Parshah Commentary
This week’s parshah, Ki Tavo, ends with a set of blessings and curses. If the Israelites follow God’s ways, they will have bountiful harvests and military victories, and God will ensure that they “will always be at the top and never at the bottom.” If they deviate from God’s commandments, however, they will face the full severity of God’s wrath: plague, drought, slavery, exile, and death. In laying out these two possible futures, the parshah emphasizes our immense individual and collective responsibility: It is always within our power to choose good over evil, obedience over waywardness. The great medieval commentator Maimonides adopts, and also radicalizes, this approach in his Laws of Repentance, where he argues that the very fact that God offers directives is the best evidence of free will. “If God were to decree that a person be righteous or wicked,” he writes, then “how could God command us through the prophets, ‘Do this’ or ‘Don’t do this’?”
Accordingly, Maimonides insists that “each person is fit to be as righteous as Moses or as wicked as [the sinful Israelite king] Jeroboam” and makes the argument—at once inspiring and terrifying—that we should imagine that each of us, as well as the entire world, is fully balanced between merit and liability, such that every choice has cosmic consequences: “If one commits a single sin, they have made themselves and the entire world liable and caused it to be destroyed,” he writes. Maimonides recognizes that we are not always aware of the choices before us. “If men possessed wisdom,” he writes elsewhere, “they would not cause any injury to themselves or to others.” But he sees this, too, as a choice: Each of us “has the power to learn and understand,” and if we are ignorant enough to sin, that is itself our fault.
We are now in the month of Elul, a time of reflection and repentance ahead of Rosh HaShanah. As part of my preparations for the High Holidays, I have been rereading Maimonides’s Laws of Repentance. Throughout my study, I’ve thought again and again about those in communities who still won’t actively oppose—or who even still support—Israel’s genocide in Gaza. How can these people choose to be so willfully ignorant? If they still haven’t changed their minds, isn’t it time to give up on them? The more frustrated I get, the more I also feel proud of myself and my friends: Haven’t we modeled exactly what Maimonides demands?
But when I think about my own transition away from Zionism, Maimonides’s framework doesn’t feel honest. I didn’t change my politics because I woke up one day and realized I’d been wrong: It was only through conversations with patient friends, coming across the right books at the right time, and seeing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank firsthand that I slowly came to reckon with the ongoing Nakba that Israel has carried out against Palestinians. “God sends each person stirrings of repentance . . . against their will,” writes Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen, the 19th-century Polish Hasidic master. His words speak to a painful truth that Maimonides does not acknowledge: Our transformations are often less a result of individual agency than the fruit of relationships and experiences that we don’t choose. All teshuvah, Rav Tzadok argues, is therefore a microcosmic reenactment of the acceptance of the Torah, which according to a rabbinic midrash was not freely elected; God held Mount Sinai over the heads of the Israelites and forced them to accept the covenant. Rav Tzadok does believe that it’s our responsibility to take advantage of these unearned “stirrings of repentance,” but even our ability to do that is conditioned by psychic and emotional forces that lie largely outside of our consciousness. In Freud’s words, “The ego is not master in its own house.”
This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t hold our communities accountable: As the philosopher Mari Ruti insists, “The fact that our actions are often unconsciously motivated does not absolve us of responsibility for the suffering we might inflict on others.” But what are our responsibilities to those communities? If Maimonides is right, though we’re obligated to do our best to educate them, at a certain point their failure to listen is their choice and their sin, and we’re off the hook. But if Rav Tzadok is right that our moral standing is less the result of our virtue than our luck, we’re deeply indebted to all those who have steered us away from becoming who we would otherwise have been. Don’t we owe others the same commitment?
Aron Wander is a rabbi, organizer, and writer. More of his writing can be found here.
