This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary Rosh Yeshivah Rabbi Jonah Rank, has been sponsored by Rabbi Dr. Raysh Weiss in honor of Rabbi Rank.
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Was it something I did
In another life?
I try and try
But nothing comes out right
For me.
Bad Karma.—Warren Zevon, “Bad Karma”
Like many other American children born near the middle of the 20th century, the idea of karma held a certain appeal to singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, who rose to fame in the 1970s through his howling “Werewolves of London” and penning Linda Ronstadt’s “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me.” Except for his estranged Jewish father’s involvement with the Jewish gangster Mickey Cohen—Zevon himself had virtually zero ties to Jewish community or practice, but the dark-humored lyricist sprinkled mythologies and doctrines from other religions into his musical career. Zevon imagined Elvis’ afterlife in “Jesus Mentioned” and teamed up with 3/5 of R.E.M. to play the blues as the Hindu Love Gods. Zevon frequently sang provocative (if not both unnuanced and hurtful) critiques of religious people—as his “Porcelain Monkey” associated Pentecostals with frequent gun ownership, and his song “Mohammed’s Radio” pictures “the village idiot” torn between Islam and rock and roll. Despite covering Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” for the album Zevon recorded while he knew he was dying, Zevon had agnostically professed eight years earlier on his song “The Indifference of Heaven:”
Gentle rain
Falls on me
All life folds back
Into the sea
We contemplate eternity
Beneath the vast indifference of heaven
Proud heirs of modern rationalism, Jewish literature, and the ‘countercultural’ trends of the 1960s, the Commission who gathered in the early 1990s to decide on the texts to be included in what is now the Recontsructionist prayerbook Kol Haneshamah struggled with Deuteronomy 11:13–21. Recited by Jews twice daily for some 2,000 years (see Mishnah, Berakhot 2:2)—these nine verses claim that those who fulfil God’s commands will receive bountiful rain and produce while those who stray from obeying God will suffer from drought and famine. As Rabbi Dr. Art Green has recounted, several laypeople at this convening voiced their strong opposition to the underlying messages—that the whole thing ran contrary to anything they would ever impart to their children. The conversation shifted though when finally, as Rabbi Green retells:
A young rabbi, Mordechai Liebling, said, “Suppose you don’t think of it as reward and punishment, but as there being consequences to human deeds. Think of the environment and how we are affecting it.”
“Oh,” they said. “You mean karma. Of course we believe in karma!”
Among those who had grown disaffected from the shortcomings of their ancestors who adhered to any of the largest Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), a spiritual appetite developed for a Sanskrit term like karma (कर्म) and other key words and beliefs associated with Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions originating in Eastern Asia. Moreover—as the historian Peter Heehs has documented in his book Spirituality Without God—religious teachings that sidestep central questions about the role of God in the universe have easily attracted seekers who have either rejected or questioned God’s existence.
Though some expressions of Buddhism may coexist with either the absence or the presence of a fully fleshed out understanding of God—God (or at least the idea of God) plays a central role in the Jewish religion. The Hebrew Bible features God so prominently that Jewish readers of the Scroll of Esther (the only Book of the Hebrew Bible where God’s name does not explicitly appear) have long combed the Scroll for hints of God—as if Jewish works are sacred only if God is present.
Modern Jewish theology, as a fluid framework, invites each of us to consider our life experiences to help us refine our convictions about God. Does a tragedy we witnessed suggest to us that God may be real—but not all-knowing, or not all-kind, or not all-powerful? Should our uncertainty about the effectiveness of addressing prayers to God force us to conclude that God is a fictional character altogether? Do the inexplicable stories of people who escaped dangers or survived illnesses against the odds prove to us that God exists, even if we do not understand what God is? Could it be that those of us who have to learned poetry now feel certain that, throughout all the history of the Jewish religion, God has always been nothing more than a metaphor for something far bigger than us?
There is hardly a positive spin for us moderns when we read that God assigns some terrible fate to those who sin. For the atheist, it is all rubbish and unnecessary terror. For the agnostic, real life offers counterevidence to God’s threat—because, while some people have paid the price for their unethical conduct, our planet still hosts so many seemingly satisfied sinners. Those who read these words with the greatest horror are in fact the faithful; they, at least by definition, try to do the right thing, but, when we make honest mistakes, the idea of retribution from a loved one—Divine or not—should terrify us. Has the relationship been all for naught?
Jews around the world will be reading this Shabbat, among other passages, the Tokhechah (תּוֹכֵחָה, “Rebuke”) of Leviticus 26:14–41 and 26:43—in which God outlines a variety of horrors that may befall those who fail to uphold God’s statutes. The Babylonian Talmud records the 3rd century sage Reysh Lakish teaching that, in order to merit any blessing, any promise of Divine punishment should be introduced with and followed by its surrounding verses (thus lessening the harshness of the passage). This same page of the Talmud mentions one Levi bar Boti, who could only read Leviticus’ Tokhechah in front of his teacher Rav Huna while stumbling his way through it (Megillah 31b). The Eastern European Rabbi Yisra’el Me’ir HaKohen Kagan (1838–1933), in his Bey’ur Halakhah commentary (on Shulchan Arukh, Orach Chayyim 428:6) wrote:
ראיתי שערוריה בענין זה בין ההמון שיש מקומות מן הישובים שבהגיעם לסדר בחקותי וכי תבא אין קוראין בתורה בשבת זו וכמה רעות עושין אחד שאין מקיימין קריאת התורה שהיא תקנה קדומה מימות מרע”ה וגם על מה שאמר הכתוב מוסר ה’ בני אל תמאס ואל תקוץ בתוכחתו.
I have seen that some have raised this matter sharply. Among the common people, there are places among settled [Jewish communities] that—upon approaching the reading of Bechukkotai [in which Leviticus’s Tokhechah appears] or [the Torah reading of] Ki Tavo [in which Deuteronomy 28:15–68 also includes a separate Tokhechah*]—do not read Torah that Shabbat. But how many bad things are they committing! First, they are not fulfilling [the command of] reading the Torah, which was an ancient decree from the days of Mosheh our master. Further, [this is bad] on account of what Scripture said [in Proverbs 3:11], “Do not detest the reproach of Adonai, and do not grow disgusted by [God’s] rebuke.”
If Bey’ur Halakhah’s point was taken, it was taken in great trepidation. In the first half of the 20th century, the Iraqi Rabbi Ya’akov Chayyim Sofer wrote in his Kaf HaChayyim commentary (on the same section of Shulchan Arukh) that though Leviticus’s Tokhechah should be read by the “חכם” (chakham, “sage” leader of the community) and “בקול רם” (bekol ram, “in a loud voice”) in Sephardic communities. Nonetheless, he added, “נוהגין שקורין בקול נמוך” (nohagin shekkorin bekol namukh, “the custom is that we read [the Tokhechah] in a soft voice”). Could our people—or at least the Ashkenazic members among us—tolerate even listening to the devastation God described in this Tokhechah?
Recalling the terror invoked in the Tokhechah, Rabbi Dr. Jason Weiner, in his book Care and Covenant: A Jewish Bioethic of Responsibility, shares:
Rabbi Yekusiel Yehuda Halberstam, scion of the famous Sanz rabbinic dynasty, lost his wife and all eleven of his children in the gas chambers of Auschwitz… After the war he… went to Brooklyn, New York, where he took it on himself to establish schools… and start a synagogue primarily for other Holocaust survivors…
The prayers in that synagogue were known for being very intense, with no talking whatsoever, and individuals frequently weeping aloud. One Shabbat morning in the summer of 1952, the Torah reader began to chant the weekly portion, which included the…Tokhechah…[T]hat morning the rabbi suddenly called out, “Hekher!” (louder!). The Torah reader couldn’t believe that the rabbi would want him to read that section loudly, so he continued to quickly whisper it in an undertone, but the rabbi demanded, banging on the table, “Ikh hob gezogt hekher!” (I said louder!). People began to tremble and cry, so the rabbi explained, “Let the Master of the Universe hear! We have nothing to be afraid of. We have already received all of the curses—and more. Let the Almighty hear, and let Him understand that the time has come to send the blessings!”
Once the prayers had concluded, the rabbi lovingly explained to his congregation that the blessings would come, as God had promised, but that these must result from their own initiatives to be a blessing to the world. (As quoted by Kylie Ora Lobell’s 2023 article “The Miracle Man,” in The Jewish Journal.)
Jewish wisdom cannot wholeheartedly accept the notion that the circumstances of our lives are curses brought on by our own actions, the actions of our ancestors, or the actions that our souls may have committed in some former lifetime. (Jewish mystics have frequently entertained this notion; Rabbi Chayyim Vital, near the beginning of the 17th century in Safed, explored this throughout his book Sha’ar HaGilgulim.) Karma, as the Sanskrit Upanishads would describe it, ultimately fails to live up to the theological nuances demanded by contemporary Jewish thinking. Our God has granted us the liberty to do good or to do evil, but—knowing what we know about how human interferences with the earth can affect the global climate—we cannot seriously conclude that nature is an instrument controlled exclusively by God. Likewise, we do not believe that God regularly manipulates wicked human beings to conduct malicious actions against those who transgress, whether rarely or often.
Yet, as the Reconstructionist Prayerbook Commission recognized just a few decades ago, the Jews live with some consequences of karma. Nearly 2,000 years ago, the sage Ben Azzai taught
שֶׁמִּצְוָה גּוֹרֶרֶת מִצְוָה, וַעֲבֵרָה גוֹרֶרֶת עֲבֵרָה. שֶׁשְּׂכַר מִצְוָה, מִצְוָה; וּשְׂכַר עֲבֵרָה, עֲבֵרָה:
that one mitzvah yields another mitzvah and one transgression yields another transgression—for the reward of a mitzvah is a mitzvah, and the reward of a transgression is a transgression. (Mishnah, Avot 2:4.)
Our own benevolent or malevolent approaches to the world will ultimately mold—if not the way others respond to us—the ways in which we continue to witness the world. Still, from time to time, we may fall victim to the callousness of our neighbors or become the beneficiaries of our fellow humans’ altruism, always when we least expect it. Neither God nor we ourselves have full control over the blessings and curses in our lives. No bad karma governs us entirely, and the loving Heavenly God in whom we believe did gift us a Torah full of commandments so that we can study lives of blessing—rather than fall into the trap of pursuing curses against ourselves or others.
No Tokhechah should frighten us too terribly. A Tokhechah is a conditional contract, delivered to a people ready to reject all the curses and the paths leading to them. No matter how quietly or loudly we recite the Tokhechah, the ugliest clauses should fall to the wayside; the real blessings of the Torah take shape when we mark our lives with altruism, wisdom, and holiness.
Even for those who doubt, we may not know who or what is truly in charge of all the good and all the bad in our lives—but we know that God has empowered us to increase the good and to maximize blessings.
*Dr. Joshua Jacobson has written that certain Jewish communities consider the second half of Deuteronomy 4:25 through the first half of 4:30 and Deuteronomy 11:16–17 to be further words of Tokhechah, deserving the same ritual treatment as the Tokhechah passages above. (See his Chanting the Hebrew Bible, first edition, p. 545, fn. 59.) Kaf HaChayyim, cited above, ruled that still a few more verses of the Torah should be recited quietly: namely Exodus 31:18–32:10 and 32:15–33:6. The Polish Rabbi Avraham Gombiner (1635–1682) in his Magen Avraham (also commenting on Shulchan Arukh, Orach Chayyim 428:6) cited a similar custom of, when chanting about the episode of the Golden Calf, a Levite from the community would have the honor of standing next to the Torah reader who would chant the passage quietly. Kaf HaChayyim likely is describing a later and more fleshed out version of the same practice as that known to Rabbi Gombiner.
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