Parashat V’Etchanan: The foundations of peoplehood

In Parashat V’Etchanan, Moshe begins his oration before the People of Israel in the first person, and yet, his subject is not himself, but a nation that he hopes to build with his words. His topic is the memory of the future.  Parashat V’Echanana is a blueprint for peoplehood.

The key to Israel’s future, Moshe tells us, lies in their keeping the Torah, but this in turn depends on their keeping alive the memory of Sinai:

The goal is the transmission of lessons learned across millennia, not the mere decades of a human life, or the few centuries of an ideology. The goal is nothing less than the manipulation of history itself—the creation of a new type of human society. God can afford to wait, but He needs the material on which to work.

Memory and the meaning of history

This is not mere historical recollection, it is memory, the transmission of a visceral experience down through the generations. In his iconic book, Zakhor, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi writes about this particularly Jewish form of ahistoric memory:

This novel perception was not the result of philosophical speculation, but of the peculiar nature of Israelite faith. It emerged out of an intuitive and revolutionary understanding of God, and was refined through profoundly felt historical experiences. However it came about, in retrospect the consequences are manifest. Suddenly, as it were, the crucial encounter between man and the divine shifted away from the realm of nature and the cosmos to the plane of history, conceived now in terms of divine challenge and human response. (Yerushalmi, p. 8)

Yerushalmi goes on to say, “Only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people. … If there can be no return to Sinai, then what took place at Sinai must be borne along the conduits of memory to those who were not there that day.”

We don’t record history, we relive it. This means breaking the link to actual happenings and dealing only with our perception of them. In this way, we can understand Moshe’s retelling of the experience on Sinai to those who stood before him, who were only children at that time:

Although the commandments—the contract between God and Israel—were written on stone, the voice of God never ceased speaking; it is heard to this day, if we will only listen. The verb form “listen” or “hear” occurs no less than 23 times in our Parasha, including in the phrase that forms the foundation of Jewish belief: “Listen Israel, the Eternal our God is one!”

But how can The Eternal, the transcendent God, the creator of being itself, be “our God”, an immanent, personal God, who takes an interest in human morality? The answer is in the preamable to the covenant: “I am the Eternal your God, Who took you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” not “I am the Eternal, Who created the universe”. We can know God through the meaning that we find in our own history.

Memory as social choice

But not every happening can, or should, be transmitted to future generations. Cultural memory, like individual memory, must be selective. Only those things that further group survival and group well being are remembered. “Many prophets arose in Israel, double the number of those who left Egypt; but prophecy that was needed for future generations was written and that which was not needed was not written.” (Megillah 14a)

What defines a people is precisely those events that it chooses to accept as meaningful. Some cultures choose to remember heroes or warriors, adventurers or scientists. Jewish culture remembers the moral strengths and failings of our ancestors, the humble beginnings of the nation, and the transformative event at Sinai.

Moshe’s passionate plea to the people to choose the right path is founded on his understanding that only in following the Law that he has transmitted to them will they survive and flourish. A mission has been given to them to become a kingdom of priests—a nation in which knowledge and moral insight are not the domain of the elite few, but of every member of society, from the greatest to the least influential.

But Moshe knows well that the creation of such a nation is fraught with peril. He knows that only through catastrophic failure will the nation of Israel come into its inheritance:

“All is foreseen, but freedom is given”

While Moshe ties together the past and future into a web of meaning, and seems to foretell the fortunes of the nation in the distant future, the outcome is not at all certain. Moshe emphasizes again and again that the God who spoke to the people was unlike anything in heaven or earth, and therefore cannot be represented by anything within the people’s experience: “Take care, for you saw no manner of form on the day that God spoke to you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire.”

And yet, earlier in the Torah, we are told that mankind was created in the image and likeness of God: “In the image of God (Tselem Elohim) He created them; male and female He created them.” What can this mean if God has no form? The answer may lie in the name with which God names himself: “I will be what I will be”. God is a free agent; not only can we not predict what He will do, but what he will do is not predictable in principle.

And, like God, man too is unpredictable. In the Song of Creation, with which the Book of Genesis opens, every creative act ends with the poetic refrain: “God saw that it was good”. This refrain is missing from the creation of man; there is no statement that man’s creation was seen by God to be good. Perhaps this is because man is never completed—as a free agent, he can never be a finished product. From the moment he left the Garden, he became a partner in his own creation. Human freedom partakes of the chaos at the heart of creation—the capacity for evil as well as for good.

Thus, just as God will be what He will be, so human beings create their own future. In the act of choosing this or that path, we alter the outcome of all future moments, and those moments in turn lead to more choices, until the whole cascading chain of consequences runs far beyond any ability to predict. The only power in our hands—and it is an overwhelmingly serious one—is the power to choose in this moment! Each decision brings its own cascading reality with it. And so individuals, civilizations, and species all hang by the thread of a decision by one person.

And that one person is each of us.