Torah is the essential recipe of purpose

A story is told of a Jewish man who was riding on the subway reading a newspaper of the Klu Klux Klan. A friend of his, who happened to be riding in the same subway car, noticed this strange phenomenon.  Very upset, he approached the newspaper reader, 
“Moshe, have you lost your mind? Why are you reading a Klu Klux Klan newspaper?”

Moshe replied: “I used to read the Jewish newspaper, but what did I find?  Jews being persecuted, Israel being attacked, Jews disappearing through assimilation and intermarriage, Jews living in poverty. So I switched to the Klu Klux Klan newspaper. Now what do I find? Jews own all the banks, Jews control the media, Jews are all rich and powerful, and Jews rule the world. The news is so much better!”

Sometimes, it seems life is all about perspective.

This week’s portion, Bechukotai, contains one of the most difficult and painful sections in the entire Torah. Known as the Tochacha, or rebuke, (admonition), in these thirty verses (VaYikra 26:14-43) the Torah describes the series of horrendous calamities that will befall the Jewish people should they fail to live up to their mission as a holy people and a light unto the nations.

The challenging implication of these verses is that all of the terrible events that the Jewish people have suffered through the ages are somehow the result or consequence of the mistakes we have made and the transgressions we have violated.

Why would G-d want such a relationship, where people obey or worship Him purely for fear of retribution?

Interestingly, before the Torah delineates what will go wrong when we do not heed the word of G-d, it first specifies all the blessings we will merit if we do live up to our responsibilities as a people.

“If you will follow in the path of my statutes, and safeguard my commandments, and fulfill them, then I will give your rains in their time, and the land will give forth its bounty, and the tree of the field will yield its fruit.” (26:3-4)

In other words, if we do right by G-d, then G-d will do right by us. But is this really true? There are tragically no shortage of people who seem to live up to the way of life the Torah desires, and yet live lives far from prosperity and often with great suffering.

Further the Mishna in Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) teaches:

“Antig’nos, a man of Socho… used to say: Do not be like the servant who serves the Master in order to receive reward, rather be like the servant who serves the Master not in order to receive reward, and may the fear of heaven be upon you.” (Avot, 1:3)

In other words, our relationship with G-d should not be out of a desire to be rewarded, nor out of fear of punishment, but rather simply because we desire a closer relationship with the Creator of the world. Which again leaves us wondering what the purpose of the entire recipe of blessings and curses in this week’s portion is all about?

It is interesting that Rashi, at the beginning of our portion suggests:

“If you will follow in the path of my statutes”: This obviously cannot be speaking about the fulfillment of the commandments, because this is the next part of the verse: “and safeguard my commandments, and fulfill them,” rather, this means (quoting the Midrash here) you shall toil in the study of Torah …because this will allow you to keep and fulfill the mitzvoth.” (Rashi 26:3)

In other words, the condition upon which the economic prosperity the Torah seems to promise is predicated, is not the fulfillment of the commandments, but rather the study of Torah, necessary in order to fulfill the mitzvoth. This would seem to imply that someone who fulfills the mitzvoth without studying Torah does not merit the rewards spoken of here. Why?

It seems the key to understanding all of these issues is to understand the meaning of Torah itself. What does it mean to study Torah? What, indeed, is Torah all about?

On a superficial level, the fundamental existential difference between a world created by G-d and a world without G-d that exists merely as some sort of cosmic accident is whether or not there is a purpose to our existence. If the world is an accident, then so are we, and while we can strive to give our accidental lives meaning, in the end, we are all random results of a random process.

But if Hashem (G-d) created the world, then creation implies purpose, and that means that everything and everyone in this world is created for a reason.

Holocaust survivor and creator of logo-therapy Victor Frankel, posits in his masterpiece Man’s Search For Meaning, that the essential ingredient that drives us in this world is our search for meaning. Fascinated by the way different people dealt with the hardships of concentration camp life in completely different ways, he noted one particular fellow who arrived in Auschwitz with one of his students and became determined to pass on to this youth a particular tractate of Talmud, which he knew largely by heart.

Whenever he would see this Rebbe (teacher), whether on work detail, or at night in the barracks, and often even at role call, when he thought no one was watching, he was always with his student whispering the sacred words of Talmud under his breath.

And even in Auschwitz, in the midst of all the death that surrounded them, this Rebbe always seemed so alive and so full of purpose. It seemed as though no matter what happened around them, he always had a spring in his step, and others seemed to take strength from being around him.

Until one day he actually completed the tractate he was teaching the boy, for which he had been living. And then Frankel watched as the weight of his reality broke him down and he became what was known as a musselman, one of the living dead who had given up on life. These inmates were immediately discernible by the vacant stare in their eyes and were avoided by other prisoners; one never knew when they would just stop what they were doing and walk over to one of the fences or defy the guards, no longer caring whether they lived or died. And when the guards started shooting they didn’t care where their bullets landed.

How could someone so full of life one day simply lose the desire to go on the next? Frankel concluded that what drives human beings above all else is our search for meaning.

If indeed we are created by G-d, then that purpose we so crave is not simply a random delusion we have created for ourselves, which can never stand up to the light of true introspection, rather, it is the purpose for which Hashem placed us in this world to begin with.

And if indeed G-d created us all for a reason, it makes no sense for G-d not to, at some point, communicate or reveal to us what that purpose is. After all, what would be the point of there being a purpose to our sojourn in this world if we never learned what that purpose was?

This is why every religion that believes in a G-d, inevitably has a revelation, a point at which G-d reveals to the world their purpose.

For the Jewish people that point in time occurred three thousand years ago at Sinai, and the Torah is essentially the recipe of purpose for what we are meant to be doing, and who we are meant to become in this life.

Torah, then, is all about purpose. And the study of Torah is the opportunity essentially, to tap into the thought process of G-d. Torah is not meant to be merely an intellectual accruing of knowledge; it is meant to be an opportunity to experience G-d. Indeed, it is the fabric of our relationship with G-d in this world. It represents our ability to find meaning in all that we do, and everything we see.

This then, may be what this week’s portion is all about. Perhaps the ‘reward’ that comes as a result of this toiling in Torah is that life becomes its own reward.

It is not that we can ever answer the question of how and why the Jewish people have suffered so much over the millennium; it is that the question no longer challenges us in the same way.

The verse tells us: “Tzaddik Be’Emunato Yichyeh,” which we usually take to mean that the righteous live on faith alone. But Rav Kook (in his Midot HaRe’ayah’) points out that faith is the way we view the world. When we believe that everything has purpose, we are then seeing the world through completely different lenses. A tzaddik lives in a very different world, because he or she sees the world in a completely different way. Everything has meaning, and everything comes from G-d.

Perhaps this is the meaning of the Mishnah from Avot we quoted above. After all, if we should not serve the Master to get a reward, then obviously we should serve the Master without any desire to receive a reward! Why the need to repeat the sentence, instead of just saying we should not serve Hashem for reward?

Perhaps the point is not to expect that you will receive a reward for your efforts, because it is the effort that is in fact the reward.

And this is why the Mishnah there concludes: “and may the fear of heaven be upon you.” Because the word morah, mistranslated as fear, really means awe, from the root lir’ot, to see. Antig’nos of Socho was suggesting that the challenge and the essence of life in this world are to see heaven on earth, every day, in everything we do.

May we all be blessed to see the world through entirely different lenses, which see only blessing!

Shabbat Shalom,

Binny Freedman

Rav Binny Freedman, Rosh Yeshivat Orayta in Jerusalem’s Old City is a Company Commander in the IDF reserves, and lives in Efrat with his wife Doreet and their four children. His  weekly Internet ‘Parsha Bytes’ can be found at www.orayta.org