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Parasha Ki Tavo

Parasha Ki Tavo

Seeing the World Through Divine Eyes

Rabbi David Ackerman

Imagine this scenario. You’ve just given a presentation at work. A co-worker offers the following feedback: “Your argument was excellent, your examples were interesting, your organization was very clear, and you spoke confidently, but there was one factual error on the third slide.” (Full disclosure: ChatGPT provided the example). You might very well focus mainly, even exclusively, on that factual error. Four statements of praise to one statement of criticism, and the takeaway is the critique! 

Psychologists and social scientists call the phenomenon ‘negativity bias.’ Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman, the coiners of the term, define it this way: “in most situations, negative events are more salient, potent, dominant in combinations, and generally efficacious than positive events.” Or, as one group of researchers terms it, “bad is stronger than good.”

According to a delicious Talmudic teaching, God sees things the other way around. 

Says Rabbi Levi (3rd century, land of Israel): Come and see that human attributes are unlike the attributes of the Holy One of Blessing. The Holy One blessed the people of Israel with ‘twenty-two’ and cursed them with ‘eight’…In contrast, our teacher Moses blessed them with ‘eight’ and cursed them with ‘twenty-two’. [Talmud Bavli, Bava Batra 88b-89a]

‘Twenty-two’ refers to the Hebrew alphabet which consists of twenty-two letters. In the blessings and curses passage in Leviticus, God speaks directly to the people. The blessing section, all of eleven verses, begins with the letter ‘alef’ and ends with the letter ‘tav.’ The much longer curse section, thirty verses in all, begins with a ‘vav’ and concludes with a ‘mem’, covering just eight letters of the alphabet. 

The blessings and curses passage in parashat Ki Tavo (Deuteronomy), spoken by a very human Moses, reverses the pattern. Moses’s fourteen verse blessing begins with ‘vav’ and concludes with ‘mem’ while his fifty-four-verse curse covers the whole alef bet, beginning with a ‘vav’ and ending with ‘heh’, cycling through the entire alphabet along the way.

Rabbi Levi’s claim is that from God’s viewpoint, good is stronger than bad, blessing is maximally expansive and broad, and curse is narrow and quite limited. In other words, no negativity bias on the part of the Holy One! For God, positive events are the more salient and efficacious ones. Good to know.

But Rabbi Levi’s claim goes farther, I think. Rabbi Levi challenges both Moses and us to see the world through God’s eyes rather than through more characteristically human eyes. Moses, after all, does imitate God’s blessing and curse pattern - the blessings are brief, the curses are lengthy, one covers the whole alphabet, one covers a third of the alphabet. Except for reversing the ‘twenty-two’ and the ‘eight’ Moses gets the rest of it right! Can he (and we) get that piece of the puzzle right as well? That, I suggest, is Rabbi Levi’s challenge. 

What if we - you and I - actually chose to see the world through divine eyes? What if we succeeded in adopting a fully expansive view of blessing and a narrowed and limited view of curse? What would be different? What would change?

A whole lot, I think. For starters, we would ‘doomscroll’ a lot less! More importantly by seeing and acknowledging more blessings (and fewer curses) I believe we would actually grow in kindness and compassion. At bottom, that is Rabbi Levi and the Torah’s guidance for us: be kinder, be more compassionate, be more loving. Start by seeing blessing more expansively, more broadly, more often. 

We always encounter Ki Tavo two weeks before Rosh Hashanah. Its message is here to take us into a new year, one in which blessing will hopefully outweigh curse by a three to one margin, and not, God forbid, the other way around. 

Shabbat Shalom.

David Ackerman serves as Rabbi at Congregation Beth Am Israel in Penn Valley, P