repairing of the world). Tikkun Olam, as a concept and value, is often spoken together with a set of words from all over The Torah: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” These two ideas are often held up as representative of the Jewish moral values that will allow us to bring about the most and highest degree of blessing in the world. This may be true, but without rich layers of interpretation of their source, we may find that both are limited to the realm of buzzwords. How do we bring these words off of posters and protests signs and into the tangible work of our hands and hearts?
To help us locate ourselves in the search, we might look to medieval rabbi (and specified genius) Saadia HaGaon, who wrote that there are two classes of Law in Judaism: Rational laws that fit within reason and laws that do not. Within the category of laws that comply with Reason, there are three groups, the third of which includes laws that relate to justice, equity, kindness, and “loving our neighbors.”
When we consider following commandments with an intention to bring blessings into the world, this third category of rational law must be the locus of our focus. This category contains the commandments that, with thoughtful contemporary interpretation, can give voice to what we mean when we say “Tikun Olam” and “Love your neighbor.” With these laws we might answer questions that we often ask ourselves: What tools can I use to make the repairs implied by Tikkun Olam? If we are meant to love our neighbors as ourselves…how? How do we actually bring blessings into the world?
At least one of the answers is in the very parsha we study this week! We learn in Deuteronomy chapter 26 that, once the people are brought into the land, they will become responsible to tithe their produce to share with the levite, the stranger, the orphan and the widow. No matter that we are not in the land and, I would guess most of us here are a little light on our farm experience, we can interpret this verse and find ways to carry forward the inherent blessings in the commandment!
Sharing our food repairs part of the world by forming community across classes to prevent isolation, and it fills in the empty space in the stomachs of the hungry, so that all can thrive through the bounty of the literal fruits of God’s world. This commandment tells us we must participate in or create the financial or physical acts of service that will contribute to feeding hungry people in our own communities. This commandment to share also tells us about loving our neighbors.
The Ramban explains that the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves is not possible in a literal sense. Rather, one is commanded to want for our neighbor what we want for ourselves. To feed another from our own fruits is a tangible way to demonstrate that type of want and mutual support. To feed another is to give them the blessing of life.
When I worked at Children’s Hospital, active interpretation of our traditions is what helped me to be an active blesser, even when it felt like I was drowning in curses. I studied the idea of Bikur Cholim, a rabbinic innovation that suggests that one of the acts we are obligated to in this world is to visit the sick.
I did not and do not feel bound by the legal requirements dreamt up by our Talmudic and medieval sages, but I was able to use the laws to guide my practice. For example, the Rambam writes that the commandment is not fulfilled if the visitor does not pray for the sick person. I took this guidance to heart, considered the meaning within the act of praying on behalf of a patient or with a patient, and also thought about the practical concerns that might make it impossible or uncouth to pray for a patient.
With the original text in mind, with consciousness to the nature of the environment of the hospital, and with attunement to patients’ individual needs, I was able to participate in bikur cholim in a way that paid dividends in blessings to me and, I pray, to my patients as well.
This is the method which I want to suggest to all of us today, but more so I want to invite us to share with our communities. It may be obvious to us here, at the Hebrew Union College, that commandments require our engagement, but we must also encourage this practice by the individuals in the communities we serve. None of us should shy away from the broad or deep study of our Jewish canon, especially not because of our lack of halakhic obligation. Rather, in the spirit of Rabbi Sabath Beit-Halachmi, we must help the people whom we serve feel as so many of us do: radically claimed by our peoplehood and tradition.
Let us remind ourselves and them that some acts and commandments are worth fulfilling, Im lo lmaaneinu, lmaan re’einu ulmaan hashem. If not for our own sake, then for the sake of our neighbor, and for the sake of God. I truly believe that if we commit ourselves to acting with the intention to bring blessings to the world, and we base those actions in our Judaism, we can bring about a world in which the list of our blessings far exceeds the list of curses, and where a flying cow would once again stop us in our tracks. May this be our will.
