The Choice to Be Good

Sermon, Parshat Tzav 5784

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ 

This week someone emailed me a piece entitled “Acts of God” which lists a wide variety of natural disasters—plus some human ones, like fires and trampling incidents—in which many people have died over the last 2000 years or so.  The comment in the email was was “please discuss on your radio show.” 

I have rarely failed to rise to appropriately flavored ideological bait, and this was certainly a tasty morsel of theological challenge.  And it seemed wrong to wait to talk about it until Sunday morning’s Too Jewish Radio Show—because the question of the morality of God is certainly appropriate material for a sermon, and the synagogue is certainly one place where we ought to be able to talk about ethics and fairness.  After all, if not here, then where?

The implication in the article I received—which documented most major natural tragedies in human history, and seemed to credit them all to “acts of God”—was that if God is powerful, and God is good, what kind of God causes these horrific natural disasters—like the tsunamis last December---that kill so many people, including the elderly and small children?  As this article put it, “Here are some of the more spectacular acts of God since recorded time, and their toll in human lives…” and it then went through a list of earthquakes, epidemics, floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, and fires with a tabulation of their victims. 

Cheerful stuff.  Obviously, in that view, either God is all-powerful but none-too merciful, or God isn’t very powerful, and God’s mercy is therefore pretty irrelevant. Game, set, and match, right?

Well, without in any way diminishing the terrible trauma of the victims of such disasters, and their bereaved families, I have to say that the Jewish view of such events is rather different.  First, most of our own people’s traumas have occurred at the hands of other human beings and can’t precisely be ascribed to God’s direct acts.  I mean, God created us all free beings, with the ability to choose to act for good or evil.  When we have that choice we individually or collectively, have the capacity to act badly, to do things that cause serious harm to others.  If God intercedes and compels us to “do the right thing” then we are not really free, or independent, and our choices are not really moral.  So, in the Jewish understanding of the world God doesn’t dictate our choices for good or evil—we do.

Now, for better or worse, the natural world has its own rules and laws, and they don’t necessarily harmonize with the choices that we human beings are making.  An earthquake is no great tragedy if people don’t build cities next to large seismic faults.  A tidal wave rarely goes very far inland, so if you live in the highlands instead of on the attractive beaches you can avoid such events.  Volcanic eruptions don’t impact people living in non-volcanic areas.  But we human beings continually place ourselves in areas that are subject to such events.  That is our choice.

Of course, you can’t really avoid a natural disaster once it’s upon you, but you can choose not to live in areas that are subject to them. 

The other interesting fact about these so-called “Acts of God” is that they are usually the result of the natural processes and laws of the universe interacting.  There is nothing so remarkable about natural disasters: they have been taking place throughout all of human history.  Water and wind and the moving of tectonic plates and magma coming from the earth’s core: these forces abut each other, powerfully, and help shape our natural world.  God created these great forces and gave them a certain inanimate freedom to function. 

Sometimes we humans get caught up in those forces, and bad things happen to us.  It’s not the “malice of God at work”—it is just the result of larger forces than ourselves at play in our world.  

The macro forces—the really big, powerful ones—have a certain inanimate freedom to function.  God created them and let them go to work.  We don’t control them… they are just part of this amazing universe in which we live.

All of that means we simply must appreciate what we do have: life, in all its complexity and beauty and struggle, and our own ability to choose to act well, and so to bring blessing.

When such disasters occur our ability to bring succor and aid, and to act with decency, kindness, and generosity, is what we truly control, and what defines our own goodness and our humanity.  It also shows that we can act, in our own way, for God, by creating morality through our own actions.

Our Torah portion, Tzav, would seem not to have much to do with ethics.  After all, it is essentially about animal sacrifice and pure ritual, rather than morality.

But even here there is a subtle message about ethics.  You see, we typically talk about thanksgiving only in the fall, around the turkey day holiday.  But in truth we have a great deal to be thankful for all the time, and mostly we miss that.

In Tzav there are many different types of sacrifices commanded: burnt offerings, guilt offerings, sin offerings, and so on.  But one group of sacrificial offerings stands out: the offerings of peace, the zevach shlamim.  And among this higher category of offerings one in particular stands out even higher: the zevach haTodah, the thanksgiving offering. 

In Tractate Berachot, it reads:

אָמַר רַב יְהוּדָה אָמַר רַב: אַרְבָּעָה צְרִיכִין לְהוֹדוֹת: יוֹרְדֵי הַיָּם, הוֹלְכֵי מִדְבָּרוֹת, וּמִי שֶׁהָיָה חוֹלֶה וְנִתְרַפֵּא, וּמִי שֶׁהָיָה חָבוּשׁ בְּבֵית הָאֲסוּרִים וְיָצָא.

Rav Yehuda said that Rav said: Four must offer thanks to God with a thanks-offering and a special blessing. They are: Seafarers, those who walk in the desert, and one who was ill and recovered, and one who was incarcerated in prison and went out. All of these appear in the verses of a psalm (Psalms 107).

That is, anyone who has come through a dangerous travel, or a time of physical or practical imprisonment, must offer thanksgiving.  I’m certain that all of us here would qualify as people who “walk in the desert.”  This offering gives us a sense of just how important it is to cultivate gratitude.

The rabbis thought so highly of thanksgiving to God that they are quoted in the Talmud saying that when the Messiah comes all sacrifices will have completed their mission, and all will be discontinued, with one exception: the thanksgiving offering.  That sacrifice will last forever.  Because even in a perfect world we must remember to give thanks, to be grateful for what we have.

So, on this Shabbat of Tzav, just after the fun holiday of Purim and as we begin to prepare for Pesach, the festival of freedom, we give thanks for what we have: for health and happiness, for the freedom to worship, and for all the wonderful goodness that God has given to this world we share.  And most of all for the ability to choose to live ethically, and to imitate God by being truly good.