In this week's parsha Miriam and Aharon criticize Moshe over his Cushite wife and Miriam gets tzara'at, "leprosy". (Aharon gets off. I'm not sure why that is.) The torah is short on details. Tonight our associate rabbi used this as the basis of a nice little drash on prejudice and dealing with the stranger in your midst.

Something he said in passing clicked with a midrash I read last night to send my thinking in a completely different direction. According to this midrash -- and you should note that for many midrashim there are equal and opposite midrashim, so take them with a grain of salt -- Miriam had been talking with Moshe's wife, Tzippora, when Eldad and Medad broke out in prophecy. Tzippora, according to the midrash, said something along the lines of "ouch, I pity their poor wives", and went on to explain that since Moshe became a prophet he'd been neglecting his obligations to his wife -- he was busy serving God and Israel instead, one gathers. Miriam said "oh, this is terrible" and went off to chastise Moshe for the way he treated his wife, and got punished. It's a different spin from the common interpretation that the criticism was about the marriage (to a non-Hebrew).

This, in turn, got me thinking about the obligations and effects of leadership. At least in the Reform movement, congregations tend to expect an awful lot of their rabbis. My rabbi works way more than the conventional 40-hour week, and he has to be on call pretty much all the time. He takes work home at night. None of this is unusual (again, in the movement -- I can't generalize). Do we, collectively, expect our rabbis to neglect their family obligations in favor of congregational obligations? Is that really fair? Is it just par for the course, or can we do something about it?

Again, speaking only of the Reform movement, there's a lot of resistance, from both congregants and rabbis, to letting lay people do some of the work. I don't know how we get better about that so we don't burn out our leaders. Moshe ended up appointing 70 elders to help him, but it wasn't his idea. How do we get more help for our leaders, and how do we get that help accepted? No answers, just questions.

That's not really the direction I expected this to go when I started writing, by the way. I was just going to comment on the load we place on our leaders and stop there.

This week's parsha describes the rewards and punishments -- mostly punishments -- that we will experience, depending on whether we keep God's commandments. Whenever we talk about reward and punishment, we inevitably end up at one question: why? Why do bad things happen to good people? If there is a system of divine reward and punishment, how do we reconcile that with what we see in the world? It doesn't seem to work the way the torah describes it.

I'm not going to talk about that. While the question has prompted a lot of discussion and commentary, I think "why?" is the wrong question. We can't know, and I think our efforts are better spent on a different question.

The torah tells us pretty explicitly that God will send the punishments described in this portion. But what are these punishments? Crop failures, war, disease, and others. We don't need God to make all those things happen in the world; we're pretty good at making some of them all by ourselves. Let's not blame God for everything bad that happens to us.

There are bad things that are completely beyond our control, and there are bad things that we can't control but we can mitigate. And there are many, many bad things that we actually could control collectively, but we don't. Maybe instead of worrying about divine actions, we can start by worrying about human ones.

A whole tikkun-olam sermon is trying to write itself in this space, but it's not my intent to focus on specific issues here. Whether we're talking about crime in Pittsburgh, hunger in America, or depleting natural resources in the world, there are negative effects that are pretty clearly man-made and that we have to work together to address. God might make these things possible, but we aren't guiltless.

The torah describes this parsha's punishments as happening in stages -- if you don't listen to me I'll do this, and if you still won't keep my commandments I'll do that, and so on. From this Rashi derives seven stages of sin, starting with not being willing to learn and ending with denying God's existence. At each stage, the consequences get more severe.

I said before that "why do bad things happen?" is not the right question to ask. The right question, in my opinion, is not "why?" but "what are we going to do about it?". Rashi described seven steps to punishment; maybe we can turn those into seven steps to reward instead.

The first of Rashi's stages is failing to study. He's talking about torah; we can talk about torah and science and human behavior. Learning is a necessary foundation to acting in the world. It makes having free will worthwhile.

Rashi's second stage, which follows from the first, is not performing the mitzvot. The ethical mitzvot are not optional, and they include things like pursuing justice and not standing by the blood of our neighbors. These core mitzvot help us see our connections to each other.

Rashi's next three steps follow in turn: being disgusted by those who keep the mitzvot, hating the learned, and preventing others from fulfilling mitzvot. Instead, let us honor those who lead the way in ethics and good behavior, learn from them, and help each other to act.

Rashi's final two stages, the ones that lead to the worst punishments, are denying God's commandments and then denying God's very existence. The more I learn, the more I build connections with others, and the more I stop and think about it all, the more evident God's role in the world is to me. I'm not talking about a God who micro-manages; I'm talking about a God who set things in motion and gave us the tools to act, or not act, as we choose. I experience the greatest rewards when I am aware of God's role in my life.

From Rashi's seven steps to punishment we can derive seven steps to reward. It begins with study and ends with connections with each other and with God. Not only can this lead to reward, but it can also be reward.

We can walk in either direction. As the torah later tells us, "I set before you life and death, blessing and curse". Let us pursue the path of reward and blessing.

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I commented later, elsewhere:

I had a lot of trouble writing this d'var torah, and threw out several different approaches to it half-written. I stumbled on the Rashi commentary on, I think, Wednesday, and that gave me an idea. But by then I was running low on time, so I felt the results were so-so. It could have benefitted from another evening of writing. So I was pretty surprised by the number of people at the minyan who complimented me using words like "great". I wonder if I'm developing an image that can carry me when it's not deserved. Do people view my torah commentaries more positively than strict merit would suggest because they're mine and they've heard me say insightful things in the past? That would be a little disturbing. (Also, I suspect, par for the course for rabbis -- you have fans and non-fans, but among the fans I see this sort of thing happening. Now I seem to have fans. Weird.)