Do Good Deeds Get Rewarded?
The Talmud: An Unfinished Conversation
If we do something good, can we expect any kind of reward? According to the Jewish tradition, will any benefit come to us from performing mitzvot (good deeds)?
This is a good, layered, complex question, worthy of a good, layered, complex answer.
And this was the question that came to mind when I saw something alarming happening on social media:
The Talmud was trending on Twitter.
Or it was trending on X. Whatever. When it comes to social media, you can tell at a glance when something bad is happening. Beloved aging celebrity trending? That ain’t good. “World War III?” That’s worse.
And when I saw “The Talmud” among the trending topics, I sensed right away I wouldn’t like the reasons why. (Spoiler alert: I didn’t.)
But before I investigated this unsettling social media clamor, my thoughts turned to the question of whether mitzvot are rewarded — and more specifically to the fascinating, layered, complex discussion of this question that you can find in the Talmud.
I think a lot of people don’t even know what the Talmud is. Not that I blame anyone.
I mean, I know what the Talmud is, and I barely know what the Talmud is.
It is a great and unwieldy text, mostly concerned with Jewish law but really concerned with everything, and includes debates, stories, non-peer-reviewed medical advice (eating a cat’s placenta as a cure for jaundice), tales of the supernatural (to see demons, this time burn the cat’s placenta and rub it on your eyes), and lots and lots of debate over the meaning of the Torah, and the meaning of the Talmud itself.
It’s 2,711 pages and millions of words written over the course of centuries and featuring hundreds of named speakers, and oh by the way, actually there are two Talmuds, and it’s all more than I can appropriately summarize in a newsletter.
The Talmud is a great and unwieldy text, mostly concerned with Jewish law but really concerned with everything.
People spend their entire lives studying it. Some participate in what’s called Daf Yomi — reading a page of the Talmud a day, completing the whole project in seven and a half years, and, if they’re in the New York metro area, attending a celebration at MetLife Stadium along with others on the same Daf Yomi cycle. Now that’s a party!
In any event, perhaps the best way to explain what the Talmud is all about is by showing it in action — so let’s turn to Kiddushin 39b, and see what the sages the Talmud records have to say about whether good deeds are rewarded.
In the Torah, there are at least two places where a specific reward — long life — is promised as a consequence of specific mitzvot: for honoring your father and mother (Exodus 20:12); and, less intuitively, for chasing away a mother bird before you take its young (Deuteronomy 22:7). The idea here is that you are minimizing the mother bird’s suffering before you kill its offspring. And you can see the general principle that follows from that.
But the sages of the Talmud have not failed to notice that performing these mitzvot does not, in practice, guarantee long life.
Us modern people sometimes assume we’re the first ones ever to look around and notice that the world is kind of a confusing place, what with all the injustice and hardship and bad things happening to good people, and things not turning out the way our holy texts say they will. But such complexities and contradictions are exactly what the Talmud is interested in.
If a bird's nest chances before you on the road, on any tree, or on the ground, and [it contains] fledglings or eggs, if the mother is sitting upon the fledglings or upon the eggs, you shall not take the mother upon the young. You shall send away the mother, and [then] you may take the young for yourself, in order that it should be good for you, and you should lengthen your days.
Deuteronomy 22:6-7
The rabbis of the Talmud propose the case of a boy whose father tells him to climb a ladder and shoo away a mother bird before taking its eggs. Honoring dad, chasing off a mother bird: Double-life-extending-mitzvot!
Lamentably, though, the boy falls off the ladder and dies. So what gives?
The rabbis consider that maybe this never happened. But then a rabbi states that no, in fact, he saw it happen. Some other possibilities are considered: Maybe the boy climbing the ladder was contemplating sin? But no, the rabbis note, God doesn’t punish you for your thoughts. (In this way, Judaism differs from other major religions.)
Ultimately, the rabbis seem to conclude that the ladder the boy climbed must have been rickety, and on the verge of breaking. And you can’t rely on God to protect you from circumstances that are going to kill you in the natural order of things. That would take a miracle. And miracles don’t come on demand. It’s like if your father tells you to leap across the Grand Canyon to shoo away a bird in a nest on the other side.
God could stop you from falling to your death — but don’t count on it.
Ultimately, the rabbis seems to conclude that good deeds are rewarded. Unless there are reasons they aren’t.
Does this answer satisfy?
No, not entirely. But that’s the whole point.
The Talmud records ideas in progress, thoughts in motion. That motion and progress continues with us when we study it and debate it today.
So to cherry-pick a couple passages and use that as the basis for bad faith arguments about Judaism in general?! No one would do that!
And yet now we must return to the reason “The Talmud” was trending on X.
I’m not going to dignify the original sources of the trend by getting into specifics. Suffice it to say, every few months online antisemites make a habit of cherry-picking and distorting passages from the Talmud in order to get bad faith arguments about Judaism and the Jews trending on social media.
Believe me, there’s part of me that doesn’t want to give this any attention at all.
But I choose to — for the sake of the Talmud.
Many Jews in America don’t get much exposure to the Talmud. I know I wasn’t introduced to it at Hebrew school at the Reconstructionist temple to which I belonged growing up. I didn’t really engage with it until I was an adult.
But everything that makes the Talmud an awkward fit with a ten-year-old’s pre-bar mitzvah religious education is exactly what makes it so valuable. It is weird and frustrating and labyrinthian and wise and hilarious and inexplicable — just like the questions the rabbis recorded within it take on.
And it shouldn’t be left to the worst people online to shape perceptions of this brilliant, integral work.
Those worst people online — how do we make sense of them? How do we explain the persistence of antisemitism? Of hatred? Of injustice?
How do we address the flip side of whether good deeds are rewarded — the question of whether evil is punished?
Luckily, the Talmud has some thoughts on this.