Parshah Commentary

Parshat Va’etchanan

In the opening verses of Parshat Va’etchanan, Moses continues the address to the Israelites that he began last week in Parshat Devarim. He reveals that he had desperately pleaded with God to be allowed into the Land of Israel—to “cross over and see the good land on the other side of the Jordan”—but that God refused his request. He then goes on to impart a number of laws, explaining that they are necessary “so that you may live to enter and occupy the land.” Indeed, more than ten times throughout the parshah, the Israelites are enjoined to keep the commandments “so that you might inherit the land” or “so that it might go well for you in the land.”

At first glance, these verses appear to present the land itself as the main point, the desired object and end. But rabbinic commentators trouble this view by complicating Moses’s seemingly simple longing to enter the land, rejecting the idea that he would wish to do so merely to enjoy its physicality, to lay some visceral claim to it. Instead, the medieval Chizkuni and the 19th-century Malbim suggest that Moses’s desperate plea is premised on an overwhelming desire to perform specific mitzvot that can only be carried out in the Land of Israel. (In a similar vein, the 19th-century rabbi the Netziv argues that Moses wished to enter the land “because of the greatness of Torah, that he might root the power of study in the land.”) According to this paradigm, it is not that Moses feels unfulfilled without any physical claim to the land the Israelites are set to enter; rather, he feels that entering the land is necessary to fulfill the Torah he has relayed, to embody the mitzvot in their entirety. Following that understanding, some commentators and midrashim envision God’s response of “rav lach,” often translated as an angry “Enough!,” as a tender reassurance: “You have done enough. You have performed enough miracles, observed enough mitzvot; you are not dying with any obligation unfulfilled.”

How, then, do we make sense of Moses’s incessant reminders to keep the commandments so as to inherit and live long in the land, which seem to suggest that the mitzvot are merely a means to an end, with ownership of the land as the ultimate goal? The Malbim, in a later comment, strenuously pushes back on this interpretation. He notes that the commandments relayed in this parshah, to which these mentions of inheritance are linked, are not ones that can only be performed in the Land of Israel. According to the Malbim, they sit alongside the invocations of the land because “even though the mitzvot are not dependent upon land, the land is dependent upon mitzvot.” For the Malbim, “the Land of Israel was only given to [the Israelites] in order that they might keep the Torah.” In other words, Torah and mitzvot are a necessary precondition for inheriting the land, not a means subordinate to the greater end of ownership.

In our parshah, as well as in countless other places in the Torah, God reminds the Israelites that if they violate the commandments, they will be expelled from the land—that their presence is not an eternal unvarying guarantee, but conditional on ethical behavior. In our parshah, we also see that warning’s inversion: If you fail to keep the mitzvot, there is no point in inheriting the land at all. It is not simply that egregious violations of religious and ethical mandates pollute the land and prompt expulsion, as we marked just this past week on Tisha B’Av; rather, the rabbis note that there is no value to land for land’s sake, no sanctity in rooting in a place for the sake of rootedness. If the goal is to root ourselves and not, as in the Netziv’s framing, to root Torah, this pursuit is utterly profane.

Thus, Moses’s plea—which becomes a paradigm for prayer despite remaining unfulfilled—can also function as a paradigm for both relationship to the Land of Israel and absence from it. We can model a relationship to the land based on sanctity, viewing it as a place to worship rather than a thing to be worshiped. And we can also embrace the tender possibility of “rav lach”; wherever you are, the sanctity you are pursuing, the community you are building, can be enough.

Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.