Ki Thavo: granted and entitled

My (mis)memmory of this parsha is that Gd is abusive.  All those curses: Inciting people ( the enemies) to beat and kill and besiege; causing famine; a return to  exile and slavery - even the threats are distressing.  And it all happened for real  75 years ago!  My parents lived through the horrors that were described.

The medical advice for a person in an abusive (or very threatening) relationship is to leave; find a refuge where the abuser/threaten-er cannot find you.  The parsha, of course, gives the opposite advice.  The curses come from abandoning Gd, staying with Gd leads to the blessings. 

My mother would often say that I "take [things] for granted."  The connotation was that I did not appreciate the  good fortune that underlay the availability of food, shelter, and the multitude of comforts I could enjoy with almost zero sacrifice. It contrasted her holocaust survivor experience to my  late  20th century American  life of middle class luxury.  I could open the freezer and eat ice cream.  She lived in a freezing hole in the ground and when she hurt, she could not even  scream.  She experienced the curses that are enumerated in this weeks parsha.  Were it not for the   documented experiences of her generation, I would have discounted these cruel descriptions in the text as fantastic nightmares.  Now I know that an enemy can be as cruel as the one described in Ki Thavo ( maybe worse).

"Take for granted" means that the object has been gifted, there was ( or should have been) an application to donor, but the recipient assumed that the request has been honored without an application.  It is a presumption of entitlement, albeit with some vague recognition of  a provider.  It is gratitude-very-light.  The absence of the "curses" enumerated in Ki Thavo , and perhaps the imparting of the blessings, is generally taken for granted.  I am used to that condition

Ki Thavo:  when you arrive in the land the land Gd has granted you.  This is title deed.  The land will be the possession of the Israelites, as had been promised to the ancestors.  But what happens after that is not guaranteed. Now we have entitlement, a sense of deserving, a legal right  to the implications of being landed: a right to bounty and leisure  and joy.  The parsha comes to tell us that the fruits of a homeland are a separate deal.  They depend, at least in part, on the covenant of commandments. 

Moshe presents a covenant, an agreement, between the Israelites and Gd prior to the entry into the Promised Land. It comes with a declaration that includes the recognition of arrival in the promised land, a declaration that the promise has been kept.

And the declaration includes a recognition that the nation is an improbable entity.  It is the product of a wandering Aramian ( Abraham), a sterile marriage ( but for Divine intervention), generations of murderous rivalry ( the legacy of Cain and Abel), and the failure of an attempt by another Aramian ( Lavan) to destroy ( either physically or spiritually) father Jacob, who descended to Egypt and started the agon of slavery that  they remember. After the fact, all extant events are extremely improbable and the product of miracles.  All extant facts have a probability of occurrence equal to one.  They certainly occurred.

This week I was introduced to the  Anna Karenina principle: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.(Thank you RZ ).  There is an infinity of possible failures that are potentially fatal and another infinity of circumstances that would make life intolerable.  For the privileged  majority of the population of the First World, misfortunes  are infrequent enough that most of our lives are pleasant.  Ultimately, there is always a biological failure: death. 

This is  related to the concept of entropy.  The popular notion  of entropy is that systems (that work) ultimately deteriorate and malfunction.  Actually, entropy means that there are many possible states and the operational state is a unique situation and the odds are against it.  The odds will eventually win and the system will fail. 

Our beautiful world of convenience and luxury requires maintenance so that it does not fall into one  of the infinite alternatives that are not pleasant, and possibly not viable. The covenant is the road to order.