Caution: Objects In This Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are
The Mirage of Paradise and the Miracle of Existential Transformation
I will grant your rains in their season, so that the earth shall yield its produce and the trees of the field their fruit. (Leviticus 26:4)
“Trees of the field”—This refers to the wild trees; even these will bear fruits in the future. (Rashi on Leviticus 26:4)
At the end of my suffering/there was a door.//Hear me out: that which you call death/I remember. (Louise Glück, The Wild Iris)
If we accept Rashi’s interpretation, the people’s observance of the Torah will lead not just to bounty, prosperity, and equanimity, but to a marvelous transformation of the natural order. The effect of keeping the law is that even trees which are normally bare will give fruit. If the people follows God, it won’t be long before they’re in paradise. Alternatively, if you prefer an anti-utopian formulation—the law is as easy and straightforward to uphold as a barren tree is as capable of bearing fruit. I dare you—says the text—show me a society that is perfectly functional and I’ll show you a nature that is perfectly hospitable.
It’s one thing to say that social health is an important component of ecological sustainability. But—on Rashi’s interpretation—the Torah goes further: by obeying the divine Law, humans make nature a better (more Edenic) version of itself. In contrast to technologically driven genetic modification, the Torah proposes spiritually and morally driven ontological modification. If the Israelites keep the jubilee and the sabbath, if they refrain from idolatry and stay devoted to and mindful of the God who liberated them from bondage, they’ll be better off than if they had stayed in lush Egypt. You don’t need the Nile to succeed, teaches the Torah over and over. With faith, you can make the desert bloom. Nature is “downstream” of Culture.
God takes the people away from the place where Nature is generous to the place where it is withholding so that, in part, they can feel a sense of agency and partnership in making their land habitable. It’s better to be a founder than an inheritor. The people are inheritors—inheritors of Abraham’s blessing—but God won’t let them be passive recipients. It’s important not to take one’s gifts or one’s lineage for granted, and so the people are taken out of a place that runs well (so well, in fact, that it’s dehumanizing) to a place where efficient systems-processes are revealed to be less important than intangible things that fall under the umbrella of culture (decency, dignity, teamwork, etc.). The land is the people’s to gain and lose. Holy Land doesn’t run on autopilot. Only founders can maintain it.
The list of blessings and curses which we read this week as part of parashat Behar-Bechukotai are a textbook version of what anthropologists critically call “magical thinking,” the belief that spiritual practice and metaphysical attention can causally influence the material world. Rain (or its absence) are not, fundamentally, a function of cyclical weather patterns, but human devotion, prayer, and diligence. The agricultural condition of the land is a function of moral and spiritual life, not the vicissitudes of the inhuman climate. While magical thinking subordinates nature to artifice in a way that is extreme (and often disturbing, if not dangerous, in its implications), it’s also not as crazy a concept as it seems, given the reality of interdependence. Modern philosophers of science like Bruno Latour question the distinction between nature and society, and in so doing insist that magical thinking has more than a kernel of truth. The difficulty is in its application, its overuse.
The Book of Job is one of many places in the Torah where magical thinking is challenged. Job’s friends are wrong to infer that Job’s suffering is a symptom of his moral failure. But the fact that we aren’t good at applying magical thinking doesn’t mean the world isn’t magical. Epistemological weakness is not a knock against the paranormal or supernatural, but against our access it. The trouble with passages such as this week’s comes when we think we can just plug in a formula—this historical trauma must be a punishment for this sin or error.
On the other hand, the long detail of the cursed reality that overshadows the shorter list of blessings may simply be an accurate description of the social world for most of human history—a place of violent conflict, scarcity, distress, constriction. Consider the possibility that the blessings offered first, seemingly so easy to obtain (all you have to do is “follow my laws and keep my commandments”) are, in fact, images of utopia. What we have today is not the world in which nature is gracious, but a technological workaround. We decided that it would be easier to excel at geo-engineering and biohacking than to learn how to live in peace with one another.
Read expansively, Bechukotai describes the tragedy of the commons. All it takes is one or two bad actors to ruin paradise for everyone else. Thus, the blessings are always just out of reach even as they seem so near. The problem isn’t individual malpractice, it seems, but something about the nature of groups and group dynamics. If you (plural) walk in my ways… the problem isn’t individual piety, but how to coordinate everyone to organize around a common mission. Perhaps we learn from the Tower of Babel story that failure is inevitable. By the same law that declares the Tower must crumble, the people must also be scattered. Diaspora is the chronic condition of groups.
It’s easier for God to find a partner at a micro-scale with the forefathers and foremothers of Genesis. But once we’re in the land of Canaan with over a million people we find that we hit up against structural constraints. As society grows it can become more productive, but it also becomes more depersonalized. It’s hard enough to honor the infinite demand of one single face before me—to borrow an image from Levinas—but try multiplying that by 1.2 million factorial! How about 8 billion? That’s a lot of infinite demands.
The Torah places the blessings before the curses perhaps because it wants us to strive for them even as we inevitably fall short. The meta-drama of the Torah is an inner conflict within God about whether justice or mercy should win the day. Perfect justice (embodied by Elohim) means humanity ought not exist since we are endlessly flawed and disappointing. Mercy (embodied by YHWH) means that love is strong enough to endure disappointment, that God prefers to work on the relationship than break it off. (A post-Holocaust, humanistic perspective might reverse the terms—Elohim means God should be “cancelled”; YHWH means God can atone and become a new God.)
It would be nice for everyone—the Torah suggests—if we could just obey the law. But human nature and group nature doesn’t work that way. Put psychologically, we’re only likely to learn and grow when we hit rock bottom, when we feel cursed. It would be more pleasant to just see the good and pursue it, but suffering seems to be a more effective teacher than pleasure. (Note: This does not mean that all suffering is inherently meaningful or justified.) Maybe this is why the parasha begins with the verb telechu—literally, “if you walk in my laws…” The path to the law is not direct or easy. It’s a bold and, at times, terrible, adventure. There is blessing on the other side of curse, but knowing this may not make it any easier. We must, as Hegel says, “tarry with the negative.”
Bechukotai reads as a kind of ouroboros: The blessing is the telos, appearing logically first; but the curse is the way, appearing experientially and historically first. Only upon reaching the blessing do we redeem the curse. Only then do the barren trees bear fruit. Only then do the disappointments in life take on a providential glow. Only then do our flaws become virtues. Only then does the “crooked timber of humanity” prove to be the straightest measure. This is the work of priests—to effect the transformation of human nature in a world that belies the possibility of transformation and makes a mockery of magical thinking. The miracle of Exodus is spectacular—a people leaving slavery; a sea splitting. The miracle of Leviticus is no less spectacular, perhaps more so—the possibility of improving as people and as a society; the possibility of meeting transcendence with all of our blocks and being met; the possibility of feeling cursed and hopeless and finding something on the other side.
“God’s anger is for a moment, but God’s favor is for a life-time
Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning.” (Psalm 30:6)
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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