We don’t know exactly why these colors were assigned to these directions, but some scholars have speculated that the sun’s path might offer a clue. Since the sun travels across the southern sky, the south became linked with heat—and so with red. The north, being dimmer, was associated with shadow and cold, and so with black. The west—where the sun sets in a blaze of light—was seen as white. And the east, where the sun rises and the sky turns cool before dawn, became green or blue.

These colors aren’t used descriptively, but they aren’t arbitrary either. They reflect an older way of seeing—a symbolic compass, a world mapped by meaning, not pigment. Color didn’t describe the surface of things; it told you how to orient yourself.

And color still does that today—especially in Jewish tradition, especially this week.

The Black of Tisha be’Av

This ancient map of meaning isn’t just a curiosity. It still shapes how we live, feel, and remember. In Jewish time, too, the year has its own palette. And this week, we turn toward its darkest shade.

The Talmud teaches that one who insists on sinning should go to a place where they are not known, wear black clothing, and wrap themselves in black—so as not to profane God’s name in public (Mo‘ed Katan 17a). The text offers no reason for the black garments, but their symbolism is unmistakable. Black, in rabbinic culture, often marks sorrow, gravity, and separation. Here, it seems to strip the act of transgression of spectacle or pride—covering it instead in shadow and restraint.

Black is also the color of mourning. By the sixteenth century, wearing black had become the established Jewish custom of mourning, at least in Ashkenaz. The Rema—Rabbi Moses Isserles—mentions it directly in Even Ha’ezer 17:5, noting that a presumed widow may not eulogize her husband or “wear black” until his death is confirmed. He records it without explanation, as if to say: of course mourners wear black.

The verse in Lamentations says: Yashav badad veyidom—“She sits alone and silent.” I picture a black-clad mourner sitting low to the ground, turned inward. The image isn’t in the text, but it’s the one we’ve come to carry—grief made visible in shadow. We wear black when we are in pain, when a light has gone out. But perhaps black is also the color of honesty—because it marks the moments when we stop pretending. When we strip away performance and sit with what is. And this week—on Tisha be’Av, the 9th of Av—many choose to dress in black or dark colors, echoing the mourning of the day in what we wear.

The White of Yom Kippur

But not all fasts are draped in shadow. Some are wrapped in radiance. To understand the difference, we have to shift from the black of grief to the white of return. On Yom Kippur, we wear white—kittel, tallit, simple linen. We fast not because we are broken, but because we are striving. White is the color of aspiration. The Talmud in Yoma (35b) compares us to angels. We are barefoot, wrapped in white, shedding the trappings of the body. So we fast in black on Tisha be’Av, and we fast in white on Yom Kippur. Both days strip us bare—but one lays us low, and the other lifts us up.

The Fields Are White: Mishnah Ta’anit and the Daughters of Jerusalem

White isn’t only for the holiest day. It’s also the color of joy, of dignity, of shared humanity. That’s what the Mishnah teaches us in one of the most surprising passages in all of rabbinic literature. The last chapter of Mishnah Ta‘anit (4:8) describes a strange, beautiful scene:

“There were no days of joy for Israel like the fifteenth of Av and Yom Kippur. On these days the daughters of Jerusalem would go out in white garments . . . and they would dance in the vineyards.”

The Mishnah insists that these garments were borrowed, so that no one would feel shame. Rich and poor alike in borrowed white. The women would call out to the young men, not with vanity, but with integrity. They said: “Lift your eyes and see whom you choose for yourself . . . but remember that charm is false, and beauty is fleeting; it is the woman who fears God who shall be praised.” Why white? Because it equalizes. Because it purifies. Because it returns us to something simple and shared.

Parashat Devarim and the Cry of Isaiah

Still, the joy of white doesn’t erase the moral weight we associate with darkness. The Torah portion we read this week and its prophetic counterpart both remind us how easy it is to cloak corruption in ritual and forget the ethical hue of our choices. Parashat Devarim opens the final book of the Torah, with Moses recounting the story of Israel’s wandering. But it doesn’t begin with history—it begins with a strange geography: “on the other side of the Jordan, in the wilderness, in the plain opposite Suph, between Paran and Tophel and Lavan and Hazerot and Di-Zahav.” These names aren’t just places; they evoke failure, complaint, disobedience. Lavan (white) and Di-Zahav (enough gold) might hint at spiritual distortion—purity turned brittle, wealth turned idolatrous.

According to Sifrei Devarim 1:1, Lavan (white) alludes to the people’s rejection of the manna, described in Numbers as “white like coriander seed” (Num. 11:7). The people grew tired of it and longed for meat. “Di-Zahav” is interpreted by Rashi (on Deut. 1:1) based on Berakhot 32a as “too much gold,” referring to the Golden Calf, which the Israelites built from their excess wealth. According to the Talmud, Moses rebuked them for the spiritual dangers of material abundance. In each case, the name recalls a sin. But each sin carries a color too: white manna, pale skin, gold gleam. Even in failure, the landscape is stained with hue.

The haftarah that accompanies it is the opening chapter of Isaiah: “Alas, sinful nation . . . They have forsaken the Holy One of Israel.” (1:4) Isaiah is writing in the eighth century BCE. He looks at a prosperous society and sees corruption, hypocrisy, and injustice. The Temple is still standing, but the people have emptied it of meaning. They offer sacrifices while trampling the poor.

“When you lift your hands in prayer, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves, make yourselves pure . . . learn to do good, seek justice, protect the vulnerable.” (1:15-17)

Isaiah speaks in shades as well: light and darkness, red like crimson, white like snow. Not physical color, but moral hue. He demands that we see the world in color—not the color of robes or walls, but of action and consequence.

Color and Orientation: What Do We See?

We see the world through color. We associate blue with calm, red with urgency, green with safety. In ancient maps, color located you. In Jewish law, color signaled category: the “white field” was grain; the “black cloth” was mourning; the “white garment” was purification.

We still live inside these metaphors. We speak of “gray areas,” of “seeing red,” of “black and white thinking.” But Jewish tradition teaches that color is not only what we see—it’s how we judge.

Are we living in red—reactive, impulsive, angry? Are we stuck in black—disoriented, numb, mourning? Are we seeking white—clarity, honesty, peace? And how does color affect us spiritually?  Does the muted green of an institutional hallway deaden the soul? Does the sterile gray of a prison uniform flatten the spirit? Should bright color in hospitals and schools be seen not just as decoration, but as moral intervention? What would it mean to choose color with care—not just in paint, but in time, in ritual, in life?

Toward the White Sea

Tisha be’Av is black. But it points toward white. Isaiah promises: Though your sins be red like scarlet, they shall become white as snow.

White, in the end, is not perfection. It is repair. It is the field after the fire. The garment after the washing. The sea at the far horizon. The one the ancients called the White Sea—not because it was pale, but because it faced west, the place where the sun sets, and where hope is deferred but not extinguished.

May this fast bring clarity. May we mourn in black and reach for white. May we see color as Torah, as prophecy, and as the geography of the soul.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l). 

In Leviticus 19:17 we are commanded: “You shall not hate your fellow in your heart. Rebuke your fellow, but incur no guilt on their account.” Rashi teaches that when the Torah says “rebuke your fellow, but incur no guilt on their account,” we come to learn that in giving rebuke, we need to be considerate of how we do it. Location, audience, and method all matter. Rebuking someone publicly may cause embarrassment. Our tone or our choice of words can also belittle them, even if unintentionally. When giving rebuke, we must keep the recipient’s dignity in mind. In Parashat Devarim, Moses expands this principle of dignity further.

Our parashah begins: “These are the words that Moses addressed to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan.” Rashi points out that the Torah rarely says Moses spoke to all the people. The specific language indicates Moses intentionally offered rebuke to the entire people. He did this so that if any of them wanted to challenge or reply to him, they could defend themself.

The underlying principle is that rebuke must include the opportunity to be challenged. Rebuke that can allow no challenge quickly silences the other. It strains and can damage, or even break, our relationships. But by hearing a challenge, by hearing the other, we build a bridge. We don’t have to agree with their point and may even push back further. All that is necessary is the willingness to hear, to be in dialogue.

This calls to mind Martin Buber’s words: “relationship is dialogical, or it doesn’t exist.” Where there is dialogue, there is relationship. To paraphrase Pirkei Avot, where two sit together and share words, there the Shekhinah dwells among them. When two people engage in dialogue, G-d is with them.

Taking these principles, that one should give rebuke in a kavodik (respectful) way, with dignity, and that one should leave room for dialogue, we can learn how to better approach relationships and the difficult conversations that come with them.

And this plays out in our very parashah! Moses gathers all the people Israel before him, and throughout the parashah offers rebuke for their shortcomings and failures. They all gather together to hear, and to push back when necessary. We finish with Moses’s assurance: “do not fear them, for it is Hashem your G-d who will battle for you,”(Deut 3:22) referring to the nations against whom the Israelites must do battle. But perhaps we can read this more figuratively in line with the translation in Targum Onkelos: “do not fear them (those giving rebuke), for it is Hashem your G-d, whose word will battle for you.” We should not fear those who speak against us, offering rebuke, for in hearing their words, and in having ours heard, G-d is with us. When rebuke is offered and received in a way that maintains dignity, the Shekhinah dwells among us.

This concept of rebuke is also relevant to where we are in the Jewish calendar, the Three Weeks, called by the rabbis, bein hametzarim (among the straits). This period between the fasts of the 17th of Tammuz and Tishah be’Av is marked by increased mourning for the destruction of our Temples and the historic atrocities committed against our people. Each of the Shabbatot during these weeks, we read one of the t’lat d’puranuta, the Three Haftarot of Destruction. These haftarot offer rebuke for the failings of our ancestors and foretell the destruction that will come should they fail to change their ways. They’re followed immediately by the Seven Haftarot of Consolation, the shivah d’nehemata, leading us all the way to Rosh Hashanah with a message of reconciliation and of hope. In the course of these final ten weeks of the year, we move through a process of rebuke and consolation, ready to start another year in relationship with ourselves, our friends, family, community, and G-d.

As we begin the final book of the Torah and move not so slowly toward the new year, let us internalize these principles. Recall the memory and feelings of rebuke I asked you about earlier. Consider how the situation could have been different. How can we give, and receive, rebuke in a way that honors the Divine dignity with which we are all created?

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l). 

When I was younger, the opening chapters of Devarim were among my favorites in all the Torah. A new generation of Israelites, assuming adult responsibility for the future of their people, stand across a narrow river from possibility greater than any the world has ever known. God has promised them a land flowing with milk and honey, and unprecedented access to God’s presence. As if that were not enough, God has granted them a blueprint for a society marked by both justice and compassion. Moses struggles to make his words (devarim) adequate to the reality (another sense of devarim) that his people have the opportunity to create with God’s help, but that he will not live to see. The Israelites for their part will soon have the task of living up to the promise of the devarim, word and deed, that Moses had imprinted on their memory.

The vision is thrilling to a person of any age, and is especially so to an individual or couple, standing with life’s spacious possibility about to unfold in front of them. It is more exciting still if, like me, your own youth corresponds with that of the new State of Israel just established in the Land that the Israelites of Moses’s day stood ready to enter.

Decades later, my children grown, I am still greatly moved by Deuteronomy’s vision of Life with a capital L opening up across a narrow river, if only one has the wisdom and courage to reach for it. But I find myself drawn more and more to the very different vision set forth at the end of the book. Picture this scene with me now: Moses is looking back upon his years, taking stock of both achievement and frustration. He is trying in the short amount of time he has left to formulate lessons that will endure among his people long after he is gone. What do you say—what devarim do you choose, what devarim do you recall or omit—when you know that the end of your speech will also mark the end of your days? What shall we hear in Moses’s words, you and I? What events in our lives shall we recall or omit as we look back—now that we are able to appreciate limit, failure, mortality, and love in a way we did not when we were younger?

I think the Torah wants its readers to engage in this sort of reflection. From the very first chapters of Genesis to the final verses of Deuteronomy, the Torah impels us to go deeper into the text with the help of personal life experience, even as we go deeper into life with the help of the text. I will follow the Torah’s lead and read Deuteronomy that way in this reflection on the book. Let’s begin by looking at the programmatic chapters near the start of Devarim—or better, by hearing them—through the eyes and ears of a new generation of adults about to set out on its way.

“Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is One,” Moses declares. The words have been recited morning and evening by faithful Jews for over two millennia, along with the passage, which follows at once, commanding every Israelite (in second person singular once more) to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your might” (). Read as a categorical statement of truth or duty, these verses arouse incomprehension, hesitation and doubt. Countless volumes of theology have been devoted over the centuries to the meaning of God’s oneness—and much blood has been spilled. How can love be commanded? Why would God demand a degree of wholeness from human beings that seems beyond our capacity to achieve?

Read the passage as instruction or invitation to a young individual or couple building a home or a family, and the words take on a different valence, abounding in significance. One desires nothing more fervently at that stage of life than to love one’s partner or child (or to have a partner or child to love) with this sort of devotion: nothing held back, no part of the self standing aside or removed from the love. The Torah lacks the words to tell us what it would mean to love God in this way. No religion or philosophy has the words, for we are mere mortals, and God is God. So the Torah summons us as best it can to the task of loving God, connecting that task to the experience in this world that we most savor, the love that makes us feel alive as nothing else can. These are the words, the facts—the devarim in both senses—that God commands each of us to keep “on your heart,” as we love one another and try to love God. This is the life lesson we are meant to teach our children in the house and on the way, lying down and rising up, shaping all we do and framing all we see.

There are few happier moments in a parent’s life (and few more weighted with responsibility and care) than those graced with the sound of children in the house. One so wants to protect these kids, your kids, and to raise them well! We promise ourselves daily that we will shield them, come what may, from the evils transpiring in the world beyond our doorsteps and our gates: the violence, the suffering, the cynicism and cruelty. We will try our best to fill them with purpose and joy, and to store up enough love in their hearts to last a lifetime. And behold: what we most want to do is precisely what God commands us to do in this paragraph of Torah, which in Jewish tradition is called, “And you shall love.”

I’ve come to believe in recent years that the allness of the love to which we are commanded or invited in this verse of the Torah is made possible by the oneness of the God who issues that charge. I read the word את (“et”) that follows “you shall love” and precedes “the Lord your God” not only as the particle that always accompanies a direct object in Hebrew but also in its other sense, “with”—a usage found as nearby as : “Not only with (את) our ancestors did the Lord make this covenant . . .” Read this way, we are commanded to “love with the Lord your God,” drawing, whenever we love, on the treasury of love that originates in our Creator and is transmitted by our family, and replenished whenever we love or are loved in turn. Loving with God, who is One, we too are equipped to aim at allness or wholeness.

The middle section of Deuteronomy sketches the project of imposing God’s legal blueprint on the Promised Land. Moses’s exposition of law is both methodical and repetitious; the vision set forth is ambitious, all-embracing, totalistic. It leaves no room for alternative ideals, beliefs, or practices, and expresses no doubt or hesitation whatever. “You must destroy all the sites at which the nations you are to dispossess worshipped their gods,” Moses declares at the very start of his law-giving (12:2). Seers and necromancers are not to be consulted in Israel’s new society. Prophets of other gods and other paths are not to be heeded. Anyone seeking to lead Israel astray must be killed. Sacrifices will henceforth be offered to the One God at one central place that the Lord will choose rather than at altars scattered throughout the country, as had been the case heretofore. “Justice, justice shall you pursue that you may live and inherit the land that the Lord is giving you” (16:20).

There is something grand about this part of the book of Deuteronomy—and there are elements that are not a little scary. Can a society or culture ever eliminate doubt and dissent as the book seems to intend and command? Why would it want to? Is the dream of a just society with God in its midst so fragile that it cannot brook the presence of naysayers? Is this the perspective on social and political life that stands behind the paradoxical instruction to “remember what Amalek did to you on your journey leaving Egypt . . . therefore . . . you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!” (25:17–19). Remember not to forget to blot out the memory of all that stands opposed to the vision of justice that you shall pursue!

I hear a very different tone as Moses nears the end of his time on earth: quieter, humbler, partaking far less of planning, action, and decision—and far more of wisdom. Two passages from the final portion of our teacher’s final lecture are especially meaningful to me.

First: the recognition (29:28) that some of what we would most like to know before we die—“the concealed things”—belong to God, and not to us. We will never penetrate those secrets in this life, and perhaps not in any other life either. However, it is also true that “the revealed things are given to us and our children forever, to do all the words of this Torah” (ibid.). We cannot and will not have some of what we most want in this world—knowledge of what awaits us after death, for instance, and what is in store for the world; why the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper; why God keeps such a distance, even while commanding us to love. But we, and our children after us, have what we need to go on. Most importantly: we have the words of this Torah, and a family and community with whom to hear those words.

Second: God has set life and goodness before us, along with death and evil; “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life—if you and your descendants will live” (30:15, 19). We are human: constrained by the limits of our years, our bodies and our imaginations. We do not always have the resources or capacity needed to accomplish what we want to do, should do, need to do. But within those limitations, there is goodness that can be chosen, blessing that can be ours—and there is life. No greater affirmation of the value of life and of the world has ever been declared by any religious tradition or philosophy. Moses dies, “his strength undimmed and his vigor unabated” (34:7), leaving behind a legacy of confidence that each of us matters and the world matters. The devarim we say and do matter more than we dare to know.

These final verses of Deuteronomy contain in equal measure a sense of completion and of new beginning. The story continues without Moses, as it had begun without him; our stories too will continue, even after we are gone. Our children, students, and successors will—as Joshua did—assume the mantle of responsibility and leadership. This is hard to imagine when a person is young, and hard to accept at any age. But sometimes—a life of achievement behind you, a child sleeping or playing on your knees, the Torah scroll rolled to start again at the beginning—you know that it is good.

This commentary was originally published in 2018.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

But before stepping aside, Moses has some things to say.

Deuteronomy, which we begin reading this week, is devoted to Moses’s farewell to his people. Deuteronomy is preeminently Moses’s book; in it, Moses mostly speaks in his own voice, so that instead of the ever-recurring third-person opening line “And the Lord spoke to Moses . . .,” we read “The Lord spoke to me” (Deut. 2:2). Deuteronomy contains not one but a series of farewell speeches and prophetic poems in which Moses recalls the forty years since the Exodus from Egypt and looks ahead to the future in the promised land.

Moses has grown as a public speaker. One of the first things he says about himself in the Torah is: “I am no man of words and have never been one . . . . I have a heavy mouth and a heavy tongue” (Exod. 4:10). Yet in Deuteronomy, Moses delivers speeches of long-rolling, well-balanced sentences. He has become a masterful speaker, a worthy predecessor of the so-called literary prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah.

Most people who retire after a lifetime in one position welcome the opportunity to reflect publicly on their career. When I retired from my forty-two years on the faculty of 91�첥, I compelled my colleagues and friends to listen to a speech of self-indulgent length. Of course, I had no intention of using the occasion to complain about bad moments in the past; it was an occasion for warm reminiscences. Most of us who have retired probably feel that way.

Not Moses. In his first remarks in Deuteronomy, when he recalls God’s command forty years earlier to break camp at Mount Sinai and begin the journey to the Promised Land, before he has heard of a single complaint or act of disobedience, he recalls that he was already groaning about the burden of being the Israelite leader: “How can I bear your trouble, your burden, your quarrels all alone?” (Deut. 1:12). Throughout this week’s parashah and later in Deuteronomy, we will be hearing Moses’s complaints about the people and his fears that they will not be steadfast in the long run.

Moses in Deuteronomy is 120 years old (Deut. 31:2), and if he was already weary at the start of the forty-year march, he must now be past exhaustion. Of his contemporaries, only he and two others—Joshua and Caleb—are left; the others died during the years of wandering that began with the episode of the spies. In this first speech in Deuteronomy, Moses tells this new generation of Israelites that story and the act of disobedience through which their parents forfeited the promise of the land and doomed them to be born and grow up in the wilderness.

In Moses’s telling, it was their parents who asked that spies be sent to reconnoiter the land (Deut. 1:22), not God, as the story was originally told (Num. 13:2), as if the people from the start did not completely trust the divine guarantee of their victory. In Moses’s telling, the spies’ report about the land was completely favorable, but the people, intimidated by rumors, simply refused to go forward (Deut. 1:25–28). In punishment, God doomed the entire generation of the Exodus, including Moses, to die in the desert, for God was angry with the leader because of his flock (Deut. 1:37). Yet in the account of the desert years in Numbers, we were told that it was for striking the rock in Kadesh that Moses was blocked from entering the Land.

Perhaps as Moses brooded on his punishment, he came to blame the people for the guilt that the Torah explicitly attaches to him alone. It is easy to sympathize with Moses’s mentally shifting the blame to the people, for it was the people’s failure to trust God that brought about the confrontation at the rock and Moses’s intemperate behavior, resulting in his downfall. In his mind, the episodes of the rock and the spies had a single cause: the people’s failure to trust. And Moses, steadfast though he was, had been caught up in their weakness.

Yes, Moses is tired, angry, and willing to blame others. Yet he still loves his people. In the very passage in which he complains of the burden of leading such quarrelsome folk, he begs God to bless them and multiply them (Deut. 1:11), to make them even more burdensome! He sees promise in this new generation, for he contrasts the behavior of their parents in the episode of the spies with their own behavior when it was their turn to engage enemies: the formidable Sihon, king of the Amorites; and the even more formidable Og, king of Bashan. This younger generation trusts God and obeys his commands implicitly: they march straight through Edom and Moab, wage war against Sihon and Og as commanded, and conquer as promised. Bitter old man that he is, Moses does not praise the people for their good behavior—they are only doing their duty, after all—but we can sense a new and more satisfactory relationship with them in the way he tells the story of the conquests in the Transjordan in the second part of the parashah.

In telling the story of the older generation’s failings, Moses used phraseology of distance: “I told you . . . . You refused . . . God heard your voice . . . . God was angry with me on your account.” When he comes to tell the story of the younger generation and their conquests, he includes himself in the telling: “We moved on . . . . We crossed over . . . . Sihon took the field against us . . . . God delivered him to us . . . . We made our way toward Bashan,” etc. In the first part of Moses’s speech, he distances himself from the people; in the second part, his identification with the people has been renewed. When, at the end of the parashah, Moses instructs the people to cross the Jordan under Joshua’s leadership and conquer the people of Canaan, it is in a new and positive tone, evincing confidence in their future behavior.

Toward the end of the book, as Moses comes closer to death, his fears that the people will not remain steadfast resurge, and he makes dire predictions about what will befall them if they fail in faithfulness. In the first chapter of Isaiah, the haftara for this week), we get a full dose of prophetic rage over the misdeeds of a generation that lived some 500 years later. But in our parashah, the bitterness is over the past, and the future looks hopeful.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

Eleh hadevarim, “these are the words”; the words that recount the life and journey of a people, their entrance into covenant at Sinai. But as the Hasidic teachers frequently remind us, the Torah is eternal, reverberating anew for each individual Jew in every generation. And so, the guiding theme of remembering also takes place in the mind and heart of each person.

We are part of a people and a community, and we are also individual selves, bound up in our personal relationships and in self-examination. This is how we may understand the strong themes of justice and love that are expressed in Deuteronomy—wise discernment and compassionate care for the other, the urgency of love in devotion. These ethical and theological imperatives flow directly from the exclamations of Parashat Devarim—the introspection, self-examination, and turn to memory.

Indeed, if Deuteronomy as a whole may be understood as an exhortation to justice and care of the vulnerable as a precondition for proper love of God, then so are we to understand the rabbinic choice to make Parashat Devarim also ShabbatḤazon—the latter name deriving from the opening word of the haftarah linked to this occasion, . This is a haftarah of harsh admonition and rebuke, an attempt by the prophet to awaken the urgency of repentance, the imperative of social justice in the form of care for the wronged and the vulnerable:

            “Cease to do evil;

            Learn to do good (limdu heitev).

            Devote yourselves to justice (dirshu mishpat);

            Aid the wronged.

            Uphold the rights of the orphan;

            Defend the cause of the widow . . .

            Be your sins like crimson,

            They can turn snow-white . . . ”

This is the essence of piety: not the external formalities of ritual performance alone, but animated by interpersonal acts of justice and compassion. “What need have I of all your sacrifices,” the prophet Isaiah says in the name of God.

            “Who asked that of you?

            Trample my courts no more;

            Bringing oblations is futile,

            Incense is offensive to Me . . .

            Though you pray at length,

            I will not listen.

            Your hands are stained with crime—

            Wash yourselves clean;

            Put your evil doings

            Away from My sight.”

Religious ritual and prayer without teshuvah (repentance) for moral transgressions, for evildoing and lack of care for the vulnerable, is useless and unwanted by God. Spiritual practice must be grounded in the moral imperative of compassion and care to achieve depth and authenticity.

Let it be in this spirit that we view the trajectory of time progressing toward the yamim noraim (High Holy Days), toward the aseret yemei teshuvah (Ten Days of Repentance). This time in which we find ourselves—the three weeks of collective mourning during the second half of the Hebrew month of Tammuz and the first part of Av—this is our reenactment of the brokenness that culminates in Tishah Be’Av (Ninth Day of Av), which commemorates the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and has also come to symbolize the many catastrophes that have befallen the Jewish people over more than two millennia.

I suggest that we understand the ruined House of God not just in its literal sense as the historical Beit Hamikdash, but as the sacred space of peace, balance, and kindness within each of us. Perhaps this is a figurative way to read the classical idea that the Temple was destroyed because of sin’at hinam—baseless hatred between people—a lack of compassion, kindness, and peace.

Read this way, the haftarah of Shabbat Ḥazon may remind us of the inner brokenness and the pain in others that is caused by our callousness and indifference to suffering. That is the deep wail of Eikhah (Lamentations) that we recite in reenacted despair on Tishah Be‘Av; a howl over the brokenness and ruin that has come about as a result of our actively destructive behavior and our apathy toward those in a state of vulnerability who need our intervention, our work of justice, compassion, and love.

The wail of lament and despair includes an introspective awareness of the ruined interior Temple of our hearts. Only through the breaking open of our hearts can we rediscover the compassion that is needed to work for the betterment of the wronged and the alleviation of suffering. 

Interpersonal justice is itself a prayer come to life. It prepares our hearts—once hardened, judgmental, and indifferent, arrogant and angry—to be softened into compassion and care, to lift up the broken remnants of the Temple, transforming them into moral piety. Only then will our hearts be truly opened to sincere prayer, only then will we even have the right to speak our prayers before the One who spoke and the world came into being.

Professor Fishbane’s recent books include The Art of Mystical Narrative (Oxford, 2018) and Embers of Pilgrimage: Poems (Panui, forthcoming this fall).

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Parashah Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

Parashat Devarim begins with Moses preparing the Israelites to finally enter into the Land of Israel after forty years in the desert. He does so by recounting some of the significant events they have experienced thus far in their journey. One of the first events about which he chooses to remind the Israelites is the story of the twelve spies, which was also recounted in Bemidbar chapters 13 and 14, back in Parashat Shelah Lekha. Yet his telling here doesn’t reproduce the account in Bemidbar exactly. What might explain the differences between the two stories?

According to the story in Bemidbar, which is told from a third-person omniscient perspective, God tells Moses to send spies to scout out the Land of Canaan. The spies return after forty days and report that the Land is excellent—flowing with milk and honey—but the people who live there are powerful, both physically intimidating and well-positioned in fortified cities. One of the spies, Caleb, insists that the Land can nonetheless be conquered, but the other spies ignore him and continue to spread word of the inhabitants’ fearsomeness. The Israelites are devastated and demand to return to Egypt. Then Caleb and his fellow spy Joshua try to convince the Israelites that the Land is good and worth conquering, arguing that God will protect God’s people against its inhabitants. The Israelites, unconvinced, are about to stone Caleb and Joshua, who are saved by Moses stepping in to deliver a rebuke. Finally, God declares that this faithless generation must wander for forty years before their descendants can enter the Land.

In Devarim, however, the story is rather different. In Moses’s first-person account, the Israelites, not God, told Moses that they want to send spies to scout out Canaan. The spies returned and said, “It is a good land that Adonai our God is giving us” (Deut. 1:25)—no mention here of fearsome inhabitants, of internal disagreement among the spies as to how to proceed, or of Caleb and Joshua’s attempt to salvage the situation. Despite the seemingly positive report from the spies, the Israelites “sulked in their tents” (1:26) and refused to go, claiming—apparently falsely—that the spies have reported that the inhabitants are too strong. Moses reassures the people that God will protect them, and again, God announces that the Israelites must wander for forty years in the desert as a consequence of their disbelief.

Some classical commentators attempt to harmonize the two stories, suggesting that Moses’s account of the spies’ report refers only to Caleb and Joshua’s statements, or pointing out that all the spies in the earlier account did admit that the Land was good, even if most thought it was unconquerable. Still, we are left wondering why Moses would have left out both the spies’ “calumnies” (Num. 13:32) and Joshua and Caleb’s attempts to protest against the prevailing attitude of despair, instead painting all the spies in a favorable light and the Israelites as utterly faithless for no apparent reason.

In her recent novel Trust Exercise, winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, Susan Choi explores the complex role of memory in the narration of past trauma. The first half of the novel takes the form of a third-person narrative about teenagers at a performing arts high school. It recounts the students’ internal drama and their relationship with a charismatic teacher, focusing on the romantic entanglements of two main characters, David and Sarah. Midway through the novel, the narration switches to the perspective of one of the students, Karen. “Karen”—not her real name, as we quickly learn, though she continues to call herself that—is now an adult and is very upset about the novel her friend Sarah, a successful author, has just published about their performing arts high school. She points out ways in which Sarah has left her, Karen, out of the narrative, unfairly shifted blame to some people, and unduly protected others. The narration begins to shift back and forth between a close third-person narration of Karen’s thoughts and a first-person narration in Karen’s voice. The reader is compelled to wonder: is Karen’s account more reliable than Sarah’s? What reasons might each of them have for preferring different versions of the story? Both Karen and Sarah seem to have been hurt in different ways—but do they want to remember what has happened to them? Or do they want to tell the version of the story that is most beneficial to them?

Perhaps we can understand the differences between the two spy stories as similarly exploring themes of narration, memory, and trauma. Both stories provide an account of why an already traumatized generation of former slaves had to endure a secondary trauma, wandering for the rest of their lives in the desert instead of entering a land where they could settle and make a home. Yet the two accounts provide contradictory perspectives on who contributed to this trauma and in what way. In the account narrated by Moses, there is no one to blame but the Israelites themselves, and no hero besides Moses, the ever-forbearing leader who alone tells the Israelites that God will protect them. Moses’s narrative even protects God from bearing any potential blame, since it is now the Israelites, not God, who requested the scouting mission in the first place. On the other hand, the third-person account in Bemidbar is an almost too-good-to-be-true account of Joshua’s loyalty, proving that he is the right person to be chosen as Moses’s successor.

These two divergent stories cannot definitively tell us who played what role in this disastrous event in the Israelites’ history. Yet they can nonetheless teach us an important lesson about how even our most cherished and trusted leaders might be influenced by what they want to remember, or what they want their followers to remember, in their narration of disturbing and significant events. Even beloved leaders such as Moses and Joshua can make nation-alteringly bad decisions, yet they, or their followers, may have preferred the version of history that lets them come across as heroes. As we in the US grapple with the process of taking down monuments, changing the names of buildings and institutions, and otherwise reckoning with the narratives told by and about America’s own past leaders, let us remember the lesson of Devarim’s retellings: no leader is without flaws, and no historical narrative is completely objective. To learn to retell, and to retell again, even while knowing that no version will ever get it quite right, is part of what it means to grow as a people and draw closer to the Promised Land.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

Destruction can teach us why freedom, justice, and human dignity are important—and fragile. And, that when freedom and justice are denied and dignity is threatened, we still retain certain powers over our own humanity.

That lesson has been brought home to me over and over again in my career, learning from the responses of both victims and survivors of the Holocaust. The assault on them was so horrific, so devastating, and so complete, it seems as if they had no agency. That, of course, is precisely what the Nazis wanted the Jews to think.

The Jews were faced with very few choices, and those they had have rightly been called “choice-less choices.” But choose they did, and those stories from survivors I have known have been a great inspiration to me.

Here’s how Lilly Malnik described her first two days in Auschwitz:

“You are told your name is a number. Forget your name. You don’t have a name anymore. And you’re hungry. And you have no clothes. And you’re freezing. And your family is taken away. At [16] I felt like I was 90. It was very hard for me to accept. Yet I got a hold of myself. I pushed all this behind me and I said: I have to live; I have to be strong.”

Vladka Meed was in the Warsaw Ghetto with her mother and younger brother. Although her mother suffered from disease and starvation, every week she managed to save two slices of bread to give to an old man in exchange for bar mitzvah lessons for her son. Of course, this was not to be. Vladka later said, “During the war, my mother taught me what it means to be human.”

Gerda Klein spoke about liberation:

“I lost my three best friends. My closest friend Ilse died the week before, Suse died on liberation morning and Liesel . . . a couple of days later. . . .  [P]eople think of [a concentration camp] as a snake pit where people stepped on each other. They didn’t see there was kindness and friendship and love. And that was the sustaining part.”

Norbert Wolheim, told of his shock at seeing a friend in Auschwitz praying. He demanded to know why. His friend said, “I am praising God,” to which an angry Norbert retorted, “Are you out of your mind? Praising God here? In this situation where we are isolated? Left alone, in this hell? What are you thanking God for?” His friend responded: “I am thanking God for the fact that he did not make me like the murderers around us.”

These survivors remind us that even under the most unthinkable circumstances, the most brutal crimes, and the complete abandonment of the world, individual Jews were able to preserve their dignity, to demonstrate their love, to perform acts of solidarity, and above all to hope.

Another story of hope that inspires me deeply comes from those who did not survive.

Immersed in Yiddish culture, historian, social worker, and political activist Emanuel Ringelblum was 39 when the Germans invaded Poland. Imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, he understood that something of great historical significance was happening to Poland’s Jews. Something that would be important to future generations. He organized a clandestine operation to create a record of daily life in the ghetto. To ensure a diversity of perspectives and represent the vibrancy of Jewish life, he involved rabbis, writers, scholars, educators, businessmen, and others in the creation of his “archive.” This story is beautifully told in Samuel D. Kassow’s magisterial Who Will Write Our History?

Ringelblum was clear as to how this would be done—not with pathos and sentimentality but with the standards of rigor and objectivity that all good history demanded. The evidence would be carefully gathered and meticulously analyzed. The truth would be told. Including hard truths—about good Germans and good Poles. Even the hardest truth of all—about bad Jews.

In Ringelblum’s mind, the Jews were not a helpless, defeated group of victims, but a people who could retain some degree of control over their humanity, and if not over their physical destiny, they could create a different destiny, by leaving a legacy—a legacy of their own creation. And it would be both a Jewish and universal legacy. He told a colleague:

“I do not see our work as a separate project, as something that includes only Jews, that is only about Jews and that will interest only Jews. My whole being rebels against that. Given the daunting complexity of social processes, where everything is interdependent, it would make no sense to see ourselves in isolation. Jewish suffering and Jewish liberation and redemption are part and parcel of the general calamity and the universal drive to throw off the hated Nazi yoke. We have to regard ourselves as participants in a universal attempt to construct a solid structure of objective documentation that will work for the good of mankind. Let us hope that the bricks and cement of our experience and our understanding will be able to provide a foundation.”

Reflecting on periods of destruction in Jewish history should provoke sorrow. Immense sorrow. The losses are incalculable. But the survivors and victims of the Holocaust would want to challenge us to make sure that our reflection would provoke something much more consequential. That it would also remind us of the power of moral courage and provoke determination, inspiration, and hope. That we—as a people and as individuals—would always write our own history, even that of destruction. In that conviction lies a vibrant future for the Jewish people—and the greatest tribute we can pay to the six million.

Ms. Bloomfield was awarded an honorary doctorate at 91�첥’s Commencement proceedings in May 2019.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

Food for thought:

• To what extent has religion become divorced from justice in contemporary society?
• What “pieties” are being used to justify ignoring immorality, greed, and self-interest in our leaders?
• Would we tolerate a message of rebuke such as this from the clergy of our own houses of worship?
• How would Isaiah respond to the claim that religion should stay out of social policy and politics?

Listen to the haftarah brought to life as it is declaimed in English by renowned actor Ronald Guttman by .