When Curses Are a Blessing
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
Edmund Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly of France (1791)
Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
George Washington, Farewell Address (1796)
The blessings of Parashat Beḥukkotai are brief and serene. When Israel lives in harmony with the will of God it will live in harmony with the land. The rain will fall in its due time, the soil will be fruitful, there will be food to eat and there will be peace. Your enemies will fail in their attacks upon you. And you will have children. Children and a land: the promise God gave to the patriarchs. God will establish His presence, His Tabernacle, among you, and you will be free. “I have broken the bars of your yoke and made you walk upright” (Lev. 26:3–13).
The curses, by contrast, are long and terrifying. First nature will turn against you: “I will break down your stubborn pride and make the sky above you like iron and the ground beneath you like bronze.” Then will come the wild animals, then your enemies. You will be defeated, humiliated, forced into exile. The land you did not allow to rest in the seventh year will lie fallow because there will be no one left to cultivate it. Your spirit will be utterly broken: “As for those of you who survive, I will send faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies. The sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall though no one is pursuing them” (Lev. 26:14–41). It is the starkest of all possible choices.
Passages like these have often been criticised by non-Jews for portraying God as jealous, vengeful, and vindictive. How are we to reconcile this dark scenario of the curses, here and in Deuteronomy, with the God of love and forgiveness and the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, the God who, said Hosea, loves the people like a husband who continues to love his wife even though she has repeatedly been unfaithful to him, the God who said through Isaiah, “Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be moved, yet My steadfast love for you will not be shaken nor My covenant of peace removed” (Is. 54:10)?
Recent research has provided a surprising answer. Before we turn to it, let us first recall the context of the Mosaic covenant, the problem to which it is the solution. The central question to which the Torah is the answer is: How can we secure co-operation between two or more individuals with conflicting desires and wills, without the use of violence or power, political or economic? How can the two fundamental values of Genesis 1 coexist: freedom and order?
The early history of humankind as portrayed in the opening chapters of Genesis can be summed up in three sentences: First God creates order. Then He gives man freedom. Then man creates chaos. There can be freedom without order: that is the world before the Flood, the Torah’s description of Hobbes’ state of nature, the war of every man against every man in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”1Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, XIII:9.
And there can be order without freedom. That is the world of Egypt, Pharaoh, and slavery.
The question is: Can there be, at one and the same time, both order and freedom? Can there be a society of law-governed liberty, in which the rule of law prevails without the use of force, in which the rich honour their responsibilities to the poor, justice is impartial, and the principles of welfare are such that extremes of poverty are eliminated and no one is a permanent slave to debt or landlessness: all this without an intrusive, oppressive government, a police force, and a hierarchy of privilege and power?
This was and remains a unique experiment: a nation in which the only ultimate sovereign is God Himself, in which even a king has no legislative power, and where the people as a whole is collectively responsible, each for the conduct of all. Such is the vision behind the covenant society inaugurated at Mount Sinai.
All ancient covenants had treaty stipulations including specification of reward for obedience (usually the protection of the weaker party by the stronger) and punishment in case of non-compliance. Most covenants, though, were between rulers of states. Unique to the Sinai covenant were the two parties. Never before had an entire nation been party to a covenant on the one hand, and never before had God bound Himself to one nation.2The two previous covenants had been with all humanity, through Noah (Gen. 9), and one family, Abraham and his descendants (Gen. 17).
It was essential therefore that the promise of reward and the threat of punishment be sufficiently powerful to have an impact on the people as a whole, for it was they who bore responsibility for the fate of the nation. They had to secure the rule of law without relying on a liberty-restricting government to do it for them. Hence the devastating, terrifying rhetoric of the curses.
Now let us turn to recent research. One of the ironies of twenty-first-century thought is that Darwinian biology has been taken as a master discipline to explain not only the evolution of life but also of culture, while at the same time it has become the substitute faith of some of the most famous critics of religion. Darwin, wrote one of them, “made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”3Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1986), 6–7.
The irony is that religion, Abrahamic monotheism in particular, has proved to be the most robust of all cultural adaptations. It has survived all the attacks on it throughout the centuries. It has spread to include, today, half of the seven billion people on the face of the earth. By the test of adaptive fitness – transmission to future generations – it is measurably more successful than secularism on the one criterion Darwinians recognise, namely the ability to pass on one’s genes. Contemporary demographic studies show, virtually without exception, that religious families, groups, and nations have higher birthrates than their secular counterparts.4Eric Kauffmann, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century (London: Profile, 2010).
As an argument against religion, Darwinism fails. Instead, it proves the opposite. Religion survives because it enables religious people to survive, whether individually or as groups.5Whether natural selection operates at group level is a topic of heated debate among Darwinians. See E. O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2012).
How so? The most recent and detailed study is Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict.6Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
Clearly the way a Darwinian understands religion is not the way a believer understands faith. But Norenzayan’s findings, all of them on the basis of empirical research, are nonetheless fascinating. The first is: Watched people are nice people. The belief that you are being observed measurably changes people’s behaviour for the better.7Ibid., 13–32.
The second is: Trust people who trust in God. Throughout the world, in survey after survey, people indicate that they trust individuals with strong religious convictions, even if they belong to a different faith. Even atheists are somewhat inclined to say so. Atheists are trusted less.8Ibid., 55–75.
Norenzayan’s view is that the belief that God sees our actions, rewards the righteous, and punishes wrongdoers is what allowed large-scale human associations to come into existence in the first place. Hunter-gatherer and tribal societies in which people lived in smaller groups with more regular face-to-face contact did not tend to think in such terms. As biologists have learned through computer simulations of the prisoner’s dilemma, two individuals will arrive at co-operative behaviour if they meet often enough and learn through experience the high cost of self-interest when pursued to the detriment of others. But large societies depend on trust between strangers. What will motivate me to act well towards someone I may never meet again? Shared belief that God rules our destinies, rewarding us for the good we do and penalising us for the bad, is the most effective source of society-wide trust. This is an entirely secular view of religion, but it remains interesting that contemporary social-psychological research, like the Torah itself though from a vastly different vantage point, sees religious faith as the solution to the coexistence of freedom and order.
One of the most striking of Norenzayan’s findings is that the more people believe that God punishes wrongdoers, the less likely they are to cheat their fellow human beings when no one else is looking. Experiments were made among religious believers, some of whom held strong beliefs about divine retribution, others of whom held equally strong beliefs about divine forgiveness. They were later invited to take part in a seemingly unrelated study in which they were given a number of anagrams to solve and told they should pay themselves $1 for every solution they reached. Unbeknown to them, only five of the ten anagrams actually had solutions. They were being given the opportunity to cheat. Those who were strong in their beliefs about divine punishment cheated less than those who believed in divine mercy.
The effects went further in powerful and surprising ways. When given the opportunity to punish someone violating a social norm, believers in a punitive God were less likely to do so than others. In other words, belief that God will punish offenders makes people more forgiving. They leave punishment to God. That frees them to be forgiving. Belief in divine punishment also makes people kinder neighbours, and it reduces crime rates. International research shows a consistent pattern: the more retributive people’s concept of God is, the more law-abiding they become. Why then do some religions emphasise the opposite, namely, divine forgiveness? One of the researchers suggests this hypothesis: “If you’re looking to gain converts, it’s much easier to sell a religion that promises a divine paradise after death than one that threatens believers with fire and brimstone.”
These are remarkable findings, and they allow us to see the curses in Parashat Beḥukkotai in a completely new light. If contemporary research is correct, the very vehemence of the curses would have been likely to make the Israelites more law-abiding and the nation itself stronger in interpersonal trust than would otherwise have been the case. It would also have made people less likely to take the law into their own hands by punishing antisocial behaviour. They would have become more forbearing. Exactly as we noted in an earlier chapter on revenge, belief that this is a matter for God has the effect of making people less vengeful.
The paradoxical conclusion is that the harsher God seems to be, the less harsh human beings become. This is what Abraham seems to have meant when he said to Abimelech king of Gerar, “I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife’” (Gen. 20:11).9See in particular the comments of Malbim ad loc. on the limits of secular ethics in the presence of strong temptation.
When people fear God, they act less fearfully towards their fellow humans. This is also why so many serious minds, among them Edmund Burke and George Washington in the quotes that head this chapter, held that religious belief (“the fear of God”) was essential to civil society.
The more we internalise the idea that we are accountable to Heaven for what we do, and that God sees our acts even when no one else is watching, the less likely we are to give way to temptation by cheating or bending the rules in our favour. Secular societies that have lost the belief that God sees what we do are forced to resort to all kinds of surveillance devices from CCTVs to electronic monitoring to make sure that someone is watching after all, with the massive invasion of privacy this involves. The more we believe in God and divine providence, the more trustworthy we become. The more social institutions can rely on trust, the less they have to rely on laws, police, regulations, surveillance, and punishment as deterrence.
So in a strange way, belief in curses creates blessings. It gives people the strongest possible motive for self-restraint, creates law-abiding citizens, promotes trust in society, and secures order while minimising external constraints on freedom. That is what Maimonides calls “the perfection of society,” which, though a lesser value than perfection of the soul, is essential to it. Fear of God helps create respect for our fellow humans. Fear of punishment from heaven helps create liberty on earth.