The Morning Scroll
The Morning Scroll
Parashat Va'etchanan, August 8th
Listen up, G_d-Wrestlers! The Lord Our G_d is one, and the Lord Our G_d is having none of Moshe's nonsense today.
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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 Va’etchanan, “And I begged”, in which we hear Moshe beg for entrance to the land of Israel. We’ll start with a brief recap:
Moshe tells how he begged God to be let into the land, but God refused, saying instead Moshe can climb a mountain and see the whole land from afar. Moshe then tells the people to follow God’s laws faithfully, not adding or detracting from them, and reminds them that people who follow the laws thrive, and those who don’t… dont. “Remember the day you got the Torah, how special that day was, and how special the Torah is”, he says, and reminds them they have a special relationship with God because of the redemption from Egypt and revelation. He designates three more cities of refuge on the eastern side of the Jordan river, and then repeats the 10 commandments, and tells them they don’t just apply to people who were there at the original revelation. Instead, he reminds them of how scared the people who were there were, and how they asked him to be their intermediary, but now it’s everyone’s responsibility to hear and keep the commandments. He then calls them closer, saying “Shema Yisrael”, listen up, Israelites, and commands them to love God with all their hearts, with all their soul and with all their might, and to remember that all good things come from God. He tells the Israelites to tell their children that the basis of this special national relationship with God lies in the redemption from Egypt, then closes out the parsha with a commandment to destroy the inhabitants and idols of Canaan and not marry them, as in them the people, not the idols.
For many Jews, this parsha contains some of the lines of Torah we know the best: Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. Listen up, God wrestlers, Adonai is our God, Adonai is one. We repeat it, as the next lines tell us, when we wake up and when we go to bed. It’s supposed to be the last words out of our mouths before we die. Judaism doesn’t have a creed, but if we did, the Shema might be a good contender for it. The lines that follow, the paragraph we know for its first word, “ve’ahavta”, tell us to love God with everything we’ve got and to put these words, and this way of life, before us everyday. It’s passionate, it’s poetic, it’s moving… There's a reason these lines are some of the most important and well-known.
It is not, however, what we would have expected given the name of this parsha, Va’etchanan, which opens with Moshe recounting how he asked God for mercy and was rejected. Moshe is clearly still a little bitter about not being able to accompany the people into the land, so we might find his impassioned command to love and remain devoted to God a little surprising. But I think that’s part of the lesson. Moshe can be disappointed about God’s insistence that he not enter the land, and still passionately believe in the relationship God is trying to build with the people. He shows us how we can hold personal disappointments and still advocate for the continuation of a covenantal, personal, eternal relationship between God and the people. This, to me, is the essence of a resilient faith, because it reminds us that we don’t have to let go of the little things, but that we also don’t need to let them detract from our big picture. We can be frustrated with God for the things in our lives that don’t work out the way we want them to, while still maintaining a relationship with God and a belief that, on the whole, faith and spiritual connection will bring us blessing and meaning.
So, this week, I want to offer Moshe a blessing for living out a definition of faith in action, for modeling how to have both a personal and a communal relationship with God. And I hope this blessing impacts each of you, who will certainly have to grapple with how to maintain faith in moments of disappointment or distance. I hope you feel seen in the personal stuff, and I hope you know that you can feel all those feelings of disappointment or distance from God and the communal exercise of faith will still be here for you, whenever you’re ready to come back.