KI TAVO
Ki Tavo, when you come into the land, (26-29:8) is a parsha that mostly focuses on all the things that will go wrong if we do not follow the laws of YHVH.
Chapter 26 begins with how we make the offering of first fruits during Shavuot. It also includes the source text for the recital during the Passover seder about how we were wandering Arameans who went down to Egypt a small group that became a powerful nation, brought out of slavery by the powerful arm of YHVH (26:5-10). This chapter also concludes with another reiteration of the chosenness of the Jewish people.
Chapter 27 starts with a confusing commandment about inscribing everything on plastered walls and building an altar there for sacrifices near Mount Ebal on the West Bank. We are then offered what sounds like a ritual where the people are divided in half, one side for the blessings that will come if they follow YHVH and one side for the curses if they do not. (27:11-14). Yet that’s not what actually happens. Instead, all the people respond Amen to the curses (27:15-26) and there are no countervailing blessings. JPS comments convincingly that this is a blending together of ancient texts and that accounts for the confusion and lack of completion of the ritual.
The blessings begin in Chapter 28, but without the chorus of Amens that are characteristic of the curses. The blessings last for only fourteen verses (28:1-14) but the curses go on and on and are both particularly colorful. Just as an example “Your carcass will become food for every bird of the skies and for the animals of the earth.” (28:26) and go on to include hemorrhoids, scabs, blindness and the utter backfiring of plans such as “You’ll betroth a woman and another man will ravish her.” (28:30). The curses continue all the way through verse 68. Finally, Moses (or better our authors) stop being drunk on the imagination of possible curses, and bring us back in Chapter 29 to the East Bank of the Jordan river and the land given to Reuben, Gad and half of the tribe of Menashe.
I want to discuss four themes.
Gratitude
Jews as Chosen People
The aborted ritual of blessings and curses
The implication of curses being so much more emphasized than blessings
The parsha begins with the ritual of the giving of the first fruits.(26:1-11) The farmer brings the produce to the priest, declares that s/he (this is written as if the farmer is male, of course, but I’ve chosen more inclusive language) has come to the land promised by YHVH, gives the basket, offers the testimony to YHVH as having saved our ancestors from Egypt and bows down. There’s also a description of the ritual for the every third year tithe for the Levite, the alien, the orphan and the widow where the farmer basically testifies that s/he has followed all the laws and maintained ritual purity. (26:12-15)
This is a basic gratitude ritual, coupled with an actual offering beyond just words. The farmer is basically saying I’ve been born into a good land, things could be a lot worse (I could be a slave in Egypt, after all or an orphan, widow or alien) and I am grateful for my blessings. I have walked the path of ritual purity in gratitude for my blessings.
The gift of good land, to use Wendell Berry’s phrase, is an incredibly valuable gift for a people, a gift that underlies the possibility of all other gifts. I remember reading about how Japan was a country without natural resources because it had no fossil fuels or significant deposits of various minerals that get mined. And then I started reading Japanese sources talking about their land and they were singing the praises of the land because of the rain and fertility that let them grow multiple crops of rice along with easy access to the ocean and the blessing of the fish that is such a large part of the Japanese diet. We used to tell jokes about how if only Moses had made a left turn instead of a right turn, he’d have wound up in Saudi Arabia and we’d be rich and the envy of the world (this was after the oil shock of the early 70’s). Only the tribes on the Arabian peninsula lived in a land that is not well watered or fertile, a land that has precious little life compared to ancient Israel—and those were the measuring sticks for most of human existence because we lived or died from our ability to work with what the land gave us. And so our ancestors brought their first fruits in their gratitude for the rain in season and the fertility of the land.
How do you express gratitude for the blessings in your life? Does the expression of gratitude also contain some kind of offering beyond words? How do you express gratitude to the more than human world for the blessings you receive from it? When you give tzedakah, if you do, do you have any kind of verbal formula to express your gratitude that you are able to do it? How much of your tzedakah goes to organizations concerned with the more than human world?
“And to set you high above all the nations that He has made in praise and name and beauty, and for you to be a holy people to YHVH, your God, as he spoke.” (26:19). We’ve seen this core idea in many other chapters of our text, but we haven’t talked about it. The idea is simple: the divine has chosen us as his chosen people. Good things will happen for us and we will dominate all other people as long as we obey his commandments.
Of course, it isn’t that simple. First, history hasn’t been exactly kind to this idea. It’s hard to reconcile the concept of chosenness with the Jewish history of national weakness and victimization. On a personal level, we know that in this life, at least, the good do not always prosper and the wicked do not always suffer—this is a simple empirical fact. Unlike Christianity with a next world orientation or Indian religions with a strong belief in individual karma, appealing to the idea that a good or evil person will get their just desserts in the next world/lifetime has been a hard sell for an ethic that has been oriented towards this world.
This belief in chosenness has also been challenged on a more fundamental level. Do we really want to argue that the divine favors one people over all others? Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, disagreed with this idea so much that he actually changed the words of prayers, including the blessing over the Torah to reject the idea of chosenness. Nowadays, many of us would want to say something like many paths to the divine, and not say that one is better than the other. Is a good Jew better than a good Christian? Are one set of beliefs true and another set false? I wouldn’t want any part of these arguments.
There’s also the problem of hierarchy. If I can set one nation above others, I can set one species over other species. Thus our lives become all about humans and we are free to exploit the more than human world, to treat all other beings as “its” without any possibility that they could be “thous” to use Buber’s language.
Hierarchy is something absolutely found in the more than human world, at least amongst mammals. Watch males fight each other for the right to breed the females, or watch a boss cow determine where the herd will graze. Human organizations simply don’t run without some kind of implicit or explicit hierarchy. Humans, and I suspect most beings, want some structure to their lives, and hierarchy provides structure.
Chosenness as a concept is all kinds of problematic. We can reject chosenness, but the related concept of hierarchy is more ambivalent. Just like I believe that the question isn’t do we steward the earth or not, but rather how we steward, I think the question about hierarchy is not to aim to create a world without any hierarchy, but to investigate how to work with hierarchies in non oppressive ways.
Do you think that any one group of people are holier than any other? If, say followers of a guru or Hasidic Jews don’t behave any better than secular people, is that a problem? How can you work with hierarchies in non oppressive ways? How can you ensure that you are open to the possibility of “thou” relationships with the more than human world?
There’s what sounds like an aborted psychodrama ritual. “Moses commanded the people on that day, saying, “These shall stand to bless the people on Mount Gerizim when you cross the Jordan: Simeon and Levi and Judah and Isaachar and Joseph and Benjamin. And these shall stand for the curse on Mount Ebal: Reuben, Gad, and Asher and Zebulon, Dan and Naphtali.” (27:12-13). Gerizim is the mountain on the southern side of the valley in which Nablus is situated, with Ebal being the northern side. So if I were doing this ritual, we’d have the one group recite the blessings, the other recite the curses, and then come together in council for sharing how it felt to bless or to curse. Only none of that happens, as I’ve mentioned above. There’s an amen to the curses, no amen to the blessings, and no discussion of what it all meant as an experience.
But I’m captured by the idea of doing a psychodrama about blessings and curses. How would it feel to recite all the blessings, to imagine yourself being blessed in the city and in the field, your people, your land and your livestock all being fertile and healthy? (28:3-4) Conversely, how would it feel to be struck with consumption, fever, inflammation, blight and mildew, stuck in an everlasting heat wave with no clouds? ((28:22-23)? How would you feel about yourself? How would you feel about the divine?
There are many more curses than blessings in this parsha. By my count, Chapter 27 and 28 have 66 verses of curses to 14 verses of blessings, or 82% curses. This kind of disparity is hardly unique to Deuteronomy or Judaism. Chinese Buddhists, for instance, always spent a lot more time describing the tortures of the hell realms compared to the bliss of the heavenly realms, and closer to home, some of us got to read the sermons of Jonathan Edwards preaching hellfire and brimstone or watch the televangelists absorbed in being chased by the devil. Why the disparity? There are multiple possible reasons, of course, but I’m going to focus on one theme.
The authors of Deuteronomy want us to behave in certain ways and not behave in other ways. They want us to follow the teachings of YHVH as presented by them, rather than following the folk and more feminist religion of most of the people of their time. So the question facing our author(s) was, consciously or not, how to motivate us in a certain direction. And the text clearly believes that the way to do that is to scare us into behaving, to motivate by fear. Now, speaking as a parent, I have certainly said to my kids, do x or I’m going to take away y. That’s both transactionally oriented and an attempt (too often unsuccessful in my case) to motivate by fear. But boy oh boy, I wish I could have motivated them to do what is right because it was right, not because of being afraid of the big bad wolf. I want my kids to work towards things, not have their actions driven by fear of something from which they are running away.
What do you think of Deuteronomy’s fear based appeal? What role does fear based action play in your life? On the other hand, what role does aspirational action play in your life?
QUESTIONS
How do you express gratitude for the blessings in your life? Does the expression of gratitude also contain some kind of offering beyond words? How do you express gratitude to the more than human world for the blessings you receive from it? When you give tzedakah, if you do, do you have any kind of verbal formula to express your gratitude that you are able to do it? How much of your tzedakah goes to organizations concerned with the more than human world?
Do you think that any one group of people are holier than any other? If, say followers of a guru or Hasidic Jews don’t behave any better than secular people, is that a problem? How can you work with hierarchies in non oppressive ways? How can you ensure that you are open to the possibility of “thou” relationships with the more than human world?
How would it feel to recite all the blessings, to imagine yourself being blessed in the city and in the field, your people, your land and your livestock all being fertile and healthy? (28:3-4) Conversely, how would it feel to be struck with consumption, fever, inflammation, blight and mildew, stuck in an everlasting heat wave with no clouds? ((28:22-23)? How would you feel about yourself? How would you feel about the divine?
What do you think of Deuteronomy’s fear based appeal? What role does fear based action play in your life? On the other hand, what role does aspirational action play in your life?
