Deuteronomy

Parshat Dvarim for Temple Ahavat Achim

(Delivered August 10, 2024)

Shabbat shalom! 

My mother often says, If three people tell you you’re drunk, you better go lie down. Now I’m not much for drinking alcohol, but I take her point. If you keep getting the same message from a variety of sources, there’s probably something to it. Sometimes we need to get clobbered over the head with it, but I guess Mom’s point is it’s better if we don’t. 

This week, we study Dvarim, the first parsha in the Book of Deuteronomy. As I said before, there is basically no new narrative material in this fifth of the Five Books of Moses. At this point, Moshe Rabeinu is in the mode of life review: going back over the story, sifting and filtering and trying to make sense of it all. And so are we. 

And indeed Parshat Dvarim has a couple of themes that keep re-sounding, frequently enough that I want us to take a close look at them and take in their message. Although these repeating themes mostly don’t come in the part of the scroll that we chant this year, they spoke to me deeply as I studied this week. Over and over, this summative parsha—the beginning of this summative book—is whispering, or maybe even shouting, Keep going! Don’t be afraid!

Keep going! Don’t be afraid!

So let’s look into it. Twice in the parsha we are told רַב־לָכֶם, enough. רַב־לָכֶם שֶׁבֶת בָּהָר הַזֶּֽה in chapter 1, verse 6 and רַב־לָכֶם סֹב אֶת־הָהָר הַזֶּה פְּנוּ לָכֶם צָפֹֽנָה in chapter 2, verse 3. Rav lachem: it’s a lot, it’s enough, it’s maybe even too much. You’ve stayed too long by this mountain. You’ve circled too long around this mountain. You’ve been here quite long enough—or perhaps too long—pick yourselves up and turn toward the north. The divine voice is speaking through Moses saying, Nu? It’s time for something different. This is a relatable stance: we stay in one place too long and it starts to feel like the world is moving away from us. And then we realize there’s more life out there and we want it. 

But it’s not always easy to break out of the perseveration of staying settled where we are, not so simple to move onto the next thing, even when we know that’s what’s called for. 

That’s where the Don’t be afraid part of this repeated message comes in. 

In chapter 1, verse 17, as Moses is reiterating the principles to keep in mind when judging legal cases, he says:

לֹא־תַכִּירוּ פָנִים בַּמִּשְׁפָּט כַּקָּטֹן כַּגָּדֹל תִּשְׁמָעוּן 

לֹא תָגוּרוּ מִפְּנֵי־אִישׁ כִּי הַמִּשְׁפָּט לֵאלֹהִים הוּא

Do not differentiate individuals in judgment, hear the humble as you hear the great
Do not be afraid before any person, for judgment belongs to God alone

Chizkuni elaborates: don’t be afraid that the person you rule against will hate you, because it’s ultimately divine judgment that matters. The human judge is merely a representative, called upon to do God’s will. 

The next instance of Don’t be afraid! comes just a few verses later, in chapter 1, verse 21, which reads:

רְאֵה נָתַן יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ לְפָנֶיךָ אֶת־הָאָרֶץ 

עֲלֵה רֵשׁ כַּאֲשֶׁר דִּבֶּר יי אֱלֹהֵי אֲבֹתֶיךָ לָךְ אַל־תִּירָא וְאַל־תֵּחָת׃

See, Adonai your God has given you the land before you,
Go up! Inherit it, as Adonai, God of your ancestors, said to you!
Do not fear and do not be dismayed.

The second part of the phrase אַל־תֵּחָת, is an unusual word choice, the root letters for תֵּחָת appear only twice in the Torah itself, though it does come up about 50 more times in the other parts of the Tanakh. It can mean dismayed or even shattered, and the 19th century Russian rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, known familiarly as the Netziv, explains that it specifically means שלא תהיו נִשְבָּרִים בַּלֵב—that they not become broken-hearted. The Netziv connects it to a pasuk from Jeremiah, which also deals with hesitation before conflict: אַל־תֵּחַת מִפְּנֵיהֶם פֶּן־אֲחִתְּךָ לִפְנֵיהֶם—do not break down before them, lest I break you down before them. In Jeremiah, God is, I think, pointing to a familiar human habit, that of allowing fear of the unknown to make us think we can’t do something—essentially, volunteering for failure rather than taking the risk of trying. In its own way, though, even Jeremiah’s tough love speaks of faith, challenging the Israelites—that is to say, us—to hold our courage in our hands, to overcome our own self-destructive impulses and choose instead to be unafraid.

Our final example comes toward the end of chapter one, when Moses, in recounting the incident with the scouts, recalls encouraging the Israelites by saying: 

לֹא־תַעַרְצוּן וְלֹא־תִירְאוּן מֵהֶם

Do not tremble, and do not fear them.

Yet again, the message is Don’t be afraid, and both Ibn Ezra and the Netziv again associate this trembling and fear with broken-heartedness. There is something about experiencing fear that breaks us, that deflates our self-respect and sense of our own value. By facing and overcoming our fears, we become whole. Our hearts heal.

Of course, it’s easy to say don’t be afraid, but much harder to actually do it. It is a human thing to panic in the face of new or unpleasant or challenging experiences. So when, in this third instance, Moses tells the Israelites not to be afraid, he then follows it with one of the most gorgeous images in the Torah: After urging the Israelites to be courageous, Moses reassures them that God will fight for them, just as they have already seen in the land of Egypt, and that God will carry them through the wilderness as a father carries his son. 

And this really is the point, the message that the parsha clobbers us over the head with, much like the three people telling you you’re drunk: that the antidote to fear is not braggadocio, it’s not posturing, it’s certainly not pretending to more bravery than we possess. Rather the antidote to fear is courage, and courage comes from faith, from the sense of God’s presence. These texts in Dvarim are locating courage in the practice of the nearness of God. It’s interesting to me that one of the synonyms for courage listed on thesaurus.com is… spirit. There is some essential overlap between being with the divine and being able to be truly fearless. 

And in a time when there is ample reason to fear—when our beloved Holy Land, the land the Israelites have been wandering toward these past four books of the Torah and which they are poised to enter imminently—is in the present day under constant threat and coping with massive undigested trauma, there is still this. With all that we face that is uncertain, we know that we have endured harsh trials before and gone on to recover. What keeps us going is this faith, this feeling that somehow our people will prevail, and with God’s help, move from strength to strength. As the words of the last stanza of Adon Olam teach us, each and every Shabbat: יי לִי וְלא אִירָא. When God is with me, I have no fear.

Shabbat shalom!

Parshat Dvarim: Crisis of Faith

This week, we begin reading the last book of the Torah: the book of Dvarim. Not a lot that’s new happens in the Book of Deuteronomy; rather it’s an extended moment of retelling the tale of the past several generations of the Israelites’ history as they—we—stand at a crossroads. Moshe, the leader who has been so instrumental in our formation as a people, is close to his end, and we are poised to enter the Promised Land. Before we take this momentous step, there is a pause as we transition from living the story to telling the story. Moshe, as always, takes the lead, sifting through the tumultuous events of the forty years of wandering and turning it into narrative. He enacts the universal human impulse to make meaning by telling what happened, shaping it into a story. As he does so, themes and threads emerge.

I was struck in particular by two contrasting ways he talks about the Israelites’ relationship with God. In chapter 1 verse 27 he scolds them saying:

וַתֵּרָגְנוּ בְאׇהֳלֵיכֶם וַתֹּאמְרוּ בְּשִׂנְאַת יי אֹתָנוּ הוֹצִיאָנוּ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם 

לָתֵת אֹתָנוּ בְּיַד הָאֱמֹרִי לְהַשְׁמִידֵנוּ

You sulked in your tents and said, “Because of God’s hate for us, God brought us out of the Land of Egypt to give us over to be destroyed by the Amorites.”

This phrase sin’at Adonai (God’s hate) is shocking, almost lacerating. We see it only once in the whole Tanach; clearly it’s a strong indicator of the level of Moshe’s disdain. Yet taken literally, he’s probably not wrong in his description of the Israelites’ experience. After all, in moments of particular crisis, they do tend to think that God hates them, that the whole thing is a mistake, that somehow they would be better off back in Egypt, taking up the yoke of slavery once more. 

The journey out was not as easy as they wanted it to be; exhausted from forced labor, they no doubt wanted everything to fall into place the minute they crossed the Sea of Reeds. Surely we’ve suffered enough, and a waiting world will soften the path for us. The fact that achieving that first goal had not immediately perfected the world must have been a great disappointment. Maybe God really does hate us.

But in just the next chapter, Moses turns this on its head: 

זֶה  אַרְבָּעִים שָׁנָה יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ עִמָּךְ לֹא חָסַרְתָּ דָּבָר

These forty years, God has been with you, you have lacked for nothing.

So…on the one hand, God hates us, and on the other, that same God has steadily accompanied us, providing for everything we needed. This also has the ring of truth to it; think of the manna that daily descended from heaven, arriving each morning like clockwork in just the right amount, tasting of whatever we most needed to taste. Think of the water that Miriam always managed to locate when the Israelites were thirsty. Think of God’s constant guidance, in the form of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

How do we reconcile these contrasting but agonizingly plausible descriptions of our relationship with the Divine? The God that hates us and makes progress so hard and the God that stays alongside us and makes sure our needs are met.

Of course different times feel different ways, and our response to our surroundings is so often an echo of our inner state and the emotional churn that makes each day distinct from the others. When we feel that God hates us, it may have as much to do with us as with God. The funhouse mirror of our own emotions (truthfully not that much fun) can trick our minds. The Midrash Sifrei Dvarim says: אפשר שהקב”ה שונא את ישראל? Is it possible that the Holy Blessed One hates Israel? Is it not written in Malachi 1:2 “I have loved you, said Hashem”? Rather, they are the ones who hate the Holy Blessed One (as per the folk saying: “As you are disposed toward another, you think them disposed toward you.”)

The Midrash summons both a biblical text and a contemporary saying to illuminate our human capacity for thinking the worst of others by imagining they think the worst of us. This recalls the incident of the scouts in Parshat Shelach L’cha a couple weeks back, the matter that catastrophically derailed the Israelites’ progress toward the Promised Land and lengthened the journey to get there by 39 years. Like the Israelites thinking God hated them, the scouts convinced themselves that entering and conquering the land would be too hard for them, that the people who were already there were too huge and powerful for them to overcome…even with divine reassurance that this was indeed their destiny and purpose. 

In other words, while God is with us and providing for our needs, we still find a way to psych ourselves out and assume that things will go badly. (Sound familiar?) And when we play that mental trick on ourselves we do it so well that we cover our own tracks. Thus in Dvarim, this whole head trip somehow gets pinned on God. It’s because God hates us, not because we’re scared and tired and demoralized. 

Of course the verses we’re looking at, the two statements that are in so much tension, both come from Moses. Each one is in its own way his rebuke against the Israelites, either scolding them for thinking God hates them or scolding them for taking for granted the many acts of hessed with which God accompanies them during those four decades in the desert. As our season of rebuke reaches its peak this week leading up to Tishaa b’Av, even Moshe’s voice joins the chorus of admonition in this parsha that is always read the Shabbat before Tishaa b’Av. It is seasonally appropriate to take in this notion that questioning God and undermining ourselves actually spring from the same source: a lack of faith. And that when we act like there’s a conspiracy against us when in fact we’re luckier than most, it is an insult to God and to our tradition. This understandable human tendency—to lean into fear and insufficiency—narrows our pathway to the divine. So as we pause in Parshat Dvarim, tending our story and winnowing through its many lessons, let one of them be this: as we read in the last line of Adon Olam, יי לי ולא אירה. When God is with me, I have no fear.