A Light Across The Void: Devarim

A Light Across The Void

D’var Torah for Parashat D’varim

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

Deuteronomy (D’varim, “words”), the fifth book of the Torah, was cast to be Moses’s personal account of the Israelites’ 40-year journey through the Sinai wilderness.  Current thinking, however, is that it was actually written a few hundred years later.  The language and style of the writing is different; it’s a darker book, displaying deeper emotions and amplifying events that the first four books gloss over or barely mention.  Finally, whereas the tone of the first books is lofty and idealistic, Deuteronomy reflects a bleaker, darker reality.

Deuteronomy encompasses the final three sermons Moses gives to the Israelites just prior to their crossing over into the Promised Land.  In these, he refers to their past and their future, reminding the people of their history and tradition as well as their obligations to one another and toward God.  Though supposedly written by Moses, an interesting discrepancy is found early on in the book.  B’eiver hayarden, “across the Jordan” (Deut. 1:1), designates the location where Moses spoke these words.  The term refers to the eastern shore of the Jordan, the river that represented Israel’s boundary on the east.  Whereas Moses may have spoken on that side of the river, beyond Israel’s borders, it is clear from the text that his words were recorded on the Israel side, west of the Jordan, in the land that Moses never entered.

But it’s more than a river that separates the first four books of the Torah from Deuteronomy.  Nor is it only a question of perspective, time or space.  It’s the meaning gleaned from experience that adds to the depth and realism of Deuteronomy.  Places and events always look different when re-visited.  Life changes the way we see things.  The Torah’s moral lessons become so much more meaningful when viewed from across the river of time.

As Deuteronomy opens, the Israelite People’s forty-year journey from Egypt is nearly over.  Having escaped slavery and genocide, Moses foresees a dark future for his people.  There will be wars, both physical and spiritual.  There will be enemies who will want to destroy Israel; there will be false prophets who will want to turn them away from God’s ways, away from their own traditions and identity, away from their sacred purpose.  A dark future—exile and destruction—is to be our fate if we give in to these temptations.

Supposedly written by Moses, in reality the words refer to a new threat that arose in the east.  The Assyrian empire had just destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel and exiled its people, and was now gathering its armies against Jerusalem and the Southern Kingdom of Judea.  In light of the rising new world order, Moses’s predictions gain new depth and greater urgency.

Today, some 3000 years later, Israel still faces similar threats to its existence.  We are in the midst of yet another war against enemies sworn to destroy us.  What was written then, so long ago, gains deeper significance because of our collective experience over the centuries.   I doubt that we could understand Moses’s words half so well if we were reading them objectively, from a calculated or disinterested distance, just as it is impossible to understand exactly what Israelis are feeling and going through right now unless you happen to be right here, in the midst of it all.  With each moment, the light changes, the shadows deepen, the highlights stand out ever more clearly.

The painful story of a mother who just lost her son in Gaza comes to mind. For years, Col. (Res.) Varda Pomerantz headed the IDF Casualties Department.  For years she was among those officers who delivered the terrible news of a fallen soldier to bereaved families.  She would then come back to them for days, weeks or months, to help them cope with the loss, to go on with life despite the tear in the fabric of their lives, to teach them how to go on living.

Last week, Varda was on the receiving end of this kind of visit.

She says she was prepared.  She says that somehow, inexplicably, she knew.  She just knew.  The day the officers arrived, she awoke early and started cleaning the house, scrubbing the bathroom, making sure everything would be ready when the visitors came.  She met them at the door and didn’t need to be told.  She knew.  During shiva, the house was filled with families that Varda had helped over the years.  But she refused to take comfort, obstinately insisting that she was all right, continuing to give comfort to others instead.  There was no cemetery in the town where the family lives; Varda insisted that one be prepared for her son, so that he could be buried close to his home.  “Nothing is impossible,” was her mantra for years, and even now she refused to take “no” for an answer.  At her insistence, an empty field where only brambles and thorns grew was paved over and a grave was dug.  Trees were planted and watered.  As Staff Sergeant Daniel Pomerantz, Varda and Avi’s fourth and youngest son, was brought to his final resting place, the rabbi consecrated the ground into which his flag-draped coffin was lowered.  Kaddish was recited by the young soldier’s broken-hearted father.  Then, with TV cameras rolling and radio mikes on, Varda played a recording she made of Daniel’s last phone call, one that was filled with foreboding.  It seems they both knew what was to come.  She read a final letter he wrote and left with his friends, “just in case.”  “If you are reading this,” Daniel wrote, “it means I have reached the end of my road.  I’m so happy I was born to this family.”  After telling each of his brothers and parents how much he loved them, Daniel wrote, “All of you must be happy, stay happy for me.”  That’s when Varda finally broke down and cried.

At her son’s graveside, Varda planted olive trees.  She saw to it that everyone who came to visit took home an olive leaf.  “So that people would go on hoping and believing.  Otherwise, what? Just so—my boy is gone? There has to be [some] good.” 

In a television interview, Varda explained that her army job prepared her for this moment.  And yet, she said, one never knows what it’s like.  For all those years, she would talk to bereaved families and comfort them, all the while knowing that there was a wide gap between them, a chasm between “what is here and what is there.”  Now she knew.  She was on this side.  And now she, her family and all Israel would have to learn how to live on, with this gaping wound in their heart.

Varda was right.  There has to be meaning.  Otherwise it’s all void and null, and there’s no such thing as good.

And that is what Moses wanted us to understand so long ago:  That we are Israel, destined to struggle but also to win; that our existence is not futile; that we have a tradition and a glorious past—but an even more glorious future to look forward to.  If we retain our identity and purpose, our destiny is to bring goodness to this planet we call home.  We must go on believing this truth.

Let each of us take an olive leaf in our hands and think of its promise of hope.  That is Varda Pomerantz’s message to us on this Shabbat, a beam of light that shines across the void, all the way from one shore of the river to the other, through all the sad days and nights of Israel’s Summer, 2014.

© 2014 by Boaz D. Heilman