B’har – B’chukotai
Leviticus 25:1 – 27:34
The second of this week’s double Torah portion, B’chukotai, opens with several promises predicated on our performance of the laws and commandments set down in Torah. “I will establish My abode with you… I will be ever present in your midst… I will be your God and you shall be My people….” (Lev. 26:11-13). It’s all looking very good for us, until we come to verse 14, which begins with the dreaded word “But.” “But if you do not obey Me and do not observe all the commandments, if you reject My laws and spurn My rules… and you break My covenant, I in turn will do this to you….” (Lev. 26:14-16) The news gets worse with each succeeding verse, and we can imagine the early Israelites quivering in abject dread because they know they will probably never measure up to the Divine decrees.
To the overwhelming majority of Western thinkers in the modern world, the idea of a God Who deals in rewards and punishments is so anachronistic that it has brought many to abandon religion altogether. The thought that righteous behavior yields success, prosperity, and peace, and that sinful behavior brings disease, poverty, and fear may have influenced the people of antiquity, but it is no longer useful because it simply isn’t true. The solution, however, is not so much to toss away the scriptures with their ancient notion of God, as to awaken to a new idea of God, to “evolve” God to meet our modern minds. Why? Because at the source of the old biblical concept of a punishing or rewarding God lies the outdated notion that the Divine is solely otherworldly, a Great Puppeteer separated from His Creation.
“Evolving” God to a new understanding is exactly what our sages did several hundred years ago. Already at the time of the Renaissance, 16th-Century mystics such as Rabbi Moses Cordovero and Rabbi Isaac Luria, of the Kabbalistic school of Safed in northern Israel, presented a revolutionary non-dual theology. With it, the idea of God as exclusively “out there,” external to or other than the manifest Universe, was replaced by a new vision of God. While still recognizing God’s transcendent aspect, the Kabbalists added the notion that not only is God fully present in the manifest Universe, God is that Universe through and through. Two hundred years later, at the dawn of Modernity, the founding figure of Chasidism, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer (the Baal Shem Tov) and his many successors in the Chasidic movement made this non-dual, panentheistic theology the central pillar of their belief system. They defined God through “negative theology,” which claimed that there is no one that God is not, no where that God is not, no when that God is not, no thing that God is not.
With an idea of God better fitted to our 21st-Century sensitivities, rooted in Kabbalah and early Chasidism, we come back to the biblical text with a different set of eyes. Wearing our non-dual reading glasses, we recognize that this is a story of God as both bestower of reward and the rewarded, both punisher and the punished all at once. One of the deeper teachings available in our text is that, inherent in Creation, is the existence of light and darkness, pleasure and pain; and that both are expressions of the Divine One. This dualistic experience is simply par for the course of our lives. The more we resist it, the more we seek to experience only the light, want only happiness and rewards, the more we set ourselves up for suffering. The true reward of the spiritual path—of taking up the covenant—lies in the acceptance that our lives are a series of “acts of God,” some fortunate and others tragic, that we can neither cause nor control. As we let go of our need for our human experience to be different from what it is (or what it was,) and are able to embrace both the light and the shadow of life with equanimity, we come closer to experiencing our true Divine nature, the non-dual Essence of Being that we are.