by Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman

May 22, 2008

On the face of it, this is a sedra that gives religion a bad name. Its message is the stark warning that if we keep God’s commandments, we will prosper; if not, God will punish us. Perhaps the most compelling argument for atheism is the charge that religionists must believe in the hidden hand of God behind every illness and cure: as if an entire population wiped out by a tsunami is to blame for its own demise, and every child who dies deserves it.

If science has taught us anything, however, it is that the universe works without such supernatural intervention. From Copernicus to Darwin, and then to this day, that has been the lesson. The earth was thrown off by chemical processes in stars; and human beings are the result of natural selection. End of story.

But what story is it the end of? Only the provisional story that our very early ancestors told for lack of a better story to tell. Science does not put an end to the Jewish story; it just opens up a new chapter, in which we get to factor in more things.

We can hardly expect the centuries that preceded the birth of science to have produced rabbinic writings informed by what science now believes. But even though rabbis in medieval times knew nothing about microbes and viruses, they had pretty much figured out the unlikelihood of God smiting or healing people to punish sin and reward virtue.

The age-old view they fought against arrives in our haftara when Jeremiah pleads, “If You [God] heal me, I will be healed.” In theory, God created us all for a Garden of Eden existence, but ever since Adam and Eve sinned, we have had to inhabit a world of woes. If God created everything, and if God retains control, surely healing comes only from God, who doles it out, presumably, if we deserve it.

That, at least, is the theory that Nachmanides sums up in his commentary to our parsha. The Talmud, he knows, considered doctors presumptuous to think that they, not God, bring healing. Insofar as they promise healing, and get paid for it besides (even when they fail), medicine is just grand larceny. The best, and even the only, recourse to disease would be prayer. Yet Nachmanides, himself a physician, knows better. So he cites the Talmud to allow for medicine.

Doctors should indeed not be so arrogant as to think they are God, but as it happens, “God has given doctors permission to heal.” God wants the sick to get better, but has delegated healing to human beings.

Nachmanides even suggests that doctors can cure people regardless of what God wants. The old theory would have prohibited medication, as if medicine, any more than the doctors who prescribe it, might have any impact beyond God’s will. But in practice, Nachmanides maintains, people have become accustomed to medication, so God has decided to let them keep on taking it. God has chosen to step aside to let medicine do its work.

Nachmanides’ illustrious predecessor, Maimonides, also a physician, had gone even farther. In his code, he did his best to minimize the role of prayer, sometimes overlooking it when the Talmud recommended it. True, Nachmanides put it back in, leaving us with a dilemma over the relative value of prayer in the case of illness, but no longer imagining that either sickness or wellbeing depends on prayer and prayer alone.

Maimonides anticipated science when he said also that disease is caused by eating bad food. Were he alive today, I suspect he would be on the forefront of medical research, expanding a very naturalistic and modern understanding of disease, having nothing to do with sin and punishment. The many “Maimonides Medical Centers” around the world would be named after a contemporary scientist, not a medieval thinker. And Maimonides’ commentaries would be laced with results of his latest laboratory findings.

Religion is an ongoing story we tell about God, the universe and ourselves – in this case, an account of sickness and health. But like any good story that gets passed on orally from generation to generation, the plot is allowed to change. That is what the Rabbis had in mind when they invented Talmud and Midrash – what they called “the oral law.” Tradition is the act of continually retelling the story, but updating it in accord with new discoveries about the way things are. Religions that cannot do that die out.

Fortunately, Jews learned long ago how to renew our story with every passing age, and guess what! We are still here.

Rabbi Hoffman, co-founder of Synagogue 3000, is the Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York. He is the co-editor, with David Arnow, of My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Jewish Lights).

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