Blessings and curses

Guess the opening line: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (Answer below.)

That quote came to mind while reading Deuteronomy 28, Moses’ catalog of blessings and curses for the people of Israel. It’s a weird context: Here they are, about 2 million strong, on the verge of achieving a multigenerational goal going back to Abraham. The land will soon be theirs to keep or to lose, and the choice is plain. Obey the LORD your God, and you will be blessed. The blessings encompass weather, fields, crops and livestock, home and family in 14 verses. The list of curses is over four times longer, for when the LORD turns against them He will drag weather, fields, family, friends, and ­enemies down on their heads.

Happiness has one face; disaster has many. The blessings sound almost Edenic. Even though death still waited at the end of a long and happy life, the passage would be peaceful as the accomplishments of one generation passed down to the next. If the people had heeded the voice of their God, their days would have been long. But their story would be short.

As we know, they failed to obey and all the curses came true, though not all at once. And with one exception: The LORD did not abandon them for good. Calamity fell at various times and places; the sky turned to bronze and the earth to iron; nightmarish predictions of siege and cannibalism came to pass, but He remained through all the ups and downs of a thousand-year history.

That’s why the Old Testament is three times longer than the New. It’s why Tolstoy, author of that famous opening line, could stretch his unhappy-family saga (Anna Karenina) to over 800 pages. It’s why all storytelling builds on conflict, because it’s the story of us and our central conflict with God.

The conditions put before the people on the edge of their Promised Land were never the whole plan. As the LORD confided to Moses, “I know what they are inclined to do even today, before I have brought them into the land I swore to give” (Deuteronomy 31:21). Every good would be theirs if they obeyed Him, but the IF was a massive stumbling block.

Almost 3,500 years later, it still is. We carry the seeds of disaster everywhere we go, and if a few lives look more like verses 1–14 than 15–68, we call those people lucky. But the great difference between the LORD’s people then and now is that felicity and misery have bled into each other. Consider that list of blessings, and many of them are ours in the United States: abundant food, long life, central heat and air, freedom from hard labor. Viewed from the perspective of most of the world and practically all of history, it looks like a perfect life. And, if surveys and statistics are accurate, it is saturated with despair.

Writing in The Free Press, Arthur Brooks ponders “Why Your ‘Perfect’ Life Feels So Empty.” The wealthy, bright, and beautiful young people he knows today appear to have everything, yet their symptoms of major depression have nearly tripled in comparison to the young people he knew 20 years ago. Too many young people are “undeniably, desperately, incorrigibly unhappy.” Brooks blames their education: They have been taught to see life as a problem to be solved rather than a mystery to be lived. At the same time, they are trained on momentary diversion rather than challenged by purposeful boredom. It’s not a new problem, but always new diversions.

Human ingenuity finds countless ways to turn blessings into curses. Meanwhile, by the alchemy of heaven, blessing penetrates the curse. We all know people who have suffered in ways they never chose and yet remain, if not constantly upbeat, yet incorrigibly joyful. Their bronze sky diffuses light and their iron earth gives way under showers. Why?

It’s because the Lord who pronounced those curses long ago became the curse.

In Anna Karenina the wealthy, bright, and beautiful title character takes her own life. Meanwhile Konstantine Levin, the brooding, often-overlooked co-protagonist, discovers joy in divine mysteries he cannot solve.

Deuteronomy says the LORD will establish you as His holy people, if—

The cross says, No if. Not anymore. The if, like death itself, is swallowed up in victory.