RE’EH
Re’eh—See (11:26-16:17) is a parsha that covers a series of topics that have been previously addressed in the five books. These topics include:
o The tit for tat theology of blessing and curses based on obedience to YHVH
o The total prohibition against anything related to worship of other deities besides YHVH
o The centralization of worship in one given place, rather than the pre-existing pattern of local sacred space
o The kinds of animals one may eat and one may not (what will become Kashrut)
o Shmita, the cancellation of debts on loans to Israelites and the time limited nature of intra communal slavery
o The three regalim or pilgrimage holidays of Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot.
I believe I have made some comments on all these topics except for Shmita, where I have instead pointed you elsewhere. Here I will focus on the following four themes:
Crossing the Jordan and returning home.
The desire to constrain prophecy and dreams
Devekut, or clinging to the divine
Interpreting the demand to kill metaphorically, rather than literally
The setting of the parsha, like all of Devarim, is with a people camped on the far or eastern side of the Jordan river, about to cross into the Promised Land. This parsha pays a little more attention to the impending crossing as part of the setting.
“And it shall be when YHVH, your God, will bring you to the land to which you are coming to take possession of it, that you shall put the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal. Aren’t they across the Jordan, beyond the way of the sun’s setting, in the land of the Canaanite who lives in the plain, opposite Gilgal, near the oaks of Mamre? For you are about to cross the Jordan to enter and possess the land that YHVH your God is assigning to you. When you have occupied it and are settled in it, take care to observe all the laws and rules that I have set before you this day.” (11:29-32).
We have come full circle back to the teaching tree, the Elon Moreh of Abraham in parshat Lech Lecha. Or have we?
There is a rhythm to our individual maturation process. There should be a rhythm to the adolescence of a person or a nation. Further, I believe that we should look at our maturation process both in the context of our human centric relationships and in the context of our relationships with the more than human world. Why? Because we live in a world in which we humans are ideologically divorced from living within the context of the more than human world. We would like to think that we are dictators of the more than human world who can simply tell it how to behave and exploit it for our own ends without any consequences.
The rhythm for adolescents involves preparation, departure, wandering to find oneself in the more than human world, and returning home with the lessons learned from the wilderness in which one cast oneself. The Israelites were prepared for the worship of YHVH through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Then they left home and wandered to Egypt. But that wasn’t a permanent home, and then they wandered again in the desert on the way home to Canaan.
We may read the parsha and Devarim in general as Moses and YHVH’s attempt to communicate with the people about what lessons they should have learned in the wilderness. They return from their wandering with the gift of the Torah, the teaching of how to live.
In our modern world, adolescents, if they are to mature into adults, still need to prepare, depart, wander and return home with gifts to their community. Unlike our ancestors, both “home” and “community” are much more difficult concepts. We, in our privilege, often have a choice about where to live. Additionally, the place where we grew up might have changed significantly. I grew up in a community that was 90% Ashkenazi Jewish. Now it is mostly Iranian and Iraqi Jewish (the ones who had money) and east Asian. I couldn’t go home to a dominant Ashkenazi Jewish community in Great Neck even if I wanted to.
Then there’s the question of community. We live in a much, much bigger world than our ancestors. If you live in a clan of 70 people like the people in Jacob’s clan who accompanied him to Egypt, you aren’t going to have the kind of enormous range of choices of people with whom to plug in as if you live in New York City. We today have to choose the communities with whom we share our gifts in a way that is literally unimaginable for our ancestors.
We might also focus on the crossing of two bodies of water—the Sea of Reeds where Pharoah’s army was drowned, and then the Jordan, the water in front of the band of Israelites. These two bodies of water mark the bookends of the trip from one perspective, the beginning of the wandering in the desert and the end of the wandering in the desert. The bodies of water are boundaries, and once a boundary is crossed, there’s no rewinding of time.
There are certain boundaries we cross in our lives that absolutely change us and make it impossible to go back to who we were before we crossed them. Physical maturation is one such boundary, but there are also plenty of other boundaries. Our ancestors desperately desired to return to the security and slavery of Egypt. But there are some boundaries that are one way streets.
Once you cross that metaphoric, or maybe literal, river, everything will be different. Our ancestors were given this wide range of obligations for their new, settled lives in the Promised Land.
You are about to cross the Jordan and come home. What are your gifts and with whom are you sharing them? If it helps, look at your gifts and community in both a human centric and an ecocentric perspective. What boundaries have you crossed from which you cannot return? What boundaries are in front of you, like the Jordan river was in front of our ancestors, that you need to cross?
There’s a striking desire to constrain prophecy and dreamwork in the parsha. “When a prophet or one who has a dream will get up among you and give you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or wonder of which he spoke to you saying, “let’s go after other Gods” whom you have not known, and let’s serve them, you shall not listen to that prophet’s words or to that one who has the dream, because YHVH your God is testing you.”(13:2-4)
Prophecy and dreams come from a different place than the everyday human centric world of commandments and judgments that we are supposed to follow. I know very little about dream interpretation and look forward to learning more. However, following Jung and my own experience, I think there’s a component of dreams and prophecy that doesn’t merely come from our personal unconscious but taps into something that is at least a reservoir of possible meanings and messages for our species. This collective unconscious is also tied to the more than human world. Prophecy and dreams are a wildcard, capable of taking us in directions that we wouldn’t consciously follow. As I discussed in my commentary on parshat Devarim on why this book does not begin with the revelation of the burning bush, the exodus from Egypt or the revelation at Sinai, this is a text that seeks to repress the wild, the unpredictable.
The vision of Devarim is prophecy and dreams in service to the ideology of our text, rather than looking towards prophecy and dreams as a source of radically new directions, either personally or collectively. Devarim is advocating for Soviet style art (I know I am dating myself). Art in service of the state is a contradiction in terms, it is not art at all.
Our old ways of being and thinking are simply inadequate to the tasks facing us. We need the wildness and wilderness of dreams, vision fasts, ecstatic dancing, art to overflow into our daily lives.
How do you think about dreams? Do you believe that we need wild visions to address the problems we face? Where do those wild visions come from, either in your experience or theoretically?
Devekut literally means “clinging” and refers to clinging to the divine. “You shall go after YHVH, your God, and you shall fear him and you shall observe his commandments and listen to his voice and serve him and cling to him.” (13:5). The idea of clinging to YHVH, devekut, has come up before in Devarim in which it is mentioned five different times (4:4, 10:20, 11:22, 13:5, 30:20).
The idea of devekut becomes a core teaching of the Baal Shem Tov, the mythical founder of Hasidism. Devekut means something more than just observing the divine’s commandments. There’s both an emotional and a mystical aspect of a sought for closeness to the divine. Traditionally it meant observing the commandments with an emotional fervor and it meant seeking a deep connection with the divine. Devekut wasn’t dependent upon how much you knew; it was a rejection of the intellectual path that was held by a different part of the community. It was part of the call for a more emotional approach to religious practice.
Devekut in Hasidism was also paired with a more full body approach to religion. Nahman of Bratzlav advocated jumping as part of prayer, there’s a famous Hasidic story about a boy playing the flute during High Holidays and being celebrated instead of being condemned, the Hasidim are rightly famous for the same sex dancing and the drinking of booze as part of celebrating. Devekut, in their hands, isn’t some kind of somber, intellectual practice.
Devekut, in Hasidic hands, is a way of taking us outside and beyond the human centric world to the divine. I would add that the divine isn’t the only thing we can cling to beyond the human centric world. We can cling to mountains and valleys and rivers and gardens and cows in pasture, foraging edible plants and the list is endless.
What should we cling to as if our very life depended upon it? How should we cling to it? How do you make your practice more of a full body experience?
This parsha has numerous commandments to kill Israelites. 13:6 proposes killing the prophet or the dreamer who doesn’t follow the prescribed religion. Another example is when a friend or a close relative says to you to go serve other Gods, “You shall not consent to him, and you shall not listen to him and your eye shall not pity him, and you shall not have compassion and shall not cover it up for him. But you shall kill him.” (13-9:10). And we are even commanded to kill the city’s residents that provide the context for such a suggestion (13:16).
It is obviously possible to read this literally, even though I don’t think there are any historical cases where Jews were killed by other Jews for apostasy. I also think that we don’t learn anything if we only read it literally, since it is/should be a given that we aren’t going to act on this commandment. Although never underestimate the power of religious fanaticism. There’s a bit of Torah we read on Tisha B’av which was just a few weeks ago about how the zealots burned the granaries that were loaded against a possible Roman siege. This created a famine and the Israelites to fight (Gittin 56:A)
What would a metaphorical reading of all this killing look like? We could treat both the act of killing and the idea of other Gods as metaphors. Let’s start with other Gods. In our age, the false idols of material excess, physical comfort, entitlement, fanaticism etc are all much more serious competitors to seduce us than the local deities of the indigenous inhabitants of where we live—the inhabitants and their deities are basically gone. Killing might mean paying attention to how this desire manifests in us and working to limit both the desire and its expression.
In our individualistic society, we tend to think that stopping chasing after false idols is an individual task. But the examples we are given in Chapter 13 all are collective examples. We need a community to eradicate all the false Gods that populate our lives.
What are the temptations of modern life that you need to uproot within yourself? How do you do that uprooting? Who are your allies?
QUESTIONS
You are about to cross the Jordan and come home. What are your gifts and with whom are you sharing them? If it helps, look at your gifts and community in both a human centric and an ecocentric perspective. What boundaries are in front of you, like the Jordan river was in front of our ancestors, that you need to cross?
How do you think about dreams? Do you believe that we need wild visions to address the problems we face? Where do those wild visions come from, either in your experience or theoretically?
What should we cling to as if our very life depended upon it? How should we cling to it? How do you make your practice more of a full body experience?
What are the temptations of modern life that you need to uproot within yourself? How do you do that uprooting? Who are your allies?
