Life is like a box of chocolates — you know exactly what you're going to get, because the packaging is well labeled and each chocolate looks slightly distinct, so you can tell the tasty ones from the ones filled with, like, raisin nougat. What I'm trying to say is that you've been a good little kid, and as a reward, you're going to get the very best chocolates in this box, because G_d says that life should be fair
But is it?
Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss. See our upcoming Shabbat services and programs here, and follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook for more updates. Check out Shabbat Replay on Contact Chai for more from Rabbi Deena.
Transcript
Welcome to The Morning Scroll! I'm Rabbi Deena Cowans from Mishkan Chicago and you're listening to what will be a quick dive into this week's parsha. If you’ve been meaning to brush up on your Jewish literacy, or you’re looking for some inspiration, you’ve come to the right place. This week, we read Parashat Eikev, a big ole If. We’ll start with a brief recap:
If the Israelites keep the commandments, they will be blessed, and their enemies will be vanquished. Moshe reminds the Israelites to destroy all the idols and idol worship-y thing when they enter the land, then reminds them of all the stuff they went through in the 40 years in the desert. He tells them that they shouldn’t get so comfortable with their new wealth that they forget where it came from, or they will lose it all. He then goes for the gut, telling them that they’re not getting to enter the land and get all these blessings on their own merit, it’s just because god made a promise to their ancestors. In fact, he says, you lot nearly boofed the whole thing by doing stupid stuff like the golden calf. But, God had mercy and allowed Moshe to carve new tablets and make the Levites holy servants which was good. So, he says to love god and fear god, serve God and be grateful to be god's people. God did a lot of miracles for you in the desert, he tells them, but in the land you will be even more dependent on god because the land depends on rain, which god brings or doesn’t. He reminds them once again that if they follow god, good stuff will happen, and if they don’t, bad stuff will, and just aS a reminder, conquering the land will be easy if they follow god's laws.
There’s a theme here: good actions = good consequences, bad actions = bad consequences. It seems simple, except it isn’t really, because most of us don’t think this way about our lives and what happens in them. There is too much suffering in the world, and in our lives, for this paradigm to be tenable. We have to, for our own psychological and spiritual sake, dissociate ourselves from the suffering we see and experience. We cannot take it all personally, or it would destroy us- we would come to think of ourselves as failures every time something bad happened. On the other hand, the torah is incredibly clear about the link, making our own culpability in suffering… a pretty hard issue to dodge. Jewish tradition has a solution that I think is rather elegant. We actually read part of this parsha everyday, as part of the second paragraph of verses we recite after the shema. But, unlike the first and third paragraphs, which are often said out loud, tradition is to recite this one quietly. Not because it’s less important, but because it’s a little unsavory to say it out loud in community, and not necessarily productive. Instead, in this moment of personal reflection and spiritual dedication, where we chant out loud our commitment to loving God with our whole selves, we fall quiet for a moment to contemplate our own role in making the world a worse place. We don’t hide it, or pretend it doesn’t exist… but after just a minute of being alone with this disquieting thought, we come back together to chant a paragraph about tzitzit, the physical reminder to stay close to God’s ways.
It’s a whole spiritual journey in the space of one or two pages of the siddur: walk in God’s ways as a community, recognize to yourself that sometimes you are responsible for suffering, and then come back together to be reminded that no one walks this path alone and unassisted. As we enter the pre-high holiday season of reflection, this is a spiritual journey I am going to try to lean into, teaching myself that I can handle confronting my own imperfections because I have a community.
With this lesson in mind, I want to offer a blessing to the individual Israelites who sinned, or made a mistake, and who began to question whether their circumstances and their suffering were their own fault. I hope they had the communal support they needed to confront their shortcomings and continue to believe in their own goodness. And the same to you: I hope the next few months bring you the chance to assess how you have fallen short, and to surround yourself with a compassionate community who is also trying to be better.