There’s an old parable which says that heaven and the underworld are both great big dinner parties. Both feature people sitting around a table with a gorgeous spread of food. Unfortunately, their elbows won’t bend, and they hold impossibly long forks. The difference is, in the underworld, each person focuses only on spearing their own food with their own too-long fork, and can never reach their mouth. Everyone goes hungry and is miserable. In heaven, on the other hand, each person spears some food, and feeds it to someone across the table. In this way, everyone is fed, and everyone actually has fun using their incredibly long forks. It’s a silly image, and it doesn’t match the Jewish conception of the afterlife (that’s for another day), but I do think this story speaks to this week’s Torah portion, and the finale of the book of Leviticus, Parsha B’chukotai.
The parsha seems to portray two profoundly different possible states for the Israelites: one filled with blessing, resources and abundance, and one doomed with curse, famine and disease, that will befall the Israelites whether they follow God’s laws — or in the case of curses, they do not. As Temple’s fifth graders reminded me last week at Sunday school, terrible things befall good people who follow rules all the time, and vice versa — so how can we better make sense of this paradox of blessings and curse if we do not wish to believe in a punishing or calculating God?
Rabbi Shefa Gold offers that we need not attempt to make sense of external circumstances, which are largely out of our control and vulnerable to randomness and chaos. Rather, we can see this “blessing and curse” paradox as an invitation to nurture our inner state of consciousness to feel more gratitude, satiety, and compassion, whatever our circumstances are — creatively choosing to look for blessing in what is, and seeing disappointments as a call to realignment with what matters most to us.
We may still hold strong feelings about what befalls us and those we love, and yearn for a world of perfect justice, where no one suffers at the hands of cruelty or lack. Nevertheless, our Torah empowers us to attune to the ways our circumstances (however challenging) can call us into relationships in profound and healing ways — oversized forks and all.
Rabbi Laura Rumpf