Busy busy week. Hope you have a chance to enjoy.
Ki Tavo is a Torah portion with a lot to say about the
people of Israel and what they must do when they cross the Jordan into the
land. Moses is coming to the end of his
life and finishing his career by continuing the final teaching. Moses is said to know the failings of the
people that will come in the future and the way they will be distant from
God. But he seems to try to inoculate
them from the most severe retribution of God with a series of laws and
functional rituals including writing down the Torah on stone.
Moses gave the Israelites a chilling prophecy of the horrors
that would come upon them if they were to reject God and the Torah. This
section is called the Tochacha, the Admonition. It reads:
"If you fail to observe faithfully all the terms of this Teaching
that are written in this book, to reverence this honored and awesome Name, the
Ruler your God, God will inflict extraordinary plagues upon you and your
offspring, strange and lasting plagues, malignant and chronic diseases." Deuteronomy 28:58-59
That is some scary stuff.
Moses, speaking for God, is giving a real serious threat. This threat has reverberated through history
in the form of people seeing many illnesses, both global and personal, as
divine punishment. Even after we began
to understand that reasons behind plagues, diseases and disasters, people have
looked to God as the cause. One must
look no further than the news in the midst of catastrophe to hear voices that
blame victims of pain and disease for moral failings.
In my youth is was HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In high school I began to read about the
disease, which was mainly seen in the promiscuous homosexual community. Almost immediately there were those preaching
and teaching it was God’s punishment on people who committed what they saw as a
sin. However they couldn’t explain the
rise of the disease in children, hemophiliacs and the equal opportunity of
being inflicted in Sub-Saharan Africa.
If HIV was God’s punishment, it was not nearly targeted enough to the
right people. However, what this
thinking did so as I grew from high school to college, was create a barrier to
knowledge among those who were vulnerable to the biology of the disease, but
felt immune because in their minds they were “living right”. As an advocate for AIDS education, I was
stone walled not by fear of discussing sexuality, but by those who felt it was
a disease of the sinful. This was true
through a good deal of the 1980s and saw shades of it even later. What is interesting is this week, a
pornographic actress tested positive for HIV.
An industry that regularly tests, place a moratorium on filming until
all the actors are tested. Right away
the chorus of God’s retribution on the industry started.
So the question is, is this how God operates? Clearly in the Torah God sends plagues and
death on the people for disobedience. In
fact God seems to kill some Israelites for fairly minor infractions. But in today’s world we look at disease and
disaster and don’t think first of God’s wrath as the ancients seemed to
do. We don’t see God as a vindictive
character who kills entire communities, or demands the destruction of a people
for moving away from God. We see the
lines of Torah in the context of the day.
The troubling nature
of these, and many lines of the Torah, should not cause us to reject its
teaching but to find a way to make the Torah our own. We can strive to get beyond these words that
sound so uncomfortable on our modern tongues and look to the entirety of the
scroll for how it can fit into our lives.
Even here in Ki Tavo, Moses is hoping that with such harsh language the
people of Israel, free of his leadership and their direct connection to God,
can still use the Torah to do what it is intended. To guide the people to build a just
society. One were people operated for the
betterment of each other and took to heart the idea that they are responsible
for the earth, themselves and their neighbor.
The Torah was written in a time and at a place that was so
very different from ours. The people
were seeking to understand God in the world, just as many of us are doing
today. The ancient ancestors did a lot
of the heavy lifting and left as a starting place, but that is what it is, a
starting place for us. It is our turn to
make meaning out of the words and how they speak to us today. Try not to stumble over the lines that you
are unable to rectify in our modern world.
Acknowledge them. Think about why they are there. And continue to turn it. We can find new things in each generation,
and we owe it to our ancestors to continue that tradition.
No comments:
Post a Comment