Topics in this digest: Reeh 5764
by Rabbi Dr. Barry Leff
“See, I set before you today, a blessing and a curse (Deut. 11:26).” Let
me think about that…blessing…curse…which do I want?
You would think that it would not be a very difficult decision. You would
think that it’s not rocket science to say “I’ll take the blessings,
thanks,” and leave the curses behind.
If that’s the case, why is it that we so often seem to make stupid
choices? Why is it that some people choose curses instead of blessings?
Why would someone choose to become a drug addict? Maybe a drug addict
does not choose to be an addict, but at some point in time he made that
first decision to shoot up.
Why would the governor of one of the 50 states choose to engage in
behavior that leads to his resigning from his office?
After detailing the blessings and curses, why does God need to tell us (in
parshat Nitzavim), “I call heaven and earth to record this day against
you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse;
therefore choose life, that both you and your seed may live.”? Do we
really need to be told to choose life—to choose the blessing?
Apparently, we do. Relative to obeying the commandments, one might argue,
as we discussed last week, that the world does not seem to work the way
described in last week’s Torah portion—the righteous don’t necessarily
seem more prosperous, the wicked don’t necessarily seem more impoverished,
so maybe on some level it’s a lack of faith. If we don’t have enough
faith in God and the Torah we don’t believe things will be better for us
through obeying the commandments, so we don’t.
But that doesn’t really explain it. Not just God in the Torah, but life
itself sets blessings and curses in front of us every day. Yet I dare say
every single one of us here today has at some time made a choice which
turned out to be a curse. You don’t get past the age of about 2 without
screwing up sometime, and you don’t get past the age of 30 without at
least one or two MAJOR screwups—choices that turn out to have been a
curse, not a blessing.
The reason we can have both a blessing and a curse in front of us, and end
up choosing the curse, is because we don’t recognize which is which. The
thing that is the blessing might look like a curse, and the thing that’s a
curse might look like a blessing. We can look at the Torah and the
commandments and think it’s a tax, or a penalty for being an observant
Jew—a curse of sorts, in other words. We can look at a curse—excessive
alcohol, hard drugs, promiscuity—and think it’s a blessing because it
feels good.
We make the wrong choices because we sometimes fail to see the
consequences of our actions. We look just at the short term, not the long
term. When Governor McGreevy of New Jersey started his ill-fated affair
it undoubtedly was exciting and fun. If he saw it was going to lead to
his quitting his job under a cloud, he probably would never have done it.
Our yetzer hara, our evil inclination, is very short-sighted. Evil
inclination is actually not the greatest translation for yetzer hara. The
yetzer hara is what Freud called the id: the basic set of instincts and
drives that we are all wired with. The id is selfish and shortsighted.
“If it feels good now, it’s good” might be the motto of the id/yetzer
hara.
A wicked person is ruled by his yetzer hara. And even those of us who
aren’t what you might call “wicked” are frequently led astray by our
yetzer hara. Maybe we have a glass of wine or two more than is good.
Maybe we eat too much—our yetzer hara likes the taste, even though we know
the extra poundage we carry is bad for us. Someone who is righteous is
successful at conquering his yetzer hara.
The Talmud brings a story of how after they pass away, both the righteous
and the wicked cry when they see the yetzer hara. To the wicked, the
yetzer hara looks like a thread of hair, and they cry, wondering, “why is
it I couldn’t conquer this little thread of hair?” But to the righteous,
the yetzer hara looks like a mountain, and they cry, wondering, “how could
I possibly have overcome such a tremendous force?”
I studied this passage in the Talmud some years ago, but it didn’t make
sense to me until recently when I studied what R. Yosef Horowitz had to
say about it in his Mussar text, Madregat HaAdam, the Levels of Man. R.
Horowitz explains that the difference between the wicked and the righteous
is that the righteous see the consequences of their actions. The yetzer
hara does not come at you full force and try and get you to turn to bad
ways—it’s far more subtle than that. No one would be overweight if you
were presented with a clear choice up front: would you like this big pile
of food—and diabetes, joints that wear out prematurely, and heart
disease—or would you rather eat this other diet and be healthy? We would
all choose the healthy diet. But that’s not how the yetzer hara works.
It seduces us a little bit at a time. MMM, that ice cream was good, why
not have just one more bowl? It’s only a bowl of ice cream, after all. A
little thing—the “thread of hair” of the midrash.
And that’s the difference between the one who can conquer his yetzer hara,
and the one who doesn’t. The person with foresight—the righteous person
in our midrash—can look at the second bowl of ice cream, and see it
leading more bowls of ice cream, to being overweight, and to struggling
with health problems..and he turns down the second bowl of ice cream. The
yetzer hara—the desire for that extra ice cream—takes on the appearance
not just of something small, but it takes on gigantic proportions, looking
like mountain. The person without that foresight just sees a bowl of ice
cream—or a cigarette, or a martini—and does not think about where it might
lead. He only sees the yetzer hara as a little thing—as a thread of hair.
Lack of foresight is the reason why someone would choose the curse. This
is described in another way in the midrash. The midrash (Deut. Rabah 4:3)
says when God said “see, I set before you today a blessing and a curse,”
at that same time a verse from Lamentations was declared, “Not from the
mouth of the Most High comes good and bad.” The midrash explains that bad
comes to those who do bad, and good comes to those who do good. God gave
us two paths, and went out of his way to tell us to choose life.
There is a folk saying of 2000 years ago which went “lo b’ad aveirah
soklin b’even, v’lo b’ad mitzvah zorkin cis zahav,” “it’s not because of
sins that a person is executed by stoning, and it’s not because of mitzvot
(obeying commandments) that a person’s pockets are filled with gold.”
Even then, people did not always associate doing the right thing with
having a successful life.
But when the midrash tells us that good and bad don’t come from the mouth
of the Most High, it’s telling us that it is our choices that bring us
good or bad…not a random decree from God. Leading a life filled with
Torah and mitzvot will be far richer and spiritually rewarding that
leading a life of sin.
The Torah has set before us a blessing and a curse. Do you see which is
which? May God help us to have the foresight to see the yetzer hara as
the mighty mountain which it is. May we always choose the blessing, not
the curse.