Parshah Commentary
When my youngest sister was in eighth grade, her Jewish day school class took a trip to Israel. On the evening they arrived, I went to meet the group in the hopes of spending a few minutes with her before the students were whisked away on their tour. After I got to the meeting point in Jerusalem—a promenade that overlooks the skyline and the Old City—I stood for a moment, watching them before they noticed me. A young, energetic Israeli tour guide spoke excitedly to the pack of jetlagged American 13-year-olds and their chaperones. He stretched his hand in the direction of the city: “This is the land upon which our father Abraham stepped!” he nearly shouted in joy. “This is the land where King David trod,” he continued. “And this,” he said with a final flourish of his hand, “is the land where our great teacher Moses walked.”
None of the students, or their teachers, objected. I don’t know if no one noticed his mistake, or if nobody had the heart to tell him, or if everyone was simply too swept up in the grandeur of nationalist myth to point out that Moses does not reach the Promised Land. Tragically, he dies alone, “on the other side of the Jordan”—the place where our parshah, Devarim, is set. Our portion contains the first part of Moses’s final speech to the Israelites, about a month before his death. It is not the warm recollections of a satisfied leader, proud of his accomplishments and hopeful about the path his disciples will take. Instead it is, as Rashi writes, a speech of “reproof” for the Israelites’ many misdeeds. “I spoke to you, but you would not listen; you flouted God’s command,” Moses rebukes the people. Because of their disobedience, he tells them: “You wept before God, but God would not heed your cry or give ear to you.”
Early in his address, Moses recalls his frustrations in leading the people: “How can I carry alone the trouble of you, and the burden, and the bickering!” he remembers saying. It’s striking that here Moses describes himself as shouldering the weight alone. The framing especially stands out in contrast with a moment later in the chapter when, using the same Hebrew root for “carry” (“n-s-a”), he recalls how he had tried to convince the Israelites that they would succeed in the struggle against their foes: “You saw how your God carried you, as a person carries his child, all the way that you traveled until you came to this place,” he reminds them. Moses understands the necessity of comforting his flock, but when it comes to his own experience, he admits to feeling utterly abandoned. Indeed, the 18th-century Hasidic text Ketonet Pasim glosses “alone” in Moses’s account as “without God’s presence.”
The first word of Moses’s anguished cry is “eichah,” a more elegiac form of “how,” perhaps better rendered as “alas.” This same word opens, and provides the name for, the Book of Eichah—known in English as Lamentations—which we read on Tisha B’Av to bemoan the destruction of Jerusalem: “How lonely sits the city once great with people.” (Tisha B’Av always falls in the week after we read Parshat Devarim; this year, it begins on Saturday night immediately as Shabbat ends.) According to a rabbinic commentary on Eichah, these are two of three key uses of the word by the Prophets, the third being Isaiah’s rebuke of the people. In this midrash, the word “eichah” reverberates backwards in time, the opening word of Tisha B’Av’s scroll invoking not only the destruction of its time but the generations of despair that preceded it. (Fittingly, there is a tradition in many communities to chant Moses’s exclamation of despair with the mournful melody of the Book of Eichah, rather than the standard cantillation of the Torah.) According to the Mishnah, “eichah” also reverberates forward; Tisha B’Av is the date that marks future calamities, including the destruction of the Second Temple, the capture of Betar during the Bar Kochba revolt, and the Roman plowing-over of Jerusalem.
In short, Tisha B’Av is the day on which we dwell in the tragedy of God’s withdrawal of the divine presence from our world. It’s a day of radical loneliness. A day on which it is fitting to ask: “How can we bear this broken world alone, without the presence of God?” This is a message that the Book of Eichah repeats again and again: We are told, relentlessly, of the bereft loneliness of Jerusalem: “Bitterly she weeps in the night, her cheek wet with tears. There is none to comfort her of all her friends. All her allies have betrayed her. They have become her foes.” Even God has “acted like an enemy.” This isn’t a temporary abandonment. One Talmudic rabbi tells us that “since the day the Temple was destroyed the gates of prayer were locked,” and “an iron wall separates the Jewish people from their Parent in heaven.”
We may take comfort in the fact that, according to the rabbis, God, too, cries, distraught, over the destruction of Jerusalem, and we may find hope in the Prophets’ repeated promise that God’s presence will eventually return. But there might be a limit to how much solace we should seek. The Talmud, in the tractate of Chagiga, lists the verses in the Torah that would make different sages cry. Rabbi Ami, we are told, would cry when he reached a particular verse in Eichah—not one of the horrific descriptions of death, devastation, and starvation, with mothers eating their children in desperation, but something that, on its face, is quite tame, even optimistic: “Perhaps there may be hope.” Yet as Rabbi Ami puts it, “All of this, and only ‘perhaps’?” Still, this is what we have: the possibility of “maybe.” We may die on the other side of the river, never to enter the Promised Land. We may be left without God’s presence, in cosmic exile with no end in sight. In the face of such horror, all we can do is cling tightly to “maybe”—charging forward and fighting on even when there is no victory visible on the horizon.
This dvar Torah is dedicated to the memory of my dear friend and comrade Awdah Hathaleen, who died on the other side of the river and who believed fiercely in the promise of “maybe.”
Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.
