Devarim

Sefer Devarim opens with Moshe looking back over forty years, and the first thing he recalls G-d saying at Horeb is jarring: רַב־לָכֶם שֶׁבֶת בָּהָר הַזֶּה — rav lachem shevet bahar hazeh, "you have stayed long enough at this mountain." You'd think the foot of the mountain of revelation is exactly where you'd pitch a tent forever. But holiness was never meant to be a place you camp; it's a place you leave, carrying what you received down into the mess below.

'Several times unconsciously I've stumbled on the path and seen a mountain in the mist' — the glimpse comes while you're moving, not while you're parked.

And then comes the stumbling. Thirty-eight years of it — the spies, the refusal, and then the part we tend to skip: the morning after, when the shame set in and they decided they would simply take it back. חָטָאנוּ, "we stand guilty," and up into the hill country they marched without Him.

'Embarrassed with failure, I [might mistakenly] try to reverse'...

The Amorites came out after them like so many bees and crushed them at Hormah. They wept, and this time it seemed no one was listening. You don't undo a stumble by charging back up the mountain. You walk it through.

The Mei HaShiloach reads this as the secret of the whole book: שֶׁאֵין אָדָם עוֹמֵד עַל דִּבְרֵי תּוֹרָה אֶלָּא אִם כֵּן נִכְשַׁל בָּהֶם, "a person does not stand upon words of Torah unless he stumbles in them." The stumbling itself was how the Torah got inside them; the desert was the curriculum, not the detour. Anyone who stood in the Worcester Centrum on November 29, 1997 and rode that Runaway Jim out for the better part of an hour knows this in their neshama — the jam loses the thread, wanders where it has no business going, seems hopelessly lost, and that meandering is exactly where it arrives at what it could never have reached by playing it straight.

So Moshe delivers the pivot: פְּנוּ לָכֶם צָפֹנָה, "turn north." The stumbling wasn't wasted, but it isn't the destination either. 'Sink my toes into the ground and set a different course' — you've been skirting this mountain long enough.

Good Shabbos, phriends.