Shabbat Ki Tavo: Rewards and punishment
The Torah this week contains blessings and warnings.
The wording is a formulation common throughout the Ancient and Near East for kings to address their subjects this way. First of all, declaring that if they are loyal, they will protect them, the rains will fall at the right time, and they will prosper. Then warning them of famine, destruction, and slavery if they betray them. Everyone would have been familiar with these monarchical declarations and knew full well that things did not always turn out as hoped.
So why do we do things in life? Is it to get some kind of reward? Most people think that this is the function of religion, to ensure that we get rewarded for doing the things that God or whatever moral code wants us to do. And this week, reading Chapter 28 of Deuteronomy reinforces this idea. It is the second time in the Torah (after Leviticus 26) that a Chapter is devoted almost entirely to threats if we misbehave, as opposed to a few lines telling us we will be rewarded if we do as we are told. Yet this doesn’t seem fair to those good people who suffer while bad people thrive. We lost our land and temple twice, two thousand and two thousand five hundred years ago because we failed as a people and a nation. But did we get our land back because we were so good? Who knows?
Some rabbis take reward literally that God rewards and punishes us in life on earth as individuals for our actions even if we have no idea how it works. Others symbolically, if not now, then perhaps after we die. Of course, the Torah uses a language appropriate to its times and its audiences. But it was designed to be a code of practice, so it is not surprising that it leaves other abstract, theological matters to be described in symbolic or metaphorical ways. This allows both the simple mind and the intellectual person to make sense of it in their own different ways.
The Mishna in Avot, tells us not to think about doing things to get rewarded, but to behave well out of a commitment to God or truth, or goodness, regardless of benefit. The Mishna also says that the reward of a good deed is another good deed, and the punishment for a bad is to continue bad destructive behaviour and simply miss out on the benefits of a religious lifestyle. It does not make sense to think of God as a candy man handing them out for being good. Besides, no one knows whether reward means physical or spiritual. But the Torah uses metaphor to tell us that there are always consequences and are warned.
This is why Maimonides says that doing good encourages us to do more good deeds and that enhances our spirituality which is less subject to pain and disintegration than the physical body. We do not agree with Shakespeare when his character Marc Anthony says, “ the evil that men do lives after them, the good, is often interred with their bones.” We are witnesses to the fact that good can indeed live on through our survival.
I look at it this way. Parents will try their best to train their children. They will give them the advice they believe will help them cope with life and make a success of it. They will probably tell their children to take good care of their minds, and bodies, to study and work hard. And most people will probably agree that these are the best pieces of advice one can give a child. But they will know that however well-prepared children are and however well behaved, there will always be failures, forces beyond their control, crises, wars, or accidents.
The Torah, like a parent, gives advice, warns us of the dangers, recommends how to behave, and calls on an authority to try to persuade or command us to follow the right path. If we follow its guidelines, although there can be no guarantees, they are bound, like a good Self-Help book, to be of value in helping us cope with life’s challenges
Deuteronomy 26:1-29:8
