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Parashat Bechukotai<\/em> (Leviticus 26:3-27:34)<\/em><\/p>\nFrom its earliest understanding, the revelation of Torah, which we celebrate next week with the holiday of Shavuot, warps time:<\/p>\n
God made a covenant with you at Horeb (another name for Sinai). It was not with your ancestors that God made this covenant, but with us \u2013 those of us who are still alive here today. (Deuteronomy 5:2-3).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
With these temporally disorienting words to the Israelites, 40 years after the revelation at Sinai, Moses inspires a wonderfully confusing question about how to relate to and celebrate the giving of Torah. We might have thought it was an event in the past that we are duty bound to commemorate; but instead, Moses invites us into mythic time, in which the past becomes available in the present, and we are asked to adopt a posture of participation.<\/p>\n
As we prepare to stand before the mountain again and receive Torah, this week\u2019s parasha, Bechukotai<\/em>, subtly, yet powerfully, illuminates and reinforces this message.<\/p>\n
The parasha<\/em> opens with the Israelites learning about the blessings they will receive for following and acting according to God and the curses that will befall them should they fail to do so. As the section concludes, the Israelites learn that after their calamitous, generation- long rejection of God and concomitant curses, as the people repent and return to God, God will \u201cremember My covenant with Jacob as well as My covenant with Isaac and My covenant with Abraham\u201d (Leviticus 26:42). Though the reunion is a relief, the phrasing of God\u2019s remembering is exceedingly odd and anomalous. Normally, the patriarchs are referred to in chronological order beginning with Abraham, which aligns with and reinforces a general Biblical and Jewish understanding of the importance of honoring and linking our lives to those who came before us. It stands to reason that in a moment of re-establishing the Divine-human relationship, the Torah would prioritize the ancestral authority and tradition. Why would the Torah reverse the order at this moment of reconciliation?<\/p>\n
Because, it seems, the sickness at the heart of the people that leads to an abandonment of God\u2019s ways is not that they strayed from the practices of their ancestors. In fact, the opposite may well have been the case. The people continue to offer sacrifices to God even during the time of curses, but God \u201cwill not smell the pleasing fragrances [of your sacrifices]\u201d (Leviticus 26:31). The people do not abandon the practices of their ancestors, but the rituals do not serve their function \u2013 to bring them close to and into relationship with God. The problem, as we are told repeatedly in the text, is the people \u201cdo not listen\u201d to God and, more evocatively, they walk with God with \u201cindifference\u201d (For example, Leviticus 26:21, 24, 28). Which is to say, the Israelites are committing the sin of religious behavioralism \u2013 of performing religious acts with no concern for the purpose of the acts.<\/p>\n
Their actions are reminiscent of the act of profaning God\u2019s name that in the previous parasha<\/em> is described through the Hebrew words \u05d5\u05d9\u05e7\u05d1 (Leviticus 24:11) and \u05d5\u05ea\u05d7\u05dc\u05dc\u05d5 (Leviticus 22:32). As my colleague, Rabbi Jordan Schuster points out, these words carry with them the \u201cconnotations of perforation, puncturing, hollowing out.\u201d When the performance of religious acts is severed from the intended purpose, to be with God, the relationship between humans and God is hollowed out and collapses.<\/p>\n
But, as a teaching of the early rabbis suggests, the people are not motivated by malice towards God. The empty ritual behavioralism emerges from doubt \u2013 they have lost faith in the possibility of being in a meaningful relationship with God. Specifically, their ailment is what author Michael Chabon refers to in his novel Summerland as \u201cbelatedness,\u201d the very common human condition of feeling like we have \u201cshown up just as light and fire were fading from the sky.\u201d Their problem is nostalgia \u2013 of thinking that the real relationship with God was in the past, and that it is not really possible for them to be in relationship with God in their lives.<\/p>\n
For this reason, according to Leviticus Rabbah, an early rabbinic text, God\u2019s assures the people when they repent that God will \u201cremember My covenant with Jacob as well as My covenant with Isaac and My covenant with Abraham\u201d (Leviticus 26:42). God will remember the covenant with the grandchild before the grandparent, \u201cto teach that all three covenants are equal\u201d (Leviticus Rabbah 36:1).<\/p>\n
In a state of debilitating nostalgia, the people cannot take themselves seriously as spiritual beings, capable of carrying on the covenant and being in an ever-evolving, unfolding relationship with God. They need to be reminded of Jacob\u2019s covenant before Abraham\u2019s covenant, of the grandchild\u2019s covenant before the grandparent\u2019s covenant, to teach them that the latter is just as meaningful and worthy as the former \u2013 that they too can be in relationship with God.<\/p>\n
To be a link in this chain of tradition demands more than a performance of the past. It requires doing and being, investing heart, mind and soul into the project of forming a relationship with God, a life of meaning. It asks that we commemorate the events at Sinai, but insists on something even more \u2013 our participation.<\/p>\n
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