The word for going mad here, məshuga, has cognates in related languages that refer to the cawing of birds and the whinnying of camels. A cognate in Assyrian means simply “to howl”. In an etymological sense, then, the threat is of a devastation so great the human mind cannot hold it without breaking. Language is insufficient to express it; all that will suffice is an animalian onslaught of asemantic noise.
Read MoreThe project of halakhic discourse has never really been about unearthing some impossible pristine viewpoint-independent reading of Tanakh; the project has always been building a livable and just system of religious law, and that necessarily depends on what you find livable and just. You values always shape the project, however much the project may recursively shape you in turn.
Read MoreVərakh haleivav is often translated something like “fainthearted” or “cowardly”, but as an adjective, rakh primarily denotes softness, tenderness, delicacy. A child’s skin is said to be rakh, as are the words that Proverbs 15:1 says can defuse wrath. A soft heart is a vulnerable heart, a heart not walled off from the sorrows of the world, a heart that is marked by the humanity of those our governments tell us to hate, to disregard, to kill. A soft heart refuses to let “enemy” become a shorthand for “undeserving of moral reckoning”.
Read MoreDəvarim is a book on the threshold. From the text’s perspective, the Israelites are just about to enter into the place where they belong. They’re not there quite yet, but they’re gonna be, and Mosheh is using his last long oration to prepare them for what’s ahead.
Read MoreA second consolation: You are going to die. Everyone you love is going to die. Every thing and place you love is going to be rendered nothingness by the expanding nuclear fire of the sun and the ultimate dissolution of the universe itself. There is nothing you can do about any of this.
Read MoreClinging is a slightly unexpected word here. We might more typically expect something like following or loving or obeying — we just had going after used a verse earlier to talk about following other g-ds, and elsewhere in this very parashah, we get, in short succession, the Shəma’s iconic insistence on obedience and the Və’ahavta’s command to love. But here we get none of those and find clinging instead. Which is a little odd, since Dəvarim is normally so insistent on an intangible, non-material G-d. How do you hold fast to something that has no substance?
Read MoreHow many moments like this are there in the multi-layered text of Torah? How many parallel stories in Genesis were preserved by this desire to keep alive the unreconcileable stories of neighbor and friend? How many incompatible lists of leaders in Numbers maintain the memories of real people long since lost to us? How many fragments are stitched in with all their contradictions out of a furious refusal to let anyone go without a fight? How much love this represents! Every seam, every doublet, every revision an active choice to prioritize inclusion over homogeny, community over rhetorical purity, building together over winner-takes-all.
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