Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah portion for this week is Parsha Va'etchanan, Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11.
I frequently refer to certain parshiot as being "loaded", that is, containing an unusually high density of extremely interesting, important information. Va'etchanan, in that regard, is half-loaded. Much of Deuteronomy is concerned with recounting the history of the Israelites and reiterating the most important laws. In a sense, it's a kind of Cliff's Notes version of the Torah after Genesis. Mixed in with this civics lesson are several key passages, some that were intended to stand out and others that came to stand out thanks to the rabbinical construction of the standard liturgy.
In the midst of a disjointed listing of the Ten Mitzvot, readers will find a pair of very familiar prayers in Va'etchanan, side-by-side no less. It is from this parsha that we get the Shemah prayer, often considered the most important prayer in Jewish liturgy, and we also find the majority of the text for the V'ahavtah prayer.
These ancient words have been repeated by every generation of Jews without fail for thousands of years. It is truly stirring to imagine the first leaders who poured over the passages of Va'etchanan and were inspired to speak them aloud at every congregation of Jews. Why these sections and not the many, many others in the Torah?
If Deuteronomy is the quick gloss of essential passages, then what are the prayers pulled from one of its portions but the most fundamental elements of what it means to be a Jew? These prayers have simple but powerful messages. The brief, convicted Shemah cements the phrases in the minds of those who speak it. Our God stands alone. Our God stands with us. Our God stands forever. If you know nothing else of Torah, at least know the Shemah.
And the V'ahavtah, the prayer that implores us to, before anything else, go with love. It is the prayer that says you can and should be a righteous person wherever you go, whatever you do. And most importantly, it tells us to teach our children to behave likewise.
Deuteronomy is Moses saying goodbye to his people. It's his way of telling them to be good in his absence. With the above two prayers that stood out so strongly for ancient Jews, we are being told what it means to be good. Simply, to live with devotion and know that there is no boundary to the truth that validates it.
There's one more line from Va'etchanan I want to address today. In so many words, there is the promise that those who reject God will suffer down through four generation, but those who love God will prosper down to the thousandth generation. While this is certainly intended as a promise of reward and consequence, it also makes a clear point about the nature of negativity and positivity. The negative, it reasons, is short-term and those who embrace it are short-sighted. But the pursuit of goodness and prosperity, by the same token, has much more long-term potential. It's the difference between cutting down a tree, which provides immediate gain, and planting a tree, which provides the potential for an entire forest many years down the line. As the Israelites stand at the entrance to their nation, they're being told to live for the long-term. By extension, we're being told the same.