TORAH SPARKS

 

 

Parashat Devarim

August 6, 2022 | 9 Av 5782

Torah: Torah Portion: Deuteronomy 1:1-3:22; Triennial 2:31-3:22

Haftarah: Haftarah: Isaiah 1:1-27

 

 

 

Moshe s Memoir

Ilana Kurshan

 

The Book of Deuteronomy, which we begin reading this week, presents an interesting paradox to the literary reader of the Bible. It is written in a different style than the earlier biblical books not from the perspective of an omniscient (and presumably divine) narrator, but from the perspective of a human being, Moshe. At the same time, the book is included in the divine Torah, in which every word and every letter is traditionally believed to have been revealed by God. Over time, traditional commentators and academic scholars have offered various views on the provenance and authorship of Deuteronomy, shaping our understanding of the literary genre to which this book belongs, and its contemporary relevance.

The book of Deuteronomy is traditionally regarded as having the same divine provenance as the other four books of Moses. The Talmudic rabbis teach that anyone who denies the divinity of any word of the Torah is regarded as a heretic and has no share in the World to Come, even if he asserts that the whole Torah is from Heaven, except a particular verse, which he maintains was uttered not by God but by Moses himself (Sanhedrin 99a). We are to believe that every word in

the Torah was spoken by God, and thus every word has the same religious authority. This understanding is reflected in the laws governing how a Torah scroll is written, which do not admit any difference between the book of Deuteronomy and the four other books. A Torah scroll that is missing a single letter or has an extra letter is invalid, regardless of whether that letter is missing from Deuteronomy or from any of the preceding books. Moreover, each and every one of the Five Books of Moses is regarded as having more sanctity than all later biblical books; Maimonides teaches that when stacking books, the Five Books of Moses may be placed on top of the Prophets of Writings, but the Prophets and Writings may never be placed atop any of the Five Books of Moses, because Moshe s prophecy unlike those of other, later prophets reflects God s will in its purest and most unadulterated form (Mishneh Torah, The Book of Love, Laws of Torah scrolls 10:5). According to this understanding, Deuteronomy, though spoken in a human voice, is fully part of the divine Torah.

In contrast, academic scholars of the Bible maintain that the book of Deuteronomy is the product of a group of revolutionary Jewish sages who were active in the kingdom of Judea prior to and following the destruction of the First Temple, when the book reached its final form. The prevailing academic theory, first put forth by the German scholar W.M.L. de Wette in 1805, identifies the book of Deuteronomy with the scroll discovered by the priest Hilkiyah during a major renovation of the Temple in the reign of King Josiah in the seventh century BCE, as recounted in II Kings (chapter 22). Scholars argue that this text was composed in the context of religious reforms advanced by King Josiah, including the prohibition on religious worship outside the Temple, which appears only in Deuteronomy and not in the preceding biblical books. The Judean monarchy, in an effort to centralize religious worship in the Jerusalem Temple, articulated its theology in the form of a lengthy address delivered by Moshe to the Israelites. According to this view, Deuteronomy, though spoken in

Moshe s voice, is part of a religious reformation dating half a millennium after Moshe s death.

Yet as Micah Goodman notes in Moses Last Address (published in Hebrew in 2014, publication in English forthcoming), both the traditional and the academic approaches to Deuteronomy ignore the book s own claim about its provenance, which appears in the first verses of this week s parashah: These are the words that Moshe addressed to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan in the fortieth year, on the first day of the eleventh month (Deuteronomy 1:1-3). Deuteronomy purports to have been authored by Moshe himself this is the assumption the book asks its readers to accept when they begin reading. Most of the book is written in the first person and is narrated from Moshe s perspective, refracted through his own emotional experience of struggle, anxiety, and triumph. Today we might refer to it as a memoir, an increasingly popular literary genre in which the author shapes his or her own experiences into a literary work guided by aesthetic considerations and often more faithful to the author s subjective, emotional experience rather than to the reality of what actually happened.

There are many seeming discrepancies between the earlier books of the Bible and Deuteronomy which indicate that the latter is more memoir than history. For instance, the book of Exodus recounts that Yitro observed Moshe s difficulty in attending to all the people s needs and warned him, You will surely wear yourself out, urging Moshe to appoint chiefs of thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens, and let them judge the people (18:17, 21-22). In our parashah, however, Moshe omits all mention of Yitro and speaks to the people about how they exhausted and depleted him: Thereupon I said to you, I cannot bear the burden of you by myself the trouble of you, and the burden, and the bickering! Pick from each of your tribes men who are wise, discerning, and experienced, and I will appoint them as your heads (1:9, 12-13). For the sake of Moshe s account, it doesn t matter that the idea for the tribal chiefs originated with Yitro; most salient for

Moshe, as he reflects back on the wilderness journey, is his own difficulty in shouldering the burden of the people, and his dire need of assistance.

If we are to regard the book of Deuteronomy as a memoir of sorts, we must recognize that it is different from any other memoir in the sense that Moshe s life is also the story of the Exodus from Egypt, the forging of the Jewish nation, and the giving of the Torah, as narrated in the previous biblical books. As such, Deuteronomy is not just Moshe s artistic rendering of his own life experiences; it is also a rewriting of the previous biblical books from Moshe s perspective. It is both part of the Bible and the earliest commentary on the Bible, in which an individual reflects on and interprets Torah in light of his own experience. According to Rabbi Zadok Ha-Cohen, who lived in Lublin in the nineteenth century, the book of Deuteronomy may be considered the first book of the Oral Torah, since it is the human part of the divine Torah. Rabbi Zadok quotes from the beginning of our parashah: On the other side of the Jordan, in the land of Moab, Moses undertook to expound this Torah (1:5) (see Pri Zadok, Deuteronomy 1). Moshe s address to the people is his expounding on Torah it is his oral commentary on the written Torah of the previous four books. As Micah Goodman notes, Rabbi Zadok inverts the traditional view that even the Oral Torah is divine, and argues instead that part of the Written Torah is in fact human.

In our own day and age, it has become very popular for everyone to tell their own version of their life story. Not only are memoirs a popular literary genre, but platforms such as Facebook and Instagram encourage individuals to curate their experiences and accomplishments to share with a wider audience. The book of Deuteronomy at once Moshe s memoir and his contribution to Torah is a reminder that if we live our lives in accordance with Jewish tradition, then the story of our lives is not just our own personal memoir; it is also part of the next chapter in the unfolding of the story of the Jewish people.

 

 

Ejection Born from Rejection

Vered Hollander-Goldfarb

 

 

 

Text: Devarim 1:20-36

 

(This is Moshe s recount of what happened with the spies)

 

24 And they departed and they brought back word to us, saying, It is a good land which the Lord our God is giving us. 26 And you would not go up, but rebelled against the command of the Lord your God; 27 and you complained in your tents, and said, Because the Lord hates us, He has brought us out of the land of Egypt to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us 29 Then I said to you, Do not be terrified, or afraid of them. 30 The Lord your God, who goes before you, He will fight for you 32 Yet, for all that, you did not believe in the Lord your God 34 And the Lord heard the sound of your words, and was angry, and took an oath, saying, 36 Surely not one of these men of this evil generation shall see that good land of which I swore to give to your fathers

 

● According to Moshe s recounting of the events, what did the people reject that made God angry? What is the role of the land in this rejection? How does this account differ from what was told in Bamidbar chapters 13-14?

 

● Which story makes it easier to understand the consequence of that generation dying out in the desert? Why could they not have entered the land?

Midrash Tanhuma Parashat Shlah, 12

 

The whole community raised [their voice (wailed), and the people cried that night] The community cried on the night of the ninth of Av.

 

The Holy One, blessed be He, said to them: You wailed in vain before me, I shall set this night for wailing for generations. And from that time, it was decreed that the Temple will be destroyed and that [the people of] Israel will be exiled to among the nations. As it is stated (Ps

106:26-27), So He raised His hand regarding them to make them fall in the wilderness. And to make their seed fall among the nations, and to scatter them among the lands. The raising of [the divine] hand corresponds to the raising of the voice.

 

(This midrash appears in Bamidbar on 14:1)

 

● According to the midrash, how does the people s crying in the event of the spies connect the event to Tisha b Av?

 

● The midrash draws the connection based on an internal biblical midrash found in Psalms 106:26-27. What does raising of a hand mean? (Think of all the court scenes you know.)

 

● Based on the Psalmist s retelling, how was the rejection of the land, following the spies report, perceived already during biblical times? How does the midrash understand the underlying cause(s) of the event of the spies and the events of Tisha b Av?

On Dialogue

Bex Stern Rosenblatt

 

 

On Tisha b Av we will read the Book of Lamentations. We will follow the speaker of the book on his journey from journalistic remove to empathy. What begins for him and for us as a tragedy that happened to someone else some time else becomes a tragedy which we live through together, lifting ourselves back up out of it.

This journey happens because the speaker is not alone. He encounters the object of his description, Lady Jerusalem. He describes the city so vividly that she pops off the page and speaks for herself, discovering her own voice. With that voice, she moves the speaker, bringing him, and through him, us, to understand and identify with her point of view. It is so effective that by the third chapter, the speaker describes himself as having witnessed and lived through Jerusalem s suffering: I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of His wrath. In the subsequent and final two chapters of Lamentations, a new voice emerges, a first-person plural. The speaker, Lady Jerusalem, and we, the readers, have joined together, adding strength to each other as we reinforce each other s pleas.

This week s haftarah is the final haftarah of the Three Weeks before Tisha b Av. The book opens with prophecies of doom and calls for change. Isaiah himself is speaking, occasionally quoting God. Much of the language he uses to rebuke us is going to be found later in Lamentations. We read of the exhortation to provide for widows and children in Isaiah; in Lamentations, that widow will become Lady Jerusalem and we will resort to eating our children. In Isaiah, we read of crimson sins which can be corrected to be white like snow, like

sheep. In Lamentations, those same colors become the red of sun-parched starvation and the white of bone.

Here, in the Book of Isaiah, we also find an incidence of a first-person plural, a we, interrupting the speaker, Isaiah. Isaiah has been accusing us, describing our failures, using the second person plural, the you all. He invokes Daughter Zion, accusing her, as well. He says, as translated by Robert Alter: And the daughter of Zion remains like a hut in a vineyard, like a shed in a patch of greens, like a town besieged It is then that we, the first-person plural, feel compelled to speak. We say, Had not the LORD of Armies left us a scant remnant, we would be like Sodom. We would resemble Gomorrah. Entering into dialogue with Isaiah, we hope to make him reconsider, to soften his judgment. We call upon him to celebrate what we have left rather than mourn what we have lost. But Isaiah ignores our plea and seizes upon the imagery we use. He responds, claiming that we actually are already as bad as Sodom and Gomorrah, saying, Listen to the word of the LORD, O leaders of Sodom, give ear to our God s teaching, O people of Gomorrah. We do not change his mind; we only harshen our punishment.

In Lamentations, we move the speaker to empathy. In Isaiah, we move the speaker to wrath. It is always a courageous choice to enter into dialogue. Let s hope we do so wisely.