In Moses’ recounting of the sin of the spies in his historical overview, which makes up this week’s Parshah, there lies an anomaly. Recounting G-d’s anger with the people and their condemnation to die in the wilderness, he states that G-d was also angry with him and swore that he would also not enter the Land. This is in direct contradiction to statements elsewhere in the Torah that Moses was barred only for the sin at the waters of Merivah. The commentators give various explanations for this discrepancy, many of them saying that Moses was aggregating all the sins of the people together, all of which barred him and them from the Land. The Seforno, however, connects this statement to the idea that the sin of the spies was the root cause of all the other disasters in Jewish history. It was thus also the ultimate cause of Moses being barred from the Land. He quotes verses from both Psalms and the prophet Ezekiel that state that G-d decreed at the time of the spies both to bar them from the Land and to scatter their children among the nations. In other words, the later exile of the Jewish people can also be ultimately attributed to this incident. How are we do understand this? Exile and redemption are prefigured in G-d’s promises to Abraham. His descendents duly were enslaved and redeemed from Egypt. Did this necessarily have to become a template for the rest of Jewish history? That depended on the attitude of the Jewish people. Did we see exile from the Land of Israel as a terrible thing and redemption as our goal. Or did we actually quite like the comfort and lack of responsibility that comes with living in other peoples lands? Had the spies not sinned and the people gone forth and conquered the Land, the spell of exile would have been broken. The template formed by the Egyptian exile would have changed to a different model: an eternal people that stayed in its land forever. Yet the Jews took another path. They longed for the comfort and lack of responsibility of exile. They rejected the burdens of true nationhood. The template given to Abraham was thus fixed. Not only that generation, but future ones, would experience the odyssey of exile. Jews would be an eternal people, but not necessarily in their own land. That is what they themselves had chosen. This is a stark lesson for us to learn. When we see the vicissitudes of modern Israel, some people seem to long for the comfort zone of exile, where the hard moral decisions are not on our shoulders. That is a fatal mistake. We made it once, let’s not make it again. 

ALIYAH BY ALIYAH SYNOPSIS

 

Rishon	Moses begins his summary of the Torah before his death.
Sheni	How Moses set up a judicial system.
Shelishi	How the people sinned by with the spies and were forced to wander for forty years.
Revi’i	How the people tried to go forward anyway and were defeated.
Chamishi	The fortieth year: relationships with surrounding nations and their history.
Shishi	The conquest of Sihon and Og and their land.
Shevi’i	As G-d had conquered the Amorites so would He help them conquer the nations of Canaan.
Haftorah	Isaiah: 1;1-27: Isaiah‘s vision of the destruction of Jerusalem.

 

Sidra Statistics

Parshat Devarim

·               has 105 verses;

·               is the 1st in Deuteronomy,  44th  in the Torah

·               6th  longest in Deuteronomy, 33rd  longest  in the Torah   

·               has  2 pos  mitzvot.