By Rabbi Sylvia Rothschild

Parashat Vayelech is the shortest sidra in our torah cycle with just 30 verses. And even when paired, as it often is, with Parashat Nitzavim, the additional 40 verses still leave us with the shortest torah reading in the year.

And yet so much happens in these short verses. Moses concludes the speeches he has been making to the people since the beginning of the book of Deuteronomy;  speeches retelling their history, reminding them of particular values and responsibilities,  reflecting on their journey, reiterating the importance of their covenant with God and the responsibility to be faithful to this covenant relationship.  Three times in this chapter he exhorts them to be strong and resolute.  Twice he states that God will not fail or forsake them.   Having addressed first “all  Israel” and then Joshua in front of all the people telling him that he will lead the people into the land, Moses then writes down “et HaTorah hazot” – this teaching, and gives it to the Levites who carry the Ark of the covenant, and to all the elders of Israel, and then instructs them about Hakhel – that every seven years on the festival of Succot there was to be a full gathering of everyone in the community, men, women, children and strangers alike, to listen to this teaching and to learn and so to follow it faithfully.  He specifies that the children, who had not lived the experience of the exodus and desert journey, must listen and learn, so that they would understand their story, would revere God and follow God’s teaching in the land to which they were about to cross.

God reminds Moses that the time of his death is approaching and tells him to bring Joshua to the Tent of Meeting so that He may instruct him. As both Moses and Joshua enter the tent, God appears in the pillar of cloud and rather than instructing Joshua, God tells Moses that he will soon be dead, that afterwards the people will forsake God and follow the alien gods of the land, and that  the consequences of this will be terrible.  God’s anger will be unleashed and God will hide the divine face from them because of their evil deeds.  They will understand that their troubles have come because God is not with them, but God will hide the divine face from them. God instructs Moses to write a poem and teach it to the people of Israel” as a witness against them”, because, God tells him, God already knows what plans the people are devising that will take them from the path, even before they enter the Land that God promised them.

So Moses writes a second document, the poem we know as Ha’azinu, and teaches it to the Israelites.  An interpolation in the text then informs us that God commanded Joshua bin Nun, telling him to be strong and of good courage, because he will be the one to lead the Israelites into the promised land, and God will be with him.

Now the text returns –  we read that Moses concludes his writing “as Moses completed writing the words of this Torah in a book, until they were  finished” (v24) he gave it to the Levites and told them to put it at the side of the Ark of the Covenant “as a witness against the people”.  He speaks of the stubbornness and defiance of the people even while he is still lives – so how much more so will they be stiff-necked and self-centred once he is no longer around to correct them?  But who is he addressing at this point?  Only the Levites who will have a particular role in the ritual life of the people,  or the whole community? The text is ambiguous.

Then Moses tells the Levites to gather all the elders and officials of the tribes for him to speak to them and call heaven and earth as witness against them. He tells them he knows that once he is dead they will act wickedly and eventually the consequences of them failing to act according to God’s teachings will bring about catastrophe because God will lose patience with them. And then the chapter ends with the introduction to the poem, where we are told that Moses recited the words of the poem to the very end, in the hearing of the whole congregation of Israel.

The sidra is part of an ongoing narrative that comprises the whole of the Book of Deuteronomy, structured as the final exhortations of Moses to the people as they camp across the Jordan waiting to enter the promised land. But it is also one moment in time that explores the dying days of Moses’ leadership and of his life.  It is a liminal moment before the next stage, the change of generation as the old leader leaves the stage, and the people around him know that life will change, that they will move on from their nomadic existence into their committed promised land.

But it is also a literary gem, one short chapter that is tightly written, with repeated words and phrases forming triggers within the text.

Twice we read of Moses writing down words – torah – in a book which is then given to the Levites to care for alongside the Ark of the Covenant. Twice we are told that the people will forsake God and the consequences of this will be devastating. Twice Moses is told that he will shortly die.   Twice we are reminded that God made an oath to deliver the people to the Land promised to them. Twice people are told that God walks with them, will not forsake them, twice we are told that the people will forsake God and regret this bitterly.

Are the people to be strong and of good courage because God will be with them – as is asserted three times in this short text. Is there no possibility that they will not become weak and fail to live up to the covenant with God when they reach the land? How can these two assertions co-exist?  And yet they do.

And there are so many questions. Is Moses at 120 years too weak be mobile, in his words “I am not able to go out or to come in”, when we are told right at the start that Moses went out (Vayelech) to speak to the community – a word that appears unnecessary in every other instance of his declarations.  And what are we to make of this when later we are told that at his death his  was eye undimmed, his physical strength unabated.

The repeated use of a written text to “act as witness” against the people is also problematic. The hope is asserted that the people will hear and learn and act according to God’s teachings – so why should the text be a kind of hostile hostage to fortune?

The timeline of the text is odd  – narratives are fractured as well as repeated, there is an almost wandering quality in the story. What happens when is hard to pin down, there is a sense of the ambiguous, even among those repetitions of key words, phrases and themes. There is a dreamlike quality to this text, a sense of trying to make sense and transmit something of the utmost importance, but of occasionally losing the thread.

The repetitions form a kind of spiral in the text, but they also act as parentheses within it, and in the centre of it all are two individual stories  – the first is Hakhel – the commandment that every seven years the whole people are to  as one community and listen to the teachings in order to learn and to do. The second is the moment when the leadership passes from Moses to Joshua, when both are in the presence of God at the tent of meeting and Moses is told of his imminent death, that Joshua will take his place.

In my work as Spiritual Care Lead at a hospice I spend many hours with people in their final weeks and hours of life. And I recognise the way this text is written – the urgency alongside the ambiguity, the way a person reflects on the past and projects  themselves into a future they know they will not see – yet still see themselves in the continuity of experience.  The repetitions and the fractured narratives. The need to retell and record and to impress on others the learning they have acquired in their own lives. The story telling and the imperatives, the fears and the repeated reassurances – even while knowing those reassurances cannot be guaranteed.

And I see two big themes at the end of life for those who see themselves connected to others – Firstly,  that even though the individual is themselves leaving this life, there is a desire that the connection will continue, that the family or friendship group will continue to see each other, support each other, reiterate and reclaim all that they share that binds them to each other and to the dying person, so that the thread of relationship and shared understanding will both give meaning to the lived life of the dying person, but also take them forward  long after they are no longer physically present.  We write on gravestones the acronym taf nun tzadi beit heh – may the soul of the deceased be bound in the threads of life – an expectation that like a woven fabric in time, every soul and life is woven together, each one necessary for what will be woven after them.

The mitzvah of Hakhel creates regular future gatherings so that connectivity and meaning will not be lost. It weaves each person of the community together, binding everyone into the connecting threads of life

And the second is the need for someone to step up and into the roles of the dying person – for the next generation to take their place in holding it all together, so that the person can die with the reassurance that all is not lost, that their life built the sort of meaning which will outlive them and they will impact on the future because someone else takes up the link in the chain of eternity. Joshua, who has been at Moses’ side throughout the journey, is now invested in this role, and will indeed take them into the land.

How do these two themes find a way to express themselves? It is always with words. Written or spoken, whispered or in the notes section on the phone, in a diary or a poem or a song. We embody all that we are into Devarim – words that can transcend time and cross space, that will speak to generations we will never know and that can sit quietly for decades or even longer, until a reader comes to encounter them and invest them with new life.

The sidra is short but the message is eternal. We each walk along our own pathway in life, but we walk together – as the text tells us, God walks alongside and will not forsake us if we pay attention to our covenantal relationship.  Generations come and generations go, we mourn as we lose the people so precious to us to death, but we never lose their stories or memories, the way they impacted on us and shaped us in life, the way their voices speak in our souls.

The relationships we nurture will nurture us – and more. They will create the continuity of meaning, create the bridge down the generations, and like the poem we will read in the next chapter, will mean that the meaning of our lives will never be forgotten.

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