During the leining for parshas Ki Tavo, a curious thing happened in that three boys in a row were called up for alias to say the blessings over their particular reading. It was cool to see because they were both classmates at the Day School and friends. By the time I noticed the pattern, however, I had already formulated a question and these boys played into the answer, bedieved.

We had previously read in the hamishi alia about Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal. According to Rashi’s understanding, the Levites stood between the two mountains, while six tribes stood on Mount Grizim and six on Mount Ebal. The Levites turned towards Mount Grizim and said eleven blessings, and then turned towards Mount Ebal and uttered the eleven curses mentioned there, the flip side of those blessings.

When written in the Sefer Torah, each curse is divided from the other by a space in between them, which are easily seen when the Torah is raised and in most of our chumashim. The blessings that follow, on the other hand, were written in the regular tightly-spaced manner with one leading to the next.

This got me to thinking about the nature of sin and how it can lead to a feeling of being cursed. It is our way to examine our shortcomings individually from every side and actively seek ways to rectify the behavior through active steps. Especially now in the days preceding Rosh Hashannah, we seek teshuvah through the classic method of identifying a sin, feeling bad about it, choosing to not do it anymore, and making amends for any damage caused by it.

Some things just can’t be swept under the rug. In the same way that the curses were written separately in Ki Tavo, we need to address our own crises and issues separately to have sure success. There is no single fix for matters of character.

The next alia follows with the blessings following one after the other without division. This said to me that if one deals with the individual middot in a spirit of teshuvah, that the blessings will pour fourth in a steady stream of all the good things we need to have a life worth living. With such thoughts in mind, I witnessed the three boy’s alia’s and tied it in with a philosophical thread.

Our tradition is that children are pure of heart with no deep underlying philosophical reason for what they do. We teach them and provide an example and they pretty much grow up on a straight path. This sense of innocence and propriety can protect them, and ourselves as well, from the evils of the world by separating one from the other.

One of the most fierce passages in Tanach, the Tochachah, followed immediately after the three boys and laid out in graphic detail what it means to be cursed with not facing up to and dealing with your sins. One curse follows the other in a similar but opposite way of blessings previously read. Pirkei Avot sums it up well saying “the reward of a mitzvah is a mitzvah and the reward of a sin is a sin.”

Just as the curses we feel now like money problems, domestic strife, or problematic children, come at us from every side, if examined separately to find working solutions, we could bring ourselves closer to that state of emuna that our sons had during their alia with the plain ol’ hard work of Teshuvah.