GOOD MORNING! As I sit to write this column, I notice that it is exactly thirty-one years to the day from when Hurricane Andrew made landfall in South Florida. On August 24, 1992, the storm struck and destroyed more than 25,000 homes and damaged an additional 100,000. The hurricane caused 26 direct and 39 indirect deaths, the majority of which occurred in Dade County. The estimated financial losses exceeded $26 billion and, at the time, it was by far the greatest natural disaster (in terms of monetary loss) to ever hit the United States.

During this time, I was married with a young family and living in Miami Beach. Before the storm hit, we evacuated to my in-laws’ home, but we returned the following day. Trying to get home was an ordeal; the National Guard was helping the local police protect the empty homes in Miami Beach and you couldn’t enter the area without proof that you lived there. A trip that should have taken 20 minutes took hours.

The devastation with which we were confronted was just stunning; fallen trees strewn everywhere as if someone had dropped a box of toothpicks and dangerous downed power lines blocked passage on most of the streets. Though my neighbors and I had several huge trees fall, none of them had landed on our houses and the actual damage to our homes was thankfully minimal.

However, the one lasting memory I have is that of trying to manage the heat. Of course, with all the downed power lines we had no electricity, and this went on for five days. Trying to manage feeding a young family without refrigeration was challenging. But that wasn’t the worst of it. If you have ever been to South Florida in the middle of August, you can probably imagine how hot it was. But this was even worse; aside from the sun beating down and generating temperatures in the high 90’s (it cooled to a balmy 88 degrees at night), the area had just been deluged with water – and the intensity of the sun during the day created a steam bath effect. It was absolutely brutal.

We became consumed with a desperate yearning for the electricity to come back on so that we could have our air conditioning back. It was all we could think about and all that we talked about with our neighbors. For my part, I couldn’t even think about work or doing anything productive. Without exaggeration, it was so oppressive that we just didn’t want to do anything; we were almost totally paralyzed by discomfort.

That’s when it struck me; my house was actually built around 1920, many, many decades before air conditioning was widely available. I was dumbstruck by the fact that a mere 60-70 years prior this was the normal living conditions in Miami Beach! Somehow people managed to live and work and be productive during the summer months in South Florida! Why were we suffering so?

I had to face the fact that I had been so spoiled by modern conveniences that my baseline of what I considered acceptable living conditions had been terribly and sharply skewed. Somehow air conditioning had become a basic need, not a luxury, and without it I was rendered powerless and almost totally aimless. I realized that when we begin to conflate wants with needs our lives change dramatically, and almost always for the worse. Remarkably, his week’s Torah portion has a similar message.

This week’s Torah reading goes into great detail regarding both the rewards for following the Almighty’s word and the calamitous repercussions for going against it. The Torah commits over fifty verses to foretelling the depths to which the Jewish nation will eventually fall, and the nearly unimaginable suffering we will endure as a consequence (e.g. personal financial and societal ruin, horrible diseases, starvation to the point of cannibalism of one’s own children etc.).

The Torah then makes an absolutely astonishing statement explaining why all these horrible things will befall the Jewish people: “Because you did not serve Hashem, your God, with happiness and a good heart, even though you had an abundance of everything” (28:45-47).

On the face of it this is actually quite astounding; if the Jewish people actually did have an “abundance of everything” then why were they not serving the Almighty with “happiness and a good heart”? This seems to be a devastating indictment of their future behavior, one that would lead to horrific suffering. It is therefore critical that we understand what the Torah is trying to teach us.

During the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE a terrible famine gripped the city and the inhabitants of Jerusalem suffered greatly. The Talmud (Gittin 56a) recounts the story of the last day in the life of a fabulously wealthy woman named Martha from the famously wealthy Baisus family.

Martha sent her purchasing agent to the market to buy fine flour for the household. He returned home shortly thereafter empty-handed saying there was no more fine flour available. Instead, he suggested buying the white flour, which was still available. Martha agreed and he went back to the market. Once again, he returned empty-handed saying that there was no more white flour in the market, but that there was still dark flour available..

Martha sent him back to the market to buy the dark flour. By the time he got there all the dark flour was gone and, once again, he returned home empty-handed and explained that all the wheat flour in the market was sold out and the only thing left was a very coarse barely flour. Martha sent him back to the market to purchase the barley flour, but by the time he got there that too was sold out. He ended up with nothing.

The Talmud goes on to say that Martha was so despondent that she ran out of her palatial home without even putting on her shoes to see if she could scavenge some sort of food in the street. According to one opinion in the Talmud, in her anguish and despair she accidentally stepped barefooted into some dung that was in the street. She was gripped with extreme disgust and in her utter shock she perished on the spot.

The famous Talmudic sage of the time, Rabban Yochanan Ben Zakai thus applied to her the Biblical verse, also found in this week’s portion, “The tender and delicate woman among you who would not venture to set the sole of her foot upon the ground” (Deuteronomy 28:56).

This passage in the Talmud requires further interpretation. Following the theme of the verse, the whole point of the story seems to be that the Torah predicts that in the worst of times a highborn woman who ordinarily never ventured out of her home without shoes would do so, and that this would be a sign of how desperate the times had become. The story with Martha certainly fulfills that foreboding verse.

But why does the Talmud relate the whole background story about the servant who couldn’t figure out how to buy flour for the family? Surely the Talmud isn’t merely telling us that even two thousand years ago it was impossible to find competent domestic help?

Similar to my experience in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew, when a person has something that he considers a basic need stripped away from him he feels so deprived that he becomes depressed and unable to move forward. Even worse, because his baseline for basic subsistence has been so warped, he fails to appreciate all the actual good in his life.

This is what the Torah means when it says, “Because you did not serve Hashem, your God, with happiness and a good heart, even though you had an abundance of everything.” The Jewish people were destined to become so spoiled that even though they had “an abundance of everything” they continuously moved the needle of their baseline for basic subsistence so that they were no longer happy or joyful or even appreciative of what they had. They became so entrenched in their luxuries that they no longer really appreciated them as being special; it was just the basic baseline for existence.

This is exactly why the Talmud introduces the whole story of Martha of the Baisus family with the seeming incompetence of her servant. In actuality, he was far from incompetent, he probably knew her better than she knew herself.

Her servant was fully cognizant that when she sent him to the market for fine flour there was no way that she would accept any lower grade – she would be literally sickened by it. He understood that until she restructured her thinking to comes to terms with less and then expressly ask him to buy the next lower grade, there was no point in spending precious money purchasing it. Each lower grade of flour was a subsequent peeling of the layers of her psyche. That’s why she never said to him “I don’t care what you buy, just bring something home!” She needed to get there emotionally, step by step.

The Torah is telling us that in the future the Jewish people, too, will lose a sense of who they are. They will become totally entrenched and spoiled and warped by the new paradigm of their successes. It’s for this reason that all these calamities will eventually befall them. The calamities will serve to clarify and refocus us as to what’s real and what’s not.

God doesn’t punish people out of anger, he does so out of care and love for humanity. He brings punishments and terrible sufferings in the hope that eventually we will learn from our mistakes, wise up, and begin to live happier, more meaningful, and productive lives. Once we have our expectations moved back to the center, we begin to appreciate all the blessings in our lives and are able to serve God properly with happiness and a good heart.

Ki Tavo, Deuteronomy 26:1 - 29:8

This week's portion includes: Bringing to the Temple as an offering the first fruits of the seven species special to the Land of Israel, declaration of tithes, the Almighty designating the Jewish people as His treasured people (Deuteronomy 26:16 - 19), the command to set up in the Jordan River and then on Mount Eival large stones that had the Torah written upon them in 70 languages, the command to have a public ratification of the acceptance of the law from Mount Gerizim and Mount Eival; the Torah then sets forth the blessings for following the law and the curses for not following it, and concludes with Moses’ final discourse. Verse 28:46 tells us the importance of serving the Almighty with “joy and a good heart.” The last verse of the portion instructs us, “You shall fulfill the words of this covenant and do them so that you will succeed in all that you do!”