Our sages teach that we read the tochacha—that terrifying litany of rebuke and curses—right before Shavuot, so we may genuinely accept the Torah, and the tochacha in Devarim before Rosh Hashanah, so we may effectively do teshuva.
But that just moves the problem one step deeper. What does reading the curses do for us?
The Kozhiglover explains that the tochacha isn’t only a list of punishments. It has a weather system. A mood. A particular kind of dread. The suffering it carves isn’t random cruelty—it’s a specific kind of distance, the kind that makes you start doubting whether anything is addressed to you at all. The line that haunts me most is not the famine or the sword. It’s this: v’halachti imachem b’keri—”I will walk with you b’keri.” With happenstance. With coincidence. With the feeling that the world has slipped out of meaning.
The curses are terrible. But the worst thing in the tochacha is the keri.
The worst thing is the possibility that nothing means anything—that the pain is coming from nowhere and going nowhere, that you can’t even locate it inside a relationship.
The Kotzker Rebbe had a way of saying things that felt like a door slammed open. “Even darkness is not dark to You.” He was reading Tehillim 139, but he was also reading human experience: darkness doesn’t destroy you; not knowing where the darkness comes from is what destroys you. And that’s the distinction the tradition keeps circling: there is suffering that refines, and suffering that merely wounds. The moment you know that even the night is held by God, the darkness changes character. It still hurts. But it no longer abandons.
Refinement requires meaning—not a neat explanation, but the minimal condition of a relationship. A pain can be unbearable and still be held. That holding changes everything.
When pain arrives b’keri—when it feels random, meaningless, like the universe forgot you were there—it doesn’t purify. It hardens. It calcifies. It creates what our sages call malachei chabalah, destructive forces born from the untethered, unintegrated experience of suffering. They circle. They compound. And they carry forward into the new year.
So what does reading the tochacha actually do?
The Torah is the blueprint of creation, the channel through which Divine will moves into the world. When we read the curses as Torah, we are doing more than speaking words; we are doing something metaphysical. We are taking the raw, uncontextualized pain of the passing year and pulling it back into the frame of Divine speech. We are saying: this too is Torah. This, too, has a Source. This too was seen.
That gaze—being seen by God through the act of Torah reading—is itself the dissolution of the curse. Not because the pain wasn’t real. But because pain that is held within a relationship is fundamentally different from pain that is adrift. One is exile. The other is return.
As R’ Nachman of Breslov taught, even in the deepest darkness within darkness, we must be certain that God is there as well; this is the practice of what it looks like to live with that knowledge.
Before Shavuot—before we receive the Torah again—we are asked to do this difficult thing: to speak our suffering in God’s language. To read the darkness as if it were verse. To refuse the lie of keri, the lie that any of it was random.
The year ends with its curses when we stop letting them be curses. When we return them to where they came from. When we look up—even from inside the darkness—and say: You were here too. Even this was Yours.
That is how the year ends.
That is how we begin again.