These are the Words

Past mid-summer, we get a bit of a new start, beginning to read a new book of the Torah. With the exception of the imminent observance of Tisha B’Av (The Ninth Day of the Hebrew month of Av, a day of mourning and sadness commemorating the Babylonian and Roman destructions of Jerusalem,   the dispersion of the Jewish people from their ancestral homeland and other tragedies of the Jewish people) a fairly quiet time on the Jewish calendar. In ancient agrarian society, it’s not yet time for the big summer harvest, we are nearly two months since Shavuot and two months away from the New Year, Rosh Hashanah.

This week we begin reading the book of D’varim, (Deuteronomy). In the book, Moses takes the
opportunity as outgoing leader to instruct the new generation born in the wilderness after the Exodus in their recent history, the laws of the society they are on the threshold of creating and the borders of their tribal holdings that they are on verge of inheriting. Our portion for this week, of the same name, begins the first of three major discourses by Moses to prepare the Children of Israel to enter the land.

It is the 39th this new generation his perspective on how they have ended up where they are, what they are about to encounter as they enter the Promised Land and what God is expecting from them, as his holy nation, once they are in the land. This portion is part travelogue describing their stops and encampments along the way, part history lecture of major events that occurred and part morality lesson about why a journey that could have taken weeks has taken forty years.

For me, one of linguistic gems of the text appears about midway through the portion, in Chapter 2, verse 14: The time we spent in travel from Kadesh-barnea until we crossed the wadi Zered was thirty-eight years, until that whole generation of warriors (Hebrew anshei milchamah) had perished from the camp to the last man. This term anshei milchamah, translated as warriors, is actually a bit of sarcastic irony on the part of Moses. The members of the generation of the Exodus were anything but warriors. They were fearful, insecure, largely ungrateful to God and to Moses for their leadership and uncooperative.

They complained at every opportunity, saw every challenge as a crisis and considered returning to Egypt on numerous occasions to return to what they knew, instead of constantly having to engage with the unknown. I’m fairly certain that what Moses means here, by calling that generation anshei milchamah is that they were constantly at war with him. If anything, Moses’ current audience, the generation about to conquer the land with Joshua as their leader, were going to have to be the anshei milchamah that their parents’ generation was incapable of being. It is an artful turn of phrase and a great example of biblical irony.

The journey is coming to an end. Over the coming weeks the people will get a variety of instructions and reviews. Moses will refresh them on the laws of kashrut, the rules of warfare and even some lessons on politics (about the eventual selection of a king and what goes into it). The children of Israel  year following the Exodus from Egypt. Moses is in part nostalgic, and in part patient, giving will get directions on how to eat, dress, resolve their conflicts and conduct their communities. What we have here are great lessons on nation building at the edge of the wilderness, on the verge of a return to their ancestral land.

Questions for thought:

1. If you were Moses, how would you decide what the people need to know?

2. Why do you think it might be important to teach a new generation about the things that happened when they were small or before they were born? They weren’t there; why does it
matter to them?

3. What questions might you have before moving to a new place? What kinds of things would you want to know?

Steve Kerbel, an education consultant, is a past chair of the Education Director’s Council of Greater Washington and a national vice president of the Jewish Educators Assembly.