Rabbi's Derasha

The Baal Koreh last Shabbat afternoon chuckled before starting.  As the Kohen came up, the reader opened the Torah and laughed.  He realized that this Parasha has a built-in trap that every reader must take care to avoid.  This morning’s Parasha begins with the words, “Ki Tetzei l’milchama,” when you go out to war.  But so does the chapter before.  If one searches out only those first words, one can easily point to the previous chapter.  As he starts reading, it gets confusing pretty quickly.

In fact, last week’s Parasha ended with several sections relating to war.  Although those sections are not sequential, they are obviously thematically connected.  There is a big debate going back to the Talmud about juxtapositions throughout the Torah.  But everyone agrees that juxtaposition is significant in the book of Devarim.  It is understood that the way Moshe spoke is at least slightly discursive.  Not stream of consciousness, but discursive.  For example, several sections toward the end of last week’s Parasha were about war. But then we ended with a section about a corpse found outside of a city.  This is not about war but the commentators say that this sequence is not random.  Finding an abandoned murder victim, they say, is more likely to occur amidst the debasement of human life during wartime.  

The beginning of this week’s portion is also about the effects of war.  But now the focus is on the way family dysfunction arises out of the debasement of war.   

Just as the juxtapositions work in the beginning of the Parasha, so they also appear at the end.  The commandment to remember Amalek is resonant this year.  The rhetoric in Israel about Amalek came under scrutiny even though it was never about Arabs in general or even about Palestinians.  It was about Hamas.  But the references were provoked by the attack itself.  The verses we read this morning highlight that Amalek focused on the most vulnerable.  And the attack on October 7 was on the vulnerable.  

But what about the juxtaposition?  The section before it has nothing to do with anything national.  It is about shopkeepers.   It calls out the manipulation of weights and measures.  But the intent to create a juxtaposition is clear.  First the verse forbids the corruption of the weights.  Normally, that would be followed with something pejorative about that type of behavior. But instead we hear the antidote, that one should maintain true weights and measures.  Then the section ends off with the declaration that those who do cheat are doing an abomination.  And this abomination brings Amalek.

And what’s in the juxtaposition?  Cheating in business arises out of a lack of trust in what Hashem has granted one in Parnassa.  One does not trust that what one has received is just.  

We know from back in Shemot that Amalek attacks because of a lack of faith.  Then it was a lack of water in the desert.  Here it’s the willingness to cheat in business.  

Back in the 80s, there was a ferment about Mashiach.  R’ Shimon Schwab, living in Washington Heights, was asked: What would make the Mashigach come now?  He said he thought he knew the answer.  If one looks at the dictionary definition of “jew” as a verb -- not as a noun, like you and me, but as a verb -- it is not very flattering.  We’re not worried about how it came about.  R’ Schwab said that when the word, as a verb, means something inspiring about business dealings, that will bring Mashiach.  It will mean that Jews are doing business with Emuna, with faith.  That level of faith can bring Mashiach.