Look and You Will See: Parshat Re’eh

JOSHUA OFFERS A TOAST IN HONOR OF CONQUERING THE LAND
CLIP FROM THE JEWS ARE COMING. Screenshot (used in accordance with Clause 27a of copyright law)

Two years ago, in my 11^th blog I wrote about the 55^th anniversary of our arrival to Israel, not as olim, but as a couple who never left. I wrote then that it was time to express our gratitude for a country to which we have contributed a lot, but from which we have received so much more. And I added that to express these sentiments, I didn’t have to look further than this week’s parshat re’eh, which means SEE. I wrote then that we had seen much and had received some curses, like the indignities of aging, but that we have received mostly blessings, which too often we didn’t appreciate. And then I added the following—and boy did I give myself an ayin ha’ra (the evil eye) when I wrote:

For instance, we take for granted, that all three of our children and seven grandchildren live in Israel. This is not necessarily a given. The parsha teaches us that we should recognize this and give thanks…. We did not appear empty-handed but came with our gifts to this land and were blessed accordingly (which was a paraphrase of the last two verses of parshat re’eh –Deuteronomy 16: 16-17).

Those of you who read my blogs regularly may notice a certain amount of optimism that is not necessarily the me of today. First of all, two of my children (and one grandchild) now live outside of Israel. October 7^th changed my family’s life in a way that I could not foresee two years ago. At our usual close ‘framily’ (friends/family) Friday night dinner, someone asked, “given the situation today, would you consider going back to the old country?” I immediately answered that we are too old to leave and we could not afford to live in the States today. Only afterwards did I realize that my answer was a pragmatic one, and the question had more to do with ideology.  If I were asked that question again, I might answer differently, that we are staying here with both the blessings and curses that we read in this week’s parsha:

See, ראה, this day I set before you blessing and curse: blessing, if you obey the commandments of your God יהוה that I enjoin upon you this day; and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of your God, but turn away from the path that I enjoin upon you this day and follow other gods, whom you have not experienced (Deuteronomy 11: 26-28).

While on the brink of entering the land, before crossing the Jordan River into Canaan, the Israelites are told what they are commanded to do. In the final program of the sixth season of the satirical program The Jews Are Coming Joshua starts out by enjoining all of the Israelites to get their act together and be a united people. But things get out of hand and the fractious band of people start fighting with each other over the territory before they even cross the Jordan. Sounds familiar!

One would think that the first thing would be to plant trees, build homes and fences around their settlements (nachalot). Perhaps they should also have a guard tower, to make sure no one attacks them. And since they are God worshippers, maybe build a synagogue or two. Instead God enjoined us to do the following TWO things:

First: You must destroy all the sites at which the nations you are to dispossess worshiped their gods, whether on lofty mountains and on hills or under any luxuriant tree. Tear down their altars, smash their pillars, put their sacred posts to the fire, and cut down the images of their gods, obliterating their name from that site. Sounds like the Taliban!

Talk about negativity! We are starting on the left foot. Rather than communicate and understand the people living in the land we are to possess, and become good neighbors with them, we are told to destroy all of their holy sites, no matter where they are. Not only are we to “dispossess” them, but we are to obliterate any evidence of their right to their own land. Does this burning spree include the inhabitants’ holy books, the remnants of their culture? We know from our own history, that one cannot totally destroy a culture and that from the small remaining remnants, a new group will arise. But this works both ways. The ramifications of this commandment are still with us today.

Now let’s look at the second commandment.

Look only to the site that your God will choose amidst all your tribes as God’s habitation, to establish the divine name there. There you are to go, and there you are to bring your burnt offerings and other sacrifices, your tithes and contributions, your votive and freewill offerings, and the firstlings of your herds and flocks (Deuteronomy 12: 2-6).

Until now, Israelites could worship where they pleased. But now there will be a centralized location for worship. This will lead to all sorts of hardship in the future. First, because they will have to shlep to this new location to worship; they will end up building a temple; they will have to pay taxes to support this new building. They will have to perform hard labor (a corvee), and then there will be a new priestly class whose needs will often be in competition with the rest of the people and its leaders.

This is one of the main messages in the book of Deuteronomy and is a real revolution. Three major holidays will be instituted. They will be called sheloshah regalim (literally three feet) because people will have to go up to the centralized location by foot. There will now be a demand for horses, donkeys, wagons. There will be traffic jams. The people living in the central location will exploit the pilgrims. They will hike prices for everything. New industries will be built—hostels for the pilgrims; food and water stands on the new highway, maintenance of the roads which lead to the centralized place of worship. Perhaps armed guards will be hired to protect the worshippers from bandits. Local governments in the peripheries will be in competition for funding and recognition. And the irony is that the new centralized location will itself turn into an idol and will be the cause of dispute that continues until today.

But all is not that clear. Despite the fact that we are told to totally obliterate the culture, it is clear that this is impossible, because the chapter ends with this interesting comment:

When your God has cut down before you the nations that you are about to enter and dispossess, and you have dispossessed them and settled in their land, beware of being lured into their ways after they have been wiped out before you! Do not inquire about their gods, saying, “How did those nations worship their gods? I too will follow those practices.” You shall not act thus toward your God for they perform for their gods every abhorrent act that God detests; they even offer up their sons and daughters in fire to their gods (Deuteronomy 29-31).

The old culture is still there; on the one hand it has been wiped out, on the other hand the threat is still there. And the intellectually curious among us, are told not to inquire about the remnants of the culture that clearly still exists. And to cement this, we will now demonize this people whose culture we have destroyed, by saying that unlike us, they do not care about their children for they sacrifice their sons and daughters.

I think it is very important to read our texts carefully and understand their ramifications for the present. We are both a nation that has had stones cast at us, and a nation that casts stones at others. We are both self-blaming and other-blaming. We are told that our God wants “perfect” sacrifices—something which is not practical, yet we live in an imperfect world, where the place of absolute statements could be considered ridiculous, were the implications of total destruction not so ominous.

We are all in a uneasy state of suspense, of fraught-ness, characterized by emotional distress and tension. We may have dodged the bullet of World War Three for now, but nothing has been resolved. We are in a state of waiting. Just when we thought things could not get any worse, they do get worse.

So let me end with some nice personal things that happened this week. As many of you know, I do not get out that much. But this week we went to our in-law’s henna celebration of their daughter’s marriage and it was a wonderful reunion—I had not seen much of that side of the family since before COVID. We were all excited to see my grandson whom I had not seen since February who returned from part one of his world travels. On the same day, right before I picked him up from the train station, I sent in the final comments on my translated book to the editor. So it is now in the next stage prior to publication. I had a long list of personal goals—and this was the last doable one. Since I plan to take a short vacation from teaching on zoom, my “to do” list now just consists of writing this weekly blog. So see you next week, as we say in Hebrew, beli neder, and let’s hope for better times.