The Nations in Your Head

What Can We Learn From Biblical Curses?

“I have become a question for myself.” (St. Augustine, Confessions, Book X)

You shall be a consternation, a parable [mashal], and a byword among all the nations to which the Lord will drive you. (Deuteronomy 28: 37)

I have become a mashal [a parable] among the nations. I have become like Tofet [Rashi: a drum]. (Job 17:6)

My zeal for Your house has been my undoing; the reproaches of those who revile You have fallen upon me. When I wept and fasted, I was reviled for it. I made sackcloth my garment; I became a mashal [parable] among them. Those who sit in the gate talk about me; I am the taunt of drunkards. (Psalm 69:10-13)

This week we read the blessings and curses that will become the people if they observe—or fail to observe—the Law. Some of the strong language, both positive and negative, recurs throughout the Torah with striking effect. Job speaks as a cursed man, and the intensity of his outcry is heightened by the fact that he describes himself in terms that Deuteronomy in this week’s parasha (Ki Tavo) promises are a recompense for wickedness. And yet we know Job is not wicked. The Psalmist—classically understood to be King David—likewise compares himself to a cursed man, and yet the implication is that the curse is unfair, the punishment undeserved. The problem of theodicy—why do good people suffer and evil people get away with it—is not external to Torah, but embedded in it. What Moses says is a rule for life and what other Biblical characters experience in their own lives do not always accord. The question raised by the discrepancy is the epistemological value of suffering—is a curse objective, subjective, intersubjective?

The secular materialist world has stripped us of both blessings and curses; everything that exists is just the laws of nature. But as Mikhail Bulgakov knew, writing The Master and Margarita in the Soviet Union under communist censorship, the existence of the devil is itself a cipher for the existence of God. If you can prove that curses exist, you can also prove the existence of blessings. Liberal readers tend to have a positivity bias, seeking to uphold the reality of the blessing but discard the reality of the curse. But recognizing that there is room to contest a curse, or that we can’t have epistemological certainty about when we are cursed, is different than challenging the very existence of curses. Perhaps a world with both curses and blessings is preferable to one with neither. Or perhaps this is the question: should we throw baby (the ability to bless) and bathwater (the ability to desecrate) out or keep baby and bathwater together?

One of the more fascinating curses is that we will become a parable for others. Neutrally and contextually, the point seems simply to be that we will be “the talk of the town”— that others will look at our downfall and gossip. Our plight will be a social shame. It is not enough that we suffer, we must also be an object of scorn, a cautionary tale, a source of Schadenfreude. The curses contain a lot of insight into human nature, suggesting that bodily pain is slight compared to the anguish of the stigmatized and derided ego. The Torah teaches the notion of “adding insult to injury.” And it also understands the sentiment well familiar to Buddhist meditators that much of our reality or experience is the “voice in our head,” the “story we tell ourselves.” The curses are not just about things that happen to us, but about stories that we will come to embrace as our truth—and they are quite terrible.

The poignancy of the psalmist’s lament that he has become a mashal for others is precisely that those others are his own peers. It is as if the people in his own life are like the nations of the world looking on at the Jewish people. One of the many brilliant poetic features of the Psalms is the way they personalize national and collective language, so that a single person in pain is a kind of microcosm of an entire people.

Let’s say that a story comes out in a large national newspaper about some Jewish community behaving in a way largely perceived to be shameful. Of course, there will be those who cry anti-semitism about any negative story about Jews, even if it is true, and even if it is shameful. “They’re biased.” And there will be those on the other side who say that we are giving the anti-semites good fodder for their preordained judgments, and that we ourselves are responsible for drawing the spotlight on our warts; the blame lies with us, not the antisemites. But to me it seems like both can be true at the same time: the curse is precisely that, in some sense, the antisemites will be right, even if for the wrong reason—for a broken clock is right twice a day. This week’s front page NYTimes story about failing Hasidic schools gives a modern taste of what it is like to be doubly cursed, cursed with bad fundamentals (a terrible system) and now cursed with bad optics (terrible press). “I am the taunt of drunkards.”

The word mashal can mean proverb, but translating it as parable calls attention to the fact that it is enigmatic, its meaning non-obvious. To be a parable means that you are in some sense indecipherable; your opacity draws people in to seek comprehension, to give their hot takes and explainers trying to reduce you to your nimshal, your expository bottom-line. It’s not inherently bad to be a parable—one can be a parable in the sense that one brings people to wonder, inspiration, and delight. This is what good art does. But the word marvelous captures the way in which sublime things can fascinate us in the same way that art does, but in a way that invites gawking and fearsome astonishment.

What fearsome astonishment do the nations experience when they behold the plight of Israel? Is it astonishment that a people beloved could be so thick and wayward? That a God so committed to their protection could turn on them? Is it the dark side of “chosenness,” like a peasant watching a favored prince get a severe beatdown from the king (a metaphor offered in Midrashim) and thinking to himself, “Yeah, I’m glad I’m not a prince.” Or is it just the stupefied sense that the Jewish people are “special,” in all senses, including both positive and negative, even if they can’t quite say how or why. Both the suffering and the survival of Israel are a marvel, and the astonishment they inspire arouse both fear and awe.

Now, let me argue the opposite side. The people are not actually as important to others as they think. They just have a case of “spotlight effect.” Do 8 billion people today really care so much about one small ethnic group? Most are living their own lives, off the grid, without internet access and running water. The curse is not in fact that people will talk about us, but that we will imagine them to be, that we will become paranoid, self-conscious. “We will be a mashal to others” means that we will look at other people talking about pleasant things and assume that it’s a parable for us. Everything becomes about us, though it shouldn’t be. This is, of course, the result of guilt. You do something wrong and now every police car is a sign that the heat is after you. If you follow this interpretation, the curse is an over-estimation of one’s importance, a noisy, neurotic mind, incapable of finding peace with itself. Everything is processed through the lens of what are others saying and thinking. The real blessing is not caring.

The curses contain recurrent themes, but a strong one is the theme of alienation—we will be living someone else’s life and someone will be living ours. We will get betrothed only to find our beloved married to someone else, we will plant vineyards and build houses only to find others enjoying them; we will be disassociated, looking down at our own lives as if from without. While this is presented as a punishment or consequence of misbehavior it might behoove us to consider it as the root cause of the misbehavior in the first place. One big reason we stray is that we feel alienated, we do not accept who we are, we are living disconnected from our authentic sense of self, we are following a script that leaves us feeling void.

The source of the curse may be that we do not recognize the blessing we are, and have. The source of the the curse may be our very lack of presence to the house we inhabit. Mystically understood, there may be no difference between the blessing and the curse other than our attitude to our existence.

As Rosh Hashana comes upon us we strive and pray to be reconnected to our selves, to love and accept the lives we have, to find blessing. We are parables. But not for others—for ourselves. Other lives can serve as positive and negative models, but we can’t really know them. To accept our own blessing we must stop gawking. We must stop wondering whether the chatter around us is about us or not. We must clear out the gawkers in our own minds, looking at us and judging us as we try to live, and just live. Thank you, nations in my head, for your attention, but I don’t need your approval or disapproval. I’ve got my own house to build.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh