Deuteronomy Cycle Three Devarim 1:1 to 4:22

Devarim


This week we begin the book Devarim. In Hebrew, words or things. The Greeks called it Deuteronomy, taking mishnah hatorah hazot to mean the second law. The Jewish encyclopedia says this is an erroneous translation, that the Hebrew means a copy of the law. My question is this. What is a copy of the law? And why devarim? Let’s merge the two together, see how they dance as one, see what fire they can light.

First, according to scholars, Devarim contains five speeches by Moses. Yes, speeches. Truth here is not only written. It is spoken, heard and known in the scene. This is an expansion from the exposition of the previous books. Therefore, it becomes an expanded level of experience, a new pulsation in our mind. It catapults us to new levels of consciousness. Suddenly we are dealing with giants, physical and beyond. For example, Rabbi Johannon (Bab Talmud) states that when he was out pursuing a deer he entered a giant thighbone of a corpse and continued for three parsangs but reached neither the deer nor the end of the thigh bone. When he returned he was told it was that of Og, the King of Bashon. On the lighter side, according to Rabbi Akiba, the arm length of God, right to left, is 770, 000,0000 parsangs (Shir Haquomah). That’s one large arm length. What can we glean from such midrash? I think the energy moving us simply from written story to sound propels us like sparks of fire in the same direction to new giant dimensions of sensual perception that on one hand we can’t yet fathom and on the other, we can.

Let’s look at definitions for a quick moment. What is a copy of the law? It sounds ominous. Well, we could say that the Deuteronomist Code, the mitzvoth, are copies from Exodus. The strange thing though is that, according to scholars, Deuteronomy precedes the rest of Torah. Exodus therefore seems to be copying Deuteronomy, not the other way around. Certainly there are holy behaviors that God wants us to copy. In Torah though they seem to be imagined more than manifest. Rashi says that these are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel infer that he spoke them in many places and each is a reminder of how the Israelites messed up. In other words, the desert points to Exodus 16:3 when the Israelites moaned with doubt that they would rather have died by the hand of God. The plain is a reminder of Moab and Bal Peor. Di Zahav is a repetition of the gilded calf. It seems you just need to say the place, for example, the Eugene Country Fair, and memories are kindled, behaviors are re-inspected, the wholeness of our action in the one place is observed, copied in our minds, and not re-written, but like iron, wrought.

In life we don’t realize it, but we can do this every moment. We can copy the law every moment. We can hear the repetition in a whirlwind and edit ourselves in the experience to try to get it right. We can see when it is rav …too much…and when it is time to turn and turn again and move on. During our time of vision though we are to remember that it is a gift of pure chesed…the fire of experiential love from God. As it says in Shir Haquomah: You are fire and your throne in fire and your celestial creatures and servants are fire. It is a gift of pain and joy, of inner search. of repetition, copying, seeing oneself over and over, reviewing, return.

But we don’t get this copy of the law nor the purification without stepping up to the plate. We don’t get it if we shut our hands, close down our hearts, shut our eyes, our ears, clamp down, clam up, parade around with self justified doubt. We don’t get it if we refuse to tap into the holy senses of expansion referred above by me and also by Rabbi Nachman, by Rabbi Akiba and by the Bal Shem Tov to name a few.

But wait, we can now think. We’re just human. Here we are faced with this fire of God. Of course there are doubts! How can we open up without being destroyed? After all, even the ARI, Rabbi Luria, points to overbearing light as the cause of breakage. This is where a stronger understanding of the word devarim comes in. Let’s look back at Mattoth, last week’s parsha. There, we read that kol davar asher yavo va’aish ta’aviru va’aish. All things/words that came from fire must go through fire. We read that gold, silver, copper, iron, tin and lead…and all devar (that came from fire)…must be purified in this way. Then, we read that all other things that can’t withstand the fire must be purified by water. Here the word kol seems to suffice. The word devar specifically refers to that which can withstand fire.

Therefore, in this parsha, named Devarim, we are being taken through fire. We are learning through experience how to have come through fire so we can be the devar that can be be purified by it. We are hearing how to allow our point-of-soul to rise to the upper three sefirot. And once we learn, the copy of the law joins to devarim like the Shechinah with the God-head, like ourselves with the absolute radiance in a dance and rhythm with people we love or don’t love, like a Greek translation, erroneous or not, with a Hebrew one, like Jacob with Esau, Isaac with Ishmael, the Hebrews with the Moabites, man with woman, woman with woman. Man with man.

So may we be open to purification. May we be open to colossal conceptions of our own perceptions, to the radiance of God merging with the gold fountaining up from our soul, to the energy that propels us closer to experiencing that merge of compassion and righteousness, so we can all find peace as one in love at the tiny and magnificent point-of-God.