When the Warning Turns Toward You

There are moments when a person knows, before anything explicit is said, that the conversation has changed. Someone says his name a little differently. A sentence begins in an ordinary tone, then narrows. He feels it almost at once—not in thought, not yet, but in the body. Something in him braces. By the time the words themselves arrive, he is already preparing an answer, or an explanation, or a way of making what is coming seem less final than it sounds. That is part of what makes rebuke so difficult to receive. The self often begins protecting itself before it has fully heard what is being said -- and that is what this week's Torah reading is all about. Our member Rabbi Steven Ettinger explains.

The tochachah of Bechukotei enters that charged territory. It is easy to read the parashah’s warnings only on the largest scale—as covenant, consequence, history, punishment. But the Torah is also tracing something closer and more unsettling: the psychology of not listening. Again and again the language circles that point. V’im lo tishme’u li—if you will not listen to Me. And later, more sharply still, im telchu imi keri—if you walk with Me in happenstance, in resistance, in a kind of estranged casualness. The problem is not only what a person does. It is what he does in order not to let what he has done become fully knowable.

That shift matters more than it first appears. A person can live with a great deal of contradiction. He can reinterpret. Delay. Rename. He can hear something that should trouble him and convert it, almost instantly, into circumstance. The Mei HaShiloach understands keri in something like that way: not simply disobedience, but the refusal to encounter what happens as if it were speaking to you (Mei HaShiloach I, Bechukotai). If pain comes, it is chance. If a pattern appears, it is coincidence. If something in life begins pressing too closely, it is dismissed as mood, misfortune, bad timing. The self remains undisturbed not because it is innocent, but because it has learned how to keep truth from sounding personal.

That is what makes the tochachah so unnerving. Its force does not feel arbitrary. It feels cumulative. The warnings intensify not only because the failure is severe, but because what was meant to be heard has not been heard yet. The Or HaChaim notes that the language of the parsahah moves with a kind of inner sequence; the distance does not merely exist, it hardens (Or HaChaim, Vayikra 26:14). Something is said, and it does not enter. So it returns in a form less easy to ignore. Then again. And again. Not because God has become erratic, but because a person can remain strangely intact while refusing what should have reached him the first time.

This is one of the less flattering things Torah says about the human being: he may need reality to repeat itself before he will consider that it is speaking. Rav Dessler writes that the deepest obstacle to truth is not lack of intelligence, but negiah—the private stake that bends judgment toward what the self needs to preserve (Michtav MeEliyahu, Vol. I). From the inside, that bending does not usually feel corrupt. It feels fair. Balanced. Even noble. Which is why rebuke is so destabilizing. The difficulty is not only in changing course. It is in allowing oneself to know, without rearranging it, that a change is being asked.

And perhaps there is something almost compassionate in the Torah’s honesty about this. It does not imagine that warning naturally produces insight. It does not flatter a person with the assumption that being told is enough. The Netivot Shalom describes the tochachah not as abandonment, but as a severe form of nearness—a refusal to let a person settle permanently into spiritual sleep (Netivot Shalom, Bechukotai). Left alone, one can become very comfortable there. One can build routines inside it, language inside it, even religious identity inside it. The warning comes not only to accuse, but to interrupt the false peace that sleep can borrow from continuity.

It is difficult not to hear some echo of this in Good Will Hunting (1997), a film that understands how brilliance can become a shelter from being reached. Will Hunting is a janitor at MIT, intellectually gifted far beyond the academic world around him. He can solve mathematics that others can barely read, and he can dismantle another person in conversation almost before they have finished speaking. He comes from South Boston, carries violence and humiliation close to the surface, and survives by staying just ahead of intimacy. When he is arrested after a fight, a professor arranges to keep him out of jail on the condition that he study mathematics and attend therapy. Will accepts the arrangement, but every session becomes a form of combat. He jokes, deflects, humiliates, performs. No one can quite get hold of him.

What makes the film painful is not that Will is rebellious. Rebellion would be easier to understand. It is that he is defended in all directions at once. Concern becomes weakness. Insight becomes condescension. Affection becomes something to mock before it can become something to need. He does not simply resist correction. He transforms it before it can touch him. There is a scene on a park bench in which Sean Maguire, the therapist played by Robin Williams, stops trying to outwit him and simply begins speaking from a place Will cannot control. He tells him, with a kind of exhausted tenderness, that all his intelligence means very little if it remains only commentary on life from a distance. “You’re just a kid,” he says—not to diminish him, but to expose how much of him is still hidden behind the performance of knowing. For one of the first times in the film, Will does not answer quickly. The words have reached a place argument cannot fully protect.

And even that is not the deepest moment. That comes later, when Sean says to him, again and again, “It’s not your fault.” At first Will laughs, then resists, then grows angry. The line is too simple for cleverness. He cannot analyze it usefully. He cannot redirect it. He can only try to keep it outside himself. The scene is powerful precisely because nothing new is being argued. Something is simply being repeated until it becomes harder to escape than to hear. Rebuke does not always come as accusation. Sometimes it comes as the truth that leaves a person with fewer and fewer places to hide.

That, too, belongs to Bechukotei. The tochachah is not merely telling Israel that actions have consequences. It is confronting the human capacity to live as if consequence were impersonal. *Keri* is not only disobedience. It is distance disguised as normal life. A person can continue for a very long time in that mode. Duties are still performed. Words are still said. The external life remains recognizable. Rav Hutner writes, in another context, that one of the great dangers in spiritual decline is not dramatic collapse, but adjustment—the slow accommodation to a diminished inner life until what should feel intolerable begins to feel ordinary (Pachad Yitzchak, Igrot u’Ketavim). That is what rebuke interrupts. Not only behavior, but adaptation itself.

There is a story told of the Kotzker Rebbe that lands in a similarly hard place. A chassid once came to him after a long period of heaviness and began speaking about his failures. His prayer felt distracted. His learning felt dull. He had tried, he said, and still found himself circling the same weaknesses. There was sincerity in the words, or at least enough of it that another person might have mistaken the speaking for the work itself. The Kotzker listened in silence. The room, one imagines, had already grown tense before he answered.

Finally he asked, “And this troubles you?”

The chassid looked up, confused. “Of course it troubles me.”

The Kotzker’s face did not soften. “No,” he said. “What troubles you is that you feel badly. If the truth of what you are saying troubled you, you would not be so calm while saying it.”

It is the kind of answer that stays in the room after the conversation is over. Not because it is harsh for the sake of harshness, but because it removes a refuge the person did not know he was using. What the chassid had brought as honesty may itself have been one more layer of concealment—the comfort of naming one’s failures without yet being altered by them. The Kotzker did not deny that he was suffering. He denied him the comfort of confusing self-description with self-knowledge.

That is part of what makes rebuke so psychologically disruptive. It is not satisfied with what a person is willing to say about himself. It asks whether he has actually been reached by what he is saying. The Baal Shem Tov taught that where a person’s thought is, there he is entirely (Tzava’at HaRivash, §9). But there are moments when the opposite becomes painfully visible: a person can speak words that are perfectly true while holding himself just beyond their reach. He can hear the warning and preserve the self that made the warning necessary.

Bechukotei is unusually lucid about how long that can go on. The tochachah grows more severe because the earlier word was not enough. Then the next was not enough. Then the next. The Torah does not flatter a person with the fantasy that truth, once spoken, will naturally be welcomed. It suggests something both more frightening and more hopeful—that the collapse of one’s defenses may itself be a form of mercy. Not a pleasant one. But mercy nonetheless.

Because there is mercy here. Hard mercy, but mercy. The warnings are not the opposite of relationship; they are what relationship sounds like when gentler forms of address are no longer enough. The covenant has not gone silent. It is still turning toward the one who would rather experience life as accident than as response. That may be the deepest discomfort of rebuke: not that it condemns, but that it refuses to let a person remain incidental to his own life.

And perhaps that is why the parashah does not end in annihilation, but in a remembered covenant. Rebuke is not the last word because rebuke, in Torah, is not finally about destruction. It is about making response possible again. A person who can still be addressed has not yet been abandoned.

The hardest truth is not always the one that accuses us. Sometimes it is the one that refuses to let us remain beyond the reach of our own lives.

Blessings and Beyond: Bechukotai 5784

This week’s parsha, which concludes the book of Vayikra, portrays some vital aspects of Jewish national and personal life. On one hand it describes in rapturous terms the blessings of happiness, security and serenity that can benefit the Jewish people and the individual Jew. On the other hand, it vividly and graphically describes the prospect of exile, tragedy, and death. 

Jewish history bears out the reality of each of these visions. We have lived through both and seem to have experienced much longer periods of darkness than of light, of more tragedy than joy or serenity. The Torah attributes observance of the commandments as the prime cause of security in Jewish life, their non-observance as the cause of tragedy. However, history and the great commentators to Torah qualify this simplistic impression. 

God’s wisdom and judgments are inscrutable, beyond even elementary comprehension by us mortals. This is why we are left to speculate about the tragedies that descended upon the Jewish people and that continue to plague us today. Though there are those amongst us who are prepared to give and accept glib answers to questions about the causes of tragedy, the wise men of Israel warned us against taking such an approach. 

Observance of commandments is enormously difficult to fulfill completely and accurately. This is why it is so hard to measure the "why" part of this week's parsha. We should still however take note of the "how it happened" part. This shows us that its depiction of contrasting periods of serenity and tragedy has been painstakingly accurate and contains not one word of hyperbole. The destruction of the Temples, the Crusades and pogroms, the Inquisition and the Holocaust are all graphically described in this week's parsha. Such is the Torah;s prophetic power. 

In personal life, the longer we live, the more likely it is that misfortune will somehow visit us. The Torah makes provision for this eventuality in its laws of mourning. We all hope for good quality of life and for secure serenity. Yet, almost inexorably, problems, disappointments and even tragedy intrude on our condition. 

In Vayikra, the death of the sons of Aharon remains the prime example of tragedy suddenly destroying a sense of pride, satisfaction and apparent accomplishment. In this week's parsha too, the description of the punishment of Israel for its backsliding is placed in the context of a background of blessings and security. The past century presented the Jewish people with horrors of unimaginable intensity and of millennial accomplishments. The situation of extreme flux in our national life has continued throughout the years of the existence of the State of Israel. 

The unexpected, sudden, but apparently regular changes of circumstance in Jewish national life mirror the same situation that which we recognize in our personal lives. We are constantly blindsided by untoward and tragic events.  So, the jarring contrast that the two main subjects of the parsha present to us are really a candid description of life, its omnipresent contradictions, and its difficulties. Though we pray regularly for health and serenity, we must always be cognizant of how precarious our situation truly is. Thus, as we rise to hear the conclusion of the book of Vayikra, we recite the mantra of "chazak, chazak, v'nitzchazek"—let us be doubly strong and strengthen others! So may it be. 

Shabbat shalom, Rabbi Berel Wein