The article below is from Rabbi Riskin’s book Devarim: Moses Bequeaths Legacy, History and Covenant, part of his Torah Lights series of commentaries on the weekly parsha, published by Maggid
Efrat, Israel – “You are standing this day all of you before the Lord your God, your heads, your tribes, your elders, and your officers, even every person of Israel.” (Deuteronomy 29:9)
Rashi quotes the Midrash Tanchuma, explaining the connection between the multitude of grim warnings (tokhacha) unloosed in the prior portion of Ki Tavo, and this week’s opening words: “You are standing.” Our sages teach: since the Israelites heard one hundred curses minus two, in addition to the forty-nine in the book of Leviticus (chapter 26), their faces turned green and they didn’t understand how they would be able to stand up to so many chastisements (curses). Moses thus began to comfort them: “You are standing here today. You have greatly angered the Almighty [after all, you constantly complained in the desert, you worshipped the Golden Calf, you refused to conquer Israel] but nevertheless you have not been destroyed and behold you are standing here today.” In effect, therefore, our opening has to be taken as a divine statement of consolation: You may well suffer, but you will never be destroyed.
Rabbi Yedidya Frankel, the late Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, asks three significant questions on this Midrash. First of all, why did it take the second set of chastisements to cause the Israelites to “turn green,” when the first set of forty-nine could hardly be described as benign experiences? Here is an example from Leviticus: “I will appoint terror over you, even consumption and fever, that shall make the eyes to fail, and the soul to languish, and you shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it” (Lev. 26:16).
Secondly, the Jewish people seem to be recoiling at the massive number of curses – forty-nine from Leviticus plus another ninety-eight from Deuteronomy. But the fact is that last week’s portion goes out of its way to point out that the specific number of curses is hardly relevant because Israel will suffer every possible blow imaginable: “Also every sickness and every trauma, and every plague which is not written in this book of law, God will bring about against you until He destroys you” (Deut. 28:61).
And, in fact, the entire span of Jewish history bears out the horrible truth of this verse. For example, where in these warnings are the gas chambers of Auschwitz mentioned? And yet we were subjected to them! Hence, why does the added number of curses cause them to turn green?
Finally, asks Rabbi Frankel, from a stylistic point of view, why does the Midrash not utilize parallel language? If, with reference to Deuteronomy, the sages speak of “one hundred minus two” curses, apparently being interested in a round number, why with reference to the curses in Leviticus do they not say “fifty minus one”? Why then do they speak of forty-nine?
Rabbi Frankel brilliantly answers all of his questions by suggesting another interpretation of “one hundred minus two.” It is not another way of representing the number ninety-eight. If we go back to the initial set of chastisements in Leviticus (Parashat Bechukotai), we discover that, after the curses and the warnings are presented, the Torah then includes two comforting promises: “Then I will remember My covenant with Jacob, and also My covenant with Isaac, and also My covenant with Abraham will I remember, and I will remember the land” (Lev. 26:42). Two verses later we read, “And even this, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them, and I will not abhor them, to destroy them utterly in order to nullify My covenant with them” (26:44). They were to be punished, but they would remain alive as a people and would be restored to the Land of Israel.
What prompted the Israelites to turn green with fright was when they heard one hundred additional curses in Deuteronomy, but “minus two” – devoid of any comforting ending, without the two guarantees they had received with the prior set of curses. And if the chastisements of the book of Leviticus refer to the destruction of the First Temple and its subsequent exile, and the chastisements of the book of Deuteronomy refer to the destruction of the Second Temple and its subsequent exile (see Nahmanides, Lev. 26:16), the Israelites feared that there might not be a return and redemption after the second destruction. They feared that they would then be destroyed as a nation totally and irrevocably. To this end, Moses comforts them: “Atem Nitzavim – You are standing here,” aren’t you, despite the Egyptian exile and enslavement, despite your miserable backsliding in the desert! You are the people of an eternal covenant – and God’s guarantee as to your eternality as a nation holds true for as long as world and history remain.
The manner in which Rabbi Frankel explains the Midrash is most optimistically comforting; we may suffer, but we will always survive! Of course, our collective tragedy is that even after the Holocaust, the total number of Jews in the world continues to decrease. Yet I believe that those who choose to remain Jewish today are all the more committed and are often much more serious than parents who took so much for granted. And it is precisely this minority of serious Jews which has been responsible for the preservation of our people.
If Josephus is correct that at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple there were five million Jews, then the natural birthrate of Jews should have easily reached 200 million by today. And even with all the deaths due to the rampant killings by our persecutors throughout history, we should still be left with one hundred million Jews today! But where are they? How did they disappear?
We must conclude that throughout our history, Jews have always defected, that we have lost many more Jews to the prevailing winds of assimilation than to the marauding swords of anti-Semitism. Sometimes the temptation to assimilate was too strong, and sometimes the sacrifice needed to remain Jewish was too difficult to bear. This is our destiny. Whoever is a Jew today is the product of generations of the most serious Jews in our history, the survival of the most committed. Moses may well be speaking to us today, after the Holocaust and in the wake of secular assimilation: “You are standing here today, all of you, before the Lord your God” – despite all your disasters and defections. Take heart!
An American magazine called Look, circulated in the millions, published a lead article in the early 1950’s on the “Vanishing American Jew.” Look magazine has long since vanished, but the American Jew is still holding strong. We are still standing here today – especially those of us in the burgeoning State of Israel – where our population has grown from 600,000 to six million in six decades – despite the ongoing struggle with the Arab states vowing our disappearance.
And my revered teacher and mentor, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, extracted one more crucial lesson from our Torah portion. There are two chapters of dire warnings and bitter tragedies in our Bible: chapter twenty-six in the book of Leviticus and chapter twenty-eight in the book of Deuteronomy. Many of our commentaries, most notably Nahmanides, link the chapter in Leviticus to the destruction of the First Temple and its concomitant exile, and the chapter in Deuteronomy to the destruction of the Second Temple and its concomitant exile. The first Babylonian exile was rather short in duration, barely fifty years, and was largely limited to one geographic area. Hence, the biblical chapter in Leviticus concludes with God’s guarantee of Israel’s eternity and our imminent return.
The second Roman exile caused our nation to be scattered all over the world and endured for close to two thousand years. And although it is true that there is no immediate guarantee of restoration – indeed, the restoration was long in coming – the opening words in Nitzavim, barely one chapter later, promise our eternal survival – and chapter thirty prophesizes our restoration:
“Even if you will be scattered to the ends of the heaven, from there will the Lord your God gather you and from there will He take you up. And the Lord your God will bring you to the land which your fathers have inherited, and you shall inherit it, He will cause you to do well, and you shall be more numerous than were your ancestors.” (Deut. 30:4–5)
The major difference is that whereas the first destruction is followed by a divine guarantee of almost immediate restoration, the second destruction will be much longer and will require Israel’s “return” (teshuva) as its prerequisite. Hence before the divine promise of restoration “even from the ends of the heavens” comes the divine command: “And you shall return to the Lord your God and hearken to His voice” (Deut. 30:2). And “return” means two things: to the Land of Israel and to the Torah of Israel.
The first time, it was mostly up to God; the second time, it is mostly up to us!
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin
Chancellor Ohr Torah Stone
Chief Rabbi – Efrat Israel
