Parashat Va'etchanon

by Rabbi Frank Dabba Smith of Harrow and Wembley Progressive Synagogue

Va’etchanon - Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11

This sidrah contains the ‘ten commandments’ and the sh’ma. I would like, however, to focus on Moses.

There is something that everyone feels, at least sometimes: that life can be a struggle. Everyone experiences pain, either emotional or physical and many people experience both sorts of pain simultaneously. And each person’s pain is real to them.

Each of us knows what it is to feel a sense of loneliness, weariness or sadness. Perhaps, too, a sense of betrayal or a loss of purpose.

What attracts me to Moses is that he is a person who is portrayed in the Torah as someone who never has it easy. He struggles with his faults, his hot temper. He struggles with his family. He struggles with the people whom he has been chosen to lead. And, this man, charged with an extraordinary task, struggles against his own feelings of futility.

The Israelites wind him up with their endless bickering and attention-seeking behaviour. Actually, I can’t begin to imagine the scale of his stress. The sheer volume of what Moses has to deal with in terms of unprocessed human trauma and pain is totally beyond the comprehension of any rabbi. One cannot even begin to imagine the quantity (and quality) of the burdensome breugeses going on between his ‘congregants’ not to mention the unfounded rubbish that his followers say about him as they project their own pain and frustration onto him.

And, now, Deuteronomy: Moses’ last chance. He is soon to die. His last chance to shape collective memory: from where the people have come, how they have gotten to where they are, and what lies ahead. His last chance to explain the teachings, what they will need to know and follow in order to survive, physically and spiritually.

And he does so knowing that he will not long be with them. Perhaps he is worn out from it all and wants out now Perhaps, he wishes he could’ve at least set foot in the Promised Land, if only for a moment. A kind of a reward for all his efforts.

Moses actually pleads to be allowed to enter the Promised Land. In this week’s sidrah, the use of the word va’etchanon suggests humble begging: ‘I pleaded with God….’

It is pertinent to recall why God decreed that Moses would not ‘cross over and see that good land…’ Moses and Aaron had gathered the thirsty Israelites around a rock. God had instructed Moses to speak to the rock, but, in anger and frustration, he had struck it instead. He was punished not for striking the rock but for what he had said while doing so: ‘Shall we [himself and Aaron] bring you forth water out of this rock?’ What he should have said was: ‘Shall He [God} bring you forth water…?’

As a result, God retorted: ‘Because you did not believe in Me, to sanctify Me in the eyes of the Children of Israel, you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them’ (Numbers 20:12). By substituting ‘we’ for ‘He’, Moses had made himself and Aaron out to be the real miracle-workers.

Perhaps, in his anger and frustration, Moses had become inflated with his own importance. To be sure, he had had a tough time shepherding hundreds of thousands of Israelites across the desert. But even the loneliness and frustrations of leadership were no excuse for arrogance. Perhaps, he knew it, too.

God, too, had struggled with the people. It had been no small task to wean them off superstition and idolatry and to substitute the Torah, with its demands for allegiance to one God, the God of mercy and justice.

So Moses begged. But he was refused his request to enter the land; marshalling what strength remained, he carried on guiding his people until he died.

Exhorting the Israelites to follow God’s laws, he urged them not to forget what had happened at Mount Sinai as they moved progressively further from it.

Though living under the cloud of death, he fulfilled his responsibilities with purpose and dignity. This was courage and dedication of extraordinary dimensions.

Rabbi Frank Dabba Smith

Harrow & Wembley Progressive Synagogue