…u-shema Yisrael (Devarim 27:9), “Be silent and listen, Israel. You have now become the people of the Lord your God.” He says there is a fundamental difference between seeing and listening and what each communicates. Seeing tells us about the surfaces and externalities of things. Listening tells us about internalities, depths and truths. Rabbi Leiner’s comments are echoed by one…
…festivals in the Torah. Unlike the Shemot and Devarim passages, this chapter includes Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Shabbat in the list of the festivals. Strangely, the Torah here seems to be calling Shabbat both a moed, an appointed time, and a mikra kodesh, a sacred assembly, which it does nowhere else. The list of the chaggim in Vayikra emphasises…
…was contained in the words: “Now write down this song and teach it to the Israelites” (Devarim 31:19), understood by rabbinic tradition to be the command to write, or at least take part in writing, a Sefer Torah. Why specifically these two mitzvot, at this time? In these last two commands God was teaching Moshe, and through him Jews throughout…
…course, is shema. I have argued elsewhere[1] that it is fundamentally untranslatable into English since it means so many things: to hear, to listen, to pay attention, to understand, to internalise, to respond, to obey. It is one of the motif-words of the book of Devarim, where it appears no less than 92 times – more than in any other…
…(Devarim 31:30). Likewise, the prologue to Moshe’s blessing in Vezot Habracha: “This is the blessing with which Moshe, the man of God, blessed the Israelites before his death…. Moshe commanded us the Torah, an inheritance of the congregation of Yaacov” (Devarim 33:1, 4). This verse tells us that the Torah belongs to everyone. It is the possession not of the…
…the Israelites in terms of family. He tells Moshe to say to Pharaoh in His name: “My child, My firstborn, Yisrael” (Shemot 4:22). When Moshe wants to explain to Bnai Yisrael why they have a duty to be holy, He says, “You are children of the Lord your God” (Devarim 14:1). If God is our Parent, then we are all…
…with joy and gladness out of the abundance of all things” (Devarim 28:47). A failure to rejoice is the first sign of decadence and decay. There are other differences. Happiness is about a lifetime, but joy lives in the moment. Happiness tends to be a cool emotion, but joy makes you want to dance and sing. It’s hard to feel…
…we teach it to our children, men wear it, in the form of tefillin, and it is placed as mezuzot “on the doorposts of your house” (Devarim 6:9). The Core Idea Near the end of Va’etchanan is a short statement which can be easy to miss, but it is an almost radical point of great importance. It seems to…
…first was the Torah reading of the day, namely the passage at the end of the Torah in which Moshe blesses the tribes (“This is the blessing”, Devarim 33:1). The other was the long-established custom of making a festivity at the conclusion of the study of a text – an order of the Mishnah, for example, or the conclusion of…
…families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your sins.” The very suffering of the Jewish people, implied Amos, was a sign of their chosenness, their preciousness in the eyes of God. What then is going on in the Sages’ interpretation of the words Di Zahav in the first verse of Devarim? The sedra of Devarim is…