The 98 Curses Read in a Whisper Every Year

Every year, when the Torah portion of Bechukotai is read in synagogue, something strange happens. The Torah reader's voice drops. He speeds up. The congregation goes quiet. He is reading the Tochecha (תוכחה) — the rebuke — and no one wants to be called to the Torah for that passage. In some communities, the shamash (synagogue attendant) walks around the room looking for a volunteer and finds none. A member eventually accepts it out of obligation, if not exactly honor. Because the passage they are about to hear is perhaps the most terrifying sustained piece of writing in the entire Torah.

The Structure of Blessings and Curses

Leviticus 26 opens with promises of extraordinary abundance. If Israel follows God's laws: "I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit" (Leviticus 26:4). Five enemies will flee before a hundred Israelites. A hundred will flee before ten thousand. "I will make my dwelling among you... I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people" (Leviticus 26:11-12). These are nine verses of blessing. Warm, specific, generous. Then the "if not" begins, and it does not end quickly. The curses run from (Leviticus 26:14) to (Leviticus 26:46) — thirty-two verses of escalating catastrophe, each wave more severe than the last.

The Midrash Rabbah on Leviticus, Vayikra Rabbah 35:1 (c. 400-500 CE), counts the curses in this passage at 49 — and in Deuteronomy 28, where the curses are repeated and amplified, at 98. This is the passage Deuteronomy refers to when it says "All the diseases of Egypt" will return. The Deuteronomic version is longer, more detailed, more graphic. It describes siege warfare so brutal that parents will eat their own children (Deuteronomy 28:53). Both passages together form what tradition calls the Tochecha: the full accounting of what happens if the covenant is abandoned.

What Exactly Do the Curses Threaten?

The curses escalate in waves, each triggered by continued rejection. First: illness, military defeat, crop failure. "Your strength shall be spent in vain, for your land shall not yield its increase" (Leviticus 26:20). Second wave: wild animals will fill the land, destroy the cattle, kill the children, depopulate the roads. Third wave: plague, defeat, famine. "I will bring the sword upon you, as vengeance for the covenant" (Leviticus 26:25). Fourth wave: siege, panic, the collapse of all food systems. "You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters" (Leviticus 26:29). This verse was read as prophecy by the rabbis who lived through the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE and again in 135 CE. They had seen it happen.

The fifth wave is exile. The cities become ruins. The sanctuaries are demolished. The land "shall make up for its Sabbath years while it lies desolate" (Leviticus 26:34) — all those shemitah years that were not observed, the land will finally rest by force, in the silence after the population is gone. And then comes a verse the rabbis never stopped discussing: "Yet even then, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or abhor them so as to destroy them completely" (Leviticus 26:44). After all of that — after plague, famine, siege, cannibalism, exile — God says: I will not finish them.

Why Is It Read in a Whisper?

The custom of reading the Tochecha quickly and quietly (b'lachash) is attested from the Talmudic period. The Talmud Bavli, Tractate Megillah 31b, discusses the practice and its rationale. One view: reading it softly protects the congregation from the power of the words. Another view: the speed signals that these words are not the Torah's main message — they are a warning embedded within a love story, not the love story itself. Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, 1040-1105 CE, Troyes, France) notes in his commentary on (Leviticus 26:14) that the curses come because of failure to study Torah with joy. The source of the catastrophe is not sin in general, but the absence of delight in the covenant. You can follow the law and still be in violation if you follow it with resentment.

The custom of not accepting an honor for this reading also has ancient roots. In many communities, the Torah reader himself reads it, taking the burden onto himself so that no single congregant bears the weight of the curse. In other communities, the rabbi insists on reading it personally — because a leader, not a bystander, should be the one to hear the full accounting of what failure costs.

How Did the Rabbis Read the Tochecha After the Temple's Destruction?

After 70 CE, when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem and drove the Jewish population into exile, the Tochecha stopped being hypothetical. It had happened. The Midrash Aggadah sources from the following centuries show rabbis wrestling directly with the text they had lived through. Vayikra Rabbah 35:6 preserves a remarkable passage in which the rabbis argue about which verse in the Tochecha is most terrible — and conclude that it is not the siege cannibalism or the exile, but the verse in which God says, "I myself will be against you" (Leviticus 26:24). When God becomes the adversary, there is no recourse. There is nowhere to flee. There is no treaty to sign, no appeasement that works. The destruction is not an attack from outside. It is a withdrawal of protection from within.

Yet the same passage circles back to that final verse, the one about not destroying them completely. Rabbi Akiva (c. 50-135 CE, Bnei Brak), who watched the Temple burn and saw his students die and eventually died himself under Roman torture, is quoted in these texts not as a man in despair but as a man pointing at the ending. "Even this," he is recorded as saying. Even this was not the end. The Tochecha is not a death sentence. It is a conditional threat inside an unconditional love. The rabbis read it that way because the alternative — that God had finished with Israel — was not a conclusion they could accept and still be Jewish.

The Tochecha as a Covenant Document

Biblical scholars have long noted that Leviticus 26 follows the structure of ancient Near Eastern treaty documents — specifically the vassal treaties used by Hittite and Assyrian kings to bind smaller nations to their authority. These treaties always ended with lists of blessings and curses. The curses were meant as deterrents, written in terrifying detail precisely so they would not need to be fulfilled. The Kabbalistic tradition in the Zohar (c. 1290 CE, Castile, Spain) reads the Tochecha as what it calls chesed me'ulam — hidden kindness — arguing that the terror of the passage is itself an act of love. A God who threatens is a God who still cares enough to warn. The silent God, who watches without comment and without threat, would be far more frightening. The Tochecha says: I am paying attention. I will not pretend not to notice. The covenant is real enough to be violated. That is not abandonment. That is intimacy of the most demanding kind.