Somewhere on the plains of Moav, in the last weeks of his life, Moshe begins to speak. He has in front of him a captive audience in the form of a nation that has buried the entire generation before them and the first words he chooses to speak at this point are God’s words at Sinai:

רַב־לָכֶ֥ם שֶׁ֖בֶת בָּהָ֥ר הַזֶּֽה׃ פְּנ֣וּ וּסְע֣וּ לָכֶ֗ם

You have stayed long enough at this mountain. Turn, and go… (Devarim 1:6-7)

Rashi, quoting the Sifrei (Devarim, piska 5), hears a second, less obvious meaning. Rav lachem (רַב־לָכֶ֥ם) can mean “enough already;” it’s time to go. Alternatively, it can mean “much is yours.” With this second understanding, one can read that Moshe gained great reward from dwelling at this mountain. Moshe built the Mishkan here, made the menorah and the vessels, received the Torah, and appointed a Sanhedrin there. Everything that defined Moshe, and ultimately created the first foundations of the Jewish nation originated at this mountain.

But now, says Parshat Devarim, it’s time to go.

Sinai was a pure gift. Nothing was taken from us there. But still God had to command the Jewish people to leave because a people will stay forever at the site of the thing that formed them unless somebody tells them to go.

And Moshe will not let the fire go. Three chapters from here he is still describing it. And when he comes down the slope with the tablets in his hands, the mountain is still burning behind him (9:15). Fire is his word for that place; Sinai was a mountain of fire.

And even so, we had to be ordered off it.

Plenty of people tell us “enough already.” They are the people who want the ash gone because it accuses them, and we learned long ago to hear those words as an attack and to camp harder. At Sinai those same words came from the One who had just given us everything. 

The fires in our own history were built to consume. Titus took the Temple down to its foundation stones. Birkenau was designed by men who wrote ash as a design feature. We did not choose those fires and we could not have stopped them. What we chose came afterward. We settled at the burned places. We pitched our tents on that ground and stayed for generations, and we handed our children the address and called it an identity.

This was largely the Jewish education I was given as a child –........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)