A Judaism worth inheriting
Somewhere on the plains of Moav, in the last weeks of his life, Moshe begins to speak. He has in front of him a captive audience in the form of a nation that has buried the entire generation before them and the first words he chooses to speak at this point are God’s words at Sinai:
רַב־לָכֶ֥ם שֶׁ֖בֶת בָּהָ֥ר הַזֶּֽה׃ פְּנ֣וּ וּסְע֣וּ לָכֶ֗ם
You have stayed long enough at this mountain. Turn, and go… (Devarim 1:6-7)
Rashi, quoting the Sifrei (Devarim, piska 5), hears a second, less obvious meaning. Rav lachem (רַב־לָכֶ֥ם) can mean “enough already;” it’s time to go. Alternatively, it can mean “much is yours.” With this second understanding, one can read that Moshe gained great reward from dwelling at this mountain. Moshe built the Mishkan here, made the menorah and the vessels, received the Torah, and appointed a Sanhedrin there. Everything that defined Moshe, and ultimately created the first foundations of the Jewish nation originated at this mountain.
But now, says Parshat Devarim, it’s time to go.
Sinai was a pure gift. Nothing was taken from us there. But still God had to command the Jewish people to leave because a people will stay forever at the site of the thing that formed them unless somebody tells them to go.
And Moshe will not let the fire go. Three chapters from here he is still describing it. And when he comes down the slope with the tablets in his hands, the mountain is still burning behind him (9:15). Fire is his word for that place; Sinai was a mountain of fire.
And even so, we had to be ordered off it.
Plenty of people tell us “enough already.” They are the people who want the ash gone because it accuses them, and we learned long ago to hear those words as an attack and to camp harder. At Sinai those same words came from the One who had just given us everything.
The fires in our own history were built to consume. Titus took the Temple down to its foundation stones. Birkenau was designed by men who wrote ash as a design feature. We did not choose those fires and we could not have stopped them. What we chose came afterward. We settled at the burned places. We pitched our tents on that ground and stayed for generations, and we handed our children the address and called it an identity.
This was largely the Jewish education I was given as a child – years spent in Hebrew school learning more about the Holocaust than the holidays, focusing on the tragic history of our people without spending time also learning about the many ways that the Jewish people have thrived.
I must be unequivocal. I do not believe that a Jewish future can be built on the ashes of the worst things that have ever happened to us.
I do not think we can immerse our children in tragedy and then expect that they will somehow take that ash in their hands and press it into a living, singing, arguing, flourishing Jewish life.
And I am deeply afraid that we are about to do it again with October 7th. I fear that we will build the memorials and the curricula and the campus programs and the museum wings, and while all of them are necessary and all of them are holy, that a Jewish child in 2055 will know precisely how we died that Shabbat morning and know nothing about how we live.
Zohar Raviv, Birthright Israel’s International Vice President of Educational Strategy, precisely names the issue. He calls it our rhetoric of crisis, the reflex to amplify every threat because urgency is the only Jewish grammar some of us were ever taught. He says so poignantly that “We are Jews despite the bad, despite the Holocaust. Not because of the Holocaust.”
We have been telling our story as a chain of catastrophes occasionally interrupted by peace. He asks us to tell it the other way, as a long life occasionally interrupted by catastrophe. And after October 7th, he offered so profoundly that “the atrocity itself was not a Jewish event. The Jewish event is what we do next.”
Our verse said it first. Sinai is the Jewish event, and the instruction God gave there is that what comes next is the point of it. “Turn and go.” The same voice that gave us everything at that mountain is the voice that told us to leave it.
At Sinai, God gave the order to leave. After the Churban, Rome gave it. But being driven from a place is not the same as being released from it. No one ever gave that generation the second order, the one that says stop facing the ruin. They had to give themselves the permission to walk away from the smoke and the ashes.
Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai is carried out alive of a burning Jerusalem in a coffin, comes before Vespasian, and asks for Yavneh and its’ Sages (Gittin 56b). And then he makes an audacious choice. He does not sit down in the ash and grieve, but rather, he legislates. The Mishnah records his enactments, one after another, and every one of them is an act of transplantation. He took the practices that had lived in one building and he distributed them across the entire Jewish world, so that while the building burnt, the practice did not.
The Sages do the same with the korbanot. Berachot 26b tells us that the prayers were established to stand where the daily offerings once stood. There is no ordinary minyan. Every minyan is that emergency innovation that held.
The most radical thing he did was never legislated. Avot d’Rabbi Natan (4:5) records it as a conversation between Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai and Rabbi Yehoshua on the way out of Jerusalem. Rabbi Yehoshua looks at the ruined Temple and cries out that the place where Israel’s sins were atoned lies in rubble. And his teacher answers him: my son, do not be grieved. We have another atonement, and it is just as good. Gemilut chasadim. Acts of loving kindness
The Beit HaMikdash is still smoking. The blood is not dry. And the rebbe turns to his student at the exact moment of the deepest pain and says that the replacement already exists, you just have to go and be kind to someone.
So what do we build on, if we refuse to build on ash?
We build upon what came after. And it came, and it is still coming, and we are so preoccupied with documenting the wound that we have not yet learned to recognize the growth.
We build on the chesed. We build on the tens of thousands who showed up with nothing asked of them in the wake of October 7th. The families who opened houses to strangers from the south for a year and the agricultural volunteers, meal trains, the reservists’ wives who organized like an army are each the building blocks of the Jewish future. In the worst hours of modern Jewish history, the Jewish people’s first instinct was not to hide. It was to organize.
We build on the innovation. We are creating new liturgies and new rituals and new institutions, which is exactly what Yavneh was, and our great-grandchildren will assume they have always existed.
We build on the voices. We amplify the voices of young Jews who arrived on campus in 2023 with a vague ancestral fondness for Israel and who are now, three years later, the most Jewishly literate and least apologetic cohort I have encountered in my adult life. That is not a byproduct of the tragedy. That is the Jewish event.
Some of this is small. In my own community we opened a free, kosher fridge and named it for Hersh Goldberg Polin, and every day, people both shop for food and provide it, both without question. It is one refrigerator in one Chicago suburb and it is also, by Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai’s plain ruling, an altar built of chesed (kindness) Hersh’s name is on a thing that feeds people. That is the innovation. That is what it looks like to honor the dead by handing something to the living.
Late 19th-century Polish Chassidic rabbi, The Sefat Emet, Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter of Ger, read a double meaning in our verse (Sfat Emet, Devarim 27:2).
Shevet, sitting, is spelled with the same three letters as Shabbat. Their sitting at the mountain, he says, was a Shabbat. It was the place of rest.
And then he asks, what is a Shabbat for? He answers that the rest on Shabbat illuminates a person for the days of action.
Sinai was the Shabbat, and the Land was the week.
One can say then, that the Sefat Emet is finishing Rashi’s sentence. Rashi said rav lachem means much greatness is yours, and then he listed the great accomplishments at Sinai: the Mishkan, the menorah, the Torah, the Sanhedrin. The Sefat Emet says that what all of that greatness was for was to increase their power to inherit the Land. Everything they received at that mountain was capacity building, and that capacity was pointed at a destination. It was never a possession.
On Wednesday night we will sit on the floor and read Eicha. We will say the kinot, and this year some of them will have names in them we knew.
Lean in to this. Mourn as fully as feels authentic and healthy to you.
And then, on Thursday afternoon, get up off the floor.
The halacha insists on it. After chatzot on Tisha B’Av we rise from the ground and sit on chairs (Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 559:3).
What was done to us was never a Jewish event. There have been so many of them that we mistook the list for a heritage. The Jewish event is what comes next. It always was.
There is a verse waiting for us at the top of this week’s parsha that reminds us, “You have spent enough time on this mountain.” You have received and built so much here. Much of the foundation of the Jewish people was built here. nd now, turn and journey, and go build a Judaism and a Land worth inheriting.
