I'm a few days behind because *someone* didn't quite realize that last week was a double portion, so I just started Sefer Devarim.
This is going to sound odd but I honestly feel like Devarim is almost like a Mosaic stand-up routine - where, after years and years of "carrying" the people (his words), he finally gets to unleash "how he really feels." Why not? Indeed, he's going to convey the Word of G-d and blessing and curses and advice and words of encouragement, but you can already tell, mixed in are most definitely his own thoughts and feelings about the wild ride it's been. To me, there's definitely an element of comedic stand-up in it.
Regardless, I am fascinated by the geography of the delivery (and I meant to, but didn't have time or capacity to fully expand on the "42 way stations" captured in last week's parasha even though I at least wrote one entry on it). The location of this book is both extremely specific and totally unplaceable on any modern map:
... on the other side of the Jordan, in the Wilderness, in Aravah, opposite the Sea of Reeds, between Paran and between Tophel, and Lavan and Hazerot, and Dizahav - 11 days from Horeb by way of Mount Seir until Kadesh Barnea.
I mean, we certainly know pretty much where this monologue was delivered - directly across Yericho. (Can you imagine what it must have felt like to be living in Yericho at that time and seeing this mass of people directly across the Jordan River, listening to their leader speak for a month? Wow.)
In one of the commentaries, it is noted that nowhere does the Torah state any location by the name of Tophel, Lavan, Hazerot, or Dizahav. And it's interesting that the Torah doesn't use the name we know of most commonly associated with that first mountain - Sinai - instead using "Horeb" instead.
The truth is that while the Torah could have said "across from Yericho" as it did in almost every occasion regarding the Israelite's current station - it didn't. Why?
Perhaps it is because something like a place - obviously it's a definite, very real and objective physical place, but it's also entirely subjective and relative as well. Everything is always between, opposite, and in something else. Just a few weeks (?) prior to Devarim, the land in which the Israelites in was full of people. Now it is desolate. And the land they're about to enter - well, that's about to meet a much slower but similar fate.
The same is for life - we cannot and should never say that, a la Matrix, this life is not real, it's just a figment of my imagination, everything is truly just emptiness. No. It's real and we are here to engage with and fix it. But it is also totally relative - there will be a "before time" and an "after time," just as the Torah tells us. What that will look like - and how it stretches to infinity in both directions - well, perhaps that's a topic for the next meditation.
So this place from which Moshe is speaking - it is definitely there, and also only there because it is in relation to other places, most of which we have never heard of and have no idea where they are, even today. And that's the point - we can most certainly have it both ways.
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