Re’eh: When Seeing Is Believing

Re’eh: When Seeing Is Believing

D'var Torah for Parashat Re'eh, Deuteronomy 11:26--16:17

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

Recently a Facebook friend sent me a link to a site of photographs taken during the Great Depression. These amazing photos show the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations. The color photographs are really an amazing portrait of how stark and difficult life was for so many people in those difficult days. What struck me most, however, was the look on the faces of those people. Their gaze is honest, steady and unwavering. They don’t smile. Many of the faces are carved with hardship. Their bodies gleam with the dirt and sweat of their labors. The African Americans among them show that though times and styles may have changed, not much else in American attitudes towards them had progressed since pre-Civil-War days.

Amazingly, as the people in the pictures gaze at the camera, they seem to look right through the years, towards the future. Times may have been difficult, they seem to say, but they weren’t about to give up. No matter what the future would hold, that much was clear.

This week’s Torah portion, Re’eh (“see” or “behold”) seems to deliver a similarly clear message. Times were indeed difficult: The Assyrians had overrun the northern kingdom of Israel and were now threatening the southern kingdom of Judah. The surrounding cultures and their immoral, superstition-filled beliefs were slowly eating away at the fabric of Judaism. Cruelty seemed the order of the day—as is evidenced from the many commandments directing us to live justly, mercifully and compassionately. The road ahead was clear: “See [Re’eh], I set before you today a blessing and a curse. The blessing, that you will heed the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you today; and the curse, if you will not heed the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn away from the way I command you this day, to follow other gods, which you did not know” (Deut. 11:26-28).

The parashah is filled with crystal-clear laws. They are down-to-earth and tangible, associating and anchoring the People of Israel with each other and with their Land. In order to deserve continued life and security in our Land, we must follow the path God sets out for us. It’s a clear and logical path, one of behavior and consequence. We must show compassion to the orphan, the widow and the stranger among us; we must give generously to the poor and set free the enslaved, sending them forth with sufficient hope and means to start off their new life. Even what we eat is regulated according to laws of morality—no bottom feeders or carrion scavengers, no animals that hunt and kill for their food. This portion contains one of the three pronouncements of the mitzvah (commandment) that we must not “boil a kid in its mother’s milk,” but rather show compassion and understanding for the grief of the bereaved parent, animal though it might be.

Our demeanor and religious behavior cannot be violent (to ourselves or to others), as was the custom of the neighboring people, who often gouged and gashed themselves or sacrificed their own children to their blood-thirsty gods.

It was clear to see that the “blessing” or the “curse” was not only a result of our actions, but inherent in our very behavior. How we lived WAS the blessing or the curse. Nothing could be more obvious or clear (no mean feat in those days of ignorance and superstition). All we had to do was open our eyes and see life around us. The promise of a secure future was also clear. If we followed God’s path of righteousness and mercy, we would survive. Like the people in the photographs, the Deuteronomist looks ahead unflinchingly.

Yet, with all that clarity and certainty, one element in this Torah portion remains elusive, unseen, not named.

Jerusalem.

Though by the time this book of the Torah appeared (around 621 BCE), the Temple had already stood at the center of Jewish life for 350 years, the portion still refers to this core of our life and culture as “The place which the Lord your God shall choose from all your tribes to set His name there.” This phrase recurs thirteen times in Re’eh! Not once is it named.

Is it merely that Jerusalem is so obviously the intended site that its name is left out? Is the omission no more than a stylistic anachronism? After all, these chapters are set in a time and place just before the Israelites enter the Promised Land—a good two centuries before King David would turn Jerusalem into his capital, his son Solomon to build the Temple there! Yet for a document that could peer into the future and see it without a doubt, and for an author (Moses) who, we are told by our ancient rabbis, would be sitting in and observing a Torah class taught by Rabbi Akiva in the second century CE—would such uncertainty be reasonable?

Why would a Torah portion called “See” or “Behold” conceal such an exalted goal?

Again, for the answer I look at the people inhabiting the photographs. They are gazing at no more than a camera and a photographer standing before them. Yet their piercing look meets our eyes and enters our souls, our very presence today. Likewise does Re’eh looks ahead to an eternal, infinite future.

Life is a blessing or a curse, depending on the road we choose to follow. Jerusalem is the goal of all roads that follow the path of blessing. There is a physical city, ancient, modern, exhausted, invigorating, beautiful and majestic, that sits atop a mountain in the region of Judah. But there is also a metaphysical Jerusalem, just as ancient, just as new, that we are all gazing at through our soul’s eye with hope, longing, courage and determination. It has no name just as it has all names. It is our future. To see it built all we have to do is follow the clear path God maps out for us in Re’eh. To get there, we have to behave in a moral, just and compassionate manner.

And one more thing:

To see it, we have to believe.

©2010 by Boaz D. Heilman