The Blessings We Seek

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Sigmund Freud asked the famous question: What do women want? But we could ask more generally, what do people want?

Good health? Prosperity? Non-caloric brownies to die for?

At the end of the book of Leviticus, a book that deals primarily with religious and spiritual topics, we have a set of blessings, good things promised to the Israelites on the condition that they follow God’s direction and instructions.

To the surprise of many of the commentators, these blessings concern only the material world. The Israelites are promised fertility and prosperity; rain in its season and success in their farming endeavors, security from wild beasts and from their human enemies. They will grow old surrounded by children and grandchildren.

The commentators are surprised at this focus on the material world. Are those really the most important things in life? What about spiritual matters? Shouldn’t that be the focus of a holy text? Where is life eternal, which seems to many the proper goal of religious life?

Some of the scholars suggest that the material blessings from the Leviticus text are the necessary foundation for the development of a spiritual life. If your body is wracked in pain, if battles are being waged in your backyard, if there is nothing to harvest and your grain storage is empty, are you really able, they ask, to be concerned with the higher things in life?

At some level that answer makes sense. We think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But at another level, this explanation defies what I have observed and experienced. I have noticed that sometimes it is poor communities that are the most focused on spiritual matters and not the well off and more secure. Sometimes it is sickness or other difficult struggles, which lead a person to question what really are the important things in life, and to wonder if it is really the acquisition of things and the keeping up with the neighbor next store, that really matters.

In this week’s Torah portion, we also have a set of blessings, the beautiful priestly benediction that the girls chanted for us. This is probably the oldest fixed prayer in Jewish tradition. We know it was important in ancient times as well as archeologists have found it inscribed on a silver amulet from the 7th century B.C.E.

This blessing comes in the context of a book that is much more mired in the material world. In the book of Numbers, the Israelites are constantly complaining, often about things like not having meat to eat, or other such non-spiritual concerns.

These blessings though are different than the ones in Leviticus. In these, the material and spiritual are blended together. We are blessed with material wealth and physical safety, but also, at least according to the commentaries, we are to be guarded from the evils that prosperity can bring. We are to develop a close relationship with God but also to have success in our relationships with other people. The medieval commentator S’forno notes that when we pray for wealth, it should be only so as to be able to give money to charity and to have time to dedicate to the study of Torah and Mitzvot. The final blessing, the capping stone of this priestly benediction, is similarly understood as a blend of the material and the spiritual. The blessing of peace, both inner and outer, so that we can enjoy all of our other blessings.

So we pray for our Bat Mitzvah girls and their loved ones, for our entire congregation and those gathered with us today, that we might experience God’s grace in our inner and outer lives, that with peaceful hearts we may be worthy to live in peaceful times.