Start Over from the Beginning
Parashat Devarim, Deuteronomy 1:1 – 3:22
Rabbi Adam Landsman, Beit Hashofar, Seattle
This week, we begin the book of Deuteronomy, a name derived from the Greek for “second law.” It is called Devarim in Hebrew, which means “Words.” Both names fit well. At the end of his life and the era of his leadership, Moses took it upon himself to review the Torah, a second run through the laws that Hashem had given his people.
Over the last four decades, Moses led the people out of Egypt and through the Red Sea to receive the Torah at Sinai, then across the desert for thirty-eight years to arrive at the bank of the Jordan, on the cusp of entering their land. He will not be going with them. Devarim is his last words, the last message he can send with them to start their new life in the land. At his complete ending, Moses starts over at the beginning, but not with the beginning we might expect.
Where to Start?
Moses begins recounting his leadership of Israel.
Adonai spoke to us in Horev. He said, “You have lived long enough by this mountain. Turn, get moving and go to the hill-country of the Emori. . . . I have set the land before you! Go in, and take possession of the land Adonai swore to give to your ancestors” (Deuteronomy 1:6–8 CJB).
This is a moving call, but it is the wrong place to start the story! What is Moses doing?
We all know that Moses’s story started on the banks of the Nile and B’nei Yisrael’s story started with the Ten Plagues and the Exodus on Passover. This generation’s story started forty years before the opening of Devarim, on Tisha b’Av, after their parents’ generation listened to the ten spies and shied back from Hashem’s command to enter the land (Numbers 14), ensuring that the ones standing before Moses forty years later would be the ones to enter the land. One could even start the story on the first Shavuot, when the Children of Israel first received the Torah and then constructed the Tabernacle so that Hashem had a dwelling-place among them.
Moses does not start with any of these obvious points. He picks a day that is not marked on our calendars, that happens rather unceremoniously in Numbers 10. It is the day that God decided that it was time for the people to get moving from Mount Sinai. Moses’s beginning sets up the Exodus and even receiving the Torah as a prologue, background knowledge that the people do not need to focus on at this moment. For the generation entering the land, the real work of being God's people begins after the mountaintop experience.
Where Are You Headed?
Moses does not want the people to get started by thinking of themselves as the first generation, though we are to remember that we were freed from Egypt and that the Torah was given to us (Deuteronomy 6:20–25). Instead, this generation is given a new start as the doers of Hashem’s commands. Rather than escaped slaves or an unformed nation, Moses’s framing casts them as a people ready to move, as those who act according to the Torah. The rest of the book of Devarim makes it clear that Moses wants to establish this idea as the core of their path going forward. He spends the rest of the parashah recounting the Israelites’ journey to the spot where they are as he speaks to them, but he continues by saying, “Now, Isra’el, listen to the laws and rulings I am teaching you, in order to follow them, so that you will live” (Deuteronomy 4:1). This refrain appears throughout Devarim, including in the texts that comprise the Shema.
This is an important shift in the identity of Israel. Just over forty years prior, the descendants of Jacob were slaves without a future until Hashem brought them out of Egypt as a free people and restored their direction. They moved from slavery and deprivation to freedom and providence, and their story from Passover to the rebellion of the spies can be described as the story of forming and organizing a new nation.
Moses shifts the new generation’s focus away from where they came from to where they are headed. Their story starts in the same way as Abraham’s – God telling them to go – and it grows from that first order. It is the process of obeying Hashem’s commands and following his will. Since the Exodus happened before their story started, they will not have the constant complaining refrain of “when we were in Egypt. . .” Instead, they are repeatedly told “when you go into the land. . .” Everything is focused on what they will do in obedience to God. This sets the whole arc of their identity, from their beginning to their future, on a pathway for success.
Start Over from the Beginning
Questions of identity, beginning, and direction are just as important for us today as they were for our ancestors. “Messianic Jew” is an identity that constantly faces disapproval and derision – many are quick to tell us all about how we’re headed in the wrong direction and leaving from the wrong place. Thankfully for us, our identity has a firm foundation in a new beginning.
New beginnings are a core element of Yeshua’s mission and our discipleship in him. “Through immersion into his death we were buried with him; so that just as, through the glory of the Father, the Messiah was raised from the dead, likewise we too might live a new life” (Romans 6:4). He came to bring renewal, repentance, and new direction, and through his life, death, and resurrection, we can participate in his renewed Kingdom of Heaven and bring that newness into our own lives.
When we commit to Messianic identity and practice, we commit to a new journey. It is a call to leave familiar ideas, habits, and worldviews and strike out across the desert, to leave what we know in pursuit of Hashem’s commands and promises. Even if we have been following a path for forty years, we can take heart that our new beginning has set us on a pathway to all of Messiah’s promises. Whatever our pasts, whether we leave the depths of Egypt or the heights of Mt. Sinai, we are offered a new beginning of our own – a chance to turn and get moving toward the future God has prepared for us. Don’t let your prologue define you, but be shaped by the calling of Hashem.