July 20, 2007 - DEVAREEM: The Responsibility is Ours - (5th of Av, 5767)

This week, we begin the Book of Deuteronomy. It is one that is exceedingly worthy of study. Deuteronomy contains some of the most uplifting and intellectually insightful passages in all of Torah. In it, Moses recapitulates Israelite history, recounting for the people what has transpired since they left Egypt. He does this in order to prepare them for what is coming, the conquest of the Promised Land.

Moses, however, doesn't stick to history in this first chapter. He deviates markedly and specifically from the way the spy story unfolded in the Book of Numbers. As you remember, because it wasn't so very weeks ago when we read in Shelach L'cha, it is [and I here quote from Harvey Field's Commentary on Deuteronomy] “God who commands Moses to send a leader from every tribe to scout the Land of Israel. They are instructed to return with information about the geography, people, fortifications, soil, and forests of the land, along with some samples of its fruit. When the scouts return at the end of forty days, they report that the land ‘flows with milk and honey’ but warn that its peoples are giants and its cities well fortified. They spread fear among the people, telling them, ‘We cannot attack the people who inhabit the land for they are stronger than we’” (Fields, p. 102)

As you will also remember, chaos breaks loose as the Israelites panic because of the evil report. They choose to believe the ten spies who spread calumny about the Land rather than to listen to Joshua and Caleb who, trying to calm the storm, swear that the Israelites, with God's help, are indeed capable of taking possession of the Promised Land. The people, however, faithlessly and brutishly push for a return to Egypt. In this Exodus passage, Moses puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of the ten spies for this most devastating insurrection.

But, here in Deuteronomy, Moses switches certain of the details of the story. It isn't God in this account, but rather the Israelites themselves, camped on the border of the Promised Land, who first request that Moses send spies. And in this narrative, the spies actually, themselves, return a good report of the land; but it is the people themselves who refuse to leave their tents to go and do the Lord's bidding to conquer the Land. Instead, they return to a favorite pass–time of whining about their lot there in the desert, demanding that cowardly return to Egypt.

So what is going on here, and why does Moses switch the onus of responsibility from the spies to the people as he begins his final orations to the masses at the edge of the Promised Land? Has his memory failed because of his age? Or is there something else going on here?

We might digress and speak about the difference between history and narrative. It is clear that there is a wide disparity between the two passages, between God commanding in Numbers and the people demanding in Deuteronomy. History, we know, is the recounting of facts. Narrative is rather the shaping of the story in order to drive home certain ideas, to make specific points. Moses is creating his own narrative here at the beginning of this book because he wants to point this cantankerous people in a certain direction. He wants to rebuke them and harden them to their past, ineffective behaviors so that they are prepared in every way for what lies before them. It is crucial that, as they now approach the moment of truth, they don't lose heart, especially when they encounter stiff resistance as they cross over in to the land that God has promised them.

It is important to note that Moses opens with this severe criticism of the people's attitude. He sticks it to them, as it were, and they amazingly listen to him. Imagine, as an employer or a teacher, opening up on your employees or your students like this, telling them how disappointed you are in their efforts or demeanor. How do you think they would respond? In this day and age, they might actually get up and walk out. They certainly might tune you and “your negative noise” out and ignore you.

But Moses has a purpose in changing the facts and telling the story differently. It is to show the people that it is they who are responsible for any evil that befalls them. It is their own lack of faith in Moses' and God's leadership and their own decision not to move forward that has gotten them into trouble so that an entire generation including Moses himself have or will soon perish in the desert. They can't blame their troubles on God- directed spies in this instance. It is their own words and their own deeds which convict them here.

Harvey Fields in his brilliant commentary on the Torah points to the sins of omission other great leaders have made throughout history, faults that Moses, in Devareem, seeks to avoid. The question Moses addresses to the people is the one of who is responsible for evil and who will be responsible in the future if things go wrong? Imagine, Field points out by referring to the book “The Abandonment of the Jews,” what might have happened were the Allied leaders, Roosevelt, Churchill and the Pope to have revealed what they knew about the Nazi's engagement in mass murder. Imagine were they to have severely condemned it and threatened punishment for these crimes and offered asylum to the Jews. The Nazis believed that the West didn't care about what they were doing to the Jews of Europe…that they could operate with impunity. To the degree that Allied leaders said nothing and did nothing, they proved the Nazis right. When evil abounds, when there are problems which begin to overwhelm a society, no one individual has a right to absent him or herself. Moses exercises a premeditated purpose in rebuking the people. He wants to expose their tendencies and does so by expressing his disappointment in their individual behavior because each one chose to stand by, join in the interminable q'vetching, but otherwise do nothing else. It wasn't their leaders, the spies' fault that the enterprise had stalled. It was the peoples' own choice. Should Moses ignore this propensity, all that transpired from the Exodus to Sinai and now to the edge of the Promised Land could be lost.

At this point in any summer, rabbis are looking around for sermon topics for the coming High Holidays. Sad to say, there is no shortage of such subjects this year. They include the faltering, mis–tmanaged War in Iraq and what now to do to extricate ourselves from what seems to be an endless entanglement there; the overwhelming costs attributed to this war and the concomitant; profligate governmental spending that has sent our national debt soaring to astronomical heights; the health care crisis; the problems which beset our schools; the challenges of global warming and climate change brought on by indiscriminate dumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; the overcrowding of prisons; the seemingly unresponsiveness of government to individual needs like those of the residents of New Orleans or for the soldiers now returning from long deployments and their problems that someone in an over–tbloated Pentagon should have been anticipating long before now; what to do about the millions of children in this nation who have no medical coverage or who go to sleep hungry each night; what to do about oil prices that have topped the $75 a barrel level and may soar even higher; how to bring some justice to Darfur…the list, unfortunately is long and growing longer. .

But were Moses speaking to us this evening, he'd not point at the folks in Washington or at the United Nations. He'd point at us and ask what we are doing about any of this or about one single issue in the litany I just listed. He'd tell us how disappointed he was in us that we were just shaking our heads about our national and international circumstances, but not taking the responsibility for them ourselves, but rather are putting the blame on our leaders and depending on them to get us out of them.

It's tough to take rebuke. It's tough to stand up and say that I was wrong or that you were in error, and to accept that and begin to do something about it. But doing so was the beginning for Moses in charging this people to stand up to what they had to do, to strengthening their faith in God and in themselves.

It was Edmund Burke who said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing.” It was against this that Moses created his narrative, changing the story as it appeared in the Book of Numbers, and changing history in a now charged up and inspired people