This parsha spells out numerous detailed laws about building a fair and just society. In contrast to last week’s parsha — Shoftim — which mostly addressed people who hold official positions of legal and communal responsibility, this parsha is primarily addressed to individuals among the people of Israel and enumerates all kinds of ways in which individual Israelites must take care to cultivate justice and not wickedness, mutual responsibility and not cynical self-interestedness.
Many of these mitzvot are not particularly pleasant. Among other issues, they deal with taking prisoners of war and making restitutions for sexual violence. Yet, as Rashi says on the parsha, the Holy Blessed One engages with the yetzer ha’ra because if G-d did not, then we would hate G-d and chase after our impulses anyways. So, instead, the Torah teaches us many ways that we may rise above our basest temptations.
Radically, our Torah teaches that G-d cares about the messy, private and interpersonal details of our lives. Whether it is our sexual, familial, agricultural, neighborly, or financial relationships, HaShem implores us not to take advantage of each other. As we prepare to go out and enter the land, it is clear that basic trust and goodwill are the terms of our covenant, the conditions of our chosenness.
This theme which emerges for me upon reading this parsha echoes the teaching of the feminist movement which says “the personal is political.” For Sefer Devarim, it seems “the personal and the political are theological.” G-d cares how we engage in every realm of our lives.
Of the many mitzvot we receive in this parsha, one of the more perplexing ones has to do with stumbling across a nest of birds. If, while on your way, you come across a bird’s nest, you are instructed to shoo away the mother before taking her eggs or chicks for your personal use.
Of course, this commandment has inspired numerous insightful explanations over the generations. According to the Ramban, the reason behind this mitzvah is to cultivate within us an attitude of compassion:
Sparing a mother bird the anguish of witnessing us taking her offspring, like so many of our mitzvot, should cultivate in us an attribute of compassion. Yet, the Torah provides an incentive for doing this mitzvah:
According to the simple meaning of the verse, G-d promises to reward our compassion with prosperity and longevity. However, our early rabbis were not satisfied with this understanding of the promise of length of days.
In the Gemara in Hullin and Kiddushin, they tell the story of a child whose father tells him to go up to the top of a building to collect eggs. In observance of the mitzvah of honoring parents — for which we are also promised the reward of length of days — the child goes up and shoos away the mother bird before collecting her eggs. However, in the next moment he slips and falls off the roof to his death.
This question, and its theological implications, have been central to our people’s struggling with G-d over the past few generations. In the wake of the Shoah when so many pious Jews and otherwise good people were killed in the cruelest of ways, how can we take seriously our Torah’s apparent promise of earthly longevity as reward for observing mitzvot?
Despite how modern this question of the apparent falsehood of G-d’s promise seems, the earliest generations of our rabbis were disturbed by this question too.
From the house of Rabbi Ya’akov, there emerged a teaching which can transform our understanding of arikut yamim and shine light upon some of the central moral issues of our generations:
In other words, in every place where the Torah spells out a reward for a mitzvah, that reward is not experienced in this world. Rather, only in the world to come that is entirely good and entirely long can anyone truly reap the harvest of our mitzvah-observance.
If it were the case that G-d rewards those who do mitzvot in this world with high quality of life and longevity, then we could look around and notice who has the privilege of economic prosperity and high life expectancy and assume those groups of people must be doing what is good and upright in the eyes of G-d. In fact, this logic has been central to some of the Christian denominations who built this country and continues to be important to many. This is a religious logic which serves to justify and sacralize current systems of inequality and violence. In the 2020 bestselling book Caste, Isabel Wilkerson demonstrates how American, Indian, and German societies have turned to theological notions like this one to justify inequality, domination, and violence.
Like Christian counterparts, our rabbis read this parsha carefully, yet they also read the world around them and noticed far too many G-d and mitzvah scorning men with wealth and power enjoying long lives of luxury to tolerate this naive understanding of G-d’s promise. In our day too, when we can turn to countless studies that show that wealth and life expectancy are strongly correlated with the circumstances of one’s birth, we should not be able to swallow a simple and naive reading of G-d’s promise of length of days.
With just over two weeks until Rosh HaShanah, we are in a time of Heshbon Nefesh, accounting for our souls. As we consider who we are in the world, what we’ve done wrong and how we need to improve, let us not slip into the complacent feeling that our physical or financial well-being reflects our upright moral behavior. Rather, I want to ask YHVH to bless us all that whenever we feel our Yetzer, our human instinct to look out for ourselves and to pursue our desire, we remember G-d’s desire for us to cultivate compassionate hearts that shape the way we live, love and do business. In the coming weeks and year, may we find the faith necessary to act in ways such that we can merit length of days in the world to come — the world that is entirely good.