The Land of Redemption

Nitzavim/ Va Yelech
Précis: Moses comes toward the conclusion of his final address to the People: You stand (nitzavim) this day before Adonai. In his final words to the People, Moses recounts the wonders Adonai has done for the people, and calls upon them to remain loyal to God through the covenant. The extent of the covenantal relationship is explained: it will survive exile and captivity with a return to the Land. The Torah is an “open book” that is accessible to all the People. A blessing and a curse have been set before the People, and they are to choose their path. Moses urges them to choose the blessing, to choose life, so that they may inherit the Land which God has sworn to their forefathers.
In Va Yelech, as the death of Moses approaches, he transfers his mantle of leadership to Joshua as his successor. Moses orders regular reading of the Law, and then transfers the written Torah into the hands of the Levites for safekeeping, in the Ark of the Covenant.

Deuteronomy 30:3 “Then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and take you back in love. He will bring you together again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you."

JTS Chancellor Schorsch writing in his Parashah Commentary (9/11/04) focuses on this verse. After the terrors of the prior parasha's curses, we come to this promise: after exile, God will bring the People back to the land.

As a result of the destruction by the Assyrians in the 8th Century BCE of the Northern Kingdom and its 10 tribes, that part of the Jewish People was lost forever. The promise of this verse does not seem to have been fulfilled for the 10 Lost Tribes.

When the first Temple was destroyed in Jerusalem, and the Babylonian Exile began in 586 B.C.E. how could this remnant (Kingdom of Judah) of the Jewish People survive, given that their central mode of worship and identification, the Temple itself, was now gone, and they were faced with the kind of exile which ended the existence of their Northern brethren? How could they keep their belief in the promise of this verse?

Writing 1,500 years later, Rashi offered an answer: As Schorsch explains, “the Hebrew verb for restore ("God will restore your fortunes") is intransitive rather than transitive, meaning that "God will come back with you out of captivity…’From this verse our sages learned that God's presence (shekhina) dwelled with Israel in the torment of its exile. And when they were redeemed, it is as if God ordered redemption for Himself, that He would return with them’."

The midrash cited by Rashi is an expression of God’s compassion and identification with Israel. God suffers along with Israel. This helped the Jews of Babylonia to re-imagine Jewish theology: God was not limited to the Land of Israel, but was Universal. God could be worshipped anywhere. It is ironic that the birth of Judaism can be traced to the loss of the Jewish national home. The sacrificial cult was to be replaced by study of Torah, acts of righteousness, and prayer. This was the beginning of the change from a sacrificial cult centered on sacred space to a religion centered on sacred text, which, over the following thousand years, came to fruition with the Mishnah and Talmud.

This is not, in any way, to diminish the centrality of the Land of Israel from the religious life of Israel: in fact, it is the central point of the restoration of the “fortune” as promised in this week’s verse. What it also shows is that Jews did not await the redemption from Babylon passively: they created a religious way of life and communal institutions that prepared them to fulfill the promise of this verse: to be restored to the land from among all of the peoples among where God had scattered them.

We in the Diaspora have a repsonsibility to support the restoration of the Jewish People to the land. As we come to the New Year, let's resolve to make sure that our support for Israel remains constant.