Reward and Punishment, or Relationship?

This week’s parshah always reminds me of a t-shirt my mom used to wear when I was a kid. In bold white letters on a bright magenta shirt, it read: “I’m the Mommy, that’s why.” In all fairness, I’m pretty sure my mom wore the shirt with a measure of irony; still, the shirt reflects deeply entrenched ideas about authority and discipline. Alfie Kohn, a prominent and controversial advocate of progressive education, points to research that found the vast majority of parenting-advice books assume all parental demands are intrinsically legitimate, and focus their methods solely on ensuring compliance and obedience from children.^[1] Kohn suggests that a broad range of cultural influences contribute to this attitude — and, when discussing the religious context for this approach to parenting, explicitly cites our parshah’s litany of rewards and punishments tied to the mitvot.^[2]

In his book Unconditional Parenting, Kohn rejects this approach on both practical and moral grounds. Parenting methods that use reward and punishment produce short-term results on the surface without a deeper commitment to the desired behavior;^[3] research into the effectiveness of punishments “consistently found that punishment was ‘ineffectual over the long term as a technique for eliminating the kind of behavior toward which it is directed.’”^[4] Rewards, too, fail to generate a deep, intrinsic commitment to positive behaviors.^[5] Standard parenting strategies prove counterproductive in other ways: we want our children to stand firm in the face of peer pressure, to protect themselves and others from bullying, to resist the temptations of drugs, unsafe sex, and other risky behaviors — and yet we are told to adopt parenting methods that emphasize unquestioning obedience and deny our children the opportunity to develop independent judgment.^[6]

Kohn goes on to raise a moral objection as well: a control-centered approach to parenting assumes a negative view of human nature and a fundamental mistrust of other people: the basic premise is that, left to their own devices, children will behave very, very badly and must be controlled to prevent their sinister nature from expressing itself.^[7] Ironically, the research in Kohn’s book suggests that reward-and-punishment parenting might actually undermine children’s ability to develop an internal moral compass and make it harder for them to make positive moral choices.^[8]

In light of these arguments against compliance-focused parenting — evident from observation and supported by peer-reviewed studies — what are we to make of this morning’s Torah portion, with its blessings and curses, explicit promises of bountiful rewards for obedience and harsh penalties for sin? While some might simply dismiss our scripture as a dated, ancient document with a limited understanding of human psychology, those of us who look to the Torah as a source of timeless spiritual wisdom and guidance must seek a way to reconcile its teachings with what we know to be true of human behavior.

At first glance, our parshah seems to take a transactional view of God’s relationship to the Jewish People: אִם־בְּחֻקֹּתַ֖י תֵּלֵ֑כוּ, “If you walk by My laws,”^[9] then God will repay us with material bounty; and on the other hand, וְאִם־בְּחֻקֹּתַ֣י תִּמְאָ֔סוּ, “If you despise My laws,”^[10] brutal punishment will follow.^[11] That view, however, flies in the face of the basic premise of the Torah: in each generation, from Abraham to Jacob and culminating at Sinai, our ancestors entered into a covenant, בְּרִית, with the Master of the World. Even today, we use covenantal language when we welcome new children into the Jewish community: brit milah for boys, brit ha-bat for girls. A covenant stands apart from contracts and other agreements in defining a relationship that goes beyond behavioral commitments. Deep significance lies within the Rabbis’ description of the revelation at Sinai as a wedding, which joins the Jewish People and God in a sacred relationship.^[12] Like spouses, God and Israel act out of love and commitment to their shared enterprise, not from a mechanical cost-benefit analysis. As we know from our personal relationships — whether in family or in business — when we assign a high priority to things that benefit our partners, make and keep our commitments, and approach the relationship with a spirit of mutuality, our relationships improve; when we fail to do these things, or worse, when we act in the contrary, the relationship suffers.^[13] Understood in this way, our parshah suggests that when we act to strengthen the covenant — by preserving the mitzvot that ensure a just society and living by the mitzvot that foster spiritual and moral growth — we will experience life as a source of blessing. Whenever we undermine the covenant, God forbid, we leave ourselves exposed to the ravages of an unredeemed life.

Our parshah opens with God’s plea, אִם־בְּחֻקֹּתַ֖י תֵּלֵ֑כוּ. While the wordאִם generally means “if,” a midrash suggests that we can also understandאִם as a plea, a covenantal request to God’s partner.^[14] Rather than offering a cold transactional choice, this midrash hears God as pleading with the Israelites to choose a path of mutual benefit. As a 20th-century commentary explains:

How far we have come from our initial assumptions about the parshah! Rather than a harsh attempt to use rewards and punishments to control our behavior, we now see God as a lover, a friend, asking us to make choices that will promote closeness between us and our Creator and among humanity. And yet ultimately it still falls upon us to make that choice. This morning’s Torah portion is an an open door, an invitation to a rich spiritual life infused with love and compassion; it is an invitation we must choose, each of us, each day, to accept.

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Tags: Behukotai, Parenting