TORAH SPARKS
Parashat Netzavim-Vayelech
September 9, 2023 | 23 Elul 5783
Torah: Deuteronomy 29:9-31:30 Triennial: Deuteronomy
29:9-30:14
Haftorah: Isaiah 61:10-63:9
The Moist and the Parched
Bex Stern-Rosenblatt
Parashah
Standing here, on the edge of the coming holidays and on the edge of Canaan, we look forward towards water. On Shemini Atzeret, we will begin to recite who brings down the rain in the Amidah, welcoming rain back into our lives also with the beautiful Tefillat HaGeshem. Looking out towards the Jordan in Deuteronomy, we reimagine our relationship with God using rain as both metaphor and reality.
As we enter a land where we will become farmers, our water needs will change dramatically. In order to receive the water we need to survive, we will need to recognize constantly that God is the source of all water. This land is a goodly land, a land of brooks of water, springs and deeps coming out in valley and in mountain, as opposed to our forty years in the great and terrible wilderness where there is no water in which God has had to bring water out for you from flintstone. Unlike Egypt, in this land from the rain of the heavens you will drink water. That rain is, of course, contingent on heeding God s commandments, to love the LORD your God and to worship Him with all your heart and with all your being. The Book of Genesis was replete with famine in Canaan, where lack of water may have caused mass starvation. Now that we are back in that land, God has given us the key to avoiding starvation, to avoiding having to leave the land in search of food. We just have to follow the commandments and God will grant us water and God will be to us as water.
This idea of God, goodness, and life itself as water is deepened in our parashah. We read of the secret sinner: Should there be among you a man or a woman or a clan or a tribe whose heart turns away today from the LORD our God to go worship the gods of those nations, should there be among you a root bearing fruit of hemlock and wormwood, it shall be, when he hears the words of this oath and deems himself blessed in his heart, saying, It will be well with me, though I go in my heart s obduracy in order to sweep away the moist with the parched, the LORD shall not want to forgive him, for then shall the LORD s wrath and His jealousy smolder against that man, and all the oath that is written in this book shall come down upon him, and the LORD shall wipe out his name from under the heavens.
This passage seems to be saying, simply, that God will punish those who worship foreign gods in secrecy. Indeed, a few verses later we read things hidden are for the LORD our God and things revealed for us and for our children forever to do all the words of this teaching. We worry about the existence of such secret wrongdoers because from those individuals much wrongdoing can blossom, infecting the whole nation.
But the phrase in order to sweep away the moist with the parched demands to be interpreted. The word translated here as sweep likely comes from the root safah. In the Torah, it appears only in a few choice places. We meet it first in the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, both when Abraham asks, Will you really sweep away the innocent with the guilty? and also when the visitors urge Lot to get a move on it lest his family swept away in the punishment of the city. It occurs next in the mouth of Moses in response to the request of the Reubenites and Gaddites to stay on the farside of the Jordan. Moses recounts the story of the spies, explaining how their wrongdoing led to wandering in the wilderness for forty years, before concluding that the request of the Reubenites is even worse: And, look, you have arisen in your fathers stead, a breed of offending men, to add still more of the LORD s flaring wrath against Israel. Here, to add is likely from the same root as the word we have been translating as sweep. The final time the word appears in the Torah is in the Song of Moses, as God describes all the terrible ways God will destroy us – I will sweep disaster upon them, my arrows I will finish on them. The idea of sweeping away in the Torah contains divine collective punishment for individual crimes. It is only too appropriate that it appears in our context of fear of individual wrongdoing.
The words moist and parched are more complicated. Some interpret these words as representing totality, two opposite ends of a spectrum encompassing everything in between them. To sweep away the moist with the parched becomes then another way of saying to sweep away everything and everyone. In the Deuteronomic scheme of water, the moist are surely the good, the followers of the commandments, and the parched are those who do not. The secret sinner is the parched and the community is the moist and God must figure out how to administer justice. The word translated here as moist is haravah. The precise meaning is unclear. It comes from ravah, meaning watered, soaked, satiated. Rashi will go so far as to interpret the meaning as drunk, God will sweep away the drunk with the thirsty or even the sober. The word translated as parched is hatzmeah. This word appears in the stories of great thirst, of need for water, in our desert wanderings.
Even as we enter the land, we carry those desert wanderings with us. We carry the memory of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. We carry our entire history, our entire relationship with God, the entire array of human possibility and human error. The land we are entering is fundamentally different from anything we have experienced in recent memory. But we are the same. As we look towards water and look towards God, it is only through our recollections of lack of water, of drunkenness, of unjust destruction, that we can hope to change ourselves and our society in a way that will allow for water and goodness to flow.
Parashat Netzavim Self-Study
Vered Hollander-Goldfarb
Questions for the
Table (From the Archive 5778)
On this last Shabbat of the Jewish year, in a period of reflection and preparation for the High Holidays, we find an entire passage about Teshuvah (returning to God) in our parashah.
- The parashah opens with a ceremony to ratify the covenant (29:9-12). Moshe opens by listing the various social positions that are present (29:9-10), but then proceeds to speak in the singular (29:10-12), individual, form (If you are able to follow the Hebrew, this will be apparent.) Why did he switch from plural to singular?
- Moshe stresses that the people have dwelt in Egypt and passed by other nations and seen all their god-figures of wood, stone, silver and gold (29:15-17). Then he warns against the temptation to worship them. Why do you think this was so tempting?
- A specific warning is given to the individual who chooses to turn away from the God of Israel (29:17-20). After reading last week s parashah, why might people have thought that it will not make a difference if they, individually, worship other gods?
- After the dire warnings about the results of turning away from God, comes the section about Teshuvah (30:1-10). When might we do Teshuvah? What is the message of placing this sections after the punishments that will come upon us if we choose to leave God?
- In 30:11-14, immediately following the Teshuvah section, we are told that this Mitzvah that we are commanded today is not too wondrous or too far away to be done. What do you think is meant by this Mitzvah ? What concern of the people does this come to answer?
The Testimony of Twins in Tishrei
Ilana Kurshan
Adventures in Mishnah with My Kids
Rosh Hashanah Chapter 2
With Rosh Hashanah fast approaching, my ten-year-old twins and I are learning the mishnayot in tractate Rosh Hashanah. We have just completed the first two chapters, which are largely about the sanctification of the new moon. Since Rosh Hashanah does not just mark the first of the year, but also the first day of the Hebrew month of Tishrei, the rabbis in this tractate discuss how the calendar, and the lengths of the months in particular, were determined in Mishnaic times. The fixed and standardized Jewish calendar as we know it was not established until generations later, in the fourth century C.E., during the time of Hillel II (not to be confused with the more famous Hillel the Elder, the contemporary of Shammai, who lived in the first century).
In Mishnaic times, people didn t look at the calendar to figure out when the new month began they looked up at the sky. Since the monthly calendar depended on astronomical observations, the rabbis of the Mishnah were reliant on witnesses who would come to the central court in Jerusalem and testify that they had seen the new moon. The Mishnah (Rosh Hashanah 2:8) teaches that the head of the central court during the early second century, Rabban Gamliel, had a chart with diagrams of different forms of the moon hung up on the wall of his attic, which he would show to the witnesses who came to testify about the moon. This way, the witnesses could point to whichever image most closely resembled the one they had seen in the sky.
It s like the eye chart at the eye doctor s office, with the letters turned in all sorts of directions, and you have to tell the doctor what you see, my daughter Liav interjects. Her comment reminds me that ideally Rabban Gamliel would first check the witnesses vision before relying on their testimony. We learn that the witnesses always had to come in pairs, and their testimony had to match one another if it was to be accepted. First the court would invite the more esteemed of the two witnesses, who would have to answer a series of questions about the shape and orientation of the moon he had seen. Only then would they bring in the second witness to examine in a similar manner (2:6). This procedure is very familiar to me as a mother of twins. It is always better when my twins do not come home from school at exactly the same moment, because they often have the same stories to tell, and they both want to be the one to relay them to me.
Liav, who is more verbal, will usually get the words out first, and then Tagel, who is more agile, will turn a cartwheel and accidentally knock into her sister as an expression of resentment. I have learned that it is much better when they stagger their entry, and I can summon one witness at a time.
Of course, the testimony of the witnesses was not always accurate, as Rabban Gamliel and his colleagues learned. Sometimes a witness would claim that he saw the new moon in front of the sun, which is astronomically impossible; such a witness would be dismissed immediately (2:6). Another witness claimed to see the moon one night, but then insisted it was not visible the following night. A skeptical Rabbi Dosa ben Hyrcanus responded derisively, How can a pregnant woman give birth one day, and then, the next day, still have her stomach so large it rises between her teeth? (2:8). (Apparently Rabbi Dosa ben Hyrcanus had never been to a post-partum aerobics class.)
Fortunately I know all about inaccurate testimony from my twins, who often have wildly diverging accounts of the same incident. Once I asked each girl about the school field trip to the museum, where they sat next to one another on the bus. Liav, who came home first, assured me that the ride was uneventful. Then when I met up with Tagel in the park an hour later, she told me that Liav had gotten carsick and vomited on her on the bus ride there, and I was left wondering if my twin girls should be included among the Mishnah s list of those who are disqualified from offering testimony the gamblers, the pigeon racers, and those who lend money with interest.
Once the testimony of the witnesses was established, the head of the court would announce, It is sanctified! All the people would respond, It is sanctified, it is sanctified! Then the members of court would light torches on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, which was a signal to the Jews on other mountaintops to light torches as well, until the news of the new month had spread far and wide, and the entire diaspora was lit up by a large bonfire (2:4).
This procedure relates to the question of why Rosh Hashanah is always celebrated for two days, even in the land of Israel. On the evening following the twenty-ninth day of the last Hebrew month of Elul, the court would sanctify the day as the first day of Tishrei based on the possibility that witnesses might come the next morning and testify that they had seen the New Moon. If the witnesses did appear, that day was indeed Rosh Hashanah; if they did not, then the following day would be Rosh Hashanah. But it was impossible to know in advance on the evening following the twenty-ninth of Elul if witnesses would arrive the next day, and so no one could know if the next day was in fact the first of the new month. Thus it was instituted that Rosh Hashanah always be celebrated as a two-day holiday. Rosh Hashanah, on which both days have equal sanctity, is referred to as a yoma arichta a single long extended day. As a parent, the notion of a very long day a day that seems never to end is very familiar to me. I only wish it were limited to Rosh Hashanah.