Unscrolled: Ki Tavo, A Pretty Thought

On my YouTube homepage this week, I saw a video titled “How Thoughts Create Floods (Or Prevent Them).” The video was posted by an account called “Kabbalah Info.”

The idea that our thoughts shape reality is an extremely popular one. This idea can be traced from the 19th-century New Thought movement all the way to today, where authors like Rhonda Byrne have made fortunes promoting positive thinking and visualization as a way to game the universe by way of the pseudo-scientific “Law of Attraction.”

While this might seem harmless, it’s not, and the YouTube video about floods shows why. Taken to its logical extreme, this philosophy places the blame for catastrophe on the victims of catastrophe. A recent article by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic, for instance, reveals the extent to which cancer patients are blamed for their own sickness by adherents of the positive thinking movement.

“When I began to understand that attitude doesn’t have anything to do with survival, I felt myself coming up out of deep water,” Flanagan wrote. “I didn’t cause my cancer by having a bad attitude, and I wasn’t going to cure it by having a good one.”

In Parashat Ki Tavo, Moses offers the Israelites two options. Either they follow the command of God and live happily ever after, or they disobey and face a litany of gruesome curses.

One could very well read this as some sort of iron-age affirmation of Byrne’s philosophy. Perhaps what Moses is really talking about is the Law of Attraction. Stick with the covenant, and you will attract more positive things into your life. Ditch it, and face the fire. What both ideas share is the idea that we are all in total control of our own fates.

To believe this, however, one must ignore the world as we see it around us.

By the time of the Talmud, it was clear to our sages that divine justice is not always so clear cut, and that good lives are not always rewarded with good fates. Take Rabbi Akiva, for instance. The Talmud relates a remarkable story in which Moses himself asks God to see the reward Rabbi Akiva will receive for his life of Torah study. In response, God reveals to Moses Rabbi Akiva as he is tortured to death by the Romans. Moses, incredulous, protests. “That’s his reward?!” God replies sharply: “Shut up. So it came to my mind” (Menahot 29B).

It seems that in God’s mind, the divisions between blessing and curse are less clear. As God says in Isaiah, “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things” (45:7).

We humans, however, see the divisions. How can we not, having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the garden of Eden? And so, Moses sets before us blessing and curse. Did he realize that this was an impossible choice? That we can’t have one without the other?

And so, Moses sets before us blessing and curse. Did he realize that this was an impossible choice? That we can’t have one without the other?

According to Zen philosopher Alan Watts, the trouble starts for us mortals when we get the notion in our heads that there can be winning without losing. “In every thought of human enterprise, we are trying to have white without black.”

This notion, of course, is an illusion. Jewish history (and human history) have made this clear. There is blessing and there is curse. There is faithfulness and there is turning away. For every “seven years of abundance” there are “seven years of famine.” These cycles repeat endlessly, but not in any neat and tidy way. In this world, the black is mixed up with the white. There are countless shades of gray and tears are often shed over answered prayers.

This is the only way it can be. “If you don’t have the unknown space–death, darkness, negative,” Watts continues, “you don’t have the light.”

The sooner we realize this, the better off we will be. The sages of the Talmud experienced firsthand that history could be unpredictable and cruel. They knew that positive thinking can’t prevent a flood any more than Rabbi Akiva’s ecstatic mysticism prevented him from running afoul of the Romans.

Judging by the quantity of self-help books published on the power of positive thinking, it would seem that we have forgotten this truth. Or perhaps we are just in denial. That would be forgivable. We are only human, and life can be very frightening. It is comforting to believe that we have a bit of control.

We can forgive Moses, too, for hoping, before he left this world, that the Israelites would manage to choose blessing. Like a loving parent, this is what he wanted for the children of Israel. And so he promised that if we only obeyed, we would “always be at the top and never at the bottom” (Deuteronomy 28:13).

As Hemingway once wrote: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.