Parashat Ki-Tavo (5760)

With God’s help, on the eve of the holy Sabbath, Parashat Ki-Tavo 5760

On Sin and Its Punishment

In our portion, the Torah elaborates on the subject of the blessings and curses spoken at Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim. In this ceremony

the whole people of Israel stood upon these mountains and entered into a renewed covenant with God. The principal content of

the covenant is understanding and accepting the workings of divine reward and punishment. If the commandments are observed, the land gives

its produce, wars are won, and so on. If they are not observed, we are defeated before our enemies,

the land does not yield its produce, and so on.

The system of reward and punishment is complex, and it is exceedingly difficult to understand it properly. The Book of Job deals primarily

with this issue, and Talmudic discussions also attempt to plumb its depths. The root of the difficulty lies in the

clear and unshakable belief that God does not punish a person without cause. On the other hand, it would seem

that some are punished for no fault of their own (‘the righteous person who suffers’). Several solutions have been offered to this issue,

including approaches that claim that one cannot fathom the full divine mind in His governance; however, it is clear

to everyone that God is a God of righteousness and justice and does not punish a person without cause. To be sure, the reasons

are not always clear to us, and that is the root of the difficulty.

There are claims concerning ‘afflictions of love,’ in which God ostensibly ‘punishes’ the righteous person in order

to atone for the generation and perhaps also to elevate that person himself to a higher spiritual level, which can be attained

only by one who has accepted suffering with love. The commentators are divided over whether such a concept truly exists and what it means,

and in any case this is not a self-evident interpretive path. Even when one concludes that these are ‘afflictions of

love,’ that is permitted only for one who finds no other sin in himself (for example, neglect of Torah study). Does

anyone among us know such a person?

Reincarnations of souls also offer a way of coping with this theological problem. According to this conception

a person can suffer for no fault of his own in order to atone for sins committed in his previous incarnation.

Such a mechanism can explain suffering endured by people who have not sinned at all, such as infants

(it is important to note that even great righteous people also sin. Who was greater than Moses our Teacher, who did not enter

the Land of Israel because of his sin?).

When we contemplate dramatic events, such as the Holocaust or Israel’s wars, there is a tendency

to portray all those who perished as holy and pure, and for some reason we tend to forget that among them there were

people of every kind. There were great sinners and small sinners, and great righteous people and lesser righteous people, just as in any

other human society. This perspective should not be confused with the conception that their death as Jews has the meaning of

a sanctification of God’s name. It is entirely possible that a person sanctifies God’s name in his death, and yet in the course of his life he also

committed transgressions, like all of us.

In his lecture, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef stated that those who perished in the Holocaust were sinners, or reincarnations of sinners.

After the wave of protests that arose following his remarks, a clarification was issued that those who perished because of their Judaism are

holy. These two statements were perceived as a retreat from the original remarks and as an internal contradiction (see the entry:

‘My words were taken out of context’).

The approach presented by Rabbi Yosef is a central and straightforward approach in Jewish thought. If God punishes

someone, there is presumably a reason for it. True, it is impossible to know precisely for which sin this occurs, but

if we are aware of some sin, we are commanded to attribute the suffering to that sin. Maimonides writes

that anyone who attributes sufferings that come upon him to chance, and determines that they have no cause at all, displays a trait of

cruelty, and this is also a fatal error in his religious worldview. He thereby prevents himself from drawing lessons

from the messages God is sending him. Rabbi Yosef’s critics apparently expected him to say that God

is wicked, doing wrong without justice and without cause. I do not understand how one can expect a religious person,

and especially a rabbi and a great sage in Israel, to believe such an outrageous approach. Even the claim that

collective punishment points only to collective sin (and not necessarily to the sin of the individuals) is not free

of problems. In light of the accepted principles of faith, even the death of a particular person within such a collective

framework must have a just cause.

The claim that those who perished were reincarnated souls of sinners was labeled

‘primitive.’ First, as I described above, this assertion is intended precisely to make it possible to clear

those who perished of suspicion regarding sins that they may ostensibly have had. Second, reincarnations of souls are a well-known

and central position in Judaism (certainly in recent centuries). Nor is it so strange, in light of the belief

in the survival of the soul. It is certainly a legitimate approach.

It seems to me that if there is any primitiveness in this discussion, it characterizes precisely the critical side. I have

heard from the critics almost no argument that appeals to rational thought. Most of what I heard was

nothing but an emotional and inflammatory jumble of ignorance, stupidity, hatred, and incitement. A ‘gut-level’

response is a clear hallmark of primitiveness. The only argument that ostensibly appealed to the rational plane

was the one claiming that this explanation supposedly exonerates the Nazis from their guilt (the position of the Attorney General,

who now also serves as the official theologian of the State of Israel). In the standard religious view, all

human activity, including murder, proceeds on two planes simultaneously: divine and human. According to

this argument, divine providence in the world is irrelevant. This is certainly neither the prevalent view nor

a necessary one, and therefore it is insufficient to challenge the legitimacy of the rabbi’s remarks.

Anyone who believes in divine providence over history is obligated to try to understand God’s ways

in terms of reward and punishment. It is true that we have no guarantee that our understanding is correct, and that the sin we

identify is indeed what we need to correct, but that does not exempt us from the task.

Have a peaceful Sabbath.

It may be left for respectful disposal at any synagogue or house of study. Comments and responses are welcome.

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