Guest Sermon by Tessa Rajak 29th August / 16th Elul 5786

Shabbat Ki Tavo

When I first looked at Deuteronomy 27, 9-26, the part of parashah, ki Tavo that we are reading today, I was shocked and dismayed by the repeated dire curses loudly expressed there, and the lurid offences that would occasion such huge condemnation. Well, I thought, it serves me right for presuming to read the parashah – and apologies for my lack of leyning ability – and then, to multiply the chutzpah, to pronounce words of wisdom from this bimah. It is a great honour that I don’t at all think I deserve.

I will stick therefore to the words of wisdom in the Torah. But, oh dear, what is our text all about? Those curses?! What do they actually mean? They sound so solemn, so dreadful and so final. Is there then no forgiveness? – the question that is naturally in our minds in the lead up to Yom Kippur. More broadly, how can we, in our present lives, identify with such unyielding and scary stuff relating to heinous crimes and sins. many of which we don’t exactly encounter on a daily basis and hopefully don’t on the whole go in for perpetrate? That is of course true of quite a good part of the legislation and penalties that feature in Deuteronomy, this last enunciation of the Torah, where the Laws of Moses are revisited. Think for example of those offences for which the inescapable punishment is stoning. How are we to deal with such topics? Sometimes we simply have to accept that the ancient world was not our world.

When it comes to curses - we might well find ourselves wondering, are curses even real? That is to say, are they efficacious? Do they work? And if they do, how? And why? Here things are rather more nuanced, and I think very interesting.

Numerous less momentous curses than those in front of us are uttered in the Hebrew Bible Cursing as a general practice between people is justified in some circumstances but on the whole it is actually discouraged when it gets discussed in later Jewish legal and ethical texts. Of course the practice was not confined to Jews. The general principle is, I think, that curses can only be thought to have effect in a world controlled by an unseen power or powers. When curses are uttered by people to back up a warning or a personal oath, they invoke God and assume His backing. Or they hope that they have a back up. As Jason mentioned last week, the Kol Nidrei service is necessary to release us from the consequences of those oaths and vows hat we have made but not fulfilled (for whatever reason).

This is not restricted to the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. A god from a polytheistic pantheon, one god of many. Might fulfil a similar function. Curses play a part in most ancient religions. Hebrew happens to have a rich vocabulary, alah, arour (as repeatedly in our portion), klalah, and other terms, but even this richness is not unique.

Nothing has been more the talk of the town lately than the Odyssey film. If you’ve seen it – I haven’t yet – I wonder if you realized that the curse put on Odysseus by the one eyed-giant Polyphemus (a blob in the film, I understand) is the entire and sole cause of cause of Odysseus’ delayed return home and his many woes and misadventures on his voyage and through his homecoming. The monster curses Odysseus after being blinded by him with a stake through his sole eye. But it so happens that Polyphemus’s father was Poseidon, God of the sea. And so there is major trouble ahead for poor Odysseus. Poseidon has the man-eating Polyphemus’s back (there was not too much morality in that universe). So Odysseus is condemned to an epic sea journey and a hair-raising ten-year return to his home on the little island of Ithaca and to his struggling, faithful wife Penelope. Historians have argued, you may be surprised to hear, that Homer’s two epic poems functioned as the Bible of the ancient Greeks. Whether that’s quite on target or not, we can all agree that there are glaring contrasts too, and on this point as on very many, our tanakh offers a deep ethical content that the Homeric poems did not aspire to – still less Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster. 

At whatever level, most of us somehow do readily believe in the reality and the consequences of cursing and being cursed. In effect, to say that there is a curse is a way of explaining why bad things have happened. In our parashah, the curses, just like the subsequent blessings, come direct from God, from the Almighty, so we do not doubt that they will be implemented. We simply tremble. The priests of the tribe of Levi, even before the creation of the Temple in Jerusalem, are there because they are His mouthpieces.

I was so mesmerized by those curses when I started thinking about my text, that I failed adequately to notice what comes before these verses, and what comes after. The complete parashah is actually incredibly full of content.

First, it’s essential to appreciate that God’s curses necessarily come with their counterparts, the greatest of blessings. And even though the blessings are not spelled out in this troubling chapter, enough blessing is promised by way of reward for right behaviour in the famous chapter 28 of Deuteronomy. While chapter 27 oddly has no blessings, in chapter 28, we find both, with approximately one quarter as many blessings as curses. There is punishment, but there is also reward here, spelled out in advance of the curse.

Second, we are here at a major turning point in the history of the Jewish people. My very first verse should have made me sit up. It says that this is the very day that Israel becomes a nation, ‘Am, a people, and the people of God. And that is defined in physical terms by their coming into possession of their territory. They are at this moment entering the Land promised to their fathers, ‘flowing with milk and honey’. . ‘Ki Tavo’, the words at the beginning of the full parshah, from which it takes its name, means ‘when you come’, ‘when you get there…’. Moses of course will not enter with them. These chapters, 26, 27 and 28 are the gateway to the moving death of Moses narrative which concludes Deuteronomy, and therefore the entire Torah.

The people are told how to make an offering the first fruits of the land, bikkurim– much as they would have liked, no doubt, to have feasted on all of it. While they do it, they are to make the declaration well known to all of us from the Passover Haggadah, ‘my father was a wandering Aramaean, and the Lord brought him out of Egypt…’. The quid pro quo, the other part of the deal, is Israel’s obedience. Thus the Covenant with God, made at Sinai, is now being re-asserted at Shechem, on these two mountains. Two stone pillars are set up, and an altar. At 26,16 and 17, we read the solemn words ‘You have affirmed this day that the Lord is your God—in whose ways you will walk, whose laws and commandments and rules you will observe, and whom you will obey.’ The people are to shut up, and to hear, which is equivalent to obeying in Hebrew. 

The Covenant involves, on Israel’s part, the acceptance of the Law. So it is not surprising that the curses now uttered are dire. Nothing matters more. The sanctions on breaking the most crucial parts of the Law, must be awesome. Chapter 28, which begins with the blessings, and which vividly and at great length enunciates the unimaginable horrors contained in the curses, will make sense of the introductory chapter 27 and give it substance. I wanted to quote a few choice curses for Deuteronomy 28 to you, but it’s simply impossible to decide where to begin. One is more awful than the next. From verse 45, the curses morph into a drawn-out national disaster, conquest by a nation from afar, siege, starvation (and cannibalism), plagues, exile, enslavement in Egypt. ‘In the morning you shall say, ‘if only it were evening, and in the evening you shall say, ‘if only it were morning.’ We are again in the territory of the grand design of Israel’s history. For the price of contravening God’s injunctions is his desertion of his people, and national catastrophe.

But what is God asking for in our text? What is Israel not to do? We have an arresting and rather peculiar combination here, adding up we might say to some of the fundamental principles that make humans human: we have two of the ten commandments - idolatry and disrespecting, indeed cursing parents, care for the disabled (blind), the outsider and the unfortunate. Then there is contravention of some sexual taboos.  There is no mistaking the profound moral core in these regulations. Thus, we are not simply being told not to take bribes: this command is about not taking bribes to kill. The sexual transgressions too are those that might have seemed fundamental to humanity – hence the inclusion of bestiality. But what about knowingly moving one’s neighbour’s boundary?! It doesn’t sound to be quite in the same league. Still, to be on the safe side, I suggest you make sure your garden fence goes up in the right place.

Here is one interpretation of the mix. Rabbi Shmuel ben Meir, a 12th-century commentator, explains why these transgressions but not others: ‘The Torah only promises a divine curse as the punishment for some — and not all —transgressions. There are a total of 12 “curses” corresponding to the 12 tribes, all of the sins mentioned in them being of the type that one commits in private, when one is unobserved and no witnesses are present. I will explain all of them. There are only two of these which are sometimes committed in private and sometimes in public. These are idolatry and striking one’s fellow Jew. This is the reason that the Torah mentions the word בסתר specifically in connection with these two sins that are listed here…’ Ingenious, but don’t worry if you don’t quite get it. Another explanation is that the perpetrator each of these particular offences will not be brought before a court of law.

The totality of the curses in these chapters, are spectacular and they are rightly famous. In a Roman-period gravestone curse I have studied, ‘all the curses in Deuteronomy’ are invoked against anyone who disturbs the burial.  Among other famous curses associated with our early history, we might think of the non-Jewish prophet Balaam’s attempted curse in the book of Numbers, which turns against the will of his master Balak the king into the important blessing ‘how goodly are thy tents, O Jacob’ – we have uttered it this morning. In the New Testament, the Jews are even made to curse themselves, in words that were to be the source of so many woes. The fate of the Jewish people in the Christian world has depended on a curse in the Gospel of Matthew (who was probably a Jew) that the Jews are said to place upon themselves at the moment of the crucifixion – ‘his blood be upon our heads’. Two or three centuries later, Christians regularly alleged, probably completely falsely, that Jews cursed them in their synagogues as part of the 18 benedictions, the Amidah. As you can imagine, neither of these claims improved relations between Christians and Jews.

Somehow, one way or another, Jews were often associated with curses. Yiddish culture is famous for its colourful and inventive curses! You’ll remember favourites like ‘he should become a chandelier, to hang by day and burn by night’; or ‘all his teeth should fall out except one to give him toothache’ or ‘God should visit upon him the best of the ten plagues’ – precisely evoking, no doubt to appreciative hearers, a curse in Deuteronomy 28. 

Let us hope that our future is one where the focus is on blessings not on curses. Jonathan Sacks had something very interesting to say about the intertwining of curse and blessing in the concept of national sin and national punishment.

Now, as then, there have been moments when the people must have come close to despair. Yet one principle has always been engraved on the Jewish heart, allowing it to emerge from tragedy with hope intact. It is the principle of "the blessing and the curse" of which Moses spoke so eloquently. When Jews have suffered, their first reaction is not to blame others but to examine themselves. That is why bad times…have always led to national renewal, and the worse the times, the greater the renewal. A people capable of seeing suffering as a call from God to return to the covenant, choosing and sanctifying life, is one that cannot be defeated because it can never lose hope.

In simple words, silver linings: darkness and light come together. Rabbi Sacks is telling us that blessings reside even within the curses, not just as their alternative or opposite. There is always some meaning, some value, in the disasters that we bring on ourselves.

But we have one final question to ask, especially at this season of reflection in the month of Elul. Can’t the consequence of the curses simply be averted on Yom Kippur, individually and collectively, with true repentance? Could there be a short cut? Deuteronomy does not seem to express any such hope. However, later Judaism, the Judaism of the Rabbis, which has made so very much more of the processes of repentance, has surely massively softened the terror of the curses for anyone with a guilty conscience, i.e. everyone. It’s still very far from easy to get ourselves off the hook. For a start, if we are serious, there is a whole month of contrition and reflection in advance of the celebration of Rosh Hashanah; and then, ten days later, the intensity of the fasting and prayer of the Day of Atonement itself. But in all this, there is also cause for rejoicing, as the Rabbis explained, because God has offered us a way back from guilt – which is why Second Temple Jerusalem was full of parties and merrymaking when Yom Kippur ended.

Well, did anyone ever suggest Judaism was straightforward? Odysseus’s troubles were a walk in the park by comparison. Or should we say, a drop in the ocean? And on that note, let me wish you all a meaningful, and also a joyful holiday season.

Shabbat Shalom.