Parashat Bechukotai includes God’s threats and punishments that will ensue should we not keep the commandments and attempt to live our lives free of Divine Providence. This is one of the most difficult sections in the Pentateuch and traditionally is read quietly by the Public Reader of the Torah. The sages explain that these punishments were already administered during the destruction of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms of Sammariah and Judea at the end of the First Temple period. The parallel set of threats and punishments appearing in parashat Ki Tavo are said to have been carried out during the years- long demise of the Second Temple and the Judean Kingdom.
In the end, it seems that the threats were not a very good deterrence. In that case, what was their purpose in the first place? In general, how should we think about sin in our day and age, 2000 years after the destruction of the Second Temple? The Chasidic approach is surprising and is presented in short in this article, which includes statements made by Rav Ginsburgh in a post-shiur supplement on the 11th of Cheshvan 5774 and excerpts from a shiur from the 11th of Shevat, 5786 (first published in Hebrew in Nifla’ot of Vayikra 5786).
There is a saying that is a foundation of our spiritual work—written also in Chabad in a completely different style, and also in Breslov in another style—that every transgression a Jew commits is 99% foolishness and 1% evil, and every act of repentance (teshuvah)—we are the generation of repentance—is 99% directed forward and 1% regret over the past. This is a very nice saying, for which one can easily find support in the Tanya. Regarding the second point explicitly: the beginning of Iggeret HaTeshuvah states that the essence of repentance, according to the Torah, is simply the abandonment of sin—everything is about going forward. As for the role that foolishness plays in sin, according to the Tanya, one could say that sin is one hundred percent foolishness, following the sages’ statement that, “a person does not commit a transgression unless a spirit of foolishness enters him.” According to Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, it seems that a person does not commit a transgression unless he has despaired of something, and as we know, Rebbe Nachman holds that despair itself is foolishness.
Now, what we would like to do is to expand this beautiful statement. What is not explicitly mentioned is the causal connection between the two parts. The causal connection between the two parts is that if the transgression is 99% foolishness and 1% evil, and repentance is 99% forward-looking and 1% regret over the past, one must say that the two depended on one another. In other words, the remedy for foolishness is to change one’s actions going forward. Conversely, the 1% of evil is rectified through the 1% of regret over the past. There is nothing to regret about having been foolish, but there is something to regret about having been evil.
How can one further sharpen this beautiful saying, which I wanted to explain especially to young people? According to this saying, we should place far less emphasis on thinking in terms of an “evil inclination,” and a “good inclination” (yetzer hara and yetzer tov). In our generation, which is a generation full of ba’alei teshuvah, a generation of teshuvah (a return to observance), people do not like these terms. And here we have a beautiful, first tier source that tells us that indeed, they are not so relevant, because all the “evil inclination” one might have, all of one’s yetzer hara, constitutes only 1% of our character. The other 99% of our character that goes into our transgressions, is just that we are fools, we act foolishly but we are not evil. By the same token, when we speak about what the guidance for our generation, the generation of teshuvah should be, it is simply a message about starting to do what needs to be done. Join a good community and begin to act in a positive and constructive way to affect reality. The past is gone. Place all your focus on the future and on leaving your foolishness behind.
Why God and the Prophets are so Harsh
The Alter Rebbe writes in the Tanya that sometimes a person is required to rebuke himself, i.e., to berate his animal soul and evil inclination, telling them: "you are evil and wicked and abominable and repulsive and vile, etc." This in order to humble the “other side” (the sitra achra), the coarseness and heresy of the animal soul, and thereby reveal and elevate the Divine soul. As an example of this he cites the benefit brought by Moses's words to the people of Israel after the Sin of the Spies. Initially the people did not believe that God could bring them into the Land of Canaan, as the spies said: "for it is stronger than us," meaning, stronger than Him, God, as it were. Moses rebuked them and told them that God was angry with them and had sworn that they would not enter the Land of Canaan, only their descendants would. As a result, they immediately changed direction and said, “We are ready and we will go up [to the Land].”[1] The rebuke brought the people to a state of a broken heart, meaning that it humbled the kelipah, the negative forces within their character that had risen and because of self-pride, stood up against God’s instruction. Once their hearts were broken and they came with submission before God, their essential Jewish self—their Divine soul—was revealed, with all the force of the faith in God that lies hidden in the heart of every Jew providing them with the courage and faith required to conquer the Land of Canaan.
That rebuke is required to break the impure elements within our psyche provides an answer to a question that many who awaken to draw close to Torah and return to God ask: Why does the Torah—beginning with the Five Books of Moses, the Pentateuch, and continuing through the words of the Prophets and the Writings, and after that, in many statements from the sages—contain threats of harsh punishments, curses, and the like directed at sinners? Is God not the very essence of good, and is it not, “the nature of the Good to do good.”[2] The Torah itself is all good, as the sages say, “there is no 'good,' but Torah.” Indeed, what is all this evil—threats, punishment, and curses—doing in the Torah? How is it that a Torah of kindness[3] contains so much anger and punishment?
The answer is that the curses and harsh judgments are considered the tried and tested way to humble evil, and a wondrous means to reveal the Divine soul. The curses are not meant to ever be fulfilled. They are meant to scare the evil inclination. They are meant to humble the kelipah which in every generation raises its head anew (like “a root that produces gall and wormwood”[4]). Their purpose is to subdue heresy and doubts and to reveal faith.
People are more than happy to hear of all the Torah’s promises of good to those who follow God’s instructions. Naturally, they do not feel the same way about the harsh punishments, such as those in parashat Bechukotai and in parashat Tavo. But the right way to respond to the harsh statements and the rebukes is to understand that they present a demand upon us to increase our faith in God, faith that increases when we develop the recognition of our own lowliness as a result of the rebuke. The intention is that from within the harsh, rebuking words, faith will be revealed, and then everything will be transformed into a goodness that is seen and experienced.[5]
When Moses and all the prophets after him tell us that we have sinned and that we are destined to continue to sin, their intent is to chastise us, and by the very act of striking the heart with these allegations and chastisement, save us from current and future sin. This is in essence prophylactic care, preventative medicine that comes either before we sin in the first place, or to prevent further sin through the repentance that will be done for the sins we have already committed. Throughout the Bible, we find that the true prophets follow this pessimistic method, while the false prophets constantly indulge the people with optimism, which in the long run (sometimes even in the short term) prevent them from repenting and paradoxically, cause them to continue to sin, in even worse ways.
Did this approach succeed? Did Moses and all the prophets manage, through their threatening rebuke, to save us from sin? In practice, we see that this approach did not work so well (except, to some extent, among those who “feared God”); the commoners continued to sin. The path of the prophets became the path of musar, a path that was followed by the preachers (מוֹכִיחִים or מַגִּידִים) who would shower fire and brimstone speeches on their audiences. This was the common way for preachers up until our teacher the Ba’al Shem Tov who argued for a different path.
When a person is told that he is essentially a sinner, "I knew you would sin," he accepts this, and the words themselves bring him to sin. This reaches its absolute extreme with Christianity, which held that the very essence of man is sin and all of humanity is essentially a self-reflection of Adam's primordial sin). To put it sharply: Moses’ attribute of strict and harsh judgment (מִדַּת הַדִּין) itself implanted a mixed multitude (ערב רב) of harsh sentiment into the heart of every Jew, and Moses’ soul must come back in every generation to rectify this.[3]
[1]. Numbers 14:40.
[2]. Eitz Chaim, beginning of Sha’ar HaKelalim.
[3]. Proverbs 31:26.
[4]. Deuteronomy 29:17.
[5]. Indeed, the value of “faith” (אֱמוּנָה), 102 is 6 times the value of “good” (טוֹב), which means that “faith” is the value of all 6 possible permutations of “good” (טוב טבו בטו בוט ובט וטב)—faith is the ultimate development and expression of “
