Parashat Devarim 5770
Changing of the Guard
I wonder what Moses would have done if he had been forced to retire at an earlier age than 120. I realize that he had a lot on his plate in those closing years of his life, trying to keep the people together on the same page as they wandered from one place to another in the wilderness outside of the land of Canaan, where God intended them to settle. What a burden it must have been to ensure that everyone was taken care of appropriately as he waited for a sign from God that they were ready to cross the Delaware River into New Jersey, the Goldine Medina, as they say!In Devarim, the opening chapter to the last book of the Bible, Moses prepares a number of statements or reports for the Jewish people. At times they read like the Annual Prospectus from my mutual fund investment accounts, detailing every transaction in the past year. In the case of Moses, he chronicles the major highlights of what happened while the Israelites were in the wilderness. Perhaps his memory was hazy, or Moses was given the liberty of having some revisionist history by the redactors of the Bible so that he could prove certain points about the behavior of the Israelite people – in retrospect.
I am currently reading a book about the catcher as an American hero and in the opening chapter, the author talks about how American society developed a definition for a hero in the late part of the 1800s following the Civil War. At that time in our history a hero was someone who was Puritan in nature – work hard and you receive your rewards. Those individuals who attempted to seek that same fortune by moving west and taking risks was seen through eyes of skepticism. For several generations we embraced the notion that son should follow in the footsteps of the father, taking over the family business that was built from the bottom up. There was a sense of pride that seems to be missing in today’s society, when the name on the front window or above the front door meant something not only to the owners but also to those who frequented their business. Customer service meant everything, because people were important. Now it is the product that takes precedence, even when it is meant to be obsolete before you reach the front door because there is somebody in R&D who is perfecting the next generation of what we buy as bigger and better than before.
There was a time when insurance agencies placed a mandatory retirement age on their agents. When it came time for a person to retire, after building up the business through his personal attention to details to his customers, many men expected to pass along the business with their name in the agency’s title to their sons – to keep the business in the family and to prevent the name from disappearing altogether. In his d’var Torah for this week Rabbi Simon Rosenbach shares these observations from his own life (AJR, Devarim 5771):
“Anybody who builds an institution wants to see it perpetuated. If somebody builds a business, he wants to ensure its continuity, because he thinks that that business has something to offer to people. So imagine if somebody were to build not a business, but a whole people? What if somebody were to build a whole way of life, a whole new way of looking at the world and a whole new way of looking at God, and saw that way of life as bettering not merely that somebody’s family, but rather the entire world? To rephrase the old saw, anything worth doing is worth doing forever, and that brings us to Moses.”
Moses is about to hand over the business of guiding the Jewish people, not to his son, but to another person whom he trusts can handle the transition. Just like many men who are forced to retire “before their time,” Moses is reluctant to let go at the age of 120. While this is not unusual, it does address the tension that he expresses in revising the history of his travels with the previous generation, and his desire to come across as a person to be valued for his contributions, despite the death sentence that has been given to him – both physically and figuratively.
Moses has a legitimate right to be concerned about the future of the business that he has spent the past forty years maintaining. Even when things were going well the people strayed from the guidelines that he and God had established. How could he rest easy knowing that what he had spent a life-time developing was in the right hands? Surely, in a new place with an even greater opportunity for interacting with the local population there would be further changes in the business – and not always good ones in his estimation. Will Joshua be a strong enough leader to keep the people together despite their dividing themselves into individual tribes and settling in various regions of their new country, no longer being held together as a cohesive group in the same way that they were when traveling in the wilderness? God seems to think so! However, as we all know from our own experiences, when people are given certain freedoms, we tend to relax our values and our standards.
Moses is concerned. How will it all end up. Stay tuned for next week’s episode – same “bat time,” same “bat channel”… Wait! Before we break, let me add one last word on this week’s Torah portion which is all about words, the words that Moses spoke to the Israelite nation before entering their new homeland. In verse one we are told that Moses spoke to “kol yisrael” rather than to the usual construction “b’nei yisrael.”
It is important for us to take note of the change. “B’nei,” as we all know, means “children.” Are we to assume that the Israelites who are now entering a new phase of their journey are no longer “youngins” – “they’s all growed up now”? That is one legitimate opinion that can be made. As adults they are now ready to accept responsibility for their own behavior in the same way that we tell our teenagers when they reach age 13, “You are an adult now! It’s your life, make the most of it. You are responsible for your own religious behavior.” And the first decision that they get to make as an adult is not “should I fast this Yom Kippur?”; rather, “Should I continue to attend religious school?”
Is Moses addressing them as adults who are ready to make their own decisions? I wonder. Perhaps “kol yisrael” is suggesting something different. Maybe Moses is not only addressing the generation of Israelites that are seated in front of him. One could argue that “all of Israel” suggests that Moses is speaking to us as well, for he is addressing himself to the future generations in addition to the current one. The message that he delivers is relevant not only to one generation of Israelite, but to all of the generations of the Jewish people.
He is genuinely concerned about the perpetuation of the business that he built with the help of God. We, too, are just as much concerned about the leadership of our own Jewish community and the future direction of Judaism, not only in our local community and in America, but also in Israel. We have a Conservative Movement that is in the midst of finding an identity of itself that will preserve its place in the scheme of American religious life from a traditional, but moderate standpoint. We have synagogues that are moving from affiliation to independent status as they try to cater to a diversity or pluralistic approach to spiritual life in a free society that is growing more secular. And we have an Orthodox political group that is attempting to control the conversion process in Israel, which will eliminate the ability of other denominations the legality of confirming non-Jews as Israelites “according to Moses.”
As we look towards beginning a new year in the Jewish calendar, and we have the establishment of a new board, in which the leadership is being entrusted to a new generation, what direction will we take in our own community? What changes do we wish to see in our worship, our education, our inner selves? Who will be our source of wisdom as we cross that threshold into a new place? What values of the past will be our guide? What will be the new values that we embrace as we anticipate change?
Let us not become complacent in what is going on around us. Judaism encourages us to take responsibility for ourselves and our connection to others. In what ways will we not only reach in, but also reach out to these changes?
