Va Yelech
Deuteronomy 31:1-31:30
Précis: The Israelites are instructed to annihilate the 7 Canaanite nations and take possession of the Promised Land. The death of Moses approaches, and 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.
Deut. 31:3 “It is the Lord your God who will cross ahead of you; He will destroy these nations before you, and you shall dispossess them. Joshua is the one who will cross ahead of you, just as the Lord has spoken.”
Rabbi David Milder has written (MyJewishLearning.com, 9/16/14) about the commandments to the Israelites to utterly destroy the 7 Canaanite nations and take sole possession of the Promised Land. Such annihilation is abhorrent to our “modern” ears. It gets worse. We are to "doom them to destruction, grant them no terms, and give them no quarter" (7:2), as well as "tear down their altars, smash their pillars...and consign their images to the fire." (7:5)
We certainly wish that our holy Torah was not quite so violent. But there is a quandary. If the Jews destroy all of these idol worshippers, how is that Moses continually must warn the Israelites against "alien gods in the Israelites' midst," and how often must he warn them not to "turn to other gods and serve them"? If the Canaanite nations were eliminated, how could future generations of Israelites be led to idol worship by Canaanites?
Milder suggests that we look to the historical record for some resolution of this dilemma. We assume that the Israelites entered Canaan about 1250 B.C.E. While Deuteronomy is written as a contemporary account, most modern scholars assume it was in fact written during the rule of King Josiah (circa 621 B.C.), which is almost 6 centuries after the fact (compare: Columbus sailed 523 years ago). His thesis: Deuteronomy represents the issues of the time of its writing. While there were no Canaanite nations during the reign of Josiah, there certainly was idol worship going on. And it is really idol worship that is the crux of the story.
Josiah was king during a brief respite from foreign domination, and he oversaw a national restoration of religious independence. As King of Judah, Josiah was intent on ending the influence of the Assyrian overlords, which included idol worship. To the writers of Deuteronomy, idol worship was a far greater challenge that the military threat of the Canaanite nations; they believed that if only we had ridden ourselves of idol worship 600 years before, they would not be forced to deal with issue during Josiah’s time. So, in effect, the writers of Deuteronomy are projecting backward to the time of Moses and Joshua the critical issue of their own day. As Milder suggests, “rather than being viewed as a mandate for the annihilation of indigenous peoples, Deuteronomy is best understood as a critique of the idolatrous habits of Jews in a much later age.”
While this thesis does not make the annihilation of the 7 Canaanite peoples any easier for us to swallow, it may put it in a historical context. And by putting it in a historical conquest, we are left with serious questions: have we in fact annihilated the threats to the Jewish People posed not only by idolatry, but by terrorists? Have we annihilated the mistrust and baseless hatred which exists against Israel and Jews, and between Jews today?
On Shabbat Shuvah, the Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when we read this parasha, these remain important questions to consider. How will history written 600 years from now record our actions?
