The Parshah this week seems to have a split personality. On the one hand, at the beginning and end of the reading we have sections detailing the praise of the Land of Israel and the uniqueness of the Promised Land. However, the middle of the Parshah consists of an indictment of the behaviour of the Israelites in the desert, including a recounting of the sin of the Golden Calf. The whole of this section is summed up by Moses in the words ‘you have been rebellious against G-d for as long as I have known you’. Is there a connection between the two focuses of the Parshah and why does the historical indictment occur here rather than during the historical retrospective which forms the first chapters of the book? One answer is given by Moses himself when he introduces this litany of charges by warning that the people should not think they are inheriting the Land because of their righteousness, because they have been anything but well behaved.

 Yet I think there is an even more basic lesson that is being taught here. It is intimated by the statement that the Land of Israel is not like Egypt and the clarification that in Israel agriculture does not rely on irrigation from the Nile but on rain. The fact that the Torah is emphasising this feature of the Land contains a profound moral lesson and warning to the people about to enter it, a lesson spelt out in the second paragraph of the Shema. The occurrence of the rains or their not falling will depend on the behaviour of the people. Their very day to day existence in the Land will therefore depend on their adherence to the Torah.

The spelling out of this important lesson serves to elucidate the reason for the indictment in the middle of the Parshah and provides a unifying theme for the text. The people had not behaved properly during their sojourn in the wilderness and as a consequence had often been punished. This was to be expected in a situation where G-d’s presence was palpable and they depended on G-d for their daily necessities. However, they may have thought that now they were entering the Land where they would be able to grow their food and provide for their own sustenance, things would be different. Their mundane existence wouldn’t be as dependant on their behaviour as it was in the wilderness.

Moses therefore disabuses them of this fallacy. The Land of Israel is a unique land where they will have to rely every year on life giving rains from heaven that will be bestowed or withheld precisely according to their behaviour. Israel is not a land you can relax in and forget G-d, not if you want to exist there in the long term. That lesson is just as relevant today as it was then. Both economically, geographically and politically the situation of the Land of Israel presents challenges that are not simple to overcome and, then as now, overcoming them depends on our behaviour. That is both the great challenge of Israel and its great opportunity.