parsha bit: B'har - B'chukotai

[cellio]

Parshat B'chukotai contains the tochecha, or rebuke: a long list of bad things that will happen if Israel does not follow God's commandments. The torah describes our potential sin in seven ways -- if you will not listen, if you will not perform the mitzvot, if you will reject my rules, and so on. Rashi, commenting on this, sees seven corresponding stages of sin: not trying to understand torah, which leads to not performing the mitzvot, which leads to being disgusted by those who do, which leads to hating the wise, which leads to preventing others from keeping the torah, which leads to denying God's commandments, which leads to denying God's existence.

(Yeah, I got exciting stuff for my "birthday" portion. :-) )

Comments

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

Rashi...sees seven...stages of sin: not trying to understand torah, which leads to not performing the mitzvot, which leads to being disgusted by those who do, which leads to hating the wise, which leads to preventing others from keeping the torah, which leads to denying God's commandments, which leads to denying God's existence.

Fascinating. That really resonated for me. Many years ago, in my (contemplative) youth %^), I decided that the number of Real Sins must be very very few, and all the rest is commentary. It occurred to me that not using your own faculties to try -- by yourself -- to figure out the world must be one of them. You can call that Denial of Logic, perhaps, or Delegation of Intellect. You can even call it Faith (at least in the way that some Christian fundamentalists use the word). Part of this gelled for me in a certain portion of Masonic ritual, which I interpret as encouraging us to use our divinely-bestowed gift of intellect to (at it were) figure out the blueprints and get to work on our portion of what we characterize as a spiritual Edifice.

[cellio]

I agree with you. God gave us the capacity for reason, and free will, for a reason. To not use the gifts given to us in appropriate ways seems to me to be akin to thumbing your nose heavenward. (And yes, you have the free will to choose that.)

For this week's d'var torah (forthcoming), I tried to turn Rashi's seven steps to punishment into seven steps to reward.