Welcome to The Morning Scroll! I'm Rabbi Deena Cowans from Mishkan Chicago and you're listening to what will be a quick dive into this week's parsha. If you’ve been meaning to brush up on your Jewish literacy, or you’re looking for some inspiration, you’ve come to the right place. This week, we read Parashat Devarim, the beginning of the final book of the Torah. We’ll start with a brief recap:
The Israelites are on the bank of the Jordan river, and Moshe begins his final speech. He reminds them of the ways they messed up, but also how they have grown in size and stature since leaving Egypt. He recalls appointing judges, and remembers the incident of the spies, who came back full of bad news about the land of Israel, leading God to punish the people with 40 years in the desert and banning anyone from the generation who left Egypt from entering the Land. Fast forward 38 years, the people are ready to enter the land, but God tells them to leave Edom, Moab and Amon alone because these are the lands of the descendants of Esau and Lot. To avoid them, the Israelites asked to go through Emor, but Sichon, their king, said no and waged battle on the Israelites. They defeated him and took his land, then did the same thing to Og and the kingdom of Bashan. This land is given to the tribes of Reuben, Gad and half of Menashe, and Moshe reminds them of the borders of their territories, then reminds them of their commitment to send soldiers with the rest of the people to capture Canaan. Moshe ends by telling Joshua, who will lead the people into battle, not to be afraid and to have courage.
Now, we can debate who wrote the Torah, and how much of the book of Bereshit Moshe wrote, or knew. But no matter where you sit on that debate, there’s something undeniably poetic about this parsha. At the very beginning, as Moshe begins to address the people, he says, “Adonai your God has multiplied you until you are today as numerous as the stars in the sky”, thus confirming the promise God made to Abraham way back at the beginning of the Torah, that Abraham’s descendants will be as numerous as the grains of sand on a beach or the stars in the sky. Whether or not we believe Moshe is explicitly referring to this line in Bereshit, we as readers, who do know the whole Torah, cannot help but hear him and see a circle completed. What we, and Moshe, know is how much this outcome was not guaranteed. At each generation, the people had to continue to identify with their ancestors, and the rest of the growing people. Whether they knew it or not, in each generation they were exercising their free will to bring God’s promise to fruition. Moshe is going to go on to say some pretty harsh stuff to the people, and he is clearly afraid that when he is gone, they will deviate from God’s ways and lose their identity. But it seems like he doesn’t need to worry, that even the pressures of 4 centuries of enslavement and oppression couldn’t kill the chain of choice that began with Abraham answering God’s call to pack up and move.
The poignancy of this is just really getting me in the kishkes. Most of the time, the things we want and work for happen just like this, slowly and over time, maybe so slowly we don’t think it’s working. Yet often we are making progress through our choices, on a daily basis.
As we enter the final days in Moshe’s life, I want to offer him a blessing that he be able to recognize all the changes he’s overseen, and that he finds peace knowing the people are going to be alright. And for anyone here, who is in the midst of something big and doesn’t know if it’s really happening, I hope you too get the chance to recognize your goals coming to fruition, even if that’s hard to do day to day.