A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

A major part of the double Torah portion we read this week (which ends the Book of Vayikra) is what is called the Tochecha, which translates as “the rebuke.”

Here are some selections from Chapter 26.

If you follow My laws and faithfully observe My commandments, I will grant your rains in their season, so that the earth shall yield its produce …you shall eat your fill of bread … I will grant peace in the land … You shall give chase to your enemies … I will be ever present in your midst. I will be your God, and you shall be My people.

But if you disobey Me and remain hostile to Me, I will send misery and diseases … and discipline you sevenfold for your sins. You shall eat the flesh of your sons and your daughters … I will lay your cities in ruin and make your sanctuaries desolate, I will make the land desolate, so that your enemies will settle in it … And I will scatter you among the nations, and Your land shall become a desolation and your cities a ruin.

In some synagogues, the custom is to read it very quickly in a soft tone — as if to tiptoe through the painful stuff, as quickly as possible.

On the one hand, it seems so out of touch with the way we think today. Life rarely works out so simply — and we are often not rewarded or penalized in the name of true justice. And yet, it is surprising how accurate it has been in describing the rise and the fall of the Jewish people.

One way of looking at this is to say that thanks to archaeology and the large amount of information that we have accumulated over the years about the culture, language, and literature of Mesopotamia, we can see how this sort of blessing and curse — promise and threat — was universal.

Whenever monarchs came to power, they would open their reign with a demand for loyalty. In exchange, they would promise protection, wealth, health, happiness, safe borders, and all good things that the monarch was committed to providing. At the same time, they would warn the people that if they betrayed the monarch, they would suffer from invasion, death, slavery, sickness, and oppression. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. But it was a way of keeping the people in line.

This part of the Torah is another example of how external culture and attitudes provide a background to the Torah. Everybody at that time would have expected promises from rulers, while as we now know, politicians often do not keep them.

But there’s another way of looking at this — perhaps more psychologically. Perhaps we should read these Biblical formal declarations as words of promise and rebuke intertwined. Designed to give us a feeling that there is some power we can feel that cares about us — who wants to help us, but also wants to prevent us from going off track and making the wrong decisions. And it’s this push and pull that we needed in ancient times — and today.

The author is a writer and rabbi, currently based in New York.