Suburban Temple - Kol Ami

This week we begin the book of Devarim – Deuteronomy. Below is a lesson from this week’s Torah portion from G-dcast.

First up is a history lesson. So it's an eleven-day journey that really doesn't bother anyone and gets straight to the destination...or what we'll call the scenic route: thirty-nine years, eleven months, one day, and lots of people in the way. So we need a review. And Devarim invites us to review our relationship to history. In Devarim, the story of the Children of Israel begins not with something that happened to us, but something we did: We got up on our own two feet (or, rather -- on our 1.2 million feet, give or take). We left Mount Sinai. We began our journey as a people with Torah.

Moses has some explaining to do. We're on the verge. We're standing on the threshold of God's promise. Except nobody knows it. Other than Moses, Joshua, and Caleb, none of the Israelites who left Egypt are still alive. It's a brand new generation, a generation with no memory of going down to Egypt, of slavery, of the Exodus, or of receiving the Torah at Sinai. This generation has no memory of anything other than wandering in the desert. And – about that – they probably have some questions. The book of Dvarim is mostly one long answer to those questions.

It takes eleven days, the Torah tells us, to get from Mount Sinai to Kadesh-Barnea, the Israelite campsite at the edge of the Promised Land. But instead of a week and a half, it has taken the Israelites nearly forty years. So it's reasonable to wonder about two things: How did we get here? And what took so long?

To be sure, the first time the Israelites got to the border of the Promised Land, it didn't go so well. After some fearful reports from their advance scouts, the people refused to walk another inch and then God became angry with them. They let events drive them, instead of taking responsibility for their own future. And it took a few years to get back, but here we are again at the edge, on the verge, at the threshold. Back then, the cliché that those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it wasn't yet a cliché. Devarim is Moses's effort to avoid that mistake. He gives the Children of Israel ownership of their own history. History is not something that happens to us. History is what we do with what happens to us. The Torah tells us that God will keep God's promises. But the long and circuitous journey to the Promised Land gives us the time to remind us that the history of our arrival has yet to be written. We have been called to the journey. How we get there is up to us.

~ Rabbi Shana Nyer