Goodbye to Deuteronomy

So here it goes. I've been wafting and wedging about writing this Siyyum.
Why?
Because doing so would imply that this part is really over. Because it would mean I need to decide what to do next. And also because Deuteronomy was hard for me, on so many levels. How do I sum it up--or some up my interaction with this difficult book?

Deuteronomy means literally "deuter" "nomos"--"second law"--a close translation of the Rabbinic appellation for the book: "Mishne Torah"--"second/ repeated law". Both names focus on the fact that this book is mostly retrospective, a spoken review of the books that came before. In terms of the time frame, this book was indeed, for me, a doubling--it took me as long as the other 4 books put together. It is harder to get a sense of continuity with all the time that passed since starting this book and finishing it. I was forced to do my own "review", going back and looking at the images, to try to feel how this book develops. 

In some ways, the Book of Number leads smoothly and directly into Deuteronomy. The final chapters of Numbers act as a segue, as they begin the review of the desert years that becomes explicit at the opening of Deuteronomy.  More profoundly, if the Book of Numbers focused on learning how to speak, this Book of Words (the literal meaning of the Hebrew name, Devarim) focuses on the next stage of speech: the creation of identity and memory. We move from learning to speak, to learning how to write, and to transmitting this writing to the future. And if Numbers ends with the fear of curses and imprecation, Deuteronomy closes with the giving over of blessing.

  

How does this “book of words” transform speech?

“These are the words the Moses spoke”: we begin with a focus on the role of the narrator. The first chapter of this book can be read as a primer in literary theories of narratology, with a defined speaker presenting reported speech and internal speech, vying with a narrative that has already been told. The literary structure forces an awareness of the presence of the speaker, and how the speaker’s experience and narrative stance affects the story that is told. The review is not identical to the original. The prism of identity stands in the way—an identity formed by the “words” being spoken, which define the timeline, define causality, define responsibility. Experience is translated into a particular frame, and into various narratives that compete with each other. Speech becomes the bearer of identity, the maker of memory. It is words that bind: you are defined by what you swear by, by the words you declaim. History is defined by what and how you choose to remember. Covenant is a story that must be personally and collectively articulated, again and again.  The book ends with a grand scene of establishing a seminal text that will serve as the nexus of identity: "And Moses wrote this teaching (torah) and delivered it to the priests and the sons of Levi...and the elders of Israel" (31:9). From internal speech, we are moving outwards, towards writing that is meant for reading, for sharing: "you will read this teaching before all of Israel, in their ears. Gather the people together: men women, and children and the stranger within your gates, that they may hear and may learn... so that their children, who do not know, may hear and learn" (10-13). 

The focus on speech and its role in creating identity, is accompanied by a focus on boundaries, both literal and metaphysical. The book sets out to differentiate "self" from "non-self."Like all stories, it is a story that also excludes and destroys. There is no room for dual loyalties in the covenant. All that is "not self" must be destroyed or incorporated.  Deuteronomy  continuously moves between a defined center and outer limits and back again--whether by tracing the contours of the country though the tri-annual journey from the peripheral cities to the central "place" that God will choose; or through a judiciary that is placed at "every gate" yet relies on a central authority; or through the network of roads providing refuge for the inadvertent killer. Beyond these etched contours is the space "outside"--a space to which the army "goes out," only to come "back in". The boundaries of the land are echoed in metaphysical laws that define and limit who can "come into" the congregation.  Even the consequence of sin is limited by a boundary, not to exceed the limits of the individual life.

It is Moses, the speaker, who experiences these absolute boundaries most acutely. Barred from crossing the physical boundary of the Jordan River, his life embodies the unbreakable and unmoving limit of God's will. The book opens as he looks out toward the Promised Land, and closes as his final request is once again refused, and he dies "there, in the desert, by the passages of Moab," unable to "cross" the river. It is Moses who embodies the lesson that his "song" comes to teach:  That God is the singularity that holds all opposition,: "I am He...there is none that can deliver from My hands."

In its focus on giving and taking and absolute boundaries, Deuteronomy returns us to the primordial introduction of the speech act: Eden and its aftermath.  Deuteronomy indeed acts as a "second law" in that it returns us to the issues that animated the primal presentation of humanity: : speech, knowledge, possession, and “good”--the adjective that Moses repeats again and again. The first, the only, command given to the humanity is to see and not not to take--to accept the imposed limits, to be a guardian who does not “send forth his hand.” In Moses’ bitter experience standing on Nebo, we return to the human in the garden, staring at the forbidden fruit. And this time, the painful boundary remains unbroken.

Does this perhaps, allow the blessing to answer the curse? 

Deuteronomy 33: In Writing

These are the words...

After all has been said

factored and seen

loosen the strands

and watch them rectangle

speak watching and wondering

watering a seed

and whispering Grow

language of letting go

ceasing to mold

the world with word

speaking the words

between now and later

Listen to my speech

turn to blessing

turn to prayer.

May we live and not die

May we be

May we come

into our people

May we draw on the deeps

May we reach for the dew 

sunk in the sand

plyng the sea.

May we reach what lurks below

what drips above.

May we find the everlasting hills

the eternal mountains

that embrace.

Hold us in your arms

gathered at your feet

carrying your voice

in the nucleus of our cells.

I know

no one

but the weave that holds us together,

the everlasting arms of earth

a lone glinting spring.

Deuteronomy: Chapter 33

from word

to blessing

draw it together

Waters above

waters below

pain of not-love

lack 

of knowledge

let us live and not die

let us be one in You

[For full chapter, click here

We come to Moses' final address to the Children of Israel. After a whole book of "the words that Moses spoke"--a book of exhortation, rebuke, warning, promise--Moses "made an end of speaking all the words" (32: 45), and begins is another kind of address: blessing. "And this is the blessing that Moses the man of God blessed the Children of Israel before his death."

In closing with a blessing, the final book of the Torah takes us back to the closing of the first book. Genesis also closes with a blessing before death--Jacob's final blessings to his sons.

These two closings are indeed linked by multiple intertextual allusions. At the opening of the blessing, Moses declares that we are dealing with the "inheritance of Jacob," and closes by declaring Israel "the spring of Jacob." As in Genesis, these blessing combine a focus on the future with a look back on the past. As in Genesis, the blessings are performative, and interweave a whole from the disparate parts. As in Genesis, the leitword is asaf, to gather, to bring together: "And there was in Yeshurun a king, when the heads of the nation were gathered, all together, the tribes of Israel,"

Like Jacob, Moses brings "together, all the tribes of Israel"  by interweaving the children of the various mothers, erasing the painful divisiveness of Jacob's family by creating new connections. Jacob created his new whole by cross-hatching the liminal surrogate children of the maidservants,  not quite Rachel's, not quite Leah's, making them the binder for the two sides of the family, interlinking Rachel and Leah's children through their proxies. Moses follows in Jacob's path, interlinking Bilhal's Dan with Zilpa's Gad through the imagery of the lion; and Zilpah's Asher with Bilha's Naphtali, through the key-word "ratzon" (desire, will). Yet Moses is more ambitious, and actually creates a matrix that unites Rachel and Leah's children directly: Levi, who has renounced all particular loyalties serves as the glue, allowing Benjamin and Joseph to be couched between Judah and Zebulun. 

Once again, Joseph seems to act as a primal binding force, as he merges the waters above and the  "deeps lurking below," reconnecting the split "waters above, and the waters below" that have not merged since the Deluge. Gad also returns to the primal "beginning" (Reishit) that opened the Bible. Throughout, the blessings bind through returning to "the eternal hills," "the ancient earth." Bringing "together, all the tribes of Israel" is tied to going all the way back to the primal divisions of creation, bringing together air, water, seas, sand and hills--all the natural phenomena that define these blessings. 

The centrality of Joseph in the blessing serves as a reminder that the question of redemption in Genesis is linked to bringing Joseph back, to undoing his sale and exile. 

Return to central. In the end, it is the Land itself that will  will act as a binder. In living within the "everlasting hills" Israel will actually, metaphysically, be living living within God: "The eternal God is a dwelling place, and beneath are the everlasting arms... and Israel dwelleth in safety, the spring of Jacob alone, in a land of grain and wine, and his heavens drop down dew."]