We finish the Book of Leviticus this week with a blessing and with a curse. However, in the modern world in which we live, we do not like to say people might be under a curse. In a sense, we try to deny the possibility of curse by denying the word. In its place the new translation of the Torah states execration, a word that I have never used.
For reasons that I do not fully understand, denial has been a way to protect ourselves from hardship and sadness. When I was growing up people never had cancer. They suffered from the 'c' word. During the Reagan years there were no liberals, only the 'l' word.
We lived and live life as if singing that old classic, "My hat it has three _____" I cannot tell you what, because that is part of the song. In truth every word not pronounced is in itself part of the curse. We fear to go here and there, say this and that out of fear that the 'evil eye' will get us. In this modern age, our vocabularies still remind us that part of us is living in the Stone Age, part of us has never grown up.
When the execration is mentioned in the Torah, it is not a done deal. We read that section in order to change the way that we live so that the execration will never fall upon us. The true curse of society is closing our eyes and our hearts to what may be evil in the hope that like those chimpanzees, the evil will not hurt us. You know the old idiom: "Hear no evil, see no evil."
Stalins, Hitlers and Husseins do not happen except when people pretend that those ogres are good people. Segregation and apartheid are the result of denial and consequent silence by good people. SARS in China happened because the Chinese government pretended that the epidemic was not that bad, and should never have been considered epidemic in size.
Joseph was a hero in ancient Egypt because he, among all the Egyptians, was not afraid to propose that the curse of famine was a real possibility. Esther saved our people in Persia when she recognized the time, at the risk of her own life, to speak out against the possible genocide that Haman's minions might cause. Indeed, a singular role of the prophets is to describe curse, execration, whatever one might call it, before it arrives.
We invite 'curse' when we do not read about the possibility of curse occurring. All we can see are the good times. We are usually blind to the possibility of sad times. No one need know about blessing when they are upon us, but how quickly we forget a potential curse when the living is good!