Natural consequences are considered best practice when it comes to disciplining children. Rather than punishing someone for undesired behavior, we simply follow that behavior to its logical end. When a young child eats sand from the sandbox, for instance, we don’t put the child into a timeout, we say “I see you’re having a hard time not eating the sand. We’re all done with the sandbox today. We will try again tomorrow.” Our parsha, Eikev, contains within it some of the famously Deuteronomistic formulae of “if you do this, good things will happen, but if you do not, bad things will happen.” A worldview such as this hinges on an understanding of God as divine punisher. Instead, we can read these warnings through the lens of natural consequences. If we do not follow our moral compass (modern shorthand for “the commandments”), then naturally we will be left to face difficult, compromising, and even painful consequences. Particularly as we head into the High Holy Days, a time of teshuvah, of returning to our best intentions, our parsha invites us to look at the natural consequences of our actions and ask ourselves if we are happy with them, or if we can do better.
