Only first the Levites say some stuff which looks like curses but are actually more like laws, for example (my favorite): (Deut 27:19) "Cursed be he who subverts the rights of the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow. — And all the people shall say, Amen."
Then come blessings, for example:
(Deut 28:7 -12): The Lord will put to rout before you the enemies who attack you; they will m arch out against you by a single road, but flee from you by many roads. The Lord will ordain blessings for you upon your barns and upon all your undertakings: He will bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. The Lord will establish you as His holy people, as He swore to you, if you keep the commandments of the Lord your God and walk in His ways. 10 And all the peoples of the earth shall see that the Lord's name is proclaimed over you, and they shall stand in fear of you. The Lord will give you abounding prosperity in the issue of your womb, the offspring of your cattle, and the produce of your soil in the land that the Lord swore to your fathers to assign to you. The Lord will open for you His bounteous store, the heavens, to provide rain for your land in season and to bless all your undertakings. You will be creditor to many nations, but debtor to none.And then the curses. And whoa, what curses!
(Deut. 28:49-57): The Lord will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the earth, which will swoop down like the eagle — a nation whose language you do not understand, a ruthless nation, that will show the old no regard and the young no mercy. It shall devour the offspring of your cattle and the produce of your soil, until you have been wiped out, leaving you nothing of new grain, wine, or oil, of the calving of your herds and the lambing of your flocks, until it has brought you to ruin. It shall shut you up in all your towns throughout your land until every mighty, towering wall in which you trust has come down. And when you are shut up in all your towns throughout your land that the Lord your God has assigned to you, you shall eat your own issue, the flesh of your sons and daughters that the Lord your God has assigned to you, because of the desperate straits to which your enemy shall reduce you. He who is most tender and fastidious among you shall be too mean to his brother and the wife of his bosom and the children he has spared to share with any of them the flesh of the children that he eats, because he has nothing else left as a result of the desperate straits to which your enemy shall reduce you in all your towns. And she who is most tender and dainty among you, so tender and dainty that she would never venture to set a foot on the ground, shall begrudge the husband of her bosom, and her son and her daughter, the afterbirth that issues from between her legs and the babies she bears; she shall eat them secretly, because of utter want, in the desperate straits to which your enemy shall reduce you in your towns.You should read the whole thing, it’s pretty impressive.
Anyway, about those curses. All the biblical scholars have discovered that this whole thing is basically a standard-format contract from the ancient near east. So it sounds all dramatic and scary but may have been a bit more like a EULA. More of a checkbox with a lot of fine print in a scrolling window no one ever actually reads. And in fact, the tradition is that the Rabbi reads all the curses in an undertone.
It was recently discovered, by the way, that for several months everyone who purchased things from a certain video game vendor had been selling their souls to the vendor via some fine print in the EULA.
Anyway, it is fair to say that as a result of the contractual nature of our relationship with God, Jews love contracts, love the law, love loopholes and legalese and line-drawing. This is sometimes caricatured, bizarrely, as an arid legalism. Is there anything at all that is arid about the Jewish engagement with the Law?
Not that I know anything about anything, so who am I to pronounce on Jews?
Actually, speaking of curses, I’ve lately become enamored of the second paragraph of the shema. As a child I knew only the first paragraph, and it was called the V’eahafta, and it was one of the four prayers I had to learn by heart for my Bat Mitzvah. Reform siddurim (prayer books) did not and still don’t have that paragraph, because much of it is redundant to the first paragraph and also because it, like the curses in Ki Tavo, is pretty clear that there are serious consequences to the failure to do God’s will. Reform Jews are not much into the notion of consequences, or at least the people who made Gates of Prayer and Mishkan T’filah, the Reform siddur then and now, were and are not. Anyway, here are the verses:
(This is actually from Devarim (Deuteronomy) chapter 11, so just a a few parshas ago.)
Beware, lest your heart be deceived and you turn
and serve other gods and worship them.
And anger of the Lord will blaze against you, and he
will close the heavens and there will not be rain,
and the earth will not give you its fullness,
and you will perish quickly from the good land that
the Lord gives you.
I have lately been worshipping a god named Lamictal. Lamictal, I had been convinced, would be my savior. Lamictal would offer me peace, health, comfort and joy, for the low, low insured price of sixty dollars a month. Everyone loves Lamictal. Lamictal is such an easy god, everyone said. Lamictal just gives and gives. I read testimonials all over the internet about the transformative powers of the great god Lamictal.
Yes, once in a very long while, Lamictal will with little warning require the sacrifice of one of his worshippers, who must be flayed alive and left to die, skinless and bleeding from every orifice. But so rarely, said everyone, that it was hardly worth worrying about.
My heart was deceived, I admit it. After four weeks of taking daily communion with the great god Lamictal (who eerily imitates Jesus in asking that we ingest him), I began to have a sense that something was wrong. I began to feel that perhaps I had been chosen to be a sacrifice. My throat hurt, and I had strange sores on my tongue. My mouth began to hurt so badly I could eat nothing but ice cream. With great reluctance, I stopped my daily communion. After a week, I was fine again, and in consultation with my doctors decided to try daily communion again, in very small doses.
At the end of the second day of the second course, I noticed that my throat hurt, there was a strange sore place on the inside of my lip, and I was aching all over. Also I had these two strange rashy places on my leg. So on the third day I did not take my Lamictal communion, and I went instead to shul and asked God what I should do.
And the parsha was Ki Tavo, and I stood there next to the Rabbi while he chanted, quietly, all those paragraphs of curses. I got tired and bored standing up there watching him chanting, and I fidgeted. I had gone up for a misheberach, a prayer for healing, and had asked God to heal me, and to heal my neighbor and a few other people who needed it, and then I was the representative from that aliyah chosen to stand up all through the next aliyah, I don’t quite understand the choreography yet, really, but stand I did. It took a while, it was a hard portion, apparently; difficult to read from the torah itself, with its absence of vowels, so the rabbi was going back and forth between the torah and a chumash with the vowels in it.
After all the curses, quietly chanted, there was one more reading. Someone explained that you never end a public reading of the Torah on a negative word or a negative thought. And obviously all those curses were negative. This explains why some parshas end in very strange places; they have to end on a high note.
In this case the high note was the first 8 verses of chapter 29, and it was sort of a summation by Moses and a reminder of why Israel should follow the rules of Yah. The last verse is often translated as “Therefore observe faithfully all the terms of this covenant, that you may succeed in all that you undertake.” (JPS translation)
But Everett Fox translates it slightly differently. “So you are to be-careful regarding the words of this covenant, and are to observe them, in order that you may act-wisely in all that you do.”
Anyway, I was finally sitting down again, feeling very much on show for having stood there for so long, and also because I’d sat in the front row for some reason, and also because I was writing notes for this d’var in a notebook before I went up and someone came over to tell me very nicely that I wasn’t allowed to write in shul on shabbat, so of course I was hideously embarassed. (But actually I was a little surprised, because in fact the correct rule is not to write on shabbat at all, and not to drive, or use electricity, or whatever. And people at my shul are clearly seen to write, drive, talk on their phones, play music, and in other ways break the sabbath. I know people who bring books to read at their seats during the torah service because they otherwise are bored to death. So I wondered too why this particular breaking of the sabbath was such a faux pas. But no matter; I watched myself from afar, feeling on show and embarrassed, and noted what it felt like, and figured it was a good and important thing to feel sometimes. Every shul has its own minhagim (customs) and I have to learn those of our shul one way or another.)
So I thought about this idea, that following God does not cause you to succeed in all you do, but causes you to act wisely in all you do. Which is all that can be expected, really, and even that is probably too much.
Anyway, I’d been wondering what to do about the Lamictal. I was loath to stop it. But God suggested I act wisely and quit following the god Lamictal. God reminded me that Lamictal was a false god, and there was a non-zero chance that if I kept following after Lamictal, convinced that Lamictal was my savior, Lamictal might flay me alive.
You would think that knowing you were at such risk would be enough to convince you to stop doing a thing. But really it’s not. We are so good at convincing ourselves that what we want to do is actually perfectly sensible, that the risks are not great, that what we know is true is not true, that it is coincidence or imaginary or unimportant or something else entirely.
Lamictal held out a shining vision of the New Jerusalem to me: mental health without side effects. I was seduced. Part of me was willing to follow after that other god, ignoring the warning that I might perish quickly. It turns out I’m not alone; if you look at the message boards about lamictal, people tell stories of how they stayed on it during just a little rash because it worked so well, how they convinced themselves they just had acne, or poison ivy, or a virus, because they simply didn’t want to quit taking the drug. I nearly did it myself; I nearly thought, “well, no need to say anything till I’m sure.” Even though I was sure, and I did need to say.
So after shul I called my doctor and told her I had to quit taking it. I’d been disappointed the first time I had to stop; this time I was not, anymore. Lamictal was not my God.
Of course, even though I’ve stopped the drug, I still have a couple of weeks in which my skin might fall off. Pray for me, readers.
P.S.
Almost immediately after I finished writing this d’var, last night, I realized I had blisters on the inside of my mouth that hadn’t been there even an hour or two before; and that my skin felt like it was burning all over. So my dear brother drove me to the emergency room, where I worried for the first hour that everything was about to escalate horribly into a nightmare plague, waited, bored and wishing I hadn’t come, through the second hour, and finally, in the third hour, saw an attending who said “It doesn’t look like it’s progressing right now, take antihistamines, and NEVER TAKE THAT DRUG AGAIN IN YOUR LIFE.”
Now I am waiting for my skin to stop burning, the soles of my feet to stop hurting when I walk, and to stop feeling this terrible fatigue and pain when I move.
This is not a diatribe against meds. I am a great believer in meds. I am happy that Lamictal is helpful for so many other people. I am taking and will take other meds, and I am and will be happy for the help they give me.
But when we turn to meds for salvation, when we make gods of them, when we seek after other gods, we can so often go wrong. We delude ourselves. We take risks we otherwise might not. We want so much what is offered and do not want to count the cost or see it. We do not see with an open eye, like Balaam did. And that is dangerous. The problem is not with the medication; it’s with our thinking the medication is miraculous. It’s with the hope we place in medication, sometimes far beyond its ability to deliver. The problem is not hope. The problem is where we place our ultimate hope. Meds can make us better, but they cannot make our lives matter.
Many of us hope for radical change in our lives: we hope to be happier, more content, more peaceful, well-loved and loving, good people, successful people. We know ourselves as broken and we want to be fixed. But nothing on this earth can give us that: no person, no community, no organization, no drug, no program, no shoe, no surgery, no doctor, no therapist, no guru. Not money, and not stuff. Not our own efforts.
All those things can help, yes. But -- and to some readers this sounds crazy and to others it sounds perfectly true and to still others it sounds both crazy and possibly -- could it be? -- true, and I don’t even know which one of those is true for me right now and it changes all the time -- the ultimate source for the ultimate fix, the repair we all need, for ourselves and the world -- that’s God. The rest is just world and more world, as broken and confused and in need of repair as we ourselves are.
When we worship idols, things of wood and stone that cannot talk, or gold, or paper, or pills, or people, we do not act-wisely. Whether things are going well or things are going badly, the Torah warns us to remember that it is God who is the ultimate source of all blessings in the universe, God alone:
When you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in, and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered, beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget the Lord your God -- who freed you from teh land of Egypt, the house of bondage; who led you through the great and terrible wilderness with its seraph serpents and scorpions, a parched land with no water in it, who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock; who fed you in the wilderness with manna, which your fathers had never known, [ ...] -- and you say to yourselves, ‘My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.’ Remember that it is the Lord your God who gives you the power to get wealth...(Deut 8:11-18, from parsha Eikev, JPS translation)
And remember that if you don’t act-wisely, then maybe “The Lord will strike you with the Egyptian inflammation, with hemorrhoids, boil-scars, and itch, from which you will never recover. ” (Deut 28:32) Or maybe even with the Lamictal rash, if you were so foolish and eager to follow after that false God that you did not see the danger.
I’m grateful I stopped taking the drug when I did, and grateful that God told me to act-wisely and do so. What happens next will happen. I just keep faith with God, as in a vigil, and I remember to look to God for my salvation, and not to pharmaceuticals.
(Note Aug 30, 2010: Ki Teitzei will be posted after Ki Tavo. I’m behind, as usual, and Ki Tavo came out first. )
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