The private world and the public liturgy

The following is the list of the 12 people who are cursed in last week’s parasha - Ki Tavo:

15. Cursed be the man who makes any engraved or molten image, an abomination to the Lord, the work of the hands of the craftsman, and sets it up in secret. And all the people shall answer and say, Amen.
16. Cursed be he who dishonours his father or his mother. And all the people shall say, Amen.
17. Cursed be he who removes his neighbour’s landmark. And all the people shall say, Amen.
18. Cursed be he who makes the blind to wander out of the way. And all the people shall say, Amen.
19. Cursed be he who perverts the judgment of the stranger, orphan, and widow. And all the people shall say, Amen.
20. cursed be he who lies with his father’s wife; because he uncovers his father’s skirt. And all the people shall say, Amen.
21. Cursed be he who lies with any kind of beast. And all the people shall say, Amen.
22. Cursed be he who lies with his sister, the daughter of his father, or the daughter of his mother. And all the people shall say, Amen.
23. Cursed be he who lies with his mother-in-law. And all the people shall say, Amen.
24. Cursed be he who strikes his neighbour secretly. And all the people shall say, Amen.
25. Cursed be he who takes a bribe to slay an innocent person. And all the people shall say, Amen.
26. Cursed be he who does not maintain all the words of this Torah to do them. And all the people shall say, Amen.

Rashbam, Rashi’s son in law, proposes that the common denominator between these 12 cases is that they are all sins that are generally performed in private and which are unlikely to be discovered. I’m convinced by his reading; take a look at the verses and think about it. If he is right then the whole infrastructure of curses in last week’s parasha really only pertains to our own little private worlds of deviance. The elaborate edifice described in the parasha is only there to impact upon our private behaviour.

I am reminded of the huge gulf between the complex communal ritual and liturgy of the Yamim Nora’im and the lonely silence of the Amida. The most intense real moments in the synagogue, the moments of actual prayer, take place in the silent Amida. It is in those moments that one attempts to stand in the presence of one’s deepest understanding of the universe. The public liturgy can take us to the edge of this place - but will we jump?

Is Judaism a form of curse when we fail to allow it to penetrate into our private places? For Rashbam a person is only truly cursed if they lead a life of obedience to the external norms of Judaism, allowing communal pressure to dictate public behaviour, but do not actually internalise it to the extent that private behaviour is also affected. Or to put it differently, is it not a curse if we draw no existential sustenance from this tradition but only a series of neurotic behavioural twitches?