Talking to a New Generation

The book of Devarim (Deuteronomy) opens by describing how Moses gathered the Israelites on the plains of Moab after conquering the Jordan’s east bank.

Standing near Mount Nebo, Moses recounted the events of the past to the new cohort of Israelites approaching the Promised Land.

This generation was quite different from the one that had left Egypt. They had no firsthand experience with the Exodus or the desert tribulations.

Moses’s account of the previous events centers on the missed opportunities and the repercussions of fear and disobedience.

Not surprisingly, this section of the Torah is read before Tisha B’Av, the annual commemoration of a multitude of calamities in Jewish history, most notably the destruction of Solomon’s Temple by the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Second Temple by the Roman Empire in Jerusalem.

The causes of the destruction of the Temples—traditionally linked to baseless hatred and the people’s internal corruption—parallel the spiritual mistakes that Moses warned about in Devarim (literally, “remarks”).

The message of Moses here is clear. Building a stable and hopeful future requires facing communal failings and honestly recounting Israel’s past. The whole book of Devarim is dedicated to setting the groundwork for this human project.

Devarim is profoundly worried that social inequality and idolatry are undermining societal unity, so it revises the previous rules in Shemot (Exodus) to provide more rights to the poor and women.

Probably no other book of the Torah would be more relevant, addressing the Jewish people’s present current situation and speaking to a generation that had not witnessed the Holocaust, the creation of the State of Israel, and the consistent rejection of those who cannot see history other than as a zero-sum dynamic and cannot turn failures into the kind of meaning on which the future is built.