"Torah Lights"
 
Video Insights on the Parsha
 
 by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin

“You shall set up for yourselves great stones… and you shall write upon them all the words of this Torah clarified completely [Hebrew, be'er hetev]... these are the words of the covenant… which the Lord commanded Moses to contract with the children of Israel in the land of Moab, in addition to the covenant He contracted with them at Horeb." (Deuteronomy 27:1, 2, 3, 8; 28:69)

Efrat, Israel – When we think of the covenants between G-d and the Jewish people, we usually focus on the covenant with Abraham and then the covenant at Sinai. The first is the Covenant between the Pieces, when G-d guaranteed Abraham progeny and a homeland (Genesis 15). The second covenant, at Sinai, was with the entire nation - the covenant of religious law, when G-d revealed His will in the form of ethical, moral and ritual commandments (Exodus 19-24). But the above-cited verses make clear that a third covenant was also made just as the people were about to enter the land. The text couldn't be more explicit: “...in addition to the covenant He contracted with them at Horeb [Sinai].” Why a third covenant? Weren't the first two enough? Didn't they cover our national identity and our religious destiny? What is G-d now adding?

In order to understand the addition, we must hark back to the divine election of Abraham, the first Hebrew.  G-d tells Abraham that "...through you shall be blessed all the families of the earth" (Genesis 12:3), which means that the Jewish mission is to reach out to the world.  And what Abraham must teach is compassionate righteousness and moral justice (Gen. 18:18,19).  Indeed, Maimonides rules that the Jewish people are obligatedto teach the nations of the world the seven Noahide laws, the universal laws of ethics and Human inviolability (Maimonides, Laws of Kings 10.8); only when the likes of an Ahmadinejad accepts “Thou shalt not murder an innocent” as an absolute will there be a future for a free and secure world in a global village.

Hence, the third covenant in this week's portion. Just as Israel assembles at the Jordan River – the gateway to the Land of Israel –  to become a nation-state, G-d commands them to erect great stones. "And you shall write upon the stones all the words of this law..." (Deut. 27:8). What then follows are the 12 curses (Deut. 27:15-26), each directed toward anyone who fails to live by a certain moral rule, resulting in 12 universal principles. This teaching is to be writ large, "clarified completely" – interpreted by the Talmudic sages to mean engraved deeply and/or translated into all 70 languages. So if the first two covenants stress who we are in terms of a family, genealogical continuity and the creation of our religious identity, the third, symbolized by the erection of the stones, dramatizes our responsibility to the world as a kingdom of priest/teachers.

Tragically however, if we do not "hear" G-d's voice which commands us to be an ethical example to the world, we will lose our homeland and turn into wanderers, prey to heinous hatred and mass murders. We will become victims of violence perpetrated by oppressors so depraved as to be no longer images of G-d. All this is implied in the third covenant. Yes, for a time, we "heard," we obeyed... and we succeeded. Josephus, among others, records how Jews, together with the Torah, were spreading all over the known world (Contra Apionem 2, 39), attracting huge numbers of converts from every part of the Roman Empire. But sometime in the second century CE - perhaps because in our pride we forgot that it was the Torah's superiority, and not our own, which had brought us such success - we became unable, or unworthy, of sustaining the momentum. We stopped "hearing" G-d's voice, were forced to leave history, and virtually forgot the mission of the third covenant.

As strange as it might sound, Maimonides – the great legalist-theologian who deplores Christianity as idolatry – nevertheless writes that at least in this regard the Christians continued where we left off. In the unexpurgated versions of the Mishneh Torah, he records: "G-d's ways are too wondrous to comprehend. All those matters relating to Jesus of Nazareth and the Ishmaelite who came after him are only serving to clear the way for King Messiah, to prepare the whole world '...to worship G-d with one accord' (Zephaniah 3:9). Thus the messianic hope, the Torah and the commandments have become familiar topics... among the inhabitants of the far-flung islands at the ends of the globe..."

Unfortunately however, the evolving theology of the new church paved the way for hateful, anti-Semitic atrocities. But miraculously, nearly 2,000 years later, a sea change has embraced many leading churchmen, beginning with Pope John XXIII and his Nostra Aetate (1965), and going on to include leading Protestant theologians and the world of Evangelicals, who never had a history of anti-Semitism and have been extremely supportive of the State of Israel in general and the settlement community in particular.

Now thank G-d we as a people and a nation have returned to history, in the “Beginning of the period of our redemption.”  Many are the miracles all around us, including our military victories and the ingathering of the exiles, the Tribe of Dan from Ethiopia and the Bnai Menashe from northern India.  Alongside of these magnificent occurrences is the growing threat of extremist Islam with its suicide bombers and commitment to jihadism. Miraculously, the Christian world is finally beginning to rid itself of the ugly specter of anti-Semitism and is beginning to recognize the eternal legitimacy of its Elder Brothers Covenant.  It is critically important that – despite the many differences which divide us, especially in our refusal to recognize the founder of Christianity as the messiah or the special and unique son of G-d – we must join hands with the Christians and bring a religion of love, morality and peace to a desperate, thirsting world The G-d of compassion must overcome the Satan of jihadism, and our revived dialogue with our younger brother must bring the light of freedom and security to the farthest corners of the world.

Shabbat Shalom