May 28/05 — Shabbat Bechukotai

Commentary by Rabbi Alan Green

"If you follow My laws, and faithfully observe My commandments, I will grant you rains in season, so that the earth shall yield its produce, and the trees of the field their fruit. Your threshing shall overtake your vintage, and your vintage shall overtake your sowing. You shall eat your fill of bread, and dwell securely in your land.” (Leviticus 26: 3-5)

But we all know that it’s never quite as simple as outlined in this week’s Parsha. Every day, we see innumerable examples of how ostensibly good, faithful, moral people go unrewarded, while obviously evil types go unpunished. Or worse, we see how the good may even be punished, while the evil are rewarded. How then are we to take these promises of reward and punishment seriously in our own lives?

This isn’t a new problem. Eighteen centuries ago, Rabbi Yannai taught (Pirket Avot 4:19), “The tranquility of the wicked, and the suffering of the righteous—these are beyond human understanding.” And it could well be that the belief in afterlife—a place where the good are rewarded, and the evil punished, in accordance with Divine justice—took root in Judaism around this time, partly to resolve this thorny problem.

The afterlife offers some comfort to those who believe in it. As Rabbi Yannai says, human knowledge is strictly limited to what we can know here and now, in this world. With the demise of our merely human condition, in death, we might well be able to know that which we are not privy to know as human beings.

However, I want to briefly describe two other solutions to the problem of evil. One is the existential approach. Existentialism is a modern philosophical movement. But 18 centuries ago, Rabbi Ben Azzai expressed a supremely concise, existentialist solution to the problem of evil. Ben Azzai taught, S’CHAR MITZVAH, MITZVAH; S’CHAR AVEIRAH, AVEIRAH—“The reward of a Mitzvah, is the Mitzvah; the penalty of a sin, is the sin.”

This teaching is logically and philosophically unassailable. Ben Azzai isn’t concerned with the issue of future reward and punishment. Ben Azzai says, “You have done what you have done. Now, look at your experience. How do you feel about the Mitzvah, or the sin, that you have just performed? However you feel about it—that, and only that, is your reward, or your punishment.” You can’t get any more direct than that.

There is also another approach. The rule of “what goes around, comes around,” does work, most of the time. In general, if you treat people well, you will be treated well in return. If you respect others, they will respect you. If you make it a habit to insult or harm others, inevitably, the insult and harm you render returns to you.

The only difficulty is that we cannot count on this mechanism to function flawlessly. Imagine a river flowing from north to south. We know that in this river, most of the water molecules of will travel in the same direction as the river. But it would be impossible to track the precise journey of every molecule in the river. The general rule is that the molecules will go the way of the river. But on the individual, molecular level, anything is possible.

Similarly, there are 6.7 billion human beings on this planet. The sum of all the innumerable interactions and influences created by all these billions of beings creates a large picture, which we might call, “the events of the day.” However, with all of these actions and reactions circulating and re-circulating around the globe at the speed of light, can we really expect that every outcome will be positive, or just?

Generally, we can expect the law of “reaping what you sow” to hold. But a reaction based on a reaction based on a reaction might take on a life of its own. Just like the molecules in the river, on the individual level of human life--for better or for worse—virtually anything, can happen to anyone, at any time.