Â
Do you believe in God as an abstract idea, or does the Torah animate your choices and behavior?
Table for Five: Vaetchanan
In partnership with the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles
 Edited by Salvador Litvak, the Accidental Talmudist
And you shall know this day and consider it in your heart, that the Lord He is God in heaven above, and upon the earth below; there is none else.
– Deut. 4:39
Â
Rabbi Elchanan Shoff, Beis Knesses of Los Angeles
“You shall know today, and bring it into your heart.” Apparently we can know things and yet they have not yet entered the heart. The heart is a muscle, it doesn’t have feelings or emotions, it’s tissue. Torah uses expressions like “loving God with all your heart.”
What role does the heart have in knowledge? We have multiple levels of knowledge. For example, you can know in your mind, that when a person insults the mother of another person, that this is incorrect behavior. But were someone to insult YOUR mother, your heart begins to beat more rapidly. When knowledge is abstract, it is knowledge nonetheless. But the Torah demands that our concept of God not be relegated to the brain. It must be knowledge that is in your heart. It must impact your emotions and your heart rhythms. It must get you excited about its ideals. It must give you peace and calm during trying times.
Those who believe in God as an abstract disconnected idea are not yet up to the Torah’s requirement. Does the Torah animate your choices and your behaviors? Does it change the way you reply to insult? Does it cause you to modify your behavior in terms of how you relate to your spouse or child? Do you wake up early for the Torah? Do you allow its Truth to actually shape your feelings? You surely ought to – after all, God is the ruler of Heaven above and Earth below, there is no other.
Â
Rabbi Chaim Singer-Frankes, Chaplain & Spiritual Care Guide, Kaiser Panorama City
This verse inspires us to contemplate both the inscrutable God and our covenant with Him, forged on this splendid but complicated earthly stage. Ironic that we are in relationship with a God whose interventions are broadcast, while He remains concealed. We aspire to perceive Him in the mountains, through a sunset, or regally in the humpback breaching the Pacific. God made us cosmically aware of all this—experiencing the transcendent together with the profane—and left with but a contract. Between the lines, God is saying “I gave you sight, hearing, feelings, and the power to interpret. My singular nature is accessible to you through reason and trust.”
Hashem’s wisdom conveys our potential to hold competing ideas at once. Our world is not simply physical, but also one of ideas, promises, principles, and actions. Our brains “see” things which aren’t materially present. Human beings walk this world in awe, worshipping something unseen. Our verse infers that by fulfilling the covenant, God becomes revealed. However, what we behold in this pageant—liminal above and splendorous on earth—is unto itself *not* God. Despite that Judaism isn’t pantheistic, Torah discloses that all this created majesty reflects what is truly Divine. Torah also counsels us that above all, on this and on every day, God dwells in our midst, in our mind and heart. The embodied creation in which we revel, show our love—and occupy for so fleeting a time—is no illusion. It is an expression of The Eternal.
Â
Rabbi Gershon Schusterman, Author of “Why, God, Why?”
In a verse previous to this week’s chosen verse, G-d reminds the Israelites of their exodus from Egypt and G-d’s revelation to them at Sinai, which they had personally experienced, saying, “You have been shown [these miraculous events] in order to for you to know that G-d, He is the Lord, there is none besides Him (Deut. 4:35). The two verses are almost identical to each other. What does this verse add?
The Jews were at the threshold of transitioning from their 40 years in the desert to entering the Land of Israel. In the desert they were coddled “as a nurse carries a suckling” (Num. 11:12), miraculously provided with manna from heaven and water from Miriam’s well, and they spent their time learning the Torah, G-d’s new instruction for them.
In their soon-to-be home in Israel, however, they will have to provide for themselves, as it says, “By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread” (Gen. 3:19). They will have to stand on their own feet. The G-dly relationship of the desert would become a thing of the past. Now G-d instructs them: Know this day and consider it in your heart. Just as harvesting does not happen without the toil of planting, living deliberately with G-d-consciousness, the raison d’ĂŞtre of the Jewish people, does not happen without considering it in our hearts. As Jews we are expected to live deliberately, to know G-d, and to consciously bring Him into our hearts.
Â
Abe Mezrich, Torah|Writing – abemezrich.substack.com
I want to compare this verse with the story at the outset of this week’s parsha. Moses asks God to let him cross the Jordan and walk into the Land just once before he dies. God tells Moses no. “Go up to the summit,” God says: “and gaze about, to the west, the north, the south, and the east. Look at it well, for you shall not go across the Jordan” (Deut. 3:27).
In that moment Moses is an old man, facing all the things he will never touch. But at the same time, God is guiding Moses to stand in the heaven above, and gaze in all directions at the earth below. To see as God sees.
It is only by being cut off from the end of his own story that Moses gets to see heaven and earth just as God sees it. Much like it is by knowing that there is no one else ruling heaven and earth – by cutting off all the other gods – that our heart can consider God. When you can’t go on with the journey, when all the old gods fall from the sky, don’t despair. Sometimes that’s when the real God enters.
Â
Kari Gila Bookbinder Sacks, LCSW, Partners in Torah Mentor, LA Jewish Ladies Chorale member
As I write these words, my thoughts are on the Land of Israel, my heart beating furiously for our brothers and sisters there. “My Heart is in the East,” Yehuda HaLevi says, “libi ba’mizrach ve’anochi be’sof ma’arav.” We are spiritually interwoven and in love with Israel forever. And just like the eternal Home Land, Hashem’s Torah has both a timeless and timely relevance to us.
The book of Devarim, and Parshas V’Etchanan – even more poignant – gives us a glimpse into the gift of our perpetual love affair with Israel. Just as everything in creation has a physical and a spiritual manifestation, every person has a soul and a body working together, and every event has an inner significance, so too, the Land of Israel has a spiritual counterpart….The Jewish Nation. Each of us is a sacred “spirit partner” to the Land. Further, when we are mindful, mentally and mystically, of G-d’s omnipotence in Heaven and on Earth, and of his Oneness as Our King and Our loving Father, we can withstand whatever comes our way. Not only have we all been there for Israel, but The Holy Land lends us the strength to stand upright as Jews in history. Rabbi Kook writes: “The strangeness that a Jew feels outside the Land of Israel causes a greater bond with the inner spiritual yearning for Eretz Yisrael and its holiness.” May our mourning turn into dancing with the hostages in our beloved Homeland soon.
Â
With thanks to Rabbi Elchanan Shoff, Rabbi Chaim Singer-Frankes, Rabbi Gershon Schusterman, Abe Mezrich and Kari Gila Bookbinder Sacks
Â
Get the best of Accidental Talmudist in your inbox:Â sign up for our weekly newsletter.Â