Torah is the essential recipe of purpose

How can someone full of life one day lose the desire to go on the next?”

A story is told of a Jewish man who was riding on the subway reading a newspaper of the Klu Klux Klan. A friend he approached and asked,
“Moshe, have you lost your mind? Why are you reading that?”

Moshe replied, “I used to read the Jewish newspaper, but what did I find? Jews being persecuted, Israel being attacked, Jews disappearing through assimilation and intermarriage, Jews living in poverty. So I switched to the Klu Klux Klan newspaper. Now what do I find? Jews own all the banks, Jews control the media, Jews are all rich and powerful, and Jews rule the world. The news is so much better!”

Sometimes, it seems life is all about perspective.

One of this week’s parshas, Bechukotai, contains one of the most difficult and painful sections in the entire Torah. Known as the tochacha (rebuke or admonition), these 30 verses (VaYikra 26:14-43) describes the horrendous calamities that would befall the Jewish people should they fail to live up to their mission as a holy people and a light unto the nations. What’s implied is that all of the terrible events suffered by Jews through the ages are somehow the consequence of mistakes we have made.

Why would G-d want a relationship in which people obey or worship Him purely for fear of retribution?

Before the Torah delineates what will go wrong when G-d’s word is not heeded, it specifies all the blessings that will follow our fulfilling our responsibilities as a people: “If you will follow in the path of my statutes, and safeguard my commandments, and fulfill them, then I will give your rains in their time, and the land will give forth its bounty, and the tree of the field will yield its fruit.” (26:3-4)

In other words, if we do right by G-d, then G-d will do right by us. But is this really true? There are tragically no shortage of people who seem to follow Torah’s path and yet live lives far from prosperity and often with great suffering.

Further, the Mishna in Avot (1:3) teaches that “Antig’nos, a man of Socho … used to say: Do not be like the servant who serves the Master in order to receive reward, rather be like the servant who serves the Master not in order to receive reward, and may the fear of heaven be upon you.”

In other words, our relationship with G-d should not be out of a desire to be rewarded, nor out of fear of punishment, but rather simply because we desire a closer relationship with the Creator of the world.

Rashi, at the beginning of our parsha, suggests: “If you will follow in the path of my statutes.” This cannot be speaking about the fulfillment of the commandments, because the next part of the verse says, “and safeguard my commandments, and fulfill them.” Rather, this means (quoting the midrash here) you shall toil in the study of Torah …because this will allow you to keep and fulfill the mitzvoth.” (Rashi 26:3)

Thus, the condition upon which the economic prosperity the Torah seems to promise is predicated is not the fulfillment of the commandments, but rather the study of Torah. This would seem to imply that someone who fulfills the mitzvoth without studying Torah does not merit the rewards spoken of here. Why?

On a superficial level, the fundamental existential difference between a world created by G-d and a world without G-d that exists merely as some sort of cosmic accident is whether or not there is a purpose to our existence.

If the world is an accident, then so are we, and while we can strive to give our accidental lives meaning, in the end, we are all random results of a random process. But if Hashem created the world, then creation implies purpose, and that means that everything and everyone in this world is created for a reason.

Holocaust survivor and creator of logo-therapy Victor Frankel, posits in his masterpiece “Man’s Search For Meaning,” that the essential ingredient that drives us in this world is our search for meaning. Fascinated by the way different people dealt with the hardships of concentration camp life in completely different ways, he noted one man who arrived in Auschwitz with one of his students and became determined to pass on to this youth a particular tractate of Talmud, which he knew largely by heart.

Whenever he would see this rebbe, whether on work detail, or at night in the barracks, and often even at role call if he thought no one was watching, he was always with his student whispering the sacred words of Talmud under his breath.

And even in Auschwitz, this rebbe was alive and full of purpose.

Until one day he actually completed the tractate he was teaching the boy, for which he had been living. And then Frankel watched as the weight of his reality broke him down and he became what was known as a musselman, one of the living dead who had given up on life. 

These inmates were immediately discernible by the vacant stare in their eyes and were avoided by other prisoners; one never knew when they would just stop what they were doing and walk over to one of the fences or defy the guards, no longer caring whether they lived or died. And when the guards started shooting they didn’t care where their bullets landed.

How could someone so full of life one day simply lose the desire to go on the next? Frankel concluded that what drives human beings above all else is our search for meaning.

If indeed we are created by G-d, then that purpose we so crave is not simply a random delusion we have created for ourselves, which can never stand up to the light of true introspection; rather, it is the purpose for which Hashem placed us in this world to begin with.

This is why every religion that believes in a G-d, inevitably has a revelation, a point at which G-d reveals to the world their purpose. For the Jewish people that point in time occurred 3,000 years ago at Sinai, and the Torah is essentially the recipe of purpose for what we are meant to be doing in our lives.

And the study of Torah? It’s an opportunity to tap into the thought process of G-d, to experience G-d.

This may be what this week’s parsha is all about. Perhaps the “reward” that comes as a result of this toiling in Torah is that life becomes its own reward.

It is not that we can ever answer the question of how and why the Jewish people have suffered so much over the millennium; it is that the question no longer challenges us in the same way.

The verse tells us, “Tzaddik Be’Emunato Yichyeh,” which we usually take to mean that the righteous live on faith alone. But Rav Kook (in his Midot HaRe’ayah’) points out that faith is the way we view the world. When we believe that everything has purpose, we are then seeing the world through completely different lenses. A tzaddik lives in a very different world, because he or she sees the world in a completely different way. Everything has meaning, and everything comes from G-d.

Perhaps this is the meaning of the mishnah from Avot we quoted above. After all, if we should not serve the Master to get a reward, then obviously we should serve the Master without any desire to receive a reward! Why the need to repeat the sentence, instead of just saying we should not serve Hashem for reward?

Perhaps the point is not to expect that you will receive a reward for your efforts, because it is the effort that is in fact the reward. 

And this is why the mishnah there concludes, “and may the fear of heaven be upon you.” Because the word morah, mistranslated as fear, really means awe, from the root lir’ot, to see. Antig’nos of Socho was suggesting that the challenge and the essence of life in this world are to see heaven on earth, every day, in everything we do.

May we all be blessed to see the world through entirely different lenses, which see only blessing!

A version of this article appeared in 2012.