Anna Davis – Year 9

Mirabelle Mirvis – Year 9

Parashat Nitsavim

In Parashat Nitsavim, Moshe informs the Israelites that man or woman, rich or poor, God’s laws apply to them and all their generations to come. If they break these laws they will be punished, and if they keep them their wheat will grow super tall. The obvious moral from this parashah is that we must all have faith in God and obey God’s mitzvot or risk punishment. A modern interpretation of this parashah would be that we should be good people and do good things like volunteering, giving to charity and having empathy.

The message that “we must be good out of fear”, is a terrible message. The reason we need to be good people is not out of fear that a divine authority will strike us down, but because treating each other and the rest of this Earth decently is the only way to make sure that we’re all treated decently.

Having good intentions (paired with understanding of the world and morality) is one of the most reliable ways of ensuring good things happen, fear of authority is only the best way to ensure obedience, regardless of what is right. Do you really believe that following commandments out of fear of pain, for the lure of a prosperous future, is the face of morality?

Authority figures across history have posed all kinds of covenants and commandments that have led to thousands of calamities, injustices and deaths. Blindly obeying the law doesn’t equal being good, therefore we should rather think critically of our laws (religious or otherwise) to seek and ensure good things happen.

I believe this message can be especially misleading as we are about to celebrate Rosh HaShanah, a time where a lot of emphasis is placed on considering the effects of our actions, and how we will attempt to be better people in the future. As people are seeking self-improvement, those who do so out of fear of punishment, are forgetting the reason we seek to be good in the first place.

So please do good stuff, be an upstanding, moral, compassionate human being, consider the effects of your actions; and, if those good things happen to also be what the Torah wants us to do, like reflection on Rosh HaShanah, then that’s great. But perhaps consider, instead of saying ‘you need to do the thing because God said you should’ say instead ‘we must do this because it is right.’