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Bechukotai - May 27, 2005

Any modern reader of this week's Torah portion, Bechukotai, is left in a quandary. The portion begins, "If you follow my laws and faithfully observe my commandments, I will grant your rains in their season, so that the earth shall yield its produce and the trees of the field their fruit....I will look with favor upon you...I will establish my abode in your midst...I will be your God and you will be my people. ...But if you do not obey Me and do not observe all these commandments.....I, in turn, will do this to you: I will wreak misery upon you. Consumption and fever, which cause the eyes to pine and the body to languish; you shall sow your seed to no purpose, for your enemies shall eat it..And if you remain hostile to Me and refuse to obey me, I will go on smiting you sevenfold for your sins. I will loose wild beasts against you, and they shall bereave you of your children....I will send pestilence among you, and you shall be delivered in enemy hands...." (Lev 26:3-25) And the list of admonishments goes on.

While it's a simple formula, do good things and blessings will follow, do the wrong thing and you will be punished, we know it not to be true to life. Acting justly, being kind, spending your life in service to others, might be valuable, might be laudable. But none of those things can stay the hand of circumstance, and protect us and our families from all harm. We all have stories of people we know, who didn't get what they deserved in life. I always think of my oldest and dearest friend's mother, a devoted Jewish educator, a great friend and person who was diagnosed with brain cancer at age 50 and died less than a year later. I think about a mother I know trying to take care of three grown children who are all gravely ill. I think of a three year old child who died after battling cancer not too long ago. I think of the parents of that three year old child and how their life has changed forever.

It was Mordecai Kaplan who said, "Expecting God to protect you if you behave justly and honestly is like expecting a bull not to charge you because you are a vegetarian." The formula of this week's portion simply does not hold.

Over the years, I have come to understand that those who canonized the Bible didn't disagree. After all, they chose to include two books which are a direct responses to this week's Torah portion and to the fact of life that bad things happen to good people. The first book is, of course, the book of Job. Job was a righteous man, blessed with seven sons and three daughters and wealth beyond his needs. Until Satan posed the question to God, would Job be so blameless if his life was a little tougher? So God tests him. When Job learns that his children are dead, still he doesn't blaspheme God. Then Satan afflicts Job himself. Again, Job remains devoted to God. The bulk of the chapters in Job's story are of conversations between Job and Job's friends who visit to comfort and console him by urging him to examine and reexamine his deeds for the reason this tragedy has befallen him. When Job can no longer stand the futility of that exercise, he cries out to God Himself. God appears to Job out of the whirlwind, to admonish Job for questioning God's actions and for the temerity for thinking he might understand God's ways. Job recants, God restores his fortune and Job lives on to create another family, seven new sons and three new daughters.

Regardless of whether we find meaning in the answer that Job gets from God or from what happens to Job after his trial, this book opens up the possibility in the Biblical canon that innocent suffering does exist. Even a devout a soul as Job, who appeared to follow all God's rules, who would even command his children to offer sacrifices after a week of feasting just in case they accidently offended God, even he suffered innocently. Today we cannot contemplate innocent suffering without thinking of the Shoah, especially the children. Listen to the testimony of a prisoner who was in Auschwitz in the summer of 1944, at the peak of the extermination of Jews: "...When the Hungarian Jews arrives, we used a music camouflage. At the time the children were burned on big piles of wood. The crematoriums could not work at the time, and therefore the people were just burned in open fields with those grills, and also children were burned among them. Children were crying helplessly and that is why the camp administration ordered that an orchestra be made by 100 inmates and should play. They played very loud all the time.... so that even the people in the city of Auschwitz could not hear the screams. Without the orchestra they would have heard the screams of horror....When one of the SS people sort of had pity on the children, he took the child and beat the head against a stone first before putting it on the pile of fire and wood, so that the child lost consciousness. However, the regular way they did it was by just throwing the children onto the pile."

When such things can happen, there is no denying the existence of innocent suffering and ultimately leads to more questions, like, where was God's whirlwind in 1944?

That is where the other book included in the canon comes in. I lovingly refer to it as the renegade book of the Bible: Kohelet or Ecclesiastes. Kohelet is the narrator of the book, an older and worldly man looking back on his own life and attempting to put the pieces together into a series of life lessons. Essentially, what Kohelet concludes is that ultimate meaning, the answers to life's most difficult questions are utterly vain pursuits. And any simple formulas of what you can expect from life are absurd, since anything can happen, even bad things to good people. Moreover, the God of Kohelet, while He may have established the rhythms of the world and the cycles of life and death, is remote and uninvolved in our lives.

So unlike Job's finale out of the whirlwind, the book of Kohelet is monologue and yields no response from God. From these two books, I have learned that I have Job moments, moments when I am awed by the senseless suffering that I see but still refuse to let go of the idea that God is present in our lives, and I have Kohelet moments, when the meaninglessness of suffering makes God feel so remote as to be absent. It is in my Kohelet moments when it is helpful to turn to another book in the same section of the Bible, the Psalms. When Harold Kushner spoke here recently about his new book, The Lord is My Shepherd, he recounted a familiar experience we all have had. You are at a funeral. Perhaps the deceased is a loved one of yours. You feel your own pain, you contemplate your own mortality. And then something magically comforting happens as the Rabbi leads the assembled in Psalm 23. "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures, leads me beside still waters and restores my soul. He guides me in straight paths for His namesake.

Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me, Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me..." It was that mysterious yet universal sense of comfort in those words, which led Rabbi Kushner to devote a book to this Psalm. I recommend the book to you, but pass along some of the wisdom from Rabbi Kushner's reading of the Psalm. He astutely points out that the psalmist understands that there is a difference in how we perceive our relationship with God when things are going well for us, and when we are walking in the valley of the shadow of death. We notice this in how the Psalmist uses the third person in addressing God in the beginning of the psalm, "He makes me to lie down in green pastures. He restores my soul. He guides me in straight paths for his namesake." But when the Psalm turns to the frightening experience of death, and its shadowy unknown, the psalmist talks to God, in the second person. "Yea, though I through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For Thou art with me, Thy rod, Thy staff, they comfort me..." As Martin Buber taught, the difference between theology and religion is that theology attempts to talk about God, while religion is the experience of God.

The power of the 23rd Psalm to comfort us is the very recognition that we, too, can not only talk about God, but be brought into an experience of God, even as we walk through the darkest times of life. The psalmist neither doubts the existence of evil nor that God will be by his side when he is stricken by it. When Rabbi Kushner was finished with the lecture, the floor was open to the audience. One questioner referred to Kushner's most well known book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, but he mistakenly called it, Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People, to which Kushner responded, "The name of the book is deliberately When Bad Things Happen to Good People, because I wasn't attempting to answer the question, Why?" I find this to be one of the most challenging parts of my rabbinate: my inability to make people's suffering meaningful. I would love to be able to give people a way to look at the deep pains and challenges of life and provide the answer as to why them. After all, a rabbi is supposed to be a facilitator, helping people make the moments of people's lives meaningful. Can life only be meaningful in times of joy and in the ordinary times made sacred?

I have discovered, however, that even in the absence of the answer to the "why" that being with people, making sure they are not alone as they walk through the valley, is where the meaning happens. There was a study done at my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin on pain tolerance. They took some poor students and tested how long they could soak their feet in ice water. What they discovered was universally, a person could keep his foot in the freezing water twice as long, if someone was in the room with them. Think about that the next time you are worried about whether someone will really want to see you while they are in the hospital. Religion, our religion, is the project of making sure no one has to be alone. Even the word, religion is related to the word ligament, that which binds the muscles of our bodies together. When we are there for one another, to remind each other that we are good people, that we don't deserve the pains we are enduring, we feel less deserving, our pain becomes less painful, our misfortune becomes less oppressive.

The same day I heard Rabbi Kushner speak, I happened to have a conversation with someone celebrating her remission from cancer. She proceeded to tell me that even after months of undergoing chemotherapy and radiation, that she wouldn't trade the experience of being so ill for anything. That the way she lives, treasuring the simple moments of life and the people around her would not have been possible without having traveled in the darkness of her cancer. She was not alone. God recognized this in the very first moments of creation: "Lo tov heyot ha-adam levado, it is not good for a humanity to be alone." And so God created others to be ezerei k'negdo, helpers beside us. As we finish this book of Torah, the closing words of Leviticus, let us heed the traditional exhortation we utter upon its completion: Chazak Chazak v'nitchazek. Be strong, Be strong, but when we cannot do it alone, let us strengthen one another.

Amen.

Rabbi Batsheva Meiri