This was my D’var Torah for Parashat Re’eh on Saturday, August 31, 2024.
When I was at my parents’ home for a week in July, they had in the fridge a container from the store with perfect precut slices of watermelon. Vertical wedges, like carrot sticks sort of, and the container contained the perfect amount for two people for most of a week, and the pieces were the choicest bits, min hamuvchar. I love watermelon, and there was a chance I would eat their container of watermelon in much less than a week. So I went and bought a whole watermelon.
Some conversation ensued with my mother about whether we could collectively finish that much watermelon. I said: a) yes, and b) if you did the cost-benefit analysis on the price of a whole watermelon vs. three containers of pre-sliced, we would come out ahead even if I ate only half the big watermelon. In fact we did not finish the entire watermelon, but I’m sure we had more than three containers’ worth and I think I was right on the cost-benefit analysis.
I don’t want you to think that this was a large focus of the time I spent with my parents. But watermelons (as some of you might remember me teaching) play a role in mussar, in the Jewish practices of spiritual-ethical self-improvement. The two (let’s-call-them-) paradigms of watermelon at my parents are also a useful metaphor for our parasha, for this amazing Parashat Re’eh, which is a turning point in the Book of Deuteronomy.
Here are some things my mom did not say, which is that the container of watermelon slices is entirely great watermelon but the big watermelon has this heavy and bitter rind around it. Which by the way you have to deal with and schlep around, and it doesn’t fit into a regular grocery bag, certainly not a paper one. And the rind is hard and curved so you can’t easily set it up to slice on a cutting board, so it’s much more likely you’ll slice yourself and injure yourself cutting into a whole watermelon rather than just the soft and juicy rectanglular inside pieces.
So too, Parashat Re’eh has some incredibly juicy parts that could go in their own container — like the tithes through which the community harvest is shared even with those who are landless, and the tithe dedicated to celebrations during pilgrimages to Jerusalem. I would personally put the kashrut verses in the juicy container also.
There is in general in this parasha a remarkable movement from the us-them of the opening sections toward the teachings of tzedakah and inclusion that go from the last part of what we read on forward. This Torah reading is really a lot like moving through the bitter watermelon rind to the sweet inside.
But there is this rind. This business about a city that goes off to idolatry or a false prophet and how you have to kill them and destroy anything that is around them — it is a merciless rind. That’s a quote from the Torah: no pity and no mercy. Slicing into that part of the watermelon, we can slice off parts of our people into us and them, and we can hurt other people, and we can hurt ourselves spiritually.
But that rind is part of the watermelon. So what do we do with it?
Well, there are a couple of options. One comes from Yisrael Knohl, an Israeli scholar of the Bible in its time, and these aren’t his words but what he says is: You have to start with the evolutionary history of watermelons. If we today were to create a watermelon in the lab, around the sweet pink juicy inside, we would engineer like an apple peel. As thin as possible and completely edible. But watermelons came about in response to their environment long ago and the threats they faced, and the thick bitter rind had a function. Our ancestors faced threats from enemies and ideas that required an us-them approach at times. Professor Knohl says even 2500 years ago, when this part of the Torah became first known, our ancestors were throwing away this rind. They would look at the rind, think about eating it, and then say no and throw it away.
That’s a good process. There is bitterness we recognize, and the Torah lets us see it but not consume it, and also not let it consume us. It’s good for us to say about some verses: That’s a rind, it’s not food, and in that way we reinforce the difference. It’s good to have a rind so you can throw it away.
A good deal of the Talmudic tradition says something different. The sages said: Cook the rind. Pickle the rind.
Those aren’t the words they actually said – they said things like d’rosh v’kabel sachar, which means explore this particular text and get some reward. They knew what I had forgotten, which is that the rind of a watermelon is actually nutritious. But you can’t eat it as-is. It’s not good that way; it’s still slippery and dangerous and bitter. So cook it or pickle it, and it will be transformed enough that you can get something nourishing out of it, without the bitterness.
When you cook the watermelon that is the first part of Parashat Re’eh, you get something you can eat with the other fruits of the Torah, which actually makes them even yummier.
The rind in this reading, when you actually cook it, is about why exactly idolatry is so dangerous. It’s not about silly statues. The Torah says that idolatry is bound up with the sacrifice of the lives of some children. Other parts of the Bible say that idolatry is bound up with the abuse of some young women. The Bible says idolatry is a transactional, materialist game of trying to figure out the right payment to a god for a short-term reward. It’s about freezing the powerful and wealthy in place and empowering them to take away from others. Idolatry is about making what we can see the limit of what we can imagine, rather than a portal to things that are deeper.
We should not want to eat such a rind as is and take in its bitterness. But actually we shouldn’t throw it away. We should want to cook those insights about idolatry into something we can stir into a sweet watermelon soup, a gazpacho, in order to enhance the flavor. So that when we taste the sweetness of generosity it’s not superficial — it’s not just help for the moment, it’s not a transaction where we exchange pity for feeling good – but rather it strengthens a connection that lasts and that travels in time and space, that links generations. Rashi says about our parasha that eating the cooked rind will make us do things like visiting the sick or seeing to burials, mitzvahs that aren’t sweet but are deeply kind, mitzvahs that can never be transactional.
We need a lot of sweet watermelon, and most of our Torah should be sweet. But you can’t just eat sugars. I am suspicious of any faith or philosophy that only talks about the sweet. Some of the nutrition we need comes from what looks like bitterness but if you cook that away it’s actually depth, complexity, connection.
My parents can eat all the inner watermelon they want, because they have given me plenty of spiritual nourishment. The point is that we don’t have to throw out any part of the Torah at all. There is so much sweet in it, and what’s amazing is that even the parts that first strike us as bitter have so much to teach us. About what bitter really is, and what it takes to overpower it or transform it. About who we are when bitter is the first taste, but we make sure it’s not the last.
Shabbat Shalom!
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