Tochacha: Learning to Wrestle With a Savage God
TOCHACHA: LEARNING TO WRESTLE WITH A SAVAGE GOD
By Eli Kavon
Sefer Vayikra challenges the most seasoned writer of divrei Torah. Much of the Book of Leviticus seems foreign to us, adherents of a religion that has not been Temple-based in 2000 years. But even so, sacrificial ritual is certainly not the only difficult aspect of the biblical book for us moderns to accept.
The climax of Vayikra—known as “the Tochacha” (the reproof)—is far more disturbing in its implication than the sacrifices and Temple ritual which dominate much of Leviticus. The Tochacha, which spans most of chapter 26 in the portion of Bechukotai, has troubled Jewish thinkers for centuries. In her Studies on Vayikra, brilliant Professor Nechama Leibowitz raises seminal questions Bible commentators had about the Tochacha.
The name “Tochacha” is a misnomer. In the second half of this week’s double portion, God does far more than threaten the Israelites preparing to enter a Promised Land filled with idolatry. He first promises that He will reward them with blessings if they keep His ordinances and commandments. For example, God tell the Israelites, “I will give peace in the land, and ye shall lie down, and none shall make you tremble: and I will rid evil beasts out of the land, neither shall the sword pass through your land” (Lev.26:6) Only if they fail to follow His words and pursue other gods should they expect many curses.
But the emphasis on censure is natural: There are 31 verses of reproof with only 13 of blessing; and the curses are more vivid than the blessings. They are terrifying. If the Israelites do not follow God’s word in Canaan, and instead worship foreign gods, “Ye shall eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters ye shall eat” (Lev. 26:29). This is not a God of compassion but of severe punishment.
“The empty-handed have asserted that curses exceed the blessings,” writes Abraham Ibn Ezra, “but that is not true. The blessings were stated in a general fashion, the curses in detail to deter and frighten the hearers.” Ibn Ezra—the Sephardic poet, grammarian and renowned Bible commentator –believes the rabbinic saying the “The quality of Divine goodness is more abundant than the quality of His retribution.”
Isaac Arama, a master of homiletics who was an exile from Spain in 1492, addresses another question about the Tochacha that has bothered Jewish thinkers: Why were God’s rewards and punishments material and not spiritual?
In his Akedat Yizhak, Arama writes: “Religious thinkers of other faiths who believe in Divine reward and punishment take the Torah to task on this point. Since spiritual reward is the chief aim of the Torah, why did it keep silent on this point, and allude to the transitory, material rewards, holding them out as incentives to men for their obedience to the laws?”
Arama’s fears are not just those of the medieval Jew. The argument that the God of the Jews was primitive and that Jesus introduced the spiritual ethos into a tribal and material religion can be found in the writings of great American Founding Fathers Johns Adams and Thomas Jefferson. While the sons of the Enlightenment argued that Jews should be treated with respect and accepted by Christians, they also expected that Jews would come to their senses after their liberation from the ghetto and become citizens of the world and good Christians. The God of the Tochacha, savage and committed to the destiny of one nation, had no place in a brave new world in which all men were created equally but in the image of a white male Protestant. This accusation that Jews were material and anti-social is unfair—ethics and compassion play an important role in the Hebrew Bible and thousands of years of Jewish texts that follow the Holy Scripture of our people.
Jewish commentators on the Bible have presented many reasons for the absence of spiritual rewards and punishments in Bechukotai. For Moses Nahmanides, material reward and punishment are part of a special Divine dispensation. But with regard to an afterlife, the Torah uses indirect allusions since “the separate existence of the soul and its communion with God is a fact of nature. It must necessarily return to the God who gave it.”
While some modern historians date the appearance of the soul in the Hebrew Bible to a post-Torah period—explaining its absence in Leviticus—we should not dismiss the point Nahmanides makes: the Tochacha is delivered before the Israelites are supposed to enter the Promised Land—not before that point and not after. God is giving the Israelites the choice to choose Life or Death, Redemption or Exile. God promises the Good before he ever warns of the punishment. A tragedy of modern times is that some Jews play into the hands of Thomas Jefferson and embrace the God of Israel as a savage God whose only purpose is to destroy enemies and punish those who are not “Torah-True Jews.” Compounding that tragedy are those Jews who also accept the caricature of a stern, tribal God and reject all of their belief because they cannot accept a God, who sometimes can be stern and punishing as in the Tochacha.
At one end of the spectrum are Jews who derive power from the censuring God alone, ignoring the concept that all human beings are created in God’s image and should benefit from God’s mercy. On the other end of the spectrum are atheists who can’t handle a Supreme Being who, at times metes out justice. Of course, there are no easy answers, especially after the Shoah and the reality of a state of Israel that must deal with enemies like Iran, threatening the existence of the Jewish people.
But, as Nahmanides makes clear, the Tochacha is an event limited to the Jews poised to enter Eretz Yisrael after the Exodus. The parallel between the generation receiving God’s curses and blessings in the Bible and the Jews returning to Israel today is faulty. But often, the most impotent members of a society will embrace an image of God—or a rejection of God—that will give them power. Rather than try to influence Israel and the Diaspora positively and peacefully—a slow, arduous process—living the Tochacha fantasy is a quick fix.
Yet, to ignore the savage God of the Tochacha is to worship a God with whom we—and the Christian West—are comfortable. If God is simply mankind’s clock maker or the mystery behind the Big Bang, I would rather believe in nothing. As a Jew, I embrace God’s mercy and compassion. Yet I also accept the God of the curses—with periodic reservations and doubts concerning God’s justice. The fact that the rabbis canonized the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible demonstrates that suffering as divine punishment troubled our sages 2000 years ago. And that was despite the savage punishments that appear in the Tochacha.
Ultimately, though I will never look in God’s face—I can wrestle with a deity shrouded in mystery. I am not looking for a Divine Friend or a Celestial Buddy. Nor am I looking for a Great Dictator to manage every aspect of my life. To paraphrase Pascal, my God is not the God of the Philosophers but the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. There will always be questions. But the God of the blessing and the Tochacha is my God and the God of my people. I have had to learn to wrestle with the savage and punishing aspects of God and come to a conclusion why Jews suffer when they are following God’s word. It is all very troubling. Yet, If I only believe in a God who fits somebody else’s caricature, then that God is an idol ready for smashing.
The writer is a rabbi, essayist, and lecturer in West Palm Beach, Florida.