Devarim and Tisha B'Av 2015

Devarim and Tisha  B'Av 2015

Devarim is about knowing where we are, who we are and how we got here. It’s about knowing so well that we can move on and respond to God’s command:  rav lechah.

Enough of you, He says. It’s the first solid direction we receive in this whole book of Devarim. Enough of you. Turn around. Move on. No doubt, this desire and yearning is repeated continually by modern poets and singers. Think of Paul Simon and his song Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover. Think of Bob Dylan and his words  She’s an Artist: She Don’t Look Back. Think of Free Bird by Lynrd Skynrd. What about And She Was by The Talking Heads? There’s celebration in moving on if you know where you stand. There’s urgency, joy, fear, fascination and poetic repetition sparked by our revolving memory.
 
Of course, the literal shock of Devarim is that we’ve moved from the omniscient perspective to that of Moses.  For a quick review, all books until now (a good many pages and months of studying) have created a distance as if with a zoom camera. In literary circles we call it the omniscient perspective.  We open Deavrim and we immediately jump into the intimate story on fast forward according to Moses.  Meanwhile, we all know that if pov can change so suddenly that somewhere in the white space is the viewpoint of ourselves, of our God, our friendly neighbors, our unfriendly neighbors and that of even the Canaanites about to be destroyed.  This is not just the angle of Moses. Oh no. It’s  that of everyone mentioned and not mentioned. As we read in Netzavim soon, it’s the pov of those of us who aren’t even there.

And what do I have to back up my statement? Honestly, we have as an inheritance hundreds of thousands  of pages written by great rabbis through the centuries, all Torah interpretation. If we take ourselves out of the picture, we take them out as well. Not because of what they say, but given the fact that they say anything at all.

And this brings me to my point. Look at the colloquial nature of  rav lechah. Formal Hebrew it is not. It is meant for the masses and transmitted in a way that opens doors for everyone.  Language of that sort can be paralleled to the easy words of our rock and country stars, to the slang we use today such as get going, get a move on,  haul ass, and take off. Ah, getting even more inclusive, we can include yallah (Arabic slang) and no manches (Spanish slang). Trust me, the fact that this phrase is in Torah can make it seem spiritual. The fact that it’s in  Biblical Hebrew can make it seem intellectual and even scholarly. The truth is though it’s colloquial. Period.  The spiritual (if it’s worth its salt) is always colloquial.

Please note, once we get colloquial (and in Devarim we do) we stay within the contract. It’s part of the b’rit, the covenant, the pact with God. There’s no avoiding it. In short, our covenant is all inclusive, being to being, community to community and within each being…heart to soul to mind. This is important.

It’s also how we want to deal with death.  Death is not a formal happening. It’s not a call for recorded prayers as in the siddur, perfect singing or for every tiny rule in the Schulchan Aruch. Death is a people event to be handled like a people event. It’s a rav lechah event at its extreme.  

And that, in my opinion, is what Tisha b’Av is all about.  And it’s what Lamentations is all about.  It’s the process…and the written testament… of the dragging of community devestation from the property of scholars and fundamentalists to the people. It’s the dragging of community death from a place of religious formality, superficiality, historical fact (and myth), and  metaphor-turned- kitch…right here to our personal  colloquial real solid strong intimate first person home. It’s so much easier if we (the people) can say it’s too difficult to understand.  Unfortunately though there’s nothing easier.