Vayeilech

I said this at the streaming service on September 11 2021, on Shabbat Shuva

'Hello everyone. Shabbat shalom. One way or another, it’s lovely to be here again…
Today we read parashat Veyeilech.
In it, we read that Moses tells the people of Israel everything they need to know as they take their next step in their Jewish Journey into the promised land.
He tells them:
Be strong and brave and don’t be afraid of what’s ahead חִזְק֣וּ וְאִמְצ֔וּ אַל־תִּֽירְא֥וּ וְאַל־תַּעַרְצ֖וּ
Then Moses writes down the Torah and he tells the priests to put it besides the Ark of the Covenant. Moses dies confident in the knowledge that his successor is in place and that his Sefer Torah is safely available for future reference.

Cutting forward 1000s of years, in the aftermath of the destruction of the second Temple, Rabbi Akiva and the sages radically reinterpret Moses’s Torah and replace Temple Judaism with Talmudic Judaism, which is where we are today.
The sages of the Talmud are aware that they had changed so much about the Torah and how Judaism is practised, that they imagine that Moses himself wouldn’t recognise it.

There is a profound story in the Talmud about this realisation. In b.Menachot 29b, God gives Moses the opportunity to sit at the back of Rabbi Akiva’s classroom and Moses doesn’t understand what they are talking about.
Moses doesn’t understand God’s decisions either. Twice he asks God why and twice God tells him in no uncertain terms to Be quiet, this is the plan that came up in my thoughts.
שתוק כך עלה במחשבה לפני
In other words, no one can know or control what happens, not even Moses.

That’s what we’ve learned in the time of Corona.

We live in an age of powerful technology, and the Torah is hosted on the fantastic website Sefaria, where our entire tradition is available to us in an instant. And we have streaming services that lets me talk to you now. We live in an age of science where eight new vaccines were developed in one year to protect us, with more on the way.

But with all the knowledge available to us, we also live in an age of uncertainty, where we don’t know where the next terror attack, plague, fire or flood is coming from. Twenty years ago, who would have thought that 3,000 people would die, out of the blue, on a sunny Tuesday morning. Who would have thought a global pandemic would stop me hugging my children for a year.

The only thing that is certain is that change is coming, in ways that we can’t know now. The future isn’t ours to see, as the lovely song goes. But it’s not que cera cera, in Judaism. Our tradition is do good things, do teshuva and do mitzvot.

We are always trying to tilt the arc towards Justice as Martin Luther King said: ‘We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’
Or as Maimonides says on Repentance:
‘If a person does just one mitzvah, he will overbalance himself and the whole world to the side of virtue, where he brings about his own and everyone’s salvation and deliverance.’

We aren’t just victims in the face of the whims of an unknowable God. We can do good things, regardless of a specific outcome.

When things don’t go our way despite our best efforts, we have to allow ourselves to be completely re-invented to the extent that the future form might barely resemble the current iteration. And that it will be ok like that. It will be ok like that.

Moses himself didn’t recognize the changes that were made to his laws, but he had the wisdom to leave us the operating system. He wrote down and placed his Sefer Torah in the Ark of the Convenant for us to re-interpret and live by generations later.
Including these words from today’s parasha…
חִזְק֣וּ וְאִמְצ֔וּ אַל־תִּֽירְא֥וּ וְאַל־תַּעַרְצ֖וּ
Be strong and brave and don’t be afraid of what’s ahead…
As it says in the last line of Adon Olam
וְעִם רוּחִי גְּוִיָּתִי, יְהֹוָה לִי וְלֹא אִירָא:
And with my spirit and my body God is with me, I won’t be afraid