Rabbi Greg Alexander
Cape Town Progressive Jewish Congregation
It first tells us that if you follow the commandments you will be showered with blessings – and what blessings! Prosperity, security, children, freedom, food to eat and peace. And you will feel G-d’s presence with you forever.
But there’s more: If you don’t, then you will be cursed, and the curses are not the kind of thing you would want to trifle with – starvation, misery, slavery, diseases and some really gruesome bits that I’ll leave you to read in the Torah itself if you wish.
Now, I know what you’re going to say: “Rabbi, that just isn’t the way the world works. I know people who are so careful about doing mitzvot and they seem to suffer such hardships. And people who are enjoying life, swanning around the world on yachts and jets and they’re horrible people! And what about the Holocaust?”
And you would be right, no disagreement there. Maybe the way to understand our portion is to look not at what is happening outside “to” us, but what is happening inside “of” us.
What I mean is that stuff happens – it happens all the time and some of it is “good” and some of it is “bad”, but actually we have as much say in this stuff as we do in the weather or the petrol price. In other words, none.
What we have huge control over is ourselves, our bodies, our responses, our time. We might think that the world just happens to us, but actually we create our world every moment when we choose what we do, what we say, even what we think.
G-d’s greatest and challenging gift in creating us was giving us free will, power over our lives.
It all comes back to the first word of our Torah portion – in Hebrew “Im”, in English – “if”. That tells us that if we choose blessings, we get blessings, if we choose curses, we get curses.
Now, I am not minimising suffering and saying that our lives are purely subjective. When I said “stuff happens”, some of that stuff is hard core and I am not dismissing the harshness of something like cancer, death of a relative or a business going under.
What I am saying is that how we respond to that “stuff” is up to us. When we live lives of mitzvot, we build up a certain way of seeing and acting in this world that makes us appreciate and acknowledge our blessings. It makes us positive responders, people who see the opportunities, who feel love and want to share love.
Forty years after our Torah portion, Moses reminds the Israelites that we have a choice – life and death, blessing and curse, and implores them to choose life (Deut. 30:19). May we all be life-choosers too. L’chaim, to life!
