Rabbi Anderson's Divrei Torah

Shabbat shalom! Since last Shabbat, TI has hosted both a bris and a funeral – I love that it was in that order, and I love that in both cases there were large and loving multi-generational families coming together to support one another and to remember their shared pasts. I loved meeting some new people, discovering more about who’s related to whom, and listening to amazing stories about the grandparents and great-grandparents little Samson Philip Mills was named after, and how Norman Rosenthal, zichrono l’tovah, shared jokes with his children, grandchildren, and TI Board colleagues.

Those stories made me think a different way about Parshat Devarim. With the exception of a handful of verses at the beginning and end of the book of Deuteronomy, the entire book is a speech Moses is making to the Israelites, and this week’s Torah portion – especially its triennial reading – is almost entirely about Israel’s past. Now, at this point in the Torah, Moses is one hundred and twenty years old, so he’s probably entitled to do a little kvetching. But here he goes above and beyond: in Moses’ telling, all the Israelites did since leaving the mountain of God is make mistakes. They sulked, complained, and went against his advice; naturally, everything went wrong. They wouldn’t listen to him; even God stopped listening to him. Only at the end of this parsha do the Israelites straighten up and start listening to Moses and winning military victories.

If you’ve been following the weekly Torah reading cycle through the summer, you’ll recognize Parshat Devarim as a summary of the Book of Numbers, but with all the good stories taken out. We don’t get Aaron pleading for Miriam to be healed; we don’t get Bilaam blessing the Israelites even though he was hired to curse them; we don’t get the daughters of Tzlofchad standing up for their inheritance rights; we don’t get the tribes of Gad, Reuven, and Menashe offering to fight in front of the other Israelite forces so that they can keep their families and livestock safe on the other side of the Jordan; we don’t get the entire Israelite nation stopping their journey for a week to wait for Miriam’s recovery and a month to mourn for Aaron’s death. In a loving family, these would be the stories people retell at major events! Instead, Moses gives us the version of Numbers that’s basically a disaster roadtrip.

Since we have two versions of these events, though, we can see that there are not just omissions but discrepancies between the version in Numbers and the version in Deuteronomy. For instance: in both Torah accounts of how Israel defeated the Amorites, King Sihon refuses their initial request to pass through peacefully. In the Numbers version (21:21-35) the Israelites simply defend themselves in response to Sihon’s attack. In the Deuteronomy version (2:24-37), though, God actually tells the Israelites to go to war against Sihon – and then, remarkably, Moses ignores God’s command and sends peaceful messengers asking to pass through (2:26)! Since God has hardened Sihon’s heart, he refuses, and the Israelites promptly go to war against the Amorites. Biblical scholars could easily explain this discrepancy as a matter of two conflicting traditions, but Jewish Torah readers wanted it to mean more. Very early rabbinic midrash[1] gives the first explanation: Moses was actually following the law laid out in Deuteronomy chapter 20 (10-18), which requires an offer of peaceful surrender for a normal battle – but does not apply in cases of divine commandment. But the Tanhuma tradition, reaching into the early Middle Ages, builds on that insight for a much better story: this is the point where Moses drops everything and argues with God about whether holy war is ever a good idea. “Am I to go in and smite them now? I do not know who has sinned and who has not sinned. Instead, I will come to them in peace,” Tanhuma imagines Moses telling God.[2] In one version, Moses also points out God’s earlier decision to offer terms to Pharoah.[3] Amazingly, God backs down and agrees with Moses, offering the laws of Deuteronomy 20 that require the Israelites to offer peace before they begin to wage war.

This is a great story. If you recast God as Bubbie or Zadie and make the conflict about anything except holy war – in my family, it would probably involve baked goods – it could even be a great family story. It’s clear from the Torah to this point that Moses and God have somehow become mishpocheh, and that Moses sees himself as an exasperated parent to the Israelites – back in Numbers 11(:12) he complained about being asked to carry them as if they were a baby! A loving family would tell the story the way the Tanhuma does, where God tries to issue an order and