…scale without codes of self-restraint and commitment to the common good. Moses knows that people often think and act in short-term ways, preferring today’s pleasure to tomorrow’s happiness, personal advantage to the good of society as a whole. They do foolish things, individually and collectively. So throughout Devarim he insists time and again that the road to long-term flourishing – the…
…Devarim) love and joy. To find God, he says in this week’s parsha, you don’t have to climb to heaven or cross the sea (Deut. 30:12-13). God is here. God is now. God is life. And that life, though it will end one day, in truth does not end. For if you keep the covenant, then your ancestors will live in…
…end. For the last month, since I began these speeches, these devarim, I have tried to tell you the most important things about your past and future. I beg you not to forget them. “Your parents were slaves. God brought them and you to freedom. But that was negative freedom, chofesh. It meant that there was no-one to order you about. That…
…and short.” What you have then, is the story of the Tower of Babel and I don’t believe we have all the archaeological evidence available for us to give the full depth of interpretation of the Tower of Babel. Here it goes, what is the opening line of Genesis 11, anyone know? Vayehi kol ha’aretz safah echat u’devarim achadim. So…
I argued in my Covenant and Conversation for parshat Kedoshim that Judaism is more than an ethnicity. It is a call to holiness. In one sense, however, there is an important ethnic dimension to Judaism. It is best captured in the 1980s joke about an advertising campaign in New York. Throughout the city there were giant posters with the slogan,…
…short, two of them appear in Sefer Shemot. You have the third in parshat Emor, chapter 23. You have the fourth in chapters 28 and 29 of Sefer Bamidbar. And the fifth in chapter 16 of Devarim. And they’re all different, and they all use different language, and they have different focuses, different dimensions of the festival. And if you…
…that is basically the book of Devarim, how Joshua did so likewise, that’s the 24th chapter of the book of Joshua, read about how King Hezekiah did so, King Josiah, and most famously probably Ezra and Nehemiah, in the fifth century BCE, pulling the nation together, renewing the covenant at the Second Temple after the Babylonian exile. And that, to…
…there is chaos in the camp. Again God threatens to destroy the nation and begin again with Moses (Num. 14:12). Again only Moses’ powerful plea saves the day. God decides once more to begin again, this time with the next generation and a new leader. The book of Devarim is Moses’ prelude to Act 5, which takes place in the…
…it finds legal restraints in his way. Montesquieu’s source was not the Bible – but there is, in a verse in Isaiah, a strikingly similar idea: For the Lord is our judge; the Lord is our law-giver; the Lord is our king; he will save us. Isaiah 33:22 This tripartite division can also be found in Devarim/Deuteronomy 17-18 in the…
In the last days of his life Moses renews the covenant between God and Israel. The entire book of Devarim has been an account of the covenant – how it came about, what its terms and conditions are, why it is the core of Israel’s identity as an am kadosh, a holy people, and so on. Now comes the moment of…