Be-hukkotai (Leviticus 26:3-27:34) and Haftarah (Jeremiah 16:19-17:14): The JPS B'nai Mitzvah Torah Commentary
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Be-hukkotai (Leviticus 26:3-27:34) and Haftarah (Jeremiah 16:19-17:14): The JPS B'nai Mitzvah Torah Commentary
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Overview
The complete set of weekly portions is available in Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin’s book The JPS B’nai Mitzvah Torah Commentary (JPS, 2017).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780827616400 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Jewish Publication Society |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2018 |
| Series: | JPS Study Bible |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 24 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Torah
Be-hukkotai: Leviticus 26:3–27:34
Just in case you were looking forward to this, the last portion of Leviticus, you should know that it's a bit of a downer. Actually, make that a major downer. God tells the Israelites what will happen if they follow God's laws. That part is okay — but the part about what will happen if they don't obey God's laws — oy.
This parashah, and all of Leviticus, ends with a somewhat anticlimactic piece about the funding of the ancient sanctuary.
Summary
• God promises that if the Israelites observe God's commandments to observe the shemitah and the yovel, then God will bless the land with prosperity. (26:3–13)
• Big "but" coming: if the Israelites do not observe God's commandments, they are entering into a "world of pain." Illnesses, wild beasts, military defeat, the destruction of the Land of Israel — even cannibalism! — will follow. (26:14–45)
• God tells Moses details about the funding of the ancient Tabernacle — specific amounts people should give based on age and gender. There are also provisions for those who vow to donate animals that would be converted into money in support of the sanctuary, or who vow to donate land or tithe produce. (27:1–34)
The Big Ideas
• Following God's commandments is a social good. It's not that if you do God's will everything will be fine with you. It's not about "you" — in the singular. This passage tells us that if the Jewish people obey God, then good things will happen in their land. While this idea of reward and punishment is debatable (and many find it, frankly, ethically questionable, if not offensive), it is clearly what the biblical writers believed.
• Actions have consequences. If you are troubled by all the threat and punishment passages in Leviticus, join the club. It even has a name — the "reproof" (tokhecha). It is such a horrible section that in synagogue it is read quickly and in a low voice. You just want to get through it and get over it. But if you read the passage carefully, you will notice that it is saying something important: societies collapse when justice is not done.
• It is a mitzvah to support the institutions of the Jewish community. Many people complain that "religion costs too much!" If that is true, then it has always been the case. The Torah specifies the amounts that people should give, based on age and gender, as well as other details of giving. These passages seem quite relevant to modern Jews, because people still argue about the best way to support synagogues and other Jewish institutions.
Divrei Torah
Is God a Bully?
Bullies. Don't you hate them? But who ever expected that God would become The Supreme Bully? God seems to be threatening the Israelites with the ultimatum "Do what I say, or else ..." Just read the list of curses that this Torah portion contains — everything from threatening to shut down the rain to (gulp) forcing the Israelites to "devour" their children.
Okay, let's figure this one out. Nachmanides, the medieval commentator, teaches: "You must know and understand that everything in this chapter actually took place during the First Temple period and its aftermath, including both the exile to Babylonia and the redemption from there, for that is when they worshiped idols and did all these evil things."
Then came the punishments, which seemed to be a fulfillment of the dire warnings of Leviticus. When the Assyrians destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, they did horrible things to the Jewish people and to the Land of Israel. The same sort of things happened two centuries later, when the Babylonians destroyed the Southern Kingdom of Judah.
Did God actually bring all those curses upon the Jewish people? Let's imagine it this way: perhaps the people were trying to figure out why all these terrible things had happened to them. In ancient times, the only real answer to that question would be: God. God was punishing the people for their sins. The Jews of ancient times believed that God "used" the enemies of the Jews as a way of disciplining God's people for their sins.
What were those sins? The list is long, and includes the sin of failing to let the land rest for one year out of every seven (shemitah). The Torah warns that if the people don't observe shemitah they will be expelled from the land, and they won't be permitted to return until the land has made up for all the missed shemitah years (26:34–35). What is so bad about not letting the land rest? Because it has to do with not exploiting the land — and also the most vulnerable people who work the land.
So, God gives the Jewish people laws that help to create a just society. That was the whole purpose of shemitah (sabbatical year) and yovel (jubilee year, returning the land to its original owner every fifty years). If you don't create a just society, then that society will crumble. You will have people who show only callousness to the poor. That society will wind up in ruins — and you are free to imagine that God, who feels very strongly about justice, will punish you.
Cantor Sarah Sager describes the mindset of the final portion of Leviticus: "It is both bribe and promise, exhortation and encouragement. The physical and ethical dimensions of God's creation are dependent upon each other, and we ignore that relationship at our peril."
If we don't create a just society, that society will fall apart.
If you look at the long sweep of human history, societies that ignored social justice did, in fact, crumble — think of medieval Spain, Nazi Germany, the former Soviet Union.
Sometimes God may seem like a bully. The same with our parents. But we need to try to get behind the threats of punishment to the real issue of how we behave. There is definitely more here than meets the eye.
Sacred Money
We have come full circle ... and it's about money! Go back to the end of the book of Exodus, and you will see it: Exodus ended on the subject of "how do we pay for the Tabernacle?" And that's how Leviticus ends as well.
The Torah portion has already figured out what people are "worth" in terms of taxation. A man between the ages of twenty to sixty is worth fifty shekels; a woman of the same age, thirty shekels. Once a man hits the age of sixty, his "value" drops to fifteen shekels, and a woman's drops to ten. Yes, it's sexist and ageist. But we're talking about something from long ago, and that's the way it was back then. (Come to think of it: has it really changed that much? Even nowadays, women earn less than men, and there is rampant age discrimination in the workplace.)
What is the best way to financially support our religious institutions? It's a question that we still wrestle with. Every institution costs money to sustain, and the modern synagogue is no exception. Though most synagogues today expect their members to pay a specific sum, called membership dues, this isn't always the case. Synagogues have all kinds of ways of raising the money they need, including voluntary giving.
Some are experimenting with a "pay what you want" system. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, has supported this new approach and said that voluntary pledging may positively change the way people view their synagogues: "The bond that holds the Jewish people to one another is not primarily and fundamentally a financial arrangement, and when we suggest that it might be, it undermines everything we stand for."
A voluntary pledge seems very different from the ancient model described in our Torah portion. There, what you have to pay is spelled out. In post-biblical times, and in medieval times, the community could force its members to pay community dues. Maimonides teaches: "People of the city can force each other to build a wall, doors, and bolt; and a synagogue, and to buy a Torah scroll, and the Prophets and the Writings for anyone in the community who wants to read."
In other words, there was general agreement — a communal covenant, if you will — that a community needs to be physically secure (cities in the Middle Ages were frequently walled in order to keep out enemies), as well as spiritually vibrant, by having a synagogue, a Torah scroll, and a full Bible that would be available for people to read.
When you think about it, support of the Jewish community and its institutions is entirely voluntary today, since nobody forces you to be a member of a synagogue and pay dues. The fact remains, however: synagogues require money to keep the lights on and to pay salaries. They depend on the goodwill of people who feel a sense of responsibility to support the Jewish community.
Yes, it's another expense, and money is often tight. But if we don't support our synagogue and Jewish community, who will?
Connections
• How do you feel about the list of blessings and curses? Do they make you afraid? Angry?
• The tradition says that the curses should be read in synagogue quickly and in a low voice. Do you agree with that tradition? Do you have any other suggestions for dealing with passages in the Torah that seem offensive or frightening?
• Do you agree that unjust societies are often destroyed, either from the outside or from the inside? Can you give some examples? How could those societies have saved themselves?
• What do you think is the best way to support synagogues? Dues? Donations? Giving whatever you can?
CHAPTER 2The Haftarah
Be-hukkotai: Jeremiah 16:19–17:14
When it comes to the ancient Israelites, sin can be deadly — literally. That's one of the central ideas of the Hebrew Bible, and the prophet Jeremiah hammers it home for us in this final haftarah of the book of Leviticus.
The Torah portion speaks of the sins that (ancient Israelites believed) were the reason why they might be exiled from their land. The horrific conditions of destruction and exile, described in the Torah portion, had become living realities when the Assyrians and the Babylonians destroyed, respectively, the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah.
Jeremiah, living in the time of the destruction of Judah, has his own take on why it is happening. To the sins of idolatry and of exploitation of the vulnerable, Jeremiah adds one more: the sin of failing to trust in God. Jeremiah believes, therefore, that some of our sins come not from what we actually do; they come from how we feel — from what is going on inside of us.
Actions, Not Feelings
Someday this will happen to you. You will know someone who is wealthy (maybe it will be you!), and that person decides she wants to give a lot of money to a particular project. Let's say that she decides to donate money for the construction of a building on a college campus, or to a project in Israel.
Good, right? But then someone gets up and says: "You know, this woman who wants to give the money — I know that she just wants the honor and respect that comes with giving all that money! It's all about her ego; she doesn't really care that much about this project."
How are you going to react to this? Sure — we would hope that the giver is sincere. But what if she isn't sincere? What if she really doesn't care that much about the project and really just wants her name on the outside of the building?
So, it's time to talk about our inner lives — the stuff that happens inside us.
First, let's get real — very few people give a whole lot of money to things that don't interest them.
Second, and what if they didn't really care that much? Is that our business? Are the inner intentions and feelings of people really that important?
Jeremiah and other prophets did care about what we think. They wanted us to be pure on the inside and the outside. But, to be honest, the weight of Jewish tradition is on our words and our actions, not on our thoughts.
Let's go to an interesting example of this from the great medieval sage Maimonides. He created a famous "ladder of tzedakah," in which he explained the best kinds of giving, ranked from highest to lowest. The highest level: "To support a fellow Jew by endowing him with a gift or loan, or entering into a partnership with him, or finding employment for him, in order to strengthen his hand until he need no longer be dependent upon others." Go through all those levels of tzedakah, and you will find that secret giving (where the giver and the recipient don't know each other) is way up there as well. The second to lowest step: "When one gives inadequately, but gives gladly and with a smile."
So, according to Maimonides, when it comes to helping people, our own emotions really don't count for that much. What matters most is the actual giving (even if you scowl)!
Jeremiah himself acknowledged that you can never really know what a person is thinking: "Most devious is the heart; it is perverse — who can fathom it? I the Lord probe the heart, search the mind — to repay every man according to his ways, with the proper fruit of his deeds (17:9–10).
We can never be sure of what's going on in other people's hearts; only God knows that. By the way, quite often we ourselves are not totally clear about our own motives for doing something. Do I want to be class president for my personal glory, or because it will look good on my college application, or because I really want to help my school? If you do a good job, does it really matter?
When President Jimmy Carter said famously that he had sinned because he had lusted after another woman in his heart, many Jews were unsure what all the fuss was about. It's not like the president had an affair (unlike many other politicians).
As Rabbi Leonid Feldman writes: "Only God truly understands our motives, and what we humans should focus on are the deeds and not the heart."
Jeremiah and the prophets urged us to have good thoughts on the inside so we have good actions on the outside. But if you can't have both (and we are only human), focus not on the first, but on the second.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Be-hukkotai (Leviticus 26:3–27:34) and Haftarah (Jeremiah 16:19–17:14)"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction,
The Torah: Be-hukkotai: Leviticus 26:3–27:34,
The Haftarah: Be-hukkotai: Jeremiah 16:19–17:14,