Shalom Chaverim,
This week’s Torah portion, Bechukotai, is known for its stark, black-and-white warning, called the “tochecha”:
Either follow God’s laws and observe the commandments – maintaining the covenant – and receive blessings;
Or…
Disobey God and not observe the commandments –
spurning the covenant – and receive the worst misfortune and suffering imaginable.
The choice is ours, either/or: Blessing or Curse …
Ordinarily we might consider this from a theological perspective, discuss what it might mean for Israel today, try to understand it in terms of pedagogy or parenting styles, or wonder whether or not God really acts in our individual or national lives…
This week, though, we need to put all theology aside, to leave God out of it. We need to stop with the ‘thoughts and prayers’, to stop with the ‘we the stand with…’
We need to stop comforting ourselves when faced with the incontrovertible evidence that how we behave as a collective society has direct consequences:
The curse of gun violence in our nation is the inevitable result – the self-induced punishment – of having dangerous weapons (at all, and then) allowed into the hands of dangerous people.
The souls of nineteen fourth-graders…and those victims of the hate crime in Buffalo last week, and of the victims of the literally hundreds of mass shootings in so many weeks, months, and years prior…all are crying out.
They are not crying out for justice, because, sadly, there cannot be justice for the lives stolen from them.
They are not even crying out for accountability – it won’t give them their lives back, or do much to mend the lives broken beyond repair of the victims’ loved ones who must endure the tragic loss day after day, still and forever.
I can only imagine they are crying out for the common sense and urgent imperative to stop the plague of gun deaths in the U.S.
Immediately.
Inaction by our leaders, by us, is tantamount to green-lighting the next murder, the next mass murder. Yet it seems this is precisely what will happen next: Inaction. And the result of that inaction will eventually follow.
Blessings or curses – The inevitable consequence of our choices and our actions.
Indeed.
May this Shabbat restore our strength and spiritual capacity to choose life and blessing in the week to come.
Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Michael Schwartz