Ziv: Parashat Re'eh 2

And you shall be nothing but joyful

This week’s parasha begins with an imperative: “see!” - open your eyes and see, that “I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you today, and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn aside from the way that I am commanding you today, to go after other gods that you have not known” (Deuteronomy 11:26–28). This emphasis on the sense of vision connects us back to the first chapter of Genesis where God saw “that [creation] was good”. Every reality can appear as a blessing or as a curse, depending on how we comply with the will of our Creator. The tension between the blessing and the curse runs as a thread throughout the book of Deuteronomy, where Moses stresses human free-will and our responsibility to choose what is good and avoid evil. The evil spoken of here is the source of all evil: idolatry, and throughout the parasha, the people of Israel are commanded to set their hearts to worship in one singular place where God “will choose to make his name dwell there” (Deuteronomy 12:11) - the temple, and to congregate there at specific points in time. This cycle of unification of the people and its God in time and in space, is in opposition to what the people of the land do, who sacrifice “on the high mountains and on the hills and under every green tree” (Deuteronomy 12:2) whenever they want, and is also different from what the people of Israel do prior to establishing a place where a stationary temple can be built. However, the patriarchs - Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - also sacrificed wherever they wished, why is this now prohibited? One of the main goals of the book of Deuteronomy is to teach the children of Israel that the actual possession of this land is not like that of other lands. It is not to be colonized like the other lands, but that this land - a land of milk and honey - has a role to play in establishing a place where the name of God can dwell and where God can “see” the people, and where the people can be seen congregated together and united. Even though the entire land is the Lord’s at all time: “a land that the Lord your God cares for. The eyes of the Lord your God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year” (Deuteronomy 11:12), He will choose one specific place where His name will dwell. With this teaching Moses is stressing the very essence of monotheistic faith, that of a God that seeks unity - unity of space and time - unity with His people, and a unity whose aim is to guarantee that we will be “nothing but joyful” (Deuteronomy 16:15). Shabbat Shalom.