|
| Deuteronomy 29:9 Nitzavim
A Contract
In this week’s portion of the Torah, Moshe again restates the nature of the covenant between God and the Jewish People. He says, “Not with you alone do I seal this covenant and this oath, but with whoever is here, standing with us today before Hashem, our God, and with whoever is not here with us today.”[i] “Whoever is not here with us today” refers to the generations of Jews not yet born. But we learn in the Talmud that you cannot make a contract to obligate someone unless that person is present.[ii] And here Moshe said that he was obligating unborn Jews! Here is a wonderful proof as to the nature of this covenant between God and the Jewish People. Indeed, the law does state that you may not obligate someone with a contract if that person is not present. However, if that contract comes to merit him, that is, the contract is being made in the other person’s benefit, such as to give him something, then you can include him even if he is not present. This covenant is certainly to our benefit. That we were included even though we were not there is the contractual proof. Good and Evil This portion ends with Moshe telling us that he had put before us the path of good and not evil.[iii] In essence, he was reminding us that now that we were in a world where good and evil are evident, we should choose good. But wasn’t choosing between good and evil our problem in the first place? Wasn’t it when Adam first ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden that all of our troubles began? The answer is, before Adam ate from that tree, he saw everything to be simply God’s handiwork. He did not judge. For him, there was no good or evil. But since Adam ate from that tree and brought the awareness of good and evil into the world, Moshe’s words came to strengthen us, reminding us that the Torah is our guide to help us make the right choices. Throughout the ages, philosophers have warned us that “good” and “evil” are merely relative terms that are impossible to define. To answer these philosophers, Moshe summed up the standard definition of good and evil: “Good” leads to life, and “evil” leads to death. “For He is your life and the length of your days … .”[iv] Deuteronomy 31 Vayeilech
Moshe Cannot Enter!
In this portion of the Torah, Moshe is about to die. He was not allowed to bring the Children of Israel into the Holy Land. But why couldn’t Moshe enter the Land of Israel? Certainly, no one loved this land more than he did, and who, if anyone, did more to bring the Jewish People there? Surely, he deserved to go up into the land. We know about the episode when Moshe hit the rock instead of speaking to it, but was that such a great sin? And even if it was, God forgave the Jewish People for the sin of idolatry, so certainly He could forgive Moshe for hitting the rock. Really, there is a deeper reason as to why Moshe was not allowed to enter the land. When Moshe was with us, we were much stronger; we were a spiritually higher people. Had Moshe brought us up into the land, there would have been such great merit that our eventual exile could not have happened. We see the same thing much later when King David was not allowed to build the Temple. Some say the reason this privilege was withheld from him was because of all of the blood that he had to shed in his battles throughout his lifetime. But this is not the real reason. The reason he was not allowed to build the Temple was that Hashem knew the Temple was going to be destroyed in the future. Either Hashem would have to destroy the Temple or He would have to destroy the people. Had David built the Temple, its spiritual merit would have been so great that it could not have been destroyed.[v] Then God’s wrath would have had to come against the people instead. God wants us to have free will. Free will means that whatever we do has to bring similar results back unto us. If we do things that require exile as their repercussions, and if exile was blocked, we would not really have free will. Had Moshe been allowed to bring us up into the land, the spiritual merit of that event would have elevated us to such a level that we could not have been exiled. We see from this that even terrible things that happen somehow also come for the good. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [i] Deut 29:13 [ii] Bava Basra 167b, Bava Metzia 13a [iii] Deut 30:15 See Gutman's Books Buy From the Old City |
