Bechukotai
If you follow My laws
and faithfully observe My commandments,.I will grant
your rains in their season, so that the earth shall yield its produce and the
trees of the field their fruit. Your
threshing shall overtake the vintage, and your vintage shall overtake the
sowing; you shall eat your fill of bread and dwell securely in your land.
26:3-5
Why does the Torah confine its goals and rewards to
material things, as mentioned in his comment, and omit spiritual perfection and
the reward of the soul after death – the true and ultimate goal of man? Our enemies exploit this text and charge
Abravanel (15th Century)
Not only are these spiritual rewards absent from
the Torah’s text, but presenting material rewards as motivators for living a
Jewish life actually cheapens the moral acts that we freely choose to do out of
duty and commitment to our covenantal relationship with God…The Torah is not
cheapening our spiritual relationship with God by offering material rewards for
living a moral and ethical life. Rather,
it is addressing the psychology of man, who must have his basic needs met in
order to pursue spiritual ideas and goals out of duty and commitment to God –
for its own sake.
Steve Baily (Contemporary)
A person cannot perform the precepts if he is sick,
hungry, or thirsty, in the hour of battle or under siege. The Almighty therefore promised that He would
rid them of these situations and that they would enjoy health and tranquility,
enabling them to perfect their knowledge and merit the Hereafter. These material rewards are thus not an end in
themselves but a means…But if you forsake and despise them, I shall put
obstacles in the way of your performance, till you are deprived of spiritual
perfection and immortality. This is the
implication of our Sages dictum: The
reward of a precept is a precept.
Maimonides (12th Century)
The reason that the Torah elaborates the reward in
this world and omits the recompense of the soul in the world of the souls, is because the former is a supernatural miracle
whereas the survival of the soul and its reunion with God is a natural process,
whereby the soul returns to its Divine Progenitor.
Ramban (13th Century)
This last parasha in the book of Leviticus sums up
the basic doctrine of reward and punishment.
If we, the nation, keep God’s laws, God promises rain, food, security
against attack – all national considerations.
There are no similar warranties for individuals. Whether a man named Job will or will not
suffer personal tragedy in this world does not necessarily depend on his overt
actions…(This is) a fundamental truth of Judaism;
there are no certain rewards for commandments in this world for the
individual. Perhaps the very nature of
free will seals off the possibility of a quid-pro-quo world in which God
functions as a master score-keeper and religious actions function like a
Caspomat; put in Shabbat observance and take out long life. However tragic the consequences sometimes are,
that’s not the way the world works.
Shlomo Riskin (contemporary)
Let us note the prediction of tragedy (in this
parsha) The
opposite of having bread to eat should be having no bread to eat. We would expect Moses to say that if we
disobey God’s word there will be no bread to eat. We discover that the penalty for disobedience
is not famine, but rather, “Ye shall eat and not be satisfied.” In other words, the opposite of having bread
to eat is not starvation. It is to have
bread and not to enjoy it. The blessing
is to eat with satisfaction, the tragedy is to eat without satisfaction…Who is
really happy and who is really blessed?
That answer is not to be found in material possessions. The answer is to be found in the heart and
the spirit.
Ralph Simon (contemporary)