Parsha of the Week

Humility
Having exhorted the people to keep God’s commandments first out of legal obligation and then additionally out of love, Moses continued: “I must now warn you about falling into the delusion of self-aggrandizement when God rewards you for observing His commandments. If you will indeed heed these ordinances with such devotion that you are scrupulous about even the seemingly inconsequential ones, and safeguard them by studying the Torah’s instructions regarding how to perform them, and then perform them accordingly, GOD, your God, will keep the covenant for you, as well as the promise of kindness that He swore to your forefathers that He would keep.

He will love you, bless you, and multiply you. He will bless your children, the fruit of your womb; your produce, the fruit of your soil: your grain, your wine, and your oil; the offspring of your cattle and the choice of your flocks – all this in the land that He swore to your forefathers to give you.

You will be blessed above all peoples. There will be no sterile male or barren female among you or your livestock.

GOD will remove from you all illness. He will not set upon you any of the evil diseases of Egypt that you knew, but will put them instead upon all your enemies.

Eradicating Idolatry
You must destroy all the peoples whom GOD, your God, is handing over to you. You must not spare them, nor may you worship their deities, for that will be a snare for you.

Perhaps you will say to yourself, ‘These nations are more numerous than me; how will I be able to drive them out?’

You must not fear them. Rather, you must remember well what GOD, your God, did to Pharaoh and to all of Egypt:

the great trials that you saw with your own eyes, in which He dared the Egyptians to test Him; the signs by which He confirmed that He sent me to save you; the marvels, i.e., the plagues, especially the two in which He killed the Egyptians: the mighty hand that He figuratively used to kill their animals with an epidemic, and the outstretched arm that He figuratively used to slay their firstborn – all of with which GOD, your God, took you out. So will GOD, your God, do to all the peoples whom you fear.

In addition, as He told you, GOD, your God, will incite hornets against them, which will inject venom into them, which will castrate and blind them, until the survivors and those who hide from you perish.

You must not be terrified of these nations, for GOD, your God, who is in your midst, is a great and awesome God.

And you need not worry that if all the inhabitants of the land suddenly die, the land will be overrun by dangerous wild animals, for as He told you, GOD, your God, will cast out these nations from before you gradually. You will thus not be able to destroy them too quickly, lest the beasts of the field outnumber you. True, wild animals do not harm righteous people, but I do not expect your entire population to sustain such a level of righteousness.

GOD, your God, will deliver these nations to you, and He will derange them with great pandemonium until they are utterly destroyed.

He will deliver their kings into your hand, and you will thus destroy their renown from everywhere under heaven. No man will be able to stand up before you, from the beginning of the battle until you have destroyed them.

You must burn the sculpted images of their deities with fire. You must not desire the silver or gold that is plated upon them and take it for yourself, lest you be ensnared by it, for it is disgusting to GOD, your God.

Nor should you bring an idol, which is an object of God’s disgust, into your house, lest – by demonstrating your lack of abhorrence for it – you thereby forfeit your life and become condemned to destruction like it. Rather, you must utterly loathe it and utterly detest it, for it is to be destroyed.

In the time remaining between now and your entry into the land, you must safeguard – of all the commandments that I am commanding you today – those that you are able to perform during this period, by studying the Torah’s instructions regarding how to perform them, in order to be able to perform them properly, in order that you may live, multiply, and come take possession of the land that GOD swore to your forefathers – for you will enter and take possession of the land in the merit of the commandments you perform.

Recalling God’s Protection in the Desert
You must recall the entire journey on which GOD, your God, led you during these 40 years in the desert, in order to afflict you and thereby to test you, i.e., to know what is in your heart, specifically: whether or not you would keep His commandments – i.e., the commandment not to put Him to the test – or criticize Him.

He afflicted you, let you go hungry, and then fed you with manna, which neither you nor your forefathers had ever known, in order to make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives by whatever he is given through the command that issues from GOD’s mouth.

Your clothing did not wear out, for the Clouds of Glory laundered and pressed them, and your children’s clothing grew with them, nor did your feet swell from walking barefoot during these 40 years, for like your clothing, your shoes never wore out.

You know in your heart that just as a man chastises his son, so does GOD, your God, chastise you.

You must keep the commandments of GOD, your God, to go in His ways and revere Him.

For GOD, your God, is bringing you to a good land: a land of brooks of water, fountains, and aquifers that emerge in valleys and mountains;

a land of wheat, barley, grapevines, figs, and pomegranates; a land of oil-producing olives and honey-producing dates;

a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity – you will lack nothing in this land; a land whose stones yield iron, and out of whose mountains you will mine copper.

You will eat, be satiated, and bless GOD, your God, for the good land He has given you.

So, after God has rewarded you with material abundance and military victory, beware lest you forget GOD, your God, by not keeping His commandments, ordinances, and rules, which I am commanding you today.

Beware lest you eat and be sated and build sturdy houses and dwell in them,

and your herds and your flocks multiply and your silver and gold increase, and all that you have increase,

and your heart subsequently grow haughty and you forget GOD, your God, who took you out of Egypt, out of the house of slaves;

who led you through the great and awesome desert, which was notorious for its snakes, vipers, scorpions, and thirst induced from lack of water; who brought forth water for you out of flint-stone;

who fed you in the desert with manna, which your forefathers did not know, in order to afflict you and in order to test you, for your ultimate benefit –

and you say to yourself, ‘It is my own strength and the might of my hand that have accumulated this wealth for me, and since I accrued it myself, I do not owe God anything for it.’

Rather, you should remember GOD, your God, for it is He who gives you strength to become wealthy, in order to fulfill His covenant that He swore to your forefathers, namely, to give their descendants this land, as He is doing today.

The Dangers of Arrogance
If, on the other hand, you forget GOD, your God, and you follow other peoples’ deities, worship them, and prostrate yourself before them, I testify before you today that you will surely perish. The surest way to forget God is by failing to remember what you have learned of the Torah, and the surest way to forget what you have learned is by failing to review it.

You will perish just as the nations that GOD destroys before you will perish, since you will not obey GOD, your God.

Hear, Israel: You are indeed a great and strong nation, but today, you are crossing the Jordan River in order to come dispossess nations greater and stronger than you, great cities fortified up to heaven,

as well as great and tall people, the descendants of the supernatural giants, whom you know and of whom you have heard said by the spies, ‘Who can stand up against the descendants of a giant?!’

Nonetheless, you must know and remember today that it is GOD, your God, who passes over before you as a consuming fire. He will destroy them and He will subdue them before you. You will either drive them out or destroy them quickly, as GOD spoke to you.

Do not say to yourself – when GOD, your God, has repelled them from before you – ‘Because of my righteousness, GOD has brought me to take possession of this land,’ and that because of the wickedness of these nations, GOD is driving them out from before you.

You are coming to take possession of their land neither because of your righteousness nor because of the integrity of your heart. Rather, it is because of the wickedness of these nations that GOD, your God, is driving them out from before you, as well as in order to fulfill the promise that GOD swore to your forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

You must know that GOD, your God, is not giving you this land to possess because of your righteousness, for on the contrary, you are a stiff-necked people.

Remember – do not forget – how you repeatedly angered GOD, your God, in the desert. You have been rebelling against GOD from the day you went out of Egypt until the day you came to this place.

The Golden Calf Revisited
The most graphic example of your stubbornness was when you angered GOD at Mount Horeb by making the Golden Calf, and GOD was so incensed with you that He wanted to destroy you, as I will now review with you.

When I ascended the mountain the first time, to receive the stone tablets, the tablets of the covenant that GOD made with you, I remained on the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights. I neither ate bread nor drank water,

and GOD gave me the two stone tablets, inscribed by the finger of God, on which were engraved all the exact words that GOD spoke with you on the mountain out of the midst of the fire on the day of the assembly, i.e., the day of the Giving of the Torah. These tablets were written in an openly miraculous manner, since even though both tablets were the same size and there were many more words on the first tablet than on the second, nevertheless, the size of the letters, the spacing between the letters, the spacing between the lines, and the size of the margins were identical on both.

At the end of 40 days and 40 nights, GOD gave me the two stone tablets, the Tablets of the Covenant.

But then GOD said to me, ‘Arise, descend quickly from here, for your people, whom you have brought out of Egypt, have become corrupt. They have been quick to turn away from the path that I commanded them to follow; they have made for themselves a molten calf.’

GOD spoke to me further, saying, ‘I have observed this people, and they are indeed a stiff-necked people – they do not accept rebuke easily, if at all.

Therefore, I have only one option: Leave Me alone, and I will destroy them and obliterate their name from everywhere beneath heaven, i.e., the whole world, and I will start over and make you and your descendants into a nation mightier and more numerous than they.’

So I turned and came down from the mountain. The mountain was ablaze with fire, and the two Tablets of the Covenant were in my two hands.

I saw that you had sinned against GOD, your God: you had made yourselves a molten calf. You were indeed quick to turn away from the path that GOD had commanded you to follow.

So I grasped the two tablets and hurled them from my two hands, shattering them before your eyes at the foot of the mountain.

The Second Forty Days
I then ascended the mountain a second time and I threw myself down on my face, to plead your case before GOD, staying there as before – for 40 days and 40 nights. I neither ate bread nor drank water, this time because I was so preoccupied with seeking God’s forgiveness for all the sins that you committed by doing evil in the eyes of GOD to anger Him,

for I was frightened by the wrath and the fury that GOD displayed when He was angry at you, threatening to destroy you. But thankfully, GOD hearkened to me also at that time and did not destroy you.

GOD was extremely furious with Aaron for acquiescing to your insistence on making the calf. He threatened to destroy him by killing his four sons, thereby leaving him without any descendants, so I prayed also for Aaron at that time. My prayer was effective only halfway, and therefore two of his sons – Nadav and Avihu – later died an unnatural death before having had any children of their own.

Before I ascended Mount Sinai for the second time, I took the object of your sin – the calf that you had made – and I burned it with fire. I crushed it, grinding it well, until it was as fine as dust, and I cast its dust into the stream that descended from the mountain.

Other Failings Revisited
Besides the incident of the Golden Calf, you also provoked GOD to anger at Tav’eirah, at Masah and Merivah, at Kivrot HaTa’avah,

and when GOD sent you from Ritmah, opposite Kadeish Barnei’a, saying, ‘Go up and take possession of the land I have given you,’ you defied the word of GOD, your God. You did not believe Him when He promised to grant you victory, nor did you obey Him; instead, you asked to send spies.

So you see, besides sinning in the incident of the Golden Calf, you have been rebelling against GOD since the day I became acquainted with you.

As I said, when I ascended Mount Sinai the second time, I threw myself down to plead your case before GOD and remained prostrate during the entire 40 days and the 40 nights after I threw myself down, because GOD had said that He intended to destroy you.

I prayed to GOD and said, ‘God, do not destroy Your people and Your inheritance, whom You have redeemed in Your greatness and whom You have taken out of Egypt with a mighty hand.

Remember Your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Pay no heed to the stubbornness of this people, or to their wickedness, or to their sin,

lest the people of the land from which you took us out – Egypt – say, “Because of GOD’s inability to bring them into the land about which He spoke to them, and because of His hatred toward them, He has brought them out to slay them in the desert.”

But they are Your people and Your inheritance, whom You took out with Your great strength and with Your outstretched arm.’

As I also said, God accepted my argument and did not wipe you out. At that time, after my second 40 days on the mountain, GOD said to me, ‘Hew yourself two tablets of stone like the first ones that you shattered, and come up to Me onto the mountain for a third time. Also make yourself a wooden ark.

I will inscribe on the new tablets the same words that were on the first tablets, which you shattered, and you must place the new tablets into the wooden ark.’

The Third Forty Days
Although God had told me first to hew the tablets and only then to make an ark to house them, I made an ark of acacia wood first, in order to have something to house the tablets, and only then I hewed two stone tablets like the first ones. I ascended the mountain with the two tablets in my hand.

On the fortieth day of my third stay on the mountain, God inscribed on the tablets – according to the original text – the Ten Commandments that GOD spoke to you on the mountain out of the midst of the fire on the day of the assembly. GOD then gave them to me.

I turned, came down from the mountain, and placed the tablets in the ark that I had made, and they remained there, as GOD had commanded me, until the golden Ark was built and we inaugurated the Tabernacle.

Defection After Aaron’s Death
God considers the death of righteous individuals as grievous as the breaking of the Tablets of the Covenant. It is therefore now appropriate to mention yet another instance when you angered God, this one occasioned by the death of Aaron. When Aaron died at Mount Hor and the Amalekites attacked you, the Israelites (i.e., all of you except the tribe of Levi) became discouraged and fled, backtracking toward Egypt. When you journeyed from the wells of Benei Ya’akan to Moseirah (i.e., Moseirot), the Levites caught up with you and engaged you in battle until you halted your retreat. Then, once peace and order were restored, you mourned Aaron as if he had died and had been buried there, and his son Eleazar had been installed to serve as high priest in his stead.

From there, you resumed the trek toward the Promised Land and journeyed once again to HaGudgod (i.e., Chor HaGidgad), and from HaGudgod you journeyed again to Yotvatah, which was a land with streams of water. I mention this incident in the context of the incident of the Golden Calf (even though the two incidents were separated by many years) in order to emphasize, as well, that your defection from God’s mission was as grievous to Him as when you made the Golden Calf.

The Levites
Just as the Levites showed themselves to be faithful to God when you tried to return to Egypt after Aaron’s death, so were they the only tribe all of whose members proved faithful in the incident of the Golden Calf. Since they did not participate in this sin, GOD separated the tribe of Levi at that time from the rest of the people, charging them to bear the Ark of the Covenant of GOD, as well as all the other components of the Tabernacle when we travel, to stand before GOD to minister to Him as priests, and to bless the people in His Name, as they do to this day.

Therefore, the tribe of Levi has no portion in the spoils of war nor any land-inheritance with its brothers, since they are occupied with other work and have no time to engage in war or agriculture. The portion that the lay people will separate from their produce and give to GOD is their inheritance, just as GOD, your God, spoke regarding them.

I remained on the mountain the third time like the first days, that is, in God’s good favor, for 40 days and 40 nights, and GOD hearkened to me also at that time; GOD did not seek to destroy you.

GOD therefore said to me, ‘Arise, go before the people to lead them on their journey, so that they may come and take possession of the land I promised their forefathers that I would give them.’

Response to God’s Mercy
And now, Israel, even though you rebelled against God all those times, what does GOD, your God, demand of you? Only that you exercise your free choice to fear GOD, your God, to walk in all His ways, to love Him, and to serve GOD, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul,

by keeping GOD’s commandments and rules, which I am commanding you today. Furthermore, He is not asking you to do this gratuitously, but for your own good, since He will reward you amply for your devotion. Indeed, it is only regarding your relationship with Him that He grants you free choice; everything else in life is predestined.

The Chosen People
Behold, both the physical heaven and the spiritual heavens beyond the physical heaven, not to mention the earth and all that is on it, belong to GOD, your God.

Yet, out of the entire universe, GOD desired only your forefathers, to love them, and He chose their seed after them – you – out of all peoples, as you remain His chosen ones to this day.

You must therefore circumcise the foreskin of your heart – i.e., cease to be callous in the face of His love – and cease being stiff-necked.

For GOD, your God, is God over all divine beings and Lord over all earthly kings and lords, so you will never be able to appeal to any other power for protection from Him. He is the great, mighty, and awesome God, who will not be partial to you if you totally shirk your Divine mission, despite having promised to be partial toward you by overlooking occasional lapses. Nor will He accept a bribe if you try to appease Him by donating money to His causes if you totally shirk your Divine mission, even though paying a fine can atone for sins in certain other cases.

Yet, despite His transcendence and omnipotence, He also concerns Himself with the lowly affairs of humanity, even its least powerful strata: He executes justice on behalf of the orphan and widow, and He showers love upon the convert by giving him bread and clothing even though he will not possess any land-inheritance from which to earn a living. Do not underestimate the importance of food and clothing, for when your forefather Jacob was threatened by his enemies, the only material request he made of God besides physical protection was for these two things.

Imitating God
You, likewise, must show love toward the convert by not taunting him for being of inferior social status, for you yourselves were strangers in Egypt and suffered for being of inferior status.

In general, you should strive to imitate God by imitating all facets of His loving-kindness. Accordingly, I am stipulating that this behavior be an additional aspect of the respect you must accord Him. Previously, I told you that you may only swear in His Name if you fear Him and worship Him. Now, I am adding a third condition: Only if You fear GOD, your God, worship Him, and are attached to Him in love may you swear by His Name.

He deserves to be the object of your praise, because He is your God, who did these great and awesome things for you, as you have seen with your own eyes.

Your forefathers descended to Egypt with seventy souls, and now GOD, your God, has made you – relative to those seventy souls – as numerous as the stars of heaven.

You must therefore reciprocate His love, and love GOD, your God, and guard His charge, rules, ordinances, and commandments, all the days, i.e., for all time.

Reciprocating God’s Love
Know and accept all that I am saying today, for I am not speaking with your children – who did not know and who did not see the chastisement of GOD, your God, His greatness, His mighty hand, His outstretched arm,

His signs, and His deeds, which He performed in the midst of Egypt, to Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and to his entire land;

and what He did to the army of Egypt, to its steeds, and to its chariots, how He made the water of the Sea of Reeds inundate them when they pursued you, and how GOD destroyed them, so that their army remains crippled to this day;

and what He did for you in the desert, until you arrived at this place;

and what He did to Dathan and Aviram sons of Eli’av grandson of Reuben, when the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up, along with their households, their tents, and all their money, which stood them on their feet (i.e., made them self-confident), in the midst of all Israel; and since your children did not know or see all this, they might question how I can exhort them to be faithful to God based upon all these things –

rather, it is with you that I am speaking, for your eyes have seen all the great work of GOD, which He did, as I have recounted.

The Promised Land
Therefore, keep all the commandments that I am commanding you today, in order that you be strong and come take possession of the land that you are crossing the Jordan River into in order to possess,

and in order that you endure in the land that GOD swore to your forefathers that He would give to them and to their seed, a land flowing with milk and date- and fig-honey.

For the land to which you are coming to possess is not like Egypt, not even like the part of Egypt out of which you came – Goshen, which is the choicest part of Egypt. In Egypt, after you sowed your seed, you watered many of the fields manually, carrying water to them by foot – just as a vegetable garden cannot survive on rainwater and needs to be irrigated – since the natural overflow of the Nile did not reach all the fields by itself, and certainly not the fields that were higher than the river.

In contrast, the land that you are crossing into in order to possess is superior to Egypt. Whereas all the arable land in Egypt is level, the Land of Israel is a land of mountains and valleys, so you can cultivate their slopes and thereby produce more yield per area than is possible in Egypt. Furthermore, it is watered by rain falling from the sky, which reaches all elevations equally. You do not have to trouble yourselves to irrigate it manually.

It is the land that GOD, your God, watches over; only through watching over the Land of Israel does He watch over the rest of the world. The eyes of GOD, your God, are always upon it, from the beginning of the year – Rosh HaShanah, when the material fortune of the world is determined for that year – to the end of the year, to see if the beneficence He apportioned it on Rosh HaShanah needs to be increased or decreased based on the merits of its inhabitants.”

Moses then spoke in God’s name, articulating the conditions for receiving the Divine blessings he just mentioned as characterizing the Land of Israel: “Specifically, if you, as a community, ensure that all the individuals who compose the community study My commandments continuously, reviewing them constantly in order not to forget what you have already learned and in order to better understand what you have yet to learn; and you study them with ever-fresh enthusiasm as if I am commanding them to you for the first time today; and you study the Torah out of love for GOD, your God, rather than out of any ulterior motive, such as reward or title; and in order to serve Him in prayer with all your heart and with all your soul – but you nevertheless do all this only to the extent required of you, not going beyond that which is required of you and not exceeding your natural abilities –

Reward and Corrective Punishment
I will reward you in a like manner: I will provide you with all your material needs, but only to the maximal extent possible within the limitations I have built into nature. Thus, I will give the rain in the manner best suited for your land to produce its yield: it will fall in its time – i.e., the time I have placed at its exclusive disposal (so to speak) – the nighttime, when people are not outdoors working the land. This way, you will be able to work the land by day unhindered by rain. Both types of rain necessary for an optimal yield will fall: the early rain, which falls after sowing-time, enabling the newly sown seed to germinate and grow; and the latter rain, which falls just before harvest-time, bringing the grain to full ripeness. You – rather than your enemies – will gather in your grain, wine, and oil.

In fact, I will give your land so much fertility that you will be able to harvest your grain a month early and use it as the grass you need to feed your livestock in your field, and by harvest time it will have grown back so you will still have enough to eat and be sated. And if you do not choose to use your grain for fodder, I will still give you the grass you need for your livestock in your own field, so you won’t have to lead them to other, far-away fields. In any case, when you eat even a small amount of the bread that you bake from your grain, you will be sated by it. (In contrast, as I have told you, if you dedicate yourselves to your Divine mission beyond the call of duty, you will earn beneficence that exceeds the limitations of nature.)

Here again, beware, lest your heart be misled into spiritual insensitivity by this material abundance, as it is apt to be, and you consequently neglect the study of the Torah, and as a result, when you eventually seek to fill the spiritual void in your life, you worship other peoples’ deities and prostrate yourselves before them.

If you fall into idolatry, the wrath of GOD will be kindled against you. He will close off heaven and there will be no rain, and the ground will even not give back as its produce the quantity of grain you sow it with. In addition, I will exile you; you will perish quickly from upon the good land that GOD is giving you, since that very land and its material bounty are causing you to rebel against Me. I will not give you any reprieve; although I gave the generation of the Flood reprieve, they had no one to learn from. You, however, should have learned from their example.

Tefilin and Mezuzah
Therefore, you must set these words of Mine upon your heart and upon your soul: fulfill My commandments – both when you are in your land, in order to earn the right to remain there, and when you go into exile, in order to remain practiced in them so they will not seem strange to you when you return. With regard to tefilin, I instruct you now to write this paragraph on a fourth parchment and place it in the remaining empty compartment of your head-tefilin, and also to add this paragraph to the single parchment of your hand-tefilin. Thus, you must bind them as a sign upon your weaker arm and they must act as a fourfold reminder on your forehead, above the point exactly between your eyes.

You must teach them to your children; in fact, teach your children to speak with them: converse with your children in Hebrew so it becomes their native tongue, and teach them the language using passages from the Torah. Let them see that the Torah’s teachings are your chief occupation: as above, each of you should discuss them when you are sitting in your house and when you are walking on the way; let them be your last concern when you lie down to sleep at night and your first concern when you awaken in the morning.

Every one of you must inscribe this paragraph, too, upon the parchment (mezuzah) that I have instructed you to affix to one of the doorposts of each door of your house and upon your gates.

Fulfill My commandments and study My Torah in order that your days as a collective entity and the days of your children increase in the land that GOD swore to your forefathers to give not only to you, their descendants, but to them as well, when they will be resurrected in the messianic future, for as long as the days of heaven above earth, i.e., for all time.

For if you take measures to safeguard all these commandments that I am commanding you, by studying the Torah’s instructions regarding how to perform them properly and by not forgetting what you have learned, and in order to love GOD, your God, and then to walk in all His ways by being merciful and kind – not only to the extent to which you have been explicitly commanded to be, but by imitating how He is merciful and kind beyond the ways He requires of you in His commandments – and finally to cleave to Him by constantly associating with the sages and teachers of the Torah,

then, in reward, GOD will drive out all these nations from before you. You will dispossess nations who are so strong that they are greater and stronger than you, even though you yourselves are mighty.

Every place upon which the soles of your feet will tread in order to conquer will be yours, even territory beyond your promised border, which will extend from the desert in the south to Lebanon in the north, and from the ‘great’ river – the Euphrates River – in the east to the Mediterranean sea in the west.

No one will stand up against you, not even a man as giant as Og. GOD, your God, will cast the immediate terror of you on those near you and the gnawing dread of you on all the inhabitants of the land upon which you tread, even those far away, as He spoke concerning you.”