This was my D’var Torah on August 26, 2022 for Parashat Devarim, the beginning of the book of Deuteronomy.
When you look at the Torah in the scroll or even in a book, it all looks the same – the stories, the laws, the recipes for meals at the altar, the census lists and travelogues, everything but the songs and poems really. It’s the same font, column after column and page by page. This communicates that all of it is equally Torah, and as Maimonides taught there is no difference at all between the verse that says “and the name of his wife was M’hay’tab’el” (Genesis 36:39) and the verse that says “Hear O Israel! Adonai our God, Adonai is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4). Whether or not you believe that these two verses are equally significant, they all flow by in the same look, the same chant.
And yet there is something different about the book of Deuteronomy. I bet you would say that of all the books in the Torah it’s Leviticus that is most distinctive, with its sacrifices and rituals that we can’t practice without the Temple, and I wouldn’t disagree. But Sefer Devarim is quite distinctive, and I want to catalogue a few of those ways. Because Sefer Devarim is the book of the Torah we read from this Shabbat all the way through the last of the Tishrei new year celebrations, from here to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and all the way through Simchat Torah. It’s the book of the Torah that is supposed to help us get from here into the new year.
I want to give a shout out to the author James Michener, who has a version of what I’m about to do in his historical novel from 1965 called The Source. If you haven’t read it and you like history at all you should. It’s set in a fictitious archaeological dig in Israel, and in one section an Israeli Jewish archaeologist tells the American Christian archaeologist to read the book of Deuteronomy five times, to see different things. So here are four takes from me on the book of Deuteronomy.
My first take, the foundation of everything, is that Devarim is a set of speeches that Moshe Rabbenu is giving to the children of his own generation, as they are about to get ready to enter Eretz Yisrael, without him and without all of their parents except for two people, including Yehoshua their leader-in-waiting. Moshe wants them to imagine themselves as if they had gone through all the miracles their parents had experienced. To think of themselves not as people born in a wilderness, with no experience growing their own food or taking care of themselves — but as a people who don’t have to worry the way other peoples worry. Because God is powerful in God’s compassion for them, and committed to them from long before they were born; and because God has given them laws that are wiser than any other people’s laws; and because God has already shown that it’s possible to choose a people who are small and wandering and keep them alive and help them fight battles and win.
Moshe repeats certain things over and over – that all takes is just to love the Divine with all your heart and all your soul, to walk in Divine ways and keep Divine commandments. Moshe tells the people that even when they spread out in the land, there will be one central place where God’s name will rest and where sacrifices of animals shall be made and festivals will be celebrated, a Temple and a capital that had not been mentioned in the Torah up to that point.
Moshe is insistent and repetitive – v’shinantam l’vanecha, say them again and then again to your children, he says (6:7 — in the Sh’ma!). And he is strangely confident in the people, enough to tell them out loud that there are dangers to their own hearts – false prophets, the idol worshippers they will meet in the land — and that they all are so stiff-necked they might not succeed and their descendants will end up doing time in exile, and still the covenant is permanent and the nation will be brought back.
And woven in the middle of all these messages is a series of review lectures of the laws for society, and this time they are made more generous and open-hearted than they were when their parents first learned them in the book of Exodus. Moshe tells the people that every seven years they should gather and read this book out loud, with every person present, and symbolically rededicate themselves to the covenant, just as the people in front of him are learning to identify with the experience of their parents who heard the words for the first time at Mt. Sinai.
This basic reading of Devarim is so much about us. The people in front of Moshe stand in for all of us, for every generation who was not at the Sea or at Sinai, who has only heard about these things. The people in front of Moshe stand in for us, with all our doubts about whether we are too stiff-necked, or up to the challenge of this covenant. We too need the review session, as we get ready for a new year.
A second read of Deuteronomy comes by way of the scholars who on the basis of various textual and other clues identify Deuteronomy with a book that was discovered inside the Temple in Jerusalem in about the year 622 B.C.E. According to the Book of Kings, it was the time of King Josiah, who was about 25 years old. This was several hundred years after David and Solomon, and one hundred years after the Assyrians had conquered half of Israel and exiled the ten lost tribes. Israel was a small and weak nation, a political football between Egypt and Mesopotamia. The high priest Chilkiah was leading a refurbishing project in the Temple when he found a book, and he was alarmed and so was the king, so they had it brought it to a prophet named Chuldah, a woman we should note, who authenticated the message.
Enough was different about this book that immediately King Josiah launched a religious reform. He read the book out loud to the nation, and made a public declaration of his own allegiance to the covenant. The people celebrated Pesach (Passover), apparently for the first time in centuries, and they got rid of little sanctuaries competing with the Temple and purged the priesthood of people who were not terribly committed to the idea of a single and singular God.
There is a hypothesis that some group of prophets wrote that book and planted it in the Temple. They made it look old and gave the narrator Moshe’s own voice. Professor Richard Friedman, who wrote the book Who Wrote the Bible, suggested that the prophet Jeremiah himself is the author of much of Deuteronomy. What I love about this possibility is that these writers, these prophets, looked at the nation of Israel in a sorry state and said: We are not this — we are the descendants of great ancestors and we will not squander any more this Torah we have and this legacy. Yes, we’ve made a mess of things and we seem weak, but we believe if we could get this message into the hands of the priests and the kings, something dramatic will happen. The whole people will see themselves differently. I think it’s genius that they didn’t take the easy route and write a book centered on being slaves who were freed – that would have spoken to their time, with the king of Assyria bearing down on them as a potential tyrant and conquerer. Instead they said let’s see ourselves as the generation in the desert – small, beset on many sides, with good laws and a good tradition, close to miracles but not having experienced miracles ourselves. If we could be that generation, it would be on our shoulders to enter the promised land – it’s the land we’re in physically, but we can remake it.
My third take on Deuteronomy focuses on the figure of Moshe specifically. Devarim is not the Torah of Vay’daber Adonai el Moshe leimor, “The Lord spoke to Moses, saying… ” — third person narrator. This is Moshe first person, telling us in his own words what the Divine had told him, telling us what he said back to God. These are long speeches from Moshe, the man who at the start of his career needed his brother to do all his talking. He cares so much about this people who have not listened to him a lot of the time, whom he will not get to do this amazing thing with – he cares enough to speak anyway and leave every word he has out there. When he’s done lecturing, he teaches laws. When he’s done with laws, he teaches a song. And when he’s done singing he gives out blessings. Everything you could do with your mouth he does.
He is as I said repetitive, he is stern, he is more of a theorist and a theologian in Devarim than really anyone anywhere else in the Bible other than maybe the book of Job. To be honest I’m not sure I would like this version of Moshe if he was my only teacher – my other primary sermon about this topic is how we pair him with Haftarot from Isaiah who is much more soothing – but this Moshe is spellbinding, I find him captivating. He is poetic, he is prophetic – he imagines for the people what it will be like to grow their own food and take pride in their harvest, and how they will need blessings to remind them that once upon a time the only food they had came daily from the sky. He turns a phrase – “man doth not live by bread alone”. He is finally proud that the people have asked him to go talk to God for them, and bring them back the words they have agreed to live by. And still he believes that the covenant only exists because it’s directly between God and every person – all ages, hewers of wood and drawers of water, the stranger or immigrant who lives with the native-born Israelites. Moshe believes in this people and he has credibility because he knows them up close, he knows everything difficult about them and still believes.
This Moshe is not only one example of a leader and teacher — he is also an example of a person wringing the most out of himself for the sake of other people, knowing that his life is about to end, believing that every minute and every ounce matters for the future, extending his love even knowing the people he’s with don’t experience him as loving, not yet — though in the future he will be beloved as Moshe Rabbenu, “Moses our Teacher.”
And my fourth and last take for now on Sefer Devarim is that this is Torah’s main statement about learning and teaching and teshuvah (spiritual return, change). Deuteronomy is about the value of hearing something once and then again, so you can think about and internalize it. V’shinantam, say it twice and more. The early chapters include Moshe making arguments for the Torah generally, for saying blessings, for the idea of one God. Deuteromomy has a theory of ethical development – walk in my ways spiritually, learn my Torah intellectually, do my mitzvot concretely, and then figure out yourself what is good and right, hatov v’hayashar. Speak of this Torah when you’re still and when you’re in action (6:7), b’shiv’tcha b’veitecha uvlecht’cha vaderech. Make sure your king writes his own Torah and reads it every day. It is not in heaven anymore (30:12) – lo bashamayim hi, but it’s in your own mouth and your own heart now.
And when you haven’t lived up to the Torah, even all of you together as a nation, there is always teshuvah. If you are in exile, you can turn back. If it’s really been seven years in the land since you heard the Torah, gather and read it out loud and all of you say to each other: we will live by this Torah and help each other to live by it.
Deuteronomy speaks to our minds and our will, and to our hearts. It’s not just trying to bend those in obedience, but to engage them. To make us into people who with all our flaws stand straight and upright, and think about what the Torah asks of us and who we can be as a covenantal community within the world of nations.
To go toward a new year, we certainly need to activate our minds and our wills and our hearts, and Devarim invites us to do that from our side, from our initiative as God’s creative and energetic creatures.
So, this is the book that will help us bring ourselves to the new year. Sefer Devarim, the book of words and speeches and concepts – may we be blessed by its words and spirit on its many levels as we read and learn it together, in the ten weeks ahead.
Shabbat Shalom!
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