By Irv Jacobs, M.D.
LA JOLLA, California — This parsha focuses on blessings and curses, in anticipation of behavior after entering the promised land. I have chosen a few passages, clashing with, or at least puzzling to, modern sentiments.
I. Deuteronomy, Ch. 12: vv. 2-3 Moses commands, “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. 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.” In the case of the prior battle with the Amorites (Deut. 2:34), Moses reported, “We took all his towns and completely destroyed them—men, women, and children. We left no survivors.”
“Why was God so violent?”–a question repeatedly raised over the centuries. Both Jewish and Christian clergy have rationalized on this matter. e.g. ‘The Amorites…sacrificed children..by burning them in fire (Lev,. 18:21). So too did the Arameans, Moabites, and Canaanites, who also practiced bestiality, sorcery, demon worship, and conducted orgies ( Lev. 17:7, 18:2, 19:31).’ The Hebrews, from time to time did the same wicked acts, and were judged harshly as well by God.
These are Biblical stories, which may be exaggerations, as was inherent in all ancient literature.
II. Deuteronomy, Ch. 12: 23 In eating meat,”…make sure that you do not partake of the blood, for the blood is the life, and you must not consume the life with the flesh. This idea, expressed several times in the Tanakh, appears to be unique to the Hebrew Bible, with no such prohibition in other ancient sources. It’s an idea worth pondering. It is of interest that Christians symbolically drink the blood of Jesus and eat of his flesh in the sacraments, following John 6:53 et al, “I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.”
III. Deuteronomy Ch. 14: v. 1 “…You shall not gash yourselves or make baldness in the front of your heads because of the dead.” Gashing the flesh until the blood runs and removing hair are known as mourning rites the world over. These practices were probably understood differently in various cultures. To some, they were believed to have an effect on the ghost of the dead person, either as offerings of blood and hair to strengthen the ghost in the nether world, or to assuage the ghost’s jealousy of the living by showing it how grief-stricken are the survivors. These rites could also be acts of self-punishment expressing feelings of guilt, often experienced by survivors after a death. Beating the breast is a mild and permitted way of expressing such feelings.
IV. Deuteronomy Ch. 15: v. 4 “There shall be no needy among you–since the Lord your God will bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a hereditary possession–…” but just a few lines later in Ch. 15. v. 11, we read “…For there will never cease to be needy ones in your land…” There is an inconsistency here, perhaps an editing error. To be considered also is that the writer (or Moses) was not confident that his society would sustain the charity he had prescribed.
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Dr. Jacobs often delivers a drosh at Congregation Beth El or at meetings o