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EXPLORING
THEOLOGICAL
MYTHS
Different ways of looking at traditional beliefs.
RABBI JEREMY ROSEN

ARE WE REWARDED AND PUNISHED FOR WHAT WE DO ?

One of the clearest messages of the Bible is that God rewards those who follow His ways and punishes those who do not. And yet, to us humans, there appears to be no reason or rhyme for so much that happens to us and around us. Terrible things happen to children and adults. Horrific tortures are applied to innocent people. Hideous disfigurement is inflicted even from before birth, sometimes because things such as nuclear fall out over which individuals have no direct control. As Jews we seem to have been particularly selected for death and destruction. Why ? Is there some explanation ?

Starting with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and continuing with Cain's murder of Abel, God appears to punish those who disobey Him. Indeed, He destroys all of mankind except for Noah and his family because His ' spirit could not bear' the evil that His creatures were perpetrating ' And God saw that the evil of man was increasing throughout the earth…And He was sorry that He had created man.' Yet , after the flood God decides that it is pointless to expect man to change his nature and God decides that destruction is not the way to proceed. Rather, humanity needs more specific guidance. To begin with this guidance is generalized. After the flood come the first rules and regulations ( apart from the original command to Adam not to eat from the tree of knowledge ) that became the basis for the seven Noachide Laws. These laws were the universals that applied to all humanity. They were given with the promise that God would seek out the offender and deal 'personally' with him. Slowly through the period of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, new, more specific instructions are given until finally, the full measure of the Divine Covenant is revealed to Moses on Sinai and through him to the people of Israel.

The promises that are made to Abraham , Isaac and Jacob, with regard to the Land of Canaan and with regard to their seed, are seen as rewards for their dedication to God. But these rewards are rather specific, a land and a populous nation. It is with the giving of the Torah that the direct connection between good behavior and benefits is made explicit. The best known expression of this comes in the Ten Commandments 'For I am YHVH your God, a God of principle, who impacts the errors of fathers onto their children for three and four generations of those who hate Me ' and, again, also in the Ten Commandments, the instruction to respect ones parents 'Honor your father and your mother so that you your days will be lengthened on the earth which your God gives you.' This promise of long days is repeated for other specific commands 'Send away the mother and then you may take the fledglings so that you will benefit and you will have long days.' And ' You should have complete and honest weights and complete and honest measures in order that your days shall be lengthened.' A lot has been read into the fact that these three issues, relationships with parents, with nature and with commerce have been selected specifically. It is as though these three issues are the three essential conditions of a balanced human society. 'Long Life' would therefore mean not so much long life for individuals as effective survival for humanity. However this promise of long life is not confined to these three items. There is an additional example ' Do not eat ( blood ) in order that it will be good for you and for your children after you.' And this same commitment to benefit those who obey the Divine commandments, is used in general too 'And you should that which is good and straight in the eyes of God in order that it should be good for you.'

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The most familiar promise of reward is that which became the second paragraph of ' The Shema'. 'And if you really pay attention to my commandments which I command you today,To love God your God and serve Him with all your hearts and all your being ,Then I will give rain to your land, The early rain and the late rain , And you will be able to gather in your corn, your wine and your olive oil, And I will give grass for your cattle, And you will eat and be satisfied. Beware, in case your hearts are turned away , And you go after other gods and serve them and worship them , Then God will be angry with you and close up the skies and there will be no rain, And the earth will not give produce, And you will disappear quickly from this good land which God is giving you

And you should take my words into your hearts and into your being

And you should tie them to your hands and as decoration between your eyes. And you should teach them to your children to talk about them

When you are at home, when you travel, when you go to sleep and when you wake up. And you should write them on the door posts of your house and your gate So that you and your children will have long lives on the land

Which God promised to give to your forefathers for as long as the heavens are over the earth.' This promise for better and for worse is repeated in Deuteronomy. A fuller, more graphic and dramatic a statement of what will go wrong can be found in Leviticus. The question is whether this commitment to reward and to punish is a national one rather than an individual one. The promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were national and the covenant on Sinai was a national one. This does not mean that individuals were not automatically involved, but that the real measure of obedience to the Divine plan lay in the extent to which the nation obeyed and served God ( or not as in the case of the Golden Calf ). This national idea is reinforced by the following quote which indeed stresses the people hood rather than individual recompense 'And if you really listen to the voice of YHVH your God to keep and do all His commandments which I command you today then God will place you above all other nations of the earth and you will receive all these blessings. '

There do seem to be two clear issues here, the national and the individual. The nation succeeds or falls on the basis of its national decisions and its commitment to its heritage. Individuals may get caught up in the fate of the people regardless of their personal merit. And , or, the individual similarly, may suffer as the result of what parents do regardless of his specific actions.

What exactly does the statement in Exodus about ' visiting the sins of the fathers on the sons' mean ? It certainly is not a legal imperative. According to Jewish law, a person alone has to pay, judicially for his actions. This is reaffirmed in the sentence in Deuteronomy ' Fathers will not die for their children and children will not die for their fathers, a person dies for his own misdeeds.' So that the statement in Exodus must be understood rather as meaning that actions bring about consequences. What parents do, certainly impacts on their children and sometimes well beyond the immediate generation. But this is not a statement about reward and punishment on an individual level. The debate moves on to the book of Ecclesiastes 'The righteous and the wicked, God will judge.' And again 'For every deed God will bring to justice, every hidden thing, for good or bad.'

So, both as a nation and as individuals, we are warned almost of a double jeopardy . If we do well, as individuals, the national disaster may still overcome us regardless. And if we are evil, the credit of the wider community may save us. The rabbis sought to avoid this conclusion by seeing the real, the true response as being on a very different level. They wanted individuals to feel that there was an immediate link between their actions and what happens to them.

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By the time the Mishna discusses the issue, it is no longer a matter of doubt. God rewards and punishes people. The issue is how it actually works in practice. In affirming that individual actions matter and that they are judged, Rabbi Yehudah The Prince says ' Think of three things and you will not do wrong. Know what is above, an Eye that sees, an Ear that hears and everything is recorded in a book. ' Similarly, Rabbi Elazar said 'Know before Whom you labor and Who you are working for that will pay you for your work.' Rabbi Elazar adds the promise that it is God who will reward. The comprehensive statement comes from Rabbi Akiva, ironically, the one person who Moses points out, was not, apparently, as he was tortured to death, rewarded for his good deeds. 'He used to say Everything has been given on loan and the net is spread for all human beings. The store is open and the shopkeeper gives credit. The register is open, the hand writes and whoever wants to come and borrow may borrow. The agents go round collecting regularly and everyday get their payment from a person whether he agrees or not. They have a legal authority and their case is just and everything is prepared for the banquet.' His contemporary, Rabbi Tarfon expresses similar views.' Rabbi Tarfon said 'The day is short, there is a lot to be done, the workers are lazy and the Master is pressing ( for the work to be done ). He said You do not have to complete the work but you are not free to give it up. If you have learnt a lot of Torah you are given a lot of reward and you can rely on the Master to pay you for your work and know that the reward for the righteous is in the future to come.'

As against these statements there are dissenting voices. The dissent is not about the principle but rather the modalities. Antignos does not deny that there are rewards. He does , however, emphasize the idea that reward and punishment should not be the criterion by which we act. 'Antignos from Socho received ( the tradition, Semicha ) from Shimon HaTsadik. He used to say Do not be like servants who serve their master in order to receive a reward but be like servants who serve their master, not to receive a reward and let the authority of Heaven be upon you.' Antignos clearly reflects an idealistic and even a philosophical position.

Another understanding seeks to emphasizes consequences ' He ( Hillel ) saw a skull floating on the water. He said to it, Because you drowned others, you were drowned and those who drowned you will be drowned. ' In effect, this is a simple utilitarian statement. Ones actions, says Hillel, are bound to lead to consequences. 'Do as you would be done by' because in the way that a person deals, so he will be dealt with. But the most specific expression comes from Ben Azai. 'Ben Azai said Run to do even a small Mitzvah ( positive commandment ) and flee from an Avera ( a negative command ) because one Mitzvah leads to another Mitzvah and one Avera leads to another. For the reward for a Mitzvah is a Mitzvah and the punishment for an Avera is an Avera.' In other words, the pleasure one gets from doing good deeds, or the spiritual pleasure one gets from keeping Shabbat or a festival will encourage us to repeat the act. The additional pleasure or sense of gratification one gets will in itself be sufficient reward. This feeling will continue to repeat itself as the positive habits and actions are done again and again and the positive actions will be reinforced. Similarly, punishment becomes simply the absence of reward. So if one is mean and uncaring, one deprives oneself from the pleasure one might otherwise have had. If one does not keep a holy day as a spiritual experience and does not have the pleasure and the refreshment that come with the experience, then one simply goes on living without these positive experiences and as a consequence lives a lesser life, deprived of these pleasures. This does not mean one lives a bad or useless life but just that this spiritual dimension is missing.

This remains , the most persuasive of solutions which avoids some of the contradictions that one has to deal with otherwise. The fact remains that suffering does not seem connected to actions at all. Pain, illness, loss and death seem not to be related at all to the way people behave. Good and saintly people suffer and awful, selfish people seem to prosper. In response to this Rabbi Yanai said ' We simply cannot explain ( it is not in our hands to explain ) either why the wicked prosper or the righteous suffer.'

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Yet, the rabbis of the Talmud continue to be perplexed by the problem of suffering. 'Moshe asked God Master of the Universe why are there righteous who have a good life and righteous who have a bad life, wicked people who prosper and wicked who suffer ? He said to Moshe a righteous person who has a good life is a righteous son of a righteous father. A righteous person who has a bad life is a good son of a bad father, a wicked person who prospers is the bad son of a good father and a wicked person who suffers is the bad son of a bad father. Some say that this is what He answered. A righteous person who has a good life is a completely righteous person. A righteous person who has a bad life is an incompletely righteous person, a wicked person who prospers is not completely bad and a wicked person who suffers is totally bad.'

The most common response is to suggest that reward and punishment is not part of our present world but is a promise for the next one. In the context of Life After Death we have quoted Rabbi Yaakov earlier. 'Rabbi Yaakov said There is not one command in the Torah that has its reward ( written ) by its side that is not connected with Resurrection. In ' Honor your father and your mother ' it is written ' In order that your days will be lengthened and it will be good for you'. In ' Sending away the nest' it is written ' So that it will be good for you and you will have long days'. So it happened that his father said to his son ' Climb up the tower and bring me the fledglings'. He climbed up the tower and sent away the mother bird and took babies and on his return he fell and died. Where are his good days ? Where is his long life ? But 'good for you' means in the world that is completely good. 'Long days' means in the world which is forever long.' Here you have the typical response. This is the dominant theme in the Gemara. 'The reward for the righteous is in the future to come.' and 'There is no reward for ( performing ) mitsvot in this world.'

But interestingly, there is a pragmatic response to this Gemara in Kiddushin where the child who falls and is killed, the Gemara continues ' Maybe the situation was different and Rabbi Yaakov saw something happen, but maybe he ( the child or the father ) had a sinful intention or maybe the ladder was rotten.' The rabbis are loth just to put off the issue to the next world. They strongly believed in consequences and that is why they try here too to see if the situation cannot be explained very simply in these terms. So that indeed we are talking about consequences again.

Yet the rabbis return again and again to the idea of reward and punishment being part of the next life. Nevertheless the position that reward and punishment are applied only in the next world , leaves open the question of why the righteous suffer in this world. It is one thing to put off the reward until a later time, it is quite another to come face to face with serious suffering that seems to have no reason or explanation.

The rabbis often used the concept of Yissurin, which one has to translate long windedly as ' The suffering imposed on good people for no apparent reason'. Of course this is the message of the biblical Book Of Job. God is proud of his servant Job. But Satan , not a Christian Satan in conflict and opposing God, but one of His lesser agents whose function simply seems to have been to challenge, to put 'the other side of the story' ( for this is one of the meanings of the word 'Satan', another side ) wonders whether Job is good only because he has it so good in life. God allows Satan to test this by removing everything and doing all the evil he can to Job short of taking his life. Job survives the experience and the three 'comforters' who come to be with him and refuses to curse God. In the end Satan is defeated, good triumphs and Job is restored to his former state. A good man suffers because of forces beyond his control and indeed, beyond the normal workings of this world. The Book Of Job is in itself a document that tries to answer this perennial and perplexing question. Of course there is no answer that satisfies the rational , human mind. Hence the statement that 'Whoever God likes He batters with suffering.' It is as though God is at least showing an interest in someone if only to test them. The testing is a sort of 'act of love'. This is reinforced by the experiences of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who, despite their close relationship and the Divine promises, still had difficult and tragic experiences in their lives. The rabbis try to differentiate between that suffering that is caused by love ' He who God loves, He corrects' and those which just seem random. Nevertheless, even that suffering caused by Divine love is not welcomed . All of this merely reinforces the fact that no explanation satisfies and whatever criteria may be applied, the problem remains an intractable one.

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In effect, trying to discover how God works, or what the criteria are by which He runs human affairs is inevitably a fruitless exercise. It is logically impossible for a limited human being, no matter how exalted, to claim that he or she can know how God works. Attempts to suggest that one can explain , say , the Holocaust in terms of the behavior of the Jews of Europe is, in my view, dangerous nonsense. This would assume that any human can know the mind of God and this goes against everything the rabbis have said about the nature of God.

It is true that the rabbis said that there were various reasons for the destruction of the Temples. But this was in situations where the Jews had clearly brought their fate upon their own heads by disregarding both the Torah and the messages of the prophets. We cannot know why God acts in ways that defy logic. All sorts of spurious explanations are bound to fail. It is often suggested that people have allotted tasks in life which some finish before others. Again, the nonsense of this position is that it will not explain the death of a child at birth.

Some Jews have taken on board the idea that pain and suffering are good. Again, this not the approach of the rabbis or of the Torah. For them, suffering can teach lessons. Humans can turn a painful experience into one which teaches. But pain in itself is not all to be welcomed for its own sake.

In the end, we must seek satisfaction in the style of life we choose for ourselves. In this way, reward and punishment needs to be divided into two different issues. The way we live our lives now must be on the basis of what we consider to be the most appropriate and most beneficial. If we decide to act morally it is not because we think we will benefit but because we believe it to be right. This is the position of Antigonos. On the other level, how God organizes His world and repays those with whom He has a relationship with is a matter of faith that cannot be dealt with logically.

Our lives are lived between two extremes. On the one hand we have responsibility and an obligation to act ' We do not rely on miracles.' On the other hand we are subject to forces beyond our own control. This is reflected in the Yiddish expression 'Bashert', fate, ordained from above. We tend to think that our life partners are in the hands of God . But what about life in general ? There are lovely stories told in the Talmud of Rabbi Akiva or Nachum Ish Gamzu dealing with bad 'fate' in a positive way. When something goes wrong, instead of dispairing, they say ' It is all for the best'. 'Fate' may appear initially to go against a person, but often we only see a short term effect and fail to see a broader plan. And yet there are events that simply cannot be explained away this way. The possibility of being run over by a drunken driver is beyond our capacity to take precautions. One can hardly argue that being killed in a car would be 'for the best'.

Besides, our appeals to God may conflict with those of others. When we pray to God it is in the hope that what He considers best for us is also what we would like. But as we know, our requests often have dubious motives and ambivalent ends. Hence we are asked to ' Do His will as though it were your will so that He may make your wishes His. And subordinate your desires before His in the hope that He may subordinate the requests of others to yours. We see things through a narrow perspective and therefore both our desires and our judgments are limited. To expect God to conform to our standards is to limit God's role to that of a superman.

If one expects and hopes for a reward, beyond the satisfaction of doing good and beyond the pleasure derived from the life itself, this certainly is no guarantee that it is going to come about and happen immediately. Reward is on two levels, a practical this worldly one, that we can experience and recognize and on the other hand , an intangible and purely spiritual one that we cannot conceive of in 'this world' terms. The spiritual person does not seek reward as a condition of living a religious life. Rewards come from the life led itself. If there is to be something more, then this is a bonus.

And what about the evil people who seem to thrive ? It is not a legitimate concern of religious people that others appear to have it better. ' One's eyes should not look badly on others'. Neither will spiritually oriented people care if others have greater material rewards because material rewards are not what they value above all other. Reward and Punishment is more a priority of the spiritually challenged than it is of those who feel part of a much larger and transcendental world.