Rabbi's Derasha

The speech that begins with Devarim is well known to us. We know how long the speech was, and where it was delivered.  But I want to ask what seems to be a painfully obvious question: Who is the audience for this speech?  

It should be clear whom Moshe Rebenu is addressing.  The entire previous generation should be gone now.  The Midrash describes a Tisha B’Av ritual.  Each year, on the anniversary of the spies’ return, people would dig their own graves.  Then they would lie down to sleep.  Each year, about 16,000 people did not wake up the next morning.  Until the last time, which was five months before Moshe Rabenu’s speech.  Then they woke up.  They thought they had miscounted the days, so they continued to lay down in their graves until the moon was full and it was clear that they had survived.  That is one of the reasons for the celebration of Tu B’Av.  

What’s more, it is clear at times that Moshe is explicitly preparing for the entrance into the land.  That’s where the people in front of him are headed.  

But there are times when Moshe Rabenu seems confused about this.  He tells stories that took place almost 40 years ago but he keeps calling the subjects of these stories “you.”  He’s got his pronouns mixed up.  He keeps telling them about YOU when he should be talking about THEY.  Keeps saying “to YOU” instead of “to THEM.”  He recalls when “you” approached me and “you” said, “let’s send me before us to reconnoiter the land.”  When he recalls the worries 40 years ago about what will be with the next generation in Eretz Yisrael, he speaks about “your toddlers,” and “your children.”   

What is he doing?  The answer is that he is instilling in them Klal consciousness, a sense that there is an entity that goes beyond the nation of Israel.  Klal Yisrael is the collective that transcends time and space.   It came into being with the exodus from Egypt and it is the entity that will bring about the Mashiach.  Unlike membership in the nation of Israel, we all need to strive to become part of Klal Yisrael.  Those who assume that mantle are responsible for the national destiny.  What has happened in the Jewish past happened to you and what will happen in the future will do so as well.  

As this generation listens to Moshe Rabenu, they are not part of the earlier stories just because they have inherited the consequences of the poor choices of their ancestors.  It’s not just that they inherited this mess.  It is that all that happened to them is now you.  

When one thinks about the last nine months, not everything has become clear.  It might not have clarified for everyone who is right and who is wrong.  But it should have clarified for us that we are them.  We are every other Jew for whom this exile is precarious.  We are the generation that Moshe Rabenu spoke to -- lost in the desert, fearing a return to a rigid existence, yearning for the freedom of home.  

I cannot pinpoint the moment that I started to have this sense.  But I can tell how it was measured.  I went to Yad V’Shem more than 40 years ago, after I had been in Israel a week.  I visited on the day that coincided with my first day in a yeshiva.  I entered its exhibits as I had entered yeshiva, as a tourist.  There is a series of pictures in one of the halls.  The pictures begin with one taken by the Nazis of men, women and children -- Jews -- perched on the edge of a pit.  There is a description of such a scene used as a caption, as a parent consoles a child about what is going to happen now.  The first time I saw that picture, I saw it as a tourist.  A few years later, I could barely contemplate the scene.  Somewhere in the middle, I became part of that scene.  

I mentioned that Klal Yisrael came to be at Pesach time.  The opposite experience is on Tisha B’Av, when the Klal loses its way.   The Tur gives a mnemonic for remembering the holidays. It points out that Pesach and Tisha B’Av are already on the same days of the week.  If Pesach was a Tuesday, then TIsha B’Av will be on a Tuesday.  This is not just a mnemonic, however.  There is a linkage.   

There will be a Kinna on the morning of Tisha B’Av that speaks about  the connection of Tisha B’Av with Pesach.  It speaks about those who left Egypt and those who left Yerushalayim, linking them.  These are the antipodes of the Jewish year but it also means that Tisha B’Av is always linked to Pesach.  This is why Chazal say that the Mashiach will be born on Tisha B’Av.  Going through a Tisha B’Av with a sense of the loss -- mourning on that day -- means that one will be a part of the Klal Yisrael that experiences redemption, Bimheira V’yameinu.