Refusing Randomness: Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Behar-Bechukotai

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"This was not punishment. And it was not a mistake."

"You don't have to like it. I hate that Hersh is not here…"

I haven't stopped thinking about Rachel Goldberg-Polin's words. They are so human. And they are also, quietly, theologically profound.

She is saying that suffering is not punishment. That tragedy is not goodness in disguise. That not every terrible thing has a hidden reason waiting to be uncovered. And yet — in the same breath — she refuses to say that life is random. That Hersh's life, his death, the texture of these unbearable months, were meaningless. She holds both. She protests and she trusts. She hates what happened and still insists it was somehow meant to be.

This contradiction — between protesting our suffering and the knowledge that there is meaning in our existence — is at the heart of so much religious tension. But it is also, I think, the quiet pulse of Behar-Bechukotai.

The Torah places two visions side by side. Behar offers a society flourishing in its land. Creativity. Human dignity. A covenantal life shaped by shmitta and yovel and shabbat— laws that interrupt the relentlessness of productivity and instrumental existence demanding we make space for the poor, the land, the other, and God. Laws that force us to lean into a God-conscious life. But then, immediately, Bechukotai gives us the inverse: exile, devastation, suffering, passivity. Collapse.

Why? Why give us images of redemption and flourishing next to ruin? Joy beside grief? Creation beside destruction? Hope beside heartbreak?

Because covenantal life is never linear. We are messy. We build and we break. We create order and we create chaos. We heal and we hurt. We ravel and we unravel.

The Torah is not a book of abstract philosophical principles. It is not Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. It is not Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. It is not a book of law, nor a book of ethics. It is a book about what it means to be human — both Divine in origin and deeply mundane. It is a book about how we build a society — our relationship with others. How we build character — our relationship with ourselves. And how we build transcendence — our relationship with God. It is not binary, not simple, not black and white.

Which is why I resist the classic reading of Bechukotai through the lens of reward and punishment. Do good, receive blessing. Do wrong, suffer the consequences. There is another way to read it — and the key is a single repeated word:  - קריkeri.

"If you walk with Me b'keri…" (Vayikra 26:21).

Keri. Chance. Randomness. Happenstance. Meaninglessness.

The Torah is teaching us a profound lesson of both national and human survival: the deepest danger is not sin. It is fatalism. It is the slow decision to believe that life is random — that there is no order, no purpose, no thread holding any of it together. Because the moment we live by keri, everything begins to unravel. We are exiled not only from the land, but from the very experience of being human.

The danger is indifference. A life stripped of purpose. A society that no longer sees itself in covenant — with history, with each other, with God. A life barren of awe. A people who have forgotten the realm of the sacred. Who have forgotten that even when life looks random, there is a bigger picture we don't need to see, but need to know exists.

Perhaps Behar and Bechukotai are juxtaposed not to teach us a tidy theology of sin and punishment, that may sit comfortable in a philosophy treatise, but something harder. That covenantal life is the ability to live between flourishing and collapse — to know that one cannot reach the fullness of being in the land without also knowing its opposite.

A friend of mine who lost her four-year-old son to cancer often says to me: "Without reaching the bottom of the pit, you can't possibly know the intensity of the top of the world."

This is where shmitta enters. Because shmitta is the antidote to keri. It is the Torah's structural protest against a life of randomness. Every seventh year, we are commanded to stop. To release. To let the land rest. To forgive debts. To remember that we are not the sole authors of our success — "My power and the strength of my hand have made this wealth for me" (Devarim 8:17) — but partners in something larger than ourselves.

Shmitta is the discipline of awe. It is what Rabbi A.J. Heschel called radical amazement — the refusal to take any of it for granted. The refusal to live as if it were all chance. Shmitta trains us, year after year, to interrupt the illusion of self-sufficiency and to reawaken to the sacred, to the transcendent realm of human existence.

It is no accident that shmitta opens Behar and keri closes Bechukotai. They are mirror images. One is the architecture of meaning. The other is its absence.

In the aftermath of October 7, many of us in Israel are still reeling from a rupture we never imagined. The ground beneath us has shaken — physically, emotionally, morally. And the great temptation, in moments like these, is keri. To collapse into the conviction that none of it means anything. Or, alternatively, to flatten our pain into a tidy theological story where every loss has a neat providential reason.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin shows us a third way. The way of Behar-Bechukotai. To say: I hate this. And I refuse to believe it is random.

Maybe faith is not having answers. Maybe faith is the refusal to let pain be the final story.

Maybe faith is the thread we hold when everything else is unraveling — knowing that even now, especially now, we are still being woven into something we cannot yet see.

Shabbat Shalom.

For a printable version click here:

Refusing Randomness Behar Bechukotai 5786 2026.pdf

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Don't forget to check out my Books and Beyond: The Rabbi Sacks Podcast especially episodes 3 and episodes 4 where we discuss the challenge of antisemitism.