Weekly Torah portion: Re'eh
This week’s parasha begins with the words “See, this day I set before you blessing and curse”. What is the significance of the blessing and the curse? One might argue that attaching rewards and punishments to commandments deprives us of our freedom to choose, and makes our behavior no more voluntary than that of Pavlov’s dogs. As opposed to this, Maimonides writes:
Although in every one of the signs (related in Scripture) the natural property of some individual being is changed, the nature of man is never changed by God by way of miracle… It is also for this reason that He distinctly stated the commandments and the prohibitions, the reward and the punishment...If it were part of His will to change (at His desire) the nature of any person, the mission of prophets and the giving of the Torah would have been altogether superfluous (Guide for the Perplexed, III:32).
For Maimonides, free will is axiomatic. The practical need and moral justification for reward and punishment – blessing and curse – derive from our freedom of choice. Because human beings are free to choose, they must know the consequences of their choices. It is that freedom and that warning that make us morally responsible for our actions. Were it not for our freedom to choose, there would be no need to teach us or to warn us, and there would be no purpose to giving us the Torah.
Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (US, 1892-1971) added another dimension to the need for blessings and curses, reward and punishment:
In the realm of history we have another problem, of course, because history is a realm of human freedom and human agency, and if it did not have any moral meaning at all, it would be intolerable. If there were not some reward for goodness, life would be absolutely askew. If there were no likelihood that forgiveness would produce the spirit of forgiveness, and mutuality the spirit of mutuality and reciprocity, it would be hard to love and trust each other” (“The Providence of God,” in Robert McAfee Brown, ed., The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, 39).
But lest we imagine that life is so simple, Niebuhr adds: “Yet in the processes of history these things are not simply correlated. The suffering of the innocent is one of the most terrible things in the collective enterprise of man.”
Another approach sees the blessing and the curse not as declaring freedom of choice, but rather as imposing a duty to choose:
“See, this day I set before you”: These words are a demand that the people make a choice after the preaching and the historical recounting that forms the first part of the Book of Deuteronomy (chaps. 1-11). In this manner, verses 26-36 end Moses speech prior to the reading of the laws… “Blessing and curse”: are the two alternatives presented to the people (Olam HaTanakh, Deuteronomy, 107).
1. Does establishing rewards and punishments deny freedom of choice, or is it the awareness of the rewards and punishments that lends a moral dimension to our choices?
2. In presenting the philosophy of R. Samson Raphael Hirsch, Prof. Eliezer Schweid explains: Because he has been given a choice, he must decide, and the choice is not easy because of its foreseeable consequences” (A History of Modern Jewish Religious Philosophy, Part II, 55). Is there a difference between the freedom to choose and the obligation to choose? Does granting us freedom of choice force us to choose?
3. During a visit to Yad Vashem, Julius “Dr J” Erving commented: “Everyone in the Holocaust had choices, except for the Jews. Their choice was taken away from them.” To what extent can a choice be deemed free when the alternatives are predetermined? Does freedom of choice require some just correlation between a choice and its consequences?
Iyunei Shabbat is published weekly by the Schechter Rabbinical Seminary, The Masorti Movement and The Rabbinical Assembly of Israel in conjunction with the Masorti Movement in Israel and Masorti Olami-World Council of Conservative Synagogues.
Chief Editor: Rabbi Avinoam Sharon
