54 | MAY 26 • 2022
S
martphones can do amazing
things — few more amazing
than Waze, the Israeli-designed
satellite navigation system acquired by
Google in 2013. But there is one thing
even Waze cannot do. It can tell you how
to get there, but it cannot tell you where
to go. That is something
you must decide.
The most important
decision we can make in life
is to choose where we want
eventually to be. Without
a sense of destiny and
destination, our lives will
be directionless. If we don’t
know where we want to go, we will never
get there no matter how fast we travel. Yet
despite this, there are people who spend
months planning a holiday, but not even
a day planning a life. They simply let it
happen.
That is what our parshah is about,
applied to a nation, not an individual.
God, through Moses, set out the stark
choice. “If you follow my statutes and
carefully obey my commands, I will send
you rain in its season and the ground will
yield its crops and the trees their fruit …
I will grant peace in the land, and you
will lie down, and no one will make you
afraid.”
If, on the other hand, “You do not
listen to me, and do not keep all these
commands …” then disaster will follow.
The curses set out here at length are
among the most frightening of all biblical
texts — a portrait of national catastrophe,
bleak and devastating.
The entire passage, both the blessings
and the curses, can be read supernaturally
or naturally. Read the first way, Israel’s
fate, at least in biblical times, was a direct
result of its faithfulness or lack of it to the
Torah. God was constantly intervening
miraculously in history to reward the
good and punish the bad. Every drought
and famine, every bad harvest or military
defeat, was the result of sin. Every
peaceful and productive year was the
result of obedience to God. That is how
Israel’s prophets understood history.
But there is also a more naturalistic
reading, which says that Divine
Providence works through us, internally
rather than externally. If you are the
Israelites in the Land of Israel, you will
always be surrounded by empires and
enemies bigger and stronger than you
are. You will always be vulnerable to the
hazards of rainfall and drought because
Israel, unlike the Nile Delta or the Tigris-
Euphrates valley, has no natural, reliable,
predictable supply of water. You will
always, therefore, find yourself looking up
to the heavens. Even quite secular Jews
often understand this — most famously
David Ben-Gurion when he said, “In
Israel, in order to be a realist you have to
believe in miracles.”
A ROADMAP FOR LIFE
On this reading, the way of life set out
in the Torah is unique in ways that are
natural rather than supernatural. It is
indeed the word of God, but not God as a
perpetual strategic intervener in history,
but rather, God as guide as to how to live
in such a way as to be blessed. The Torah
is a set of instructions for life issued by
the Designer of life.
That is what the Sages meant when
they said that at the beginning of time,
“God looked into the Torah and created
the world.” Living according to the Torah
means, on this view, aligning yourself
with the forces that make for human
flourishing, especially if you are a tiny
people surrounded by enemies.
What was unique about the society
SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH
Rabbi Lord
Jonathan
Sacks
A Sense of
Direction