Parshat Re’eh

This week around the world we will read the words of פרשת ראה. The פרשה begins in the following way: ראה אנכי נתן לפניכם היום ברכה וקללה. See I place before you today a blessing a curse… It is hard to study these words this week when all we see is the וקללה… the curse. Just this week Israel has been attacked in the North, in the South and in the West. Just this week we have been reminded that there are people in this world who will stop at nothing to destroy this precious world. Then there was Tuesday in Connecticut in a beer distribution facility. An employee was asked to resign or be fired, he chose to resign and then proceeded to kill eight people along with himself, and injure two others. It feels as if we are living in an age of being cursed, without being blessed.

But I do not believe that to be the case. We live in an age where the human capability to inflict harm on other people is far too great. We live in an age where far too many people in our world are being denied the basic human right of security and safety. We are living in an age where humans are constantly intervening with the blessings that God has given us, and thus we have the appearance of being cursed, when in fact humans are negating the blessings that we so desire.

Lets look at the opening words of the פרשה a little more closely:

Deuteronomy 11:26 - 16:17

This translation was taken from the JPS Tanakh

26 See, this day I set before you blessing and curse: 27 blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoin upon you this day; 28 and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn away from the path that I enjoin upon you this day and follow other gods, whom you have not experienced. 29 When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and possess, you shall pronounce the blessing at Mount Gerizim and the curse at Mount Ebal. — 30 Both are on the other side of the Jordan, beyond the west road that is in the land of the Canaanites who dwell in the Arabah — near Gilgal, by the terebinths of Moreh.
31 For you are about to cross the Jordan to enter and possess the land that the Lord your God is assigning to you. When you have occupied it and are settled in it, 32 take care to observe all the laws and rules that I have set before you this day.

Chapter 12

1 These are the laws and rules that you must carefully observe in the land that the Lord, God of your fathers, is giving you to possess, as long as you live on earth.
2 You must destroy all the sites at which the nations you are to dispossess worshiped their gods, whether on lofty mountains and on hills or under any luxuriant tree. 3 Tear down their altars, smash their pillars, put their sacred posts to the fire, and cut down the images of their gods, obliterating their name from that site.

What does this leave us with? An argument can be made that we need to uproot and obliterate the evil in our midst, and that we all need to become warriors for goodness and decency. An argument can be made that we as humans need to overcome our obsessions with violence and our desire wealth and all things that other people have. This argument means that we are experiencing curses, and that might be the case… But are the two mutually exclusive? Can we only experience either the blessing or the curse? Or, is it possible to be living in an age where we experience both? Do we see the curses and the blessings? Sadly, all too often, people only see the curse and ignore the blessing staring them in the face. Sadly we are blind to the many blessings that exist in our world. This is in part due to our magnification of the curses, but it has much more to do with our unwillingness to simply count the blessings for what they are… BLESSINGS. This week I would like to ask you to please list in the comment area the blessings that you see in your life and in the world today. We will then have at our disposal a constant reminder of all of the ברכות/Blessings, in our world today.

Count your blessings, and destroy that which helps to make curses thrive today…