Parashat Ki Tavo
Judaism emphasizes deed, not creed.
By Jessica Marshall
This
commentary is provided by special arrangement with American Jewish World
Service. To learn more, visit www.ajws.org.
Within
the narrative of blessings and curses in Parashat
Ki Tavo, God sets out expectations for how we should behave, making it
clear that this is not a covenant of faith, but one of deeds. Contemporary
Jewish philosopher David Hartman contends that the blessings and curses are not
literally inflicted upon humans in response to their observance or
nonobservance of commandments. Hartman argues, instead, that our Torah
enumerates these curses and blessings in order to emphasize the grave
importance of acting with holiness and thereby actualizing God's presence in
our midst. The blessings and curses are provided as a symbolic reminder of our
covenantal obligations, reinforcing our commitment to a covenant rooted in action.
Rabbi Abraham
Joshua Heschel also invokes our covenant with God when he asserts that the
blessings and curses are meant to impart a sense of our partnership with the
divine as we struggle to cope with good and evil. Simply observing the Torah's
written laws is not enough to continually bring sanctity into our lives. The
Torah not only narrowly stipulates that certain acts are prohibited, but also
broadly demands that we accept our responsibility to realize a sustainable and
just society.
Heschel
understands the significance of our deeds both as signs of our covenantal
relationship and as active agents of change in our surroundings. In God in
Search of Man, he writes:
"It is in
the deeds that human beings become
aware of what life really is, of their power to harm and to hurt, to wreck and
to ruin; of their ability to derive joy and bestow it upon others…The deed is
the test, the trial, and the risk. What we perform may seem slight, but the
aftermath is immense."
A Recipe for Sustainable Development
Understood
this way, mitzvot ben adam l'chavero--those commandments that guide
human relationships--really actualize our covenant with God. The majority of
the mitzvot detailed in this parashah focus on supporting just and
compassionate relationships with other human beings--in effect, offering
guidelines for the creation of just communities.
Prohibitions
against subverting the rights of the stranger, secretly harming a neighbor, and
accepting bribes support the universal human rights we seek to uphold in our
social justice work. The Torah champions human integrity and dignity, and our
literary tradition further elevates this with the assertion that the highest
form of tzedakah is to help someone
become self-sufficient.
Expanding
this oft-cited mitzvah from the individual scale to the community offers a
recipe for sustainable development. The most empowering and long-lasting
support we can provide for a community in need is to assist it to create the
infrastructure to care for and protect itself. This kind of development also
often has spillover effects by enabling an increasingly self-sufficient
community to assist its neighbors through its newfound wisdom and resources.
Manifesting
our covenant with God through action tips the scale away from curses and toward
blessings. As Heschel maintained, "In a sacred deed we echo God's
suppressed chant…We intone God's unfinished song. God depends upon us, awaits
our deeds." We have the opportunity to heal our world and make it a place
of peace. The list of blessings and curses in the Torah reminds us that we must
choose each and every day to be active partners with God working to repair the world.
We
begin this work at the individual level, but must recognize that it needs to be
applied also at the community level if we are to build a truly just society. We
do not only hold the fate of our personal lives in our hands, we also hold the
fate of humanity. Through acts of holiness, we engender God's presence in our
midst and become sacred instruments through which God's justice, goodness,
mercy, and love enter and transform the world.
Jessica
Marshall is a fifth year rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College in New
York.
