Addict Torah: Bechukotai 5784/2024

Addict Torah's Mission: To interrogate Torah deeply so as to create space, connection and safety for people with addictive patterns and behaviors that have led them to a crisis of the spirit to tell and shape their stories for the purpose of healing, growth, and a return to their whole selves.

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RA & USCJ, Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary, p. 747

4. rains in their season What is the modern reader to make of these threats and promises, aware of the fact that righteous people are not always rewarded and that wicked people are not invariably punished? We can see them...as a collective assurance: When most members of a community follow God's ways, the community as a whole will prosper even if some innocent individuals suffer illness or unjustice.

Mahatma Ghandi, saying

Earth . . . provides enough to satisfy everyone’s needs, but not for everyone’s greed.

Rashi on Leviticus 26:8

FIVE [OF YOU SHALL PURSUE] A HUNDRED AND A HUNDRED… TEN THOUSAND — But is this the right proportion? Surely it should have stated only “and a hundred of you shall pursue two thousand (and not ten thousand)!? But the explanation is: a few who fulfill the commandments of the Torah cannot compare with the many who fulfill the commandments of the Torah (i. e. the greater the group of those loyal to the Torah, the greater is the morale and, under God’s blessing, the physical strength of each individual belonging to the group) (Sifra, Bechukotai, Chapter 2 4)

The AA Promises

1. If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through. 2. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. 3. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. 4. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. 5. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. 6. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. 7. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. 8. Self-seeking will slip away. 9. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. 10. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. 11. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. 12. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us - sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.

Rabbi Shai Held, The Heart of Torah, vol. 2, location 2063, Kindle edition

The verse implicitly contrasts what it means to be a slave to Pharaoh with what it means to be a servant of God. Pharaoh places the Israelites under a backbreaking and soul-crushing yoke, whereas God invites them to stand tall.209 Subtly the Torah indicates that to serve God and to stand upright are not mutually contradictory. On the contrary one cannot really serve God without a robust sense of one’s own dignity. True divine service depends on those who serve standing tall.

Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, The Everyday Torah, p. 207

...if a religious life does not stand on a basis of human concern—specifically, a concern for other people—then it has no basis whatsoever. Notice that the pasuk does not speak about our obligation to liberate ourselves. It is human nature, naturally, to focus on oneself and make one's concerns the primary object of our own attention. Precisely for that reason, the Torah insists that the liberation of others must be our most pressing concern. Indeed, that concern is the very consequence of God's having liberated us from slavery. We are summoned as Jews and human beings to work for the redemption of the enslaved, those suffering in our midst, both as a reflection of ani Ha-Shem ("I am the Lord") and asher hotzeiti otam me-eretz Mitzrayim (as a consequence of having been brought to freedom).

Rabbi Shefa Gold, Torah Journeys, p. 131

It is an incredibly radical realization when we discover that it is the inner state of consciousness, and not outer circumstance, that determines whether our lives are an expression of Heaven or Hell. Personally this realization stands at the foremost challenge to my own ego...the fear-driven ego says, 'If only I had these things....then everything would be OK. The wisdom of my soul says, 'I will find Heaven here regardless of circumstances.'

Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Living Sober, p. 44-45

We all followed up that last "if with our own explanations (excuses?) for our drinking. Each of us thought: I wouldn't be drinking this way... If it wasn't for my wife (or husband or lover)...if I just had more money and not so many debts...if it wasn't for all these family problems... if I wasn't under so much pressure...if I had a better job or a better place to live... if people understood me... if the state of the world wasn't so lousy...if human beings were kinder, more considerate, more honest...if everybody else didn't expect me to drink...if it wasn't for the war (any war)... and on and on and on...Meanwhile, our life is much, much better sober, no matter what else may be going on. But then, after a sober while, for some of us there comes a time when—plop!—a new discovery slaps us in the face. That same old "iffy" thinking habit of our tippling days has, without our seeing it, attached itself to not drinking. Unconsciously, we have placed conditions on our sobriety. We have begun to think sobriety is just fine—if everything goes well, or if nothing goes askew.

Richard Elliott Friedman, Torah and Commentary, p. 1880-1881, Kindle edition

A people who loses sight of its commitments and values will suffer. (It should not be hard to think of contemporary parallels.) The frightful curse of eating one’s own children comes true centuries later in one of the most horrifying stories in the Bible (2 Kings 6:24–30). It is not presented there as a punishment. It rather conveys the terrible state of things in Israel in the wake of the heretical reigns of Kings Ahab and Jehoram. There is a big difference between a punishment and a curse, between a threat and a warning.

Rabbi Mark Borovitz, Finding Recovery and Yourself in Torah, p. 229

As we all know, when we first start to err, the consequences are not usually so bad. For many people, this leads them to believe that what they are doing is okay because a lightning bolt from the sky has not struck them. We lie to ourselves so that we can continue to do what we want even if we know that it is not the next right action to take. Then, as the consequences get worse, those of us who are unable to take responsibility for our own actions blame everyone and everything around us. God tells us in this parashah that we actually have a choice; we do not have to continue to do the wrong action.

Rabbi Mark Borovitz, Finding Recovery and Yourself in Torah, p. 226

I believe that this tochechah is for the community and that each of us must be accountable for our own actions and for the actions of our community.

Rabbi Benay Lappe, paraphrase of a conversation, c. 2022

Just as the world is not complete without teshuvah, it is not complete without tochechah.

Avodah Zarah 10b, 12-13

The Gemara asks: What is it that occurred involving Ketia, son of Shalom? As there was a certain Roman emperor who hated the Jews. He said to the important members of the kingdom: If one had an ulcerous sore [nima] rise on his foot, should he cut it off and live, or leave it and suffer? They said to him: He should cut it off and live. The ulcerous sore was a metaphor for the Jewish people, whom the emperor sought to eliminate as the cause of harm for the Roman Empire. Ketia, son of Shalom, said to them: It is unwise to do so, for two reasons. One is that you cannot destroy all of them, as it is written: “For I have spread you abroad as the four winds of the heaven, says the Lord” (Zechariah 2:10). He clarified: What is it saying? Shall we say that the verse means that God has scattered them to the four winds of the world? If so, this phrase: “As the four winds,” is inaccurate, since it should have said: To the four winds. Rather, this is what the verse is saying: Just as the world cannot exist without winds, so too, the world cannot exist without the Jewish people, and they will never be destroyed. And furthermore, if you attempt to carry out the destruction of the Jews, they will call you the severed kingdom, as the Roman Empire would be devoid of Jews, but Jews would exist in other locations.

Dr. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy, p. 326-327

The driven leaf imagery haunts us. Perhaps the slippery-slope midrash meant to imply that the failure to observe Shmittah in the first place is an expression of a compulsive, paradoxical sanity. To trade in the fruits of the Shmittah year is, after all, one might say, to be extremely sensible. But this commonsense act betrays precisely that anxiety about work, duration, and death that makes one clutch at the world of things. As Bataille puts it, this anxiety obscures the “ground of things that is dazzlingly bright,” which is uncovered precisely in the Sabbath moment. The Shmittah year acts as a homeopathic dose of exile, not only from home and land, but from a socially coherent sense of self. The Sabbath experience is a form of temporary madness. We are touching here on the core of selfhood. Twin impulses reign here: the desire to be the ba’al ha-bayit, the master of the house, who knows what belongs to him/her, who invests resources into improving the world, husbanding the fruits of the land so that there may be a future; and the ability to let go, to loosen one’s grip, to relinquish, to consume resources in one uncalculated moment. Under the first impulse, work is driven by fear and sacrifice is anguish; under the second, the suspension of the work modality means the experience of the sacred, the passion of being part of a larger reality. In the Shmittah year, one passes from one world to another, almost from one self to another. Temporary exile from the conventional boundaries of self paradoxically protects one from the radical alienations of exile.

RA & USCJ, Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary, p. 752

40. Although God proclaims the divine readiness to accept penitents and meet them more than halfway, the first turning must come from the errant people. God does not impose repentance (t'shuvah) on an unwilling people.

Rabbi Shai Held, The Heart of Torah, vol. 2, location 1983, Kindle edition

Leviticus as a whole is profoundly concerned with the sacrificial system—which makes it all the more striking that here sacrifices are not mentioned at all; a humbled heart, genuine confession, and restitution for sin are enough.190 On one level, of course, sacrifice could not coherently be called for in these circumstances; the people are, after all, in exile. Nevertheless, as Jacob Milgrom points out, “the importance of the concession should not be underestimated.” The text’s focus on confession rather than sacrifice “approximates, and perhaps influences, the prophetic doctrine of repentance, which not only suspends the sacrificial requirement, but eliminates it entirely.”

Rabbi Shai Held, The Heart of Torah, vol 2, location 2035, Kindle edition

God’s commitment does indeed mean that God will not destroy the people, but the people are charged to mend their ways. They remain, always, “responsible for their actions. The blend of divine grace and human responsibility is apparent. This is a both/and situation precisely because it is viewed in relational terms. Both parties must respond and act.”196 God’s turn to Israel comes in tandem with—and arguably in response to—Israel’s turn to God.

Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Covenant and Conversation: Leviticus, p. 349

This is a turning point in the history of the human spirit. It is the birth of hope: not hope as a dream, a wish, a desire, but as the very shape of history itself, “the arc of the moral universe,” as Martin Luther King put it. God is just. He may punish. He may hide His face. But He will not break His word. He will fulfil His promise. He will redeem His children. He will bring them home. Hope is one of the very greatest Jewish contributions to Western civilisation, so much so that I have called Judaism “the voice of hope in the conversation of humankind.”

RA & USCJ, Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary, p. 757

Not all the laws, however, were literally given to Moses at Sinai! The opening verse of Leviticus describes the laws that follow as having been given at the Tent of Meeting. Sinai is not a geographic location. It is a symbol of Israel's awareness of having stood in the presence of God and having come to understand what God requires of them. Whenever a person hears the commanding voice of God and commits himself or herself to live by that voice, that person can be considered to be standing at Sinai.

Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, p. 1906, Kindle edition

...the literary study of the Hebrew Bible has to come to terms with Leviticus, for it is embedded in the biblical narrative. Indeed, the fact that no law code from ancient Israel survived independently, that law codes survived only in contexts of narrative, is notable in itself.

Rabbi David Kasher, ParshaNut, p. 264

...we have been, for twenty-seven chapters now, bombarded with precise rituals, graphic depictions, arcane laws. Details, details, details. The reader can easily become, at a certain point, so overwhelmed with the minutiae that they forget the point of it all. And the point of it all – the sacrifices, the purity laws, the holiness codes, all of it – is to come close to God. We are being trained, throughout Leviticus, to see the ultimate Oneness that underlies the dizzyingly manifold nature of our existence. That is the secret of the world: God is in the details.