Re’eh: Beyond False Redemptions

This week’s parshah, Re’eh, describes the chilling case of the Ir HaNidachat – a “wayward city” that has embraced idolatry. The instructions are simple: “Put the inhabitants of that town to the sword and put its cattle to the sword. Doom it and all that is in it to destruction.” 

This is one of three passages in the Torah – alongside the mandated execution of a rebellious son and the description of a house affected by plague for no reason – about which the Rabbis of the Talmud declared, “It never was and it never will be.” 

For the Rabbis, each of these cases contravenes their most basic beliefs. To murder an entire city for idolatry or to kill a son for recalcitrance would be to abandon all ethical restraint, and if a house were to be plague-stricken without cause, it would undermine the notion of divine justice. At the same time, the Rabbis believe that the entire Torah is the word of a moral and righteous God. By reinterpreting the text, though, they’re able to reconcile the apparent dilemma: The Torah is only describing a theoretical scenario. 

This leads, however, to a natural rebuttal: If these texts are merely theoretical, why write them in the first place? The Talmud responds: “Interpret and receive a reward!” In other words, the act of reading and then reinterpreting these texts offers insight that would otherwise be unavailable. For the Zohar, the foundational mystical text of Kabbalah, for instance, the case of the rebellious son is actually a mystical analogy for the relationship between God and the Jewish people. And for the scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the description and rejection of the case of the wayward city highlights the distinction between divine and human justice and is a check on our inclination to violence. 

On the one hand, this series of interpretations demonstrates the best of the Rabbinic tradition: An insistence on wrestling with tradition without excising it, and a commitment to rediscovering and reinventing its language again and again. In such a framework, everything has infinite meaning. In the words of one Rabbi: “Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.” 

But this insistence has a darker side. The assertion that everything is meaningful can also serve to repress the experience of rupture. If everything means something, if everything happens for a reason, if everything will work out in the end, then we don’t need to attend to the trauma of the present. This is the premise of the Kabbalistic notion of yeridah le-tzorech aliyah, “descent for the sake of ascent,” the idea that our suffering – or that of others – serves some redemptive purpose that lightens the load. “Redemptive narrative,” writes historian Dominic LaCapra, “is a narrative that denies the trauma that brought it into existence.”

It’s not hard to see these dynamics in play in the narrative structure of mainstream Zionism: Zionism structures the trauma of the Holocaust by promising that Jews will never again be victims, and represses the trauma of the Nakba by framing it as a necessary, justified, or unavoidable element of Israel’s formation. But we on the left aren’t immune from the temptations of redemptive narrative, either. We, too, want to believe that ours and others’ suffering has some higher meaning that will eventually be revealed, even if – or, maybe, especially if – such a stance dulls the reality of that suffering right now. 

Perhaps this is why, alongside the contention that the three problematic biblical texts “never happened and never will happen,” the Talmud includes a dissenting testimony alongside its discussion of each case. “I saw [the rebellious son] and sat on his grave,” says one rabbi. “I saw [the wayward city] and sat upon its ruins.” Another rabbi declares that he has seen a “plagued ruin.” For both of them, the traumatic vicissitudes of history cannot simply be interpreted away.

But we can easily imagine their stoic witness transforming into a melancholic insistence on remaining fixated upon destruction. Watching the destruction of the past years, each of us has no doubt been tempted by hopelessness. Can we carve a narrow path between a false optimism that would sublimate suffering and an endless pessimism that would drown in it? With this question in mind, we might reread the opening line of Re’eh: “See, this day I set before you blessing and curse” – not as a description of fate, but as a reminder that neither calamity nor utopia is guaranteed, and that we always have a choice, no matter how uncertain the future. 

Rabbi Aron Wander is an organizer and writer based in Boston. More of his writing can be found here.