BECHUKOTAI 5784
Bechukotai, By My Laws (26:3-27:24) is the last chapter of Leviticus, although Numbers (1:1-10:10) are also priestly documents and would have fit in perfectly well in Leviticus. The divisions into books of the Bible were finalized sometime around 400 BCE during the Second Temple period after the return from Babylon. Bechukotai is read in conjunction with Behar in non leap years.
Bechukotai has two basically unconnected parts. Chapter 26 is a list of all the blessings we will receive if we observe divine commandments and then all the curses if we do not. Naturally, the curses capture the imagination of our authors, and the list is longer and much more colorful than the list of blessings. Chapter 27 is all about the details of appraising the value of different things—people, land, animals and having a surcharge of 10 or 20% for YHVH. This surcharge goes to the priesthood and helps support them because they do not have any land.
I want to discuss four themes.
The implications of the curses being longer than the blessings
The promise of the elimination of wild animals
Paying religious specialists
The oddities in the text.
The curses are longer than the blessings. The blessings go from verse 4-12 in Chapter 26. The set up, as will become really familiar in Deuteronomy, is “If you will go by my laws, and if you will observe my commandments, and you will do them.” (26:3), all these wonderful things will happen. The blessings close with the justification for all laws post Exodus: “I am YHVH your God, who brought you out from the land of Egypt, from being slaves to them.” (26:13). Then come the curses “But if you will not listen to me, and not do all these commandments and if you will reject my laws and if your souls will scorn my judgments so as not to do all of my commandments, so that you break my covenant, I too, I shall do this to you: (26:14-16). The curses actually come in 4 waves (16-20, 21-22, 25-26, 29-39) with a chance to repent and follow YHVH’s laws after each wave. The curses start moderately enough with sowing seed in vain because the enemy will eat it to culminating in exile from the devastated land. “You will perish among the nations, and your enemies’ land will eat you up, and those of you who remain will rot for their crime in your enemies’ land and also for their fathers’ crimes with they they will rot.” (26:38-39)
This great elaboration of the curses is also found, I would suggest, in Buddhist descriptions of Hungry Ghosts and hell realms which are much more elaborate than descriptions of Boddhisattvas, in Dante whose descriptions of hell are much more compelling than his descriptions of paradise, in the hellfire and brimstone preachers that are so common in so many periods of American history. So not something unique to us.
I think we see this emphasis on evil consequences partly because of the belief that such descriptions will be more motivating of moral action than describing the benefits that come from being good, and partly because the forbidden is more appealing precisely because it is forbidden. Both of these motivations seem immature to me. They result, at best, in surface compliance rather than deep transformation.
We need moral compliance as a minimum standard for things like taking care of each other and of the more than human world. Moral compliance is not nothing, as we see in the widespread intolerance of the other that is present in our world. And we need transformational change, because that’s what roots morality in the deep soil of our souls. We live in a world where the nurturing of the deep soil of our souls is poorly tended.
What do you think is the relationship between moral compliance and deep transformation? What two or three areas beg for moral compliance in the world? Where do you need deep transformation in your life?
“I will give you peace in the land, and you will lie down with no one making you afraid and I shall make wild animals cease from the land and a sword will not pass through your land.” (26:6). This vision, which is echoed and elaborated by Ezekiel, a priest and a prophet who prophesied during the Babylonian exile (Ezekiel Chapter 34) is that rightly ordered worlds don’t have any wild animals. We all want security and this is precisely the promise being extended. As YHVH says in the preceding parsha talking about shmita “And you shall do my laws and observe my judgments and do them, so you will live on the land in security. And the land shall give its fruit, and you will eat to the full, and you will live in security on it.” (Leviticus 25:18-19).
I love security. I’m a huge fan of predictable patterns in my life. Wild animals scare me—I’m back to taking my dog out on a leash to pee at night because a wild coyote family has joined the neighborhood and even though he is 55 lbs, coyotes scare me. I tend to keep a really tight leash on anything unpredictable.
The promise of no wild animals is a wrong promise for both spiritual and anthropocentric practical reasons. Practically, wilderness serves a great variety of beneficial functions for humans that we don’t recognize and therefore, in our hubris, mistakenly assume don’t exist. Think of the destruction of forests for palm plantations in Asia or the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest to provide grazing land as simple examples. Think of the destruction of coastal wetlands providing protection for places like New Orleans from hurricanes. The examples are literally countless.
On a spiritual level, we need wilderness. We need a counterweight against our tendency to be human centric. Wilderness impresses us as a place where we simply aren’t the center. We also need to incorporate wilderness within us because it is the source of so much of our creativity. If we were completely civilized, if there were no wild animals outside or inside of us, we would be spiritually and eventually literally dead. This is a vision of a mutually reinforcing relationship between internal and external wilderness. Most of us, certainly including me, suffer from a wilderness deficit.
I wanted to ask this question “how well are you tending your wild edges?” There is an interesting inherent tension in this question. On the one hand, wildness can’t be tended, else it wouldn’t be wild. On the other hand, if we don’t tend it, the overwhelming gravitational pull of human centric civilization will swallow us whole.
Where does wilderness or wildness play a role in your life? How well are you tending your wild edges?
Financial support of religious specialists is a tricky issue. The entire burden of Chapter 27 is how to support the Levites who are busy maintaining the divine order. In our world where we are oriented towards me, we don’t want to pay for religious specialists such as Rabbis—and guess what, neither did our ancestors, judging from this chapter. In some traditional societies, religious specialists were often part timers who participated in the rest of normal economic life. That only works if most folks participate in maintaining the sacred order, rather than delegating it to the specialists. Leviticus is actually arguing for the delegation.
I think there are two different problems here. In our society we tend to want to delegate taking care of sacred tasks to the religious specialists—but not support them. That’s unsustainable. Taking care of our spiritual teachers is part of how we are oriented towards community; the fact that they aren’t being taken care of is indicative of the weakness of our communities. The Baal Shem Tov, as an example, eventually made his living as a community supported mystic, in a time when communities actually tended to support a few such people. Community weakness is a spiritual weakness that will bite us in the behind. Promise.
These comments about not supporting religious specialists equally apply to a broad range of nonprofit work for instance directors of peace centers or workers with the homeless etc.
There’s also a spiritual danger in being a religious specialist disconnected from normal economic life. That spiritual danger is arrogance. It is too easy to believe that you are above the messiness of economic activity and thus look down upon us peons who toil. Your arrogance says to you that you are entitled to be supported by normal people. And if you think that ends well, I invite you to look at our Universities today which are a mess in part because of their sense of entitlement. I invite you to look at young people who feel entitled. As those of us who are parents have often enough told our kids, just because I love you and want to give things to you, doesn’t mean that the rest of the world is going to give you what you want. You’ve got to earn it.
How well do you support the religious specialists who have a role in your life, either with time or money? If you view your work as some kind of sacred calling, how well are you also grounded in the practicalities of life?
The last topic is the discordant nature of the writing and editing. Most of the other parshiot have some consistency in how they communicate what they are seeking to convey, but this one is just weird. First, there’s the blessings and curses. Friedman translates this as if it were poetry and thus akin to what we seen in the Prophetic writings, and Artscroll and JPS do not. My Hebrew isn’t good enough to evaluate the arguments for and against translating this as poetry, but for sure the whole tone is different than the rest of Leviticus. It is jarring.
Then there is the structure of the chapters. Chapter 26 closes with this verse: “These are the laws and the judgments and the instructions (Torah) that YHVH gave between YHVH and the children of Israel in Mount Sinai by Moses’ hand.” (26:46). Nice summation. This sure seems like a culmination of all of Leviticus. But then comes Chapter 27 about how to support the Levites. Huh?
We could simply chalk this up as a bad editing job. Put Leviticus 26:46 at the end of Chapter 27 and call it good. Or the priestly editors are rereading the book and realize they don’t have enough about how to support the priesthood financially so tack it on the end.
But maybe the discordance is deliberate. So you think you know that Leviticus is mostly this boring repetition of lots of laws and how to do sacrifices with almost no narrative? Let’s jerk you around so that you are pulled up short and stop to think if Leviticus (and by extension the priesthood as a whole) are really just a bunch of boring rules.
Being open to being confounded by the unexpected is at the heart of spiritual experience. Spiritual practice is all about waking up from the dogmatic slumbers into which we all fall. Being spiritually asleep is comfortable, secure. But unless you are in a really well functioning community where most people are awake to the more than human world and to the divine, being asleep isn’t working particularly well. Where are you asleep in your life?
QUESTIONS
What do you think is the relationship between moral compliance and deep transformation? What two or three areas beg for moral compliance in the world? Where do you need deep transformation in your life?
Where does wilderness or wildness play a role in your life? How well are you tending your wild edges?
How well do you support the religious specialists who have a role in your life, either with time or money? If you view your work as some kind of sacred calling, how well are you also grounded in the practicalities of life?
Where are you asleep in your life?
