Eruvin 13b tells us a bat kol, a Heavenly Voice, told us how to rule between the houses of Shammai and Hillel. The bat kol said elu va-elu divrei Elokim chayyim, these and these are the words of the living Gd, והלכה כדברי בית הלל, but normative practice follows Beit Hillel.

Although there has been some debate about whether a Heavenly Voice can establish normative practice (since the Gemara elsewhere says lo ba-shamayim hi, Torah is not in Heaven), Jews have long seen the first part of the statement as true of all debates among qualified Jewish thinkers. Proper scholars using legitimate processes necessarily arrive at ideas or perspectives the system sees as valid, in some sense.

I will not try here to define who counts as a qualified scholar, what constitutes a legitimate process, nor what type of validity elu va-elu grants (whether it means all views are right in some way, or only systemically legitimate). Books have been written on the issues, with no absolute consensus on an answer, and I do not pretend I can resolve any of those here.  

What I find sometimes lost in the focus on pluralism, on accepting all these scholars’ divergent ideas, is how much they share, since they all start with the same devar Hashem, word of Gd. I have taken to looking for those unifying elements because I have met many Jews (in person or through their writings) who have forgotten how much of Torah is nigh universally agreed, no matter what brand of elu va-elu one accepts.

Shared ground seems to me as pressing an agenda to articulate as any specific acts of obligation. As important as details and rituals are, they cannot divert our attention from the overall framework shared by all the scholars whose debates of details we assiduously unpack. As we all struggle to find our best Jewish selves, I think we need to start with what is common to us all, but too often forgotten.

The World of Rashi and Ramban

I proposed a list of such common ideas and commitments in my book We’re Missing the Point: What’s Wrong with the Orthodox Jewish Community and How to Fix It, with mixed results. My two recent samplings of commentaries on the Torah allow for a more modest attempt (and therefore I hope more convincing, at least for these two commentators), to see what Rashi and Ramban agreed was important to the life the Torah recommended.

There are other equally authoritative Torah scholars, so what is true of Rashi and Ramban does not necessarily obligate us. But their influence and impact are broad and deep enough to make whatever they agreed upon a pretty likely candidate for how Jews need to approach the world, and to place a burden of proof on those who would insist on assuming otherwise.

For me, this started almost four years ago, when I marked the passing of a good friend and chavruta, Bruce Ritholtz a”h, studying five comments of Rashi’s on each Torah portion. This year, I did something similar for Ramban’s commentary on the Torah, and now we can step back and see what themes cropped for each often enough for us to notice.

A reminder: they also differ on much, which I will ignore. This essay does not answer a high school exam compare and contrast question. I am discussing only where they are the same, or close enough, despite significant differences. Each time I write “both saw” or other similar phrases, I do not mean they agree exactly, I mean they included those issues or questions as part of the agenda of a Jewish life.

Once we’ve seen their list, we can discuss the light they shed on our Jewish lives today.

The Shaping Forces of Life

Rashi and Ramban drew our attention, over and over, to who runs the world, and included a more diverse list of participants than I would have expected. Both saw elements of life beyond human control, individual or national, and others fully within such control. They phrased it differently, but both thought Jews and people generally were supposed to work to improve a world which Hashem set up, within what could be frustrating or upsetting contours and limitations.

Both thought the metaphysical affected the world, thought purely physical “laws of Nature” insufficiently describe how the world works, especially in the Land of Israel. Both also thought human activity impacted the world physically and metaphysically, with the Torah as a guide to how to produce the best outcomes.

Human Beings in Their Groupings

Rashi and Ramban focus on two nations, primarily, the Egyptians and the Jews. The Egyptians presented the prime example of a nation which resisted and rejected Hashem’s messages, could not or would not see Hashem’s Hand or heed Hashem’s orders, and bore the consequences.

The Jews are and can be representatives of Hashem, who declare the truth of Hashem’s Oneness, role as Creator, and continuing Providence. Or they too can be punished for their failure to live up to their responsibilities.

 A level below entire nations, both Rashi and Ramban also addressed tribes of Israel, particularly the Levi’im. Tribes, clans, and families all had roles of their own, were a part of the whole, but with distinct contributions to make.

Individuals

Given Rashi and Ramban’s agreement about how much Hashem determines, how nations, tribes, and families impose a certain character on their members, how geography and neighbors shape people’s lives, we might think there’s nothing left, no room for or reason to expect individuals to do much.

Yet both Rashi and Ramban are sure of the opposite, of the ability of any of us to redirect history in positive ways, or to do the opposite and send history the other way. Through their readings of the lives of the Avot, the Patriarchs, and other notable figures of the Torah—Aaron, Moshe, Noach, in alphabetical order—their comments on where individuals did or should have earned merit or opprobrium through their choices, Rashi and Ramban made clear their belief in how much each person matters.

A Basic Judaism

Generalities leave much room for difference and debate about particularities of how it all works. Even so, I believe the ideas I have presented here portray a vision of Judaism many observant Jews have forgotten, and therefore bears repeating and rejuvenating.

Rashi and Ramban seem to agree that to be Jewish is to recognize one inhabits a world created by Gd (whatever that means), with certainly regularities we can reasonably call Nature, but also significantly affected by forces which are not purely physical or natural.

That’s because Hashem continues to care about and be involved with the world (whatever that means), commanded a Torah (however that happened), which expects people to participate in helping the world become its best version, as legislated by the Torah.

People do so in groups, large and small, and as individuals, and we are each—as individuals or in our groups– responsible for our attitudes, what we support or oppose, condone, protest, or ignore, actions, and inactions. For all of which we will be punished or awarded, as appropriate.

As I cannot say often enough, the specifics are much debated and can end up looking extremely different. I know people who could ascribe to everything I’ve written here and yet seem to me clearly far from what Rashi, Ramban, or any other rabbinic writer I am familiar with. I do not mean to imply adopting the worldview I’ve inferred from Rashi and Ramban is all we need.

But I know many, many Jews who are ritually observant, more or less, but have forgotten or rejected some or all of the basic picture we saw in Rashi and Ramban. Those people spend much time and effort observing a religion they think is Judaism but which dismisses the basic picture of these two giants of Jewish tradition.

Of course, they may have an equally authoritative source, but our project here at least challenges such Jews to find such an authority or rethink their understanding of the religion to which they adhere.

We get caught up in cleaning up details, sometimes, when we have not yet taken care of the big picture. I have sampled Rashi and Ramban to find the big picture, and this is what I’ve found: a world given to us by Hashem, with clear contours, yet with much room for each of us and all of us to affect how it comes out. It’s just for us to take up the mantle left for us, and do our best to usher in the best version of Hashem’s Kingdom over the world.

A Non-Apology

I have been taking samples of Ramban’s comments on the parsha since the end of Pesach 5777 (2017; I took two weeks for each parsha of Devarim). At the end of each book of the Torah, I’ve paused to share the ideas of themes which popped up repeatedly. As I reviewed those five summary essays to see what flowed through the commentary as a whole, I realized I’ve each time worried aloud about whether I was subconsciously selecting for my preconceptions, was molding Ramban into my own image.

After reading and re-reading to write this essay, I feel comfortable saying that if I have done that, I’ve done it so well that, week after week, without reviewing earlier weeks’ pieces, I managed to pick comments which came together into a remarkably cohesive picture.

I don’t think that’s what happened, however, I think my random sample did what it was intended, showed us concerns of Ramban’s we might not have noticed had we studied the commentary straight through. I cannot say these were what was most important to him, since we were sampling—in theory, a sample can happen to have always missed his more central concerns, over and over. But I feel confident that the ideas we’ll see here would have to be part of any picture of the ideas which mattered to Ramban in his Torah commentary.

After you read, you may disagree, and I’d be happy to hear from you with your reactions, comments, or criticisms (my email is in the paragraph after next).

Ramban’s commentary as I’ve found it focused on the many participants in shaping the world. Hashem could have done it alone, could have completely determined what would happen, yet Ramban thought Hashem in fact allowed a large cast of characters, from Hashem down to each of us as individuals, with many stops in between. His view of the variety of actors who improve or diminish the world carries the assumption each of us is responsible for doing our best, individually and in the groups to which we belong, to bring the world to its best.

Since this is a summary essay—the originals appeared weekly on torahmusings.com, as did the summaries of each book of the Torah, or you can email me (grothst, a gmail account) for the file with the essays—I will not give all the examples which fueled the conclusion I present here. I will name actors Ramban thought affected the world, give some examples, and move on.

Hashem

Any consideration of the world starts with Hashem, Who (for Ramban) created yesh me-ayin, out of complete nothingness, continues to be invested in what happens in the world, and continues to wield the power to change the natural patterns of the world as valuable or necessary. Hashem’s role and powers mean Hashem decides who lives where (as shown by the generation of the Flood, whose lives were forfeit for their misdeeds, and of the Tower, whom Hashem scattered).

Especially since Ramban sees a role for physical and metaphysical powers other than Hashem, he repeatedly stresses Hashem’s sole hold on ultimate power. Hashem leaves room for angels and nature, even prefers the world follow its ordinary patterns, as we’ll see, but is always in full control. Hashem stopped Par’oh’s sorcerers’ usual powers during the plagues, for example, and showed His incomparable power at the Splitting of the Sea.

For reasons Ramban does not lay out quite explicitly, Hashem has an interest in people acknowledging these truths, which is why worship of other powers is so serious, the only sin for which Hashem visits the sins of earlier generations on later ones who continue sinning that way. For the flip side, Hashem sanctifies some items, such as the incense-pans of the Korach group, solely because they served to prove Hashem’s power.

Ramban also pointed several times to Hashem’s overall kindness in administering the world, such as when he said miracles only come to help people or to fully punish evildoers, thought Hashem told Moshe to send more spies to give the Jews the best chance of averting the disaster they were about to bring upon themselves.

Ramban’s world starts with an all-powerful Gd, kind and invested in the world.

Angels

Despite his insistence on Hashem’s sole power and control, Ramban believes in angels, who do have some ability to affect the world. He thinks angels do guide all lands other than Israel, have enough leeway to be punished for mis-stepping (such as the angels of Egypt, who were punished along with the Egyptians at the Exodus), and can choose to delay going into Lot’s house until he makes himself worthy. He also recognized a Heavenly Court, which seems to have more control over the night, and has some kind of leeway to enact strict justice rather than the merciful Providence of Hashem.

Angels’ leeway has strict limits, though. The angel of Esav wanted to hurt more than Ya’akov’s thigh while wrestling him, but was prohibited. The angels in Ya’akov’s dream ascended and descended a ladder to show their need to check with Hashem how to affect the world.

There are angels, which do have meaningful (and a bit independent) impact on the world, but never in any way to make us doubt or wonder about Hashem’s omnipotence.

Nature

The topic did not arise often, but often enough to show Ramban’s belief that Hashem prefers a world which runs naturally. He limited creation from nothing to the first moment, after which anything new was constructed from something which already existed.

When miracles are necessary, Ramban thinks Hashem brings them as minimally as possible. Noach’s ark, for example, was not big enough for the animals it needed to hold. Hashem made it expand, miraculously, yet also required Noach to build as large a structure as feasible, to sustain the natural pattern of the world to the extent possible.

Land of Israel

Nature matters less in Israel, where Hashem retains full and direct Providence. That can be positive, in that rain and other sustaining elements of life will come whenever the Jews act well enough to merit Hashem’s beneficence (or compassion). It’s why prophecy happened only in Israel, why the laws of the Torah are inherent to Israel (mishpat elokei ha-aretz, the laws of the Gd of the land, a Scriptural phrase Ramban repeats a few times), not just the particular legal system of one land’s inhabitants.

Ramban seems to have accepted the view of Sifrei that observance of mitzvot outside Israel was practice for when Jews got back to where the Torah obligated them to live, outside of which he thought they were as people who had no Gd.

The special Providence of Israel also leads to certain punishments, is why Sodom was destroyed more quickly than cities outside Israel of comparable evil. Clothing and house tzara’at could happen only in Israel, and the Land spewed out the Canaanites for their sexual perversions, as it would spew out the Jews if they took up those perversions.

Venue of Hashem’s most direct Providence, the Land itself has a role to play in our world.  

Metaphysical Within Physical

Mostly in Israel, Ramban thought Hashem showed the metaphysical within the physical. The central structure of Judaism, the Mishkan and then Mikdash (Temple), served to house the kind of Divine Presence the Jews had experienced at Sinai. Prophets, the Urim ve-Tumim, and bat kol, Heavenly Voice, were ways to have continuing access to communication from Hashem.  

We’ve already mentioned tzara’at, but Ramban thought zivah was another illness which would only appear in Israel (and only when the Jewish people were at a high enough spiritual state to deserve direct divine effects), a physical and contagious manifestation of a spiritual problem.   

Death showed Ramban two other ways the metaphysical interacted with the physical. He thought the sprinkling of parah adumah water created a reiach nichoach, a pleasing smell, to counteract the smell of death inserted by the sin in the Garden of Eden. The righteous are an exception, their lives of service meaning their corpses do not create the smell or ritual impurity of death.

People’s sins also affect their deaths, a second intrusion of the metaphysical into the physical. Ramban chose to quote R. Yehudah Ha-Levi’s assertion that death without sons is itself a sign of sin, when he does not quote him anywhere else, signaling his agreement with the idea.  

Hashem prefers the world to operate with largely regular patterns, but the metaphysical peeks out often enough to stop us from fooling ourselves to think it’s all natural.

Torah

The surest way to know how to engage a world which mixes the physical and metaphysical is the Torah. It predates the world, contains all wisdom, explicitly, implicitly, and in hidden allusions. Much of Shlomo HaMelech’s wisdom and Yechezkel’s readiness for his vision of Hashem’s Chariot came from their knowledge of Torah.

The Aron, the Ark, sat in the Holy of Holies and was the vehicle for the Divine Presence to reside among people. The Aron housed the Tablets, which had the Aseret Ha-Dibberot written on them. More than once, Ramban referred to the Dibberot as avot of mitzvot, broad categories which encompass all other mitzvot. It seems Torah and mitzvot bring the Presence to the world.

Torah and mitzvot will also let the Jews avoid other nations’ fates and punishments. Observing mitzvot serves a natural protective function, saving Jews from ordinary outcomes. Jewish observance helps nature itself, leads to rains which improve the air and enhance overall health.

Despite Torah’s broad wisdom, Ramban thinks it left out much, for various reasons. We know less about Avraham’s life because the Torah did not want to pay attention to the idolaters he defeated in Ur Kasdim, and are generally not told about hidden miracles (such as Yocheved giving birth at age 130). But what Hashem did tell Moshe was told leimor, clearly, no doubt as to what was said, Moshe Rabbenu conveying exactly the words Hashem meant and spoke.

People in Their Groups

I have been surprised, ever since working on As If We Were There: Readings for a Transformative Passover Experience, by Ramban’s insistence on the political power the masses have. I would have expected the subject of a monarchy, writing about monarchic societies such as Egypt, to dismiss the hoi polloi as irrelevant to history.

Instead, he repeatedly speaks of kings’ need to secure the agreement of their subjects. Par’oh needed to convince his advisers before elevating Yosef to second in command, and could not decree the killing of Jewish babies, since the people would object.

With or without kings, societies need civil law to avoid people running amuck, which is also why punishment must be meted out. Ramban knows of people who protest capital punishment as adding unnecessary death to our world, but he sees it as a community’s responsibility, its way of declaring its opposition to various acts.

The need for punishment is supported by his view of how poorly some people will use their power. In his view, many Egyptians voluntarily killed Jewish babies once they knew there would be no legal consequences, and fooled themselves into denying Hashem’s role in the Exodus so fully they could chase after the Jews into the Sea without thinking they would end up drowned.  

Nations and groups operate together, ideally to articulate, support, and enforce moral conduct.

Jewish People

Among nations, the Jewish one obviously has a special role for Ramban. The Torah calls Jewish coins kadosh, sanctified, because they are used for sanctified purposes, and the Jewish calendar reflects all of Hashem’s redemptions. When the nation as a whole acts well, they need not be subject to the laws of Nature, would be within their rights to consult prophets about how to deal with illnesses and other troubles, not doctors or other experts—as was true of righteous people in our past. Just wanting to the building of the Mishkan was enough for the verse to include ordinary Jews among those who were building it.

So the nation’s possible upside was high, and took less than we might have thought.

Unfortunately, Ramban mostly pointed out where the nation did poorly rather than well. While reading the Sodom story, he digressed to the rape and murder of the concubine at Give’a, with three groups failing to reach their best selves. The tribe of Binyamin failed to stop or protest the crime, then stood by their fellow Benjaminites when the rest of the nation called for justice.

The other tribes were not much better, since they reacted to this crime but not the setting up or theft of the idol of Michah, a story told in the previous chapter of the book of Shofetim. Then, when they went to war against the tribe of Binyamin, they were overconfident, failed to ask Hashem whether they should go at all.

In another digression to a later story, Ramban’s discussion of censuses at the beginning of Bemidbar leads him to David’s census, which led to a plague. Ramban thinks the people should have insisted on being counted only by giving half-shekels, but were already in the wrong for their failure to seek to build a Temple.

Ramban thought the Exodus was delayed thirty years because of the Jews’ many sins. At the late date it did happen, Hashem had to work hard (as it were) to allow it, since the Jews still did not deserve to go out. Once the process started, the Jews continued to err, with some pockets of the Jewish people doubting Hashem sent Moshe all the way up to the Splitting of the Sea.

Just as wanting the good to happen redounded to their credit, watching or joining wrongful causes created liability. The whole nation was at risk because they came to believe Korach was acting on their behalf. Their attitude when leaving Sinai again put them in the wrong, the fact of their relief at not having been given more commandments enough to deserve punishment, and maybe an indirect cause of their being doomed to thirty eight more years in the desert.

Nations, especially the Jewish nation, make the world what it is.

Tribes

Ramban does not spend a lot of time delineating the tribes’ individual characters, but he makes clear he assumed it. The gifts the heads of the tribes brought to mark the dedication of the Mishkan reflected aspects of their unique character, history, or future, Ramban thought.

He also inserted the tribe of Shim’on into the story of their head, Zimri’s, decision to publicly assert his right to marry Kazbi. While the Torah does not mention any action on their part, Ramban thought they accosted their leader over his silence as they were being tried and punished for their own dalliances with Moabite women. They also stood by him as he dared Moshe to react, were a reason Pinchas might have thought twice before responding.

The tribe he looked at most often was the one the Torah did as well, the Levi’im. Ramban thought they missed out explosive population growth in Egypt because they were not enslaved. After the Exodus, the reverse was true, Levi became the tribe most closely connected to and representative of Hashem, so they received no share in the Land or the booty of the war to conquer the Land.

The nation was not conceived as a shapeless whole, it had subgroups with their own ways of contributing, starting with tribes.  

Families

Ramban also points to the family as a corporate entity, which plays a role in the world as a unit.  Had Hashem killed all of Aharon’s sons as punishment for his role in the sin of the Golden Calf, it would have been a destruction of Aharon himself, because children are so fully a part of who parents are.

He noted commandments which legislated the ways members related to each other. Children have to treat parents akin to how they treat Hashem (acknowledging the parent’s role in the child’s creation, with the concomitant obligations of fear and honor), and siblings are to care for and protect each other (avenging Dinah’s honor or marrying a childless brother’s widow).

Moving farther out, Hashem punishes up to four generations for continuing an ancestor’s worship of powers other than Hashem (if the descendants continue the sin), because their sins have some roots in the great-grandfather’s impact on the family.

Families worked together and for each other, so they shared in their failures and successes.

Great Individuals

The smallest unit is the individual, some more impactful than others. The Patriarchs offer many examples, but Ramban’s principle says it best, ma’aseh avot siman le-banim, their actions foreshadowed and shaped their descendants’ experiences. Acts such as Avraham’s leaving Canaan during a famine or Ya’akov’s conquest of Shechem built the Jewish future in certain directions, positive or punitive.

Other remarkable individuals include Moshe, who learned how to invoke specific Divine Attributes as relevant to a current national crisis, could decide to send spies of his own accord, and had the right to plan the order in which the people would conquer and settle the Land.

Aharon was so spiritually excellent, expressed for example in his staying silent when Korach’s group denied he was worthy of being Kohen Gadol, Ramban was sure he could never have had a mum, a physical blemish, or contract the bodily impurity of zivah or tzara’at. His successor High Priests would also be exalted, with the downside of being unable to secure full atonement with sacrifice. A High Priest who sinned would need continuing repentance and prayer.

Noach, a significant step below the greats discussed until now, earned his special status by rejecting wrong, by avoiding the perversions of those around him. Just avoiding evil earned him his place in history.  

A nazir lived a better life than regular people, and was—similarly to a prophet—sent by Hashem to show us a model of a better life. Prophets defended the people to Hashem, a function on par with their more commonly recognized role, communicating Hashem’s word.

The nazir chose his status of his own free will, and was expected to promise sacrifices in addition to those the Torah required. Like ordinary people who volunteer to bring certain sacrifices, the nazir is given the room to define his/her nezirut.

Ordinary People

The list of groups and people who shape the world might seem to leave little room for more ordinary people to make a contribution of any moment. Ramban reads the Torah to disagree, in numerous places. The count which opened the book of Bamidbar chose a verb, pkd, to tell Moshe to take note of each individual. The Aseret Ha-Dibberot, the Decalogue told the whole people at Sinai, was expressed in the singular to make sure each Jew knew Hashem was setting up a personal, not just national, relationship.

As was true at the group level, people are responsible for attitudes and choices in addition to actions. The problem with sin starts at leaving one’s heart open to seduction, the Torah warns each Jew. People also can make mistakes about what is right. When the soldiers bring captive women with them from the war with Midian, Ramban thinks they honestly thought they had done what Moshe wanted.

Reading a few comments a week, the world I suggest we found in Ramban’s commentary on the Torah is populated by a multitude of actors, each of whom change the world to varying degrees and in varying ways. To choose our best way, individually or in our various groupings, we need to understand the whole picture, who does what in what contexts. It’s only in putting them all together, each to their proper extent, that we see how we have gotten here, and can know what we need to do to be doing our best to bring out the world’s best.

Today, it might seem obvious that if a person feels s/he has what to say on the Torah, that person can or even should publish a commentary. Ramban introduces his commentary from the opposite perspective, apologizing for his temerity, since he feels there’s a gap between his knowledge and wisdom and the lofty secrets found in the Torah.

He’s going to come back to what Torah contains, but at this point he says only that all we might want to know, all wisdom, all wonders, are found there, which is why Tehillim 119;96 describes the Torah as extremely broad.

He’s Doing It Anyway

With all his inadequacies, he feels compelled to share his understanding. He expresses that with two recognizable phrases, first that his soul desires the Torah [Yevamot 63b quotes Ben Azzai using those words to respond to those who asked him why he didn’t marry, when he himself likened the failure to marry to murder, reducing the divine element within human beings]. The second phrase is that his ideas burn like a fire in his heart [from Yirmiyahu 20;9; as R. Chavel made clear in his edition, Ramban was a practitioner of a literary style called melitzah, where thoughts are couched in Scriptural phrasings to the extent possible. I won’t note this regularly, but these examples show he was skilled at pulling up the right words for what he wanted to say].

Perhaps as part of his humility, he plans to follow the lead of two earlier great scholars, taking up their ideas for critical discussion. First is Rashi, whom he lauds while telling us he intends to searchingly question Rashi’s ideas, and will often disagree. Second is Ibn Ezra, about whom Ramban says he will have open admonition and hidden love (many have noted that his reactions to Ibn Ezra are so harsh one can wonder where this concealed love lies; a former professor at Harvard, Bernard Septimus, has an article where he claims that Ramban’s textual readings are more similar to Ibn Ezra’s than to Rashi’s, but that’s an issue for some other time.) 

Moshe’s Narrative Style

Taking up the book at hand, Ramban wonders why Bereshit never says Vayedabber Hashem el Moshe, Gd spoke to Moshe. After all, in Shemot 24;12, Hashem tells Moshe He’s going to give him haTorah ve-haMitzvah, the Torah and the commandments. Torah includes the stories from Bereshit, since those teach us matters of emunah, of holding fast to claims about Hashem’s rule of the world that others might deny [I am trying to wean myself from using “believe” for emunah, since it implies that it’s about what I believe, not about what is the truth—emunah means I assert that this is true, not that I think or believe this is true].

But if Hashem dictated Bereshit as much as any other part of Torah, why doesn’t that common introductory phrase appear? Ramban’s answer is that Moshe Rabbenu didn’t write the Torah as if he were writing it, he wrote it as Hashem dictated it. Where other prophets insert themselves into the story (such as Yechezkel, who often will say “the word of Hashem came to me, saying “son of man”), Moshe writes in the third person. If so, there’s no reason to mention him until he is born, at the beginning of the book of Shemot.

Ramban’s theory works until Devarim, where Moshe speaks in the first person for most of the book. But that’s easily explained, he says, since Devarim opens with the words “these are the words Moshe spoke to the entire Israel,” so the rest is a quotation within the book as a whole. (It’s not Moshe lapsing from his style, the third-person style led to a large section that quotes Moshe himself).

Primordial Torah

The choice of third-person presentation isn’t obvious, and Ramban says it was meant to reflect the fact that the entire Torah predates the world (this is based on a tradition Rashi, too, quotes, that the Torah was written as black fire on white fire before the world was created).

Whatever that means—and Ramban does not expand on it—Moshe’s writing the Torah was like a scribe copying over a pre-existing text [this needs a great deal of clarifying, which Ramban does not provide. In this introduction, he did refer to the debate in Gittin 60a about whether Moshe gave the Torah to the Jews scroll by scroll or in one large scroll at the end of their time in the desert. We ourselves saw, at the end of Devarim, that Ramban had shifting views as to when Moshe was taught all the pieces of the end of the Torah. So his chronology is not quite clear).

What he is clear about is that the entirety of the Torah, from the first word to the last was dictated directly from Hashem to Moshe (similar to what Baruch b. Neriah describes about how Yirmiyahu dictated prophecies for him to record, in Yirmiyahu 36;18 [meaning, among other interesting aspects of this assertion, he is not accepting the Talmudic view that Yehoshu’a wrote the last eight verses].

All-Encompassing Torah

The other aspect of Torah Ramban emphasizes is that it contains all wisdom. When Hashem transmits these ideas to Moshe, it’s not just the bare-bones version of the Creation story we have in Bereshit, it was a full explanation of the four elements [until the 19^thcentury, most people accepted the four element theory, that the basic building blocks of matter are earth, wind, water, and fire], how matter decays, and more.

Moshe was taught all the details of how that works, and it was included in the Torah, explicitly or implicitly. When Chazal speak of fifty gates of wisdom (forty-nine of which were revealed to Moshe, see Rosh HaShana 21b), each gate means an aspect of the world—vegetation, animal life, human life, the soul, the ability to tell people’s deeds by looking at their faces, and more. All possible wisdom is included (he suggests that the gate Moshe was denied was the one that leads to full understanding of Hashem, as Hashem tells him, Shemot 33;20, that no one can see Hashem and live; “seeing,” for Ramban, means understanding).

The number forty-nine (for the achievable gates of wisdom) is hinted at in the forty-nine days of counting the Omer, and the forty-nine years of each Jubilee (when we get there, we’ll have to check what Ramban says—I think he there suggests a more cosmic significance to the number, although perhaps that too is connected to the limitations and reaches of human understanding).

Finding Moshe’s Wisdom

This was all included in the Torah, whether by the shapes of the letters, by writing certain words with or without a vav, or other ways of inferring added layers of meaning, such as gematria, numerological readings of letters and words.

Ramban relates this claim to Menachot 29b, where Moshe is told that R. Akiva would one day make significant halachic inferences from the crowns Hashem attached to letters of the Torah. Surprisingly, though, Ramban reads the end of that story (where R. Akiva agrees that a particular rule is halachah le-Moshe mi-Sinai, sourced in a tradition going back to Moshe) to mean that all such hints and inferences must be a matter of tradition (he’s saying R. Akiva didn’t expound these ideas, as the Gemara itself seems to say, it’s that R. Akiva gathered all the traditions about such inferences, and taught them to his students).

All later visions, too—such as Yechezkel’s famous vision of the Chariot of Hashem—have their basis in Torah itself. So, too, Shlomo’s great wisdom, his ability to understand the plant and animal kingdoms so fully that he could converse with them (and, according to Midrash Tanchuma, knew which parts of Israel could grow crops that aren’t native to Israel, since he knew which parts of Israel were the roots of the regions where those crops do in fact grow), are for Ramban an expression of the depth of his understanding of Torah.

One Long Word and Names of Gd

Another tradition is that the entire Torah consists of Names of Hashem (Ramban points out that Rashi to Sukkah 45a accepts at least some of this perspective, since he defines the 72 letter Name of Gd as being Shemot 14;19-21. Ordinary verses, then, can be Names).

Part of the way we get to these Names (or, in the first view he mentioned, the wisdoms hidden or embedded in the Torah) is by realizing, according to Ramban, that the Torah was originally written as one long word, leaving it up to us to decide where words begin and end. That’s why the Gemara rules that a Torah scroll missing even one letter loses its validity—that missing letter interferes with our ability to get at the wisdom of the Torah.

[Among the challenges in Ramban’s claims here are that it is commonly accepted, since the time of the Gemara, that we no longer are certain of the correct spelling of many of the words of the Torah; for Ramban, that seems to mean some of the Torah’s wisdom has been lost, that we today cannot in fact find all possible knowledge in the Torah, because of flaws in our scrolls]. It was the importance of each letter, too, that led to the development of and investment in the Masorah, the painstaking enumeration of words and letters in parts of the Torah and the book as a whole, to try to safeguard the exact writing [I would have thought as an end of its own, Ramban means that it’s because of the hidden knowledge that will be lost].

His Commentary

Turning to what he aims to do, he says that, first, he’ll follow the example of his predecessors, giving enough explanation to ease the reading of the parsha itself for those who only have time on Shabbat or holidays to study it. For them, he’ll offer the plain sense of the text, while he’ll also offer some ideas for those who know or have heard some mysticism (chen, literally grace or attractiveness, but often used as code for chochah nisteret, hidden wisdom).

Once he’s mentioned esotericism, he cautions the reader against thinking he can infer new ideas about that wisdom. It has to be tradition, he says, and there’s no way to extrapolate or elucidate new ideas. [This raises two questions: first, what does it say about what he might have thought of later forms of Kabbalah, which I’m pretty sure have in fact built off of tradition? Second, what’s his point in including these ideas, if the ones who can understand them already know them?]

They are questions Ramban does not address, so we’ll leave it as well. What we have facing us, then, is a commentary that views Torah as the source of all wisdom, and looks to make some small piece of that wisdom available to us, as we begin again to read our way through the Torah.

Mixing the Metaphysical with the Physical: Towards an Accurate Summary of Ramban’s Views in Devarim

We have been studying Ramban on the book of Devarim since just after Pesach, two columns on each parsha. Going forward, I hope to start with Bereshit (so that next Monday, Gd willing, we’ll study some pieces of Ramban’s Introduction to the Torah, and for theMonday of Chol HaMoed Sukkot, we’ll start with Bereshit); since we’re now caught up with the weekly Torah reading, we’ll spend only one week on each parsha.

It has been my recent practice to set aside time to summarize at the end of a unit, to see what overall themes came out of our week by week study of a text (we did this when studying R. Aharon Lichtenstein’s published volumes, Aruch HaShulchan’s derashot for Shabbat Shuva and Shabbat HaGadol, and I’ve done it in my study of Rashi, five Rashi’s a week). I had hoped to do that here as well, to convey a sense of the themes that cropped up when we took Ramban week by week.

I have struggled this time, however, which is also why I haven’t re-read and repolished this column as much as usual [years ago, my father a”h told me that the only way he could write at all effectively was if he wrote it, put it away for a week, and came back. I don’t always have a week to give it, but I, too, find that I need that kind of distance to notice my mistakes. Today’s column will not have that; for this and the ensuing stylistic or clarity issues, I apologize].

Physics and Metaphysics

Ramban was simply too rich, too full of ideas, for me to lasso or horn them into an essay short enough for this space. Instead, I want to take one theme (that divides into three sub-themes, as mori ve-rabi R. Lichtenstein zt”l might have said) I did find, and share a couple of examples (without pretending to be comprehensive even within the excerpts we studied together; these are just examples of what struck me as a broader phenomenon).

I found Ramban coming back, repeatedly, to the balance between metaphysical and physical. That is, he commented sometimes on aspects of Hashem Himself and how Hashem impacts this world, sometimes on how the metaphysical appears within what seems the purely natural world, and then sometimes also comments on ordinary life, where there’s no hint of the metaphysical.

As we start, I want to emphasize that by metaphysical, I do not mean kabbalistic. Ramban also speaks of esoteric secrets, usually in hints. It’s easy (and not wholly inaccurate) to say that unless one has decided to delve into that view of the world, one can live without knowing any of that.

When I speak here of metaphysical ideas, I mean truths of the world that Ramban thought the Torah was telling us in its plain, exoteric sense, part of how all Jews should see and understand the world. This is not a chochmat hanistar, a hidden knowledge, it’s how he understands the Torah’s perspective of how we should experience the world.

What It Means to be the Creator

Ramban often commented on truths about Hashem that came out of verses in Devarim. In 5;15, when the Torah links our observance of Shabbat to remembering that we were slaves in Egypt, Ramban did not like Rambam’s claim that our desisting from creative labor on Shabbat is an expression of the freedom to do so that came with no longer being slaves.

Instead, he said that the Exodus reminds us of basic propositions about Hashem—that Hashem existed before the world, created it from nothing, is continuingly interested in what happens in the world (particularly to the Jewish people), and has the ability to affect or change it. Those truths, too, were revealed in the Exodus, when Hashem actively and supernaturally took us out.

As I noted when we studied Parashat VaEtchanan, this quartet of ideas appears more than once in Ramban’s commentary, is for him crucial to our understanding of Hashem and the nature of Creation; since those same ideas arose during the Exodus, they too will help us experience Shabbat properly.

Hashem’s Role in the Land of Israel

Two other comments speak of Hashem’s specific connection to the Land of Israel. In 11;12, the Torah speaks of Israel as a land that Hashem “doresh otah tamid einei Hashem Elokecha ba, inquires after it always are the eyes of Hashem your Gd on it.” Ramban connected that to the prior verses, which contrasted Israel to Egypt in how the two lands get water. Egypt has the Nile, so that farmers always had water for their crops. Israel needs rain (and Ramban spoke of Israel as a thirsty land, needing rain all year).

That’s a boon to Israel in that it keeps its inhabitants more easily in touch with and aware of Divine Providence. Hashem is more involved in Israel in some sense than with the rest of the world (Ramban included a sod amok, an esoteric secret, that said that Providence for the rest of the world actually extended from that Israel; while I’m not including esoteric ideas here, this one fits well with the plain idea he had stated).

Towards the end of Devarim (31;16), the idea crops up again. When Hashem warns Moshe that after his passing, the Jews will worship powers other than Hashem, they are referred to as elohei nechar ha-aretz, the foreign gods of the land. Ramban read that phrase to mean the gods themselves are foreign to the land, since Israel is the land that Hashem looks after Himself, as it were. We don’t have space to repeat his examples from II Melachim 17;21 or Hoshea 9;3 (but you can look them up), but he seems to have held as a literal truth that Hashem oversees Israel more directly and/or more intimately than other parts of the world.

The Metaphysical in Human Lives

Nor was metaphysics left to comments about Hashem which, theoretically, could matter to us only sort of academically, that those of us who like to think deeply about the world would have to consider. Metaphysics affected ordinary human life as well for Ramban.

For a first example, let’s remember a couple of Ramban’s ideas about prophets. First, the fact that Hashem would send prophets (and, in 18;15, Ramban thought that might be restricted to Israel, another example of the land’s special qualities) to help us find our way in the world.

Prophets means there might be false prophets. In 13;2, Ramban defined the first steps of a prophet’s proving him/herself (giving an ot or a mofet) in ways that showed how complicated it can be to experience the metaphysical. He said that an ot is a prediction, whereas a mofet is a change of tiv’o shel olam, which we might at first take as Nature.

In elaborating, he points to Shemot 8;19 as an ot, where Moshe predicts the plague of wild animals; that’s even though he thought there was a non-natural aspect to that plague, in that the animals did not rove into Goshen, where the Jews were. For a mofet, he includes an example from Yeshayahu 20;3, where the prophets walks barefoot and in torn clothing for three years; Ramban says that was unnatural, in that prophets did not usually conduct themselves that way.

So that the line between physical and metaphysical can be tenuous, clear to us only if we look with great care. (There’s much more to Ramban’s view of prophets, especially the challenges of false prophets, but we have to leave it there).

Hashem’s interactions with Israel and prophets are perhaps still too academic in our times (Ramban would not have meant them to be—we are supposed to experience those directly and ordinarily, and it’s only because we live in an unredeemed world that we do not), so let me offer one last quick example of where the metaphysical was meant to impact our lived experience.

Devarim 6;13 tells us (among other adjurations) to swear in Hashem’s Name. Ramban offers several readings of the verse; his first is that it means to tell us that we cannot use any other standard of truth (when we take an oath to assert a certain truth, as people do, Hashem must be the way we assure everyone that we are speaking the truth to the best of our ability).

He also cites Midrash Tanchuma, which sees the earlier parts of that verse (“you shall fear Hashem your Gd, Him shall you serve”) as prerequisites before we may feel comfortable voluntarily swearing in Hashem’s Name. For those of us who won’t reach such a lofty level, the Midrash offers the substitute of marrying one’s daughter to a Torah scholar, enabling Torah scholars to support themselves and/or sharing one’s wealth with a Torah scholar. That kind of person is free to take voluntary oaths in Hashem’s Name, according to the Midrash.

In our context, that’s another example of where Ramban saw an ordinary human life as necessarily including metaphysical awareness.

Ordinary Human Life

But much of Devarim took on how the Jews should build a human society, where there was no hint of the metaphysical, where people were just being people. When Moshe speaks of the torach, the toil, involved in leading the people (Ramban’s view of Moshe as a remarkable person and leader is a repeat idea that we will not have space to review here), Ramban read that as the inherent challenge in teaching Torah and all its nuances to an entire nation (of different levels of ability to comprehend and absorb).

He then struggled with a Sifrei Rashi had quoted, which tells us something about his view of human justice. Sifrei said a litigant would try to add more judges; Rashi thought that was if he saw he was losing a case. Ramban did not know of that as an halachic option for a litigant, and instead suggested the litigant would insist on more judges at the outset of the case.

That is his/her right, since cases heard by more judges come to a verdict that is more just (I think because more views will have been brought to bear). The torach is that the litigant didn’t do it for that reason, he did it to delay or to make it harder for the other litigant to get the case going.

Two ordinary human ideas in one comment, one about how we secure justice, the other about how people try to misuse systems for their own purposes.

A second example that jumped out at me because of its contemporary overtones is his reading of 7;12, where the Torah warns us to observe the mishpatim, which Ramban understands to refer to civil law, the system of laws that keeps society going. He says that these kinds of laws need to be emphasized repeatedly, because it is the obligation of each community to react to wrongdoers, those who don’t keep these laws, for the health of society at large.

Some might say, he says (I stress that Ramban himself says this, because it is so easy to hear people today saying the same thing), that it’s wasteful to punish criminals one the sin has occurred; it only adds more destruction to whatever happened (if society kills a murderer, that’s just two people dying instead of one, these people would say; or if we put away a criminal for years, they might argue, that doesn’t help erase the damage that criminal created).

Verse sixteen warns against that kind of misplaced compassion (its’s society’s job to respond to evil, to make clear that it’s evil. There’s what to say about what kinds of punishments we may/must use and when, but that’s not for here). Verse eighteen then warns against fearing these evildoers, another reason societies fail to respond or eradicate the wrongs in their midst.

More Than What I Have Included Here

As this column comes out during Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, a Mishnah in Yoma 7;1 seems appropriate. After the Kohen Gadol read the Torah on Yom Kippur, he would say to the assemblage, “yoter mi-mah she-kara’ti lifneichem katuv kan, more than I have read before you is written here.”

As I close our study of Ramban’s comments to Devarim, I want to emphasize that as well. Even within the theme I chose to highlight, Ramban’s awareness of Hashem, how Hashem impacts the world [and how Jewish lives are supposed to be necessarily aware of that impact—one more quick example is that Ramban thought that Ha’azinu, the reminder of the course of Jewish history, of how life goes better for Jews when they serve Hashem well and poorly when they do not, focused solely on the problem of avodah zarah, of worshipping powers other than Hashem], and also of ordinary life, where the Divine is so in the background Hashem does not obviously play a role, we left much that we could have reviewed.

It is also a set of themes I find useful as a shaping mechanism for life in general (which perhaps calls into question how randomly I chose these comments to begin with). The life of the Jew, Ramban seems to be saying, mixes all of these, and it is in being aware of each in their proper time and place that we build our way to serving Hashem as Hashem asks and demands of us.

Ramban to VeZot HaBerachah, Week Two: Yosef, Gad, and Moshe

The Gd of the Bush

While blessing the tribe of Yosef (at the end of the berachah, he mentions both Ephraim and Menasheh), Moshe Rabbenu refers to retzon Shocheni seneh, the favor (or goodwill) of the One Who dwells in the bush.

To explain why Moshe would choose to refer to Hashem that way, Ramban points out that that’s where Moshe first “met” Hashem, and that the bush was at Sinai, which was why why Hashem told him that the Jews would worship at that place on their way out of Egypt. When the Divine Presence rested on Sinai for many days (before, during, and after the Giving of the Torah), it then joined the Jewish people (Ramban’s view is that the Mishkan enshrined the same Presence that appeared at Sinai, to let it remain connected to the people).

The point of mentioning it here is that Yosef’s land would be blessed by the retzon Hashem, the positive Will of Hashem. Ramban stops there, but he seems to me to be implying that there’s something about this manifestation of Hashem, which started with Moshe and then stuck with the people throughout the desert (and then resided in the Beit HaMikdash) that Moshe was blessing Yosef to have infuse his land.

Gad the Conqueror

Moshe’s first words to the tribe of Gad are actually about Hashem, baruch marchiv Gad, blessed is the One Who enlarges Gad’s territory. Ramban says it’s because Gad and Reuven both took their land on their own (rather than receive it by lot). Because they took all of Sichon’s land, they ended up with more land than any of the other tribes. According to that logic, though, Moshe should have said this a few verses earlier, when blessing Reuven (where, instead, he only said, “let Reuven live and not die, nor his people be few.”).

Ramban gives three answers, which may be complementary rather than distinct from each other. First, he says that what Moshe did say about Reuven was enough [he doesn’t elaborate, but I think he might mean Reuven needed this blessing before any other one would be meaningful—if the tribe was slated for destruction, or for tiny numbers, nothing else would really matter. We’d still need/want to know why that was Reuven’s original fate].

Secondly, Ramban suggested Gad were the better fighters, so they took all the border areas, which gave them the opportunity to expand in the future. Finally, he refers back to the fact that when the Torah told the story in Bamidbar, it mentioned Gad first. Ramban there had said that showed that it was Gad’s idea, they instigated the plan.

Each or all of these explain why Moshe speaks of expansive territory particularly regarding Gad.

Last Characterizations of Moshe

At the beginning of chapter 34, before Moshe is taken away, Hashem shows him all of Israel. No verse quite explains why Hashem showed him all this (Rashi to verse four suggests that it’s so Moshe can tell the Patriarchs that Hashem is about to fulfill the promise to them, and give the Land to the Jews; Ramban doesn’t discuss this view and its problems, so we can leave it).

Ramban’s own idea is that this is to help Moshe feel better. Such was his love for the Jewish people that seeing what they were about to get (without him, as Hashem stresses in verse four), knowing for himself that they were going to receive a beautiful and bountiful land, would ease the sting of his own passing. It’s a remarkable claim about this leader of our people, that after all he had gone through with them, after they had been part of the reason he lost his right to enter this Land he had worked so hard to bring them to, knowing they were getting a good outcome would make him happy, would let him go to his eternal reward with a sense of satisfaction.

Verse 10 says that no prophet arose after that who could compare with Moshe in that Hashem knew him face to face. While Rashi thought that was about how comfortable Moshe was, but Ramban focuses on the verse’s referring to Hashem’s knowing him face to face, and says that it’s about the level of prophecy Moshe experienced, the extent to which Hashem expressed Himself to Moshe (as it were).

That doesn’t seem all that different from Devarim 5;4, which says Hashem spoke to the entire people face to face at Sinai. What saves him is that the verse there says it was mi-toch ha’esh, from within a fire, a kind of intervening barrier reducing their access to Hashem’s ideas.

Moshe’s Miracles

Verse eleven refers to the signs Moshe performed. Ramban cites a Midrash that notes that all the other prophets had to pray to produce their miracles (Yehoshu’a getting the sun to stand still, Eliyahu and Elisha resurrecting boys, etc.), where Moshe would perform one instantly (The Midrash means the later Moshe; with the plagues in Egypt, Moshe in fact seems to have to pray when it’s time for them to stop).

Ramban thinks the Midrash’s meaning is unclear. He points us to Rambam in the Guide II;35, who said that what set these miracles apart was how public they were, that they were (as the verse says) le-Par’oh u-lechol avadav u-lechol artzo,” in front of Paroh, his servants, and his whole land, and “le-einei kol Yisrael, in the eyes of all Israel.” Moshe performed these miracles before those who agreed with him and those who didn’t, went through a public vetting process, as it were, gave a chance to any naysayers to show where he was tricking people.

Ramban disagrees about how unique that was. When Eliyahu declared a drought, then had the showdown with the priests of Ba’al on Mt. Carmel, that was very public (and Ovadyah tells Eliyahu that Achav, the king of Israel, searched the known world for him, which would have brought these events to everyone’s attention). When the sun stood still for Yehoshu’a, Bereshit Rabbah 6;9 said that was seen by all the nations of the world.

So it’s not a convincing theory to Ramban. He instead relates this back to the level of Moshe’s prophecy, that the verse is continuing its reasons to see Moshe as unique. There was the way in which Hashem “knew” him, face to face, and the kind and number of miracles Moshe did. While other prophets might have done ones that were as public, or as impressive, they didn’t then do them over and over, as Moshe did.

For our last look at pieces of Devarim this time through Ramban’s commentary, we saw a sense of the aspects of Hashem that became lastingly part of the Jewish people’s experience, we saw why Gad the tribe seems to have had the most expansive territory, and learned a bit more about Moshe, as a prophet, who always wanted the people’s welfare, and as a performer of miracles.

From a Man of Gd

The first verse of the parsha gives Ramban much to discuss, and I’m not going to resist the urge to engage with it at length.

דברים פרק לג:(א) וְזֹ֣את הַבְּרָכָ֗ה אֲשֶׁ֨ר בֵּרַ֥ךְ מֹשֶׁ֛ה אִ֥ישׁ הָאֱלֹהִ֖ים אֶת־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל לִפְנֵ֖י מוֹתֽוֹ:

Devarim 33;1: This is the blessing Moshe, the man of Gd, blessed the Children of Israel before his death.

Ramban picks up on two elements of this verse, which we read on Simchat Torah. First, the reference to Moshe as a man of Gd tells us to expect that these berachot will be effective. Ramban’s beautiful phrase is u-tefillat yesharim retzono, the prayer of the righteous is His Will. As we’ll see in his discussion of the use of the word ve-zot, I think he likely means that the righteous are so tapped into Hashem’s Will that whatever they say articulates that Will.

[Another option would be that the righteous choose which of several possible futures will come to fruition, and that Hashem does what they want. Ramban seems to go in this more conservative direction, so we’ll leave it there].

Part of what signals Moshe’s ability/right to express effective blessings is that he is referred to as an ish haElokim, as were many other prophets. I think Ramban’s hinting that Elokim refers to the Gd of Nature, as it were, the world as it runs in its ordinary way. Prophets work up to an understanding of how that natural order works (with Hashem’s input) well enough that they also know how to ask or invoke particular possible futures, rather than others.

At the end of the parsha, Moshe’s also called eved Hashem, using the other common Name. Ramban says a maskil, an enlightened one, will understand, but does not elaborate. My guess is that we connect this Name with the Attribute of Mercy; Ramban might be implying that we cannot have any real grasp of how that aspect works, not nearly enough to be able to claim to predict, ask, or tell that aspect of Hashem what should happen. When it comes to Hashem, the best we can achieve is being an obedient servant.

This Is the Blessing

Ramban also picks up on the Torah’s use of the word ve-zot, and this. He ascribes an esoteric significance to the word, linking it to Tehillim 118;23’s declaration “ki me-Hashem hayeta zot, for from Hashem was this,” and to the Torah’s saying about Ya’akov (Bereshit 49;28), “this is what their father said to them.” Tehillim 119;56 also uses the word zot to refer to a blessing, in that case the City of David, where Hashem has commanded blessing for eternity.

He closes by saying the enlightened would understand, but adds a clue in that he says that a passage in Bereshit Rabbah 100;12 assumes his idea. That Midrash says the Torah’s use of ve-zot for Ya’akov’s blessing left the door open for another man to come later and pick up where he left off, which is why Moshe opened with ve-zot. He also told them (in the Midrash’s reading) that they had earned these blessings when they accepted the Torah, about which Moshe had said ve-zot haTorah, and this is the Torah. That Torah also encompasses the covenant Hashem had told Avraham, in Bereshit 17;10, zot beriti, this is my covenant.

At one level, this is Midrash being Midrash, ascribing connection and significance to all the appearances of a slightly out of place word. In our case, it links the covenant, the Torah, and the blessings. While Ya’akov only articulated some of them, Moshe came (after the covenant had been turned into a Torah, still identified as zot) to round them out.

Ramban’s reference to that Midrash is why I take him to mean Moshe’s blessings would surely come to fruition because he was articulating what Hashem wanted to do anyway. These aren’t so much blessings as the “natural” outcome of being partners to a covenant and then a Torah.

The Dedication of the Desert

דברים פרק לג:ב וַיֹּאמַ֗ר יְקֹוָ֞ק מִסִּינַ֥י בָּא֙ וְזָרַ֤ח מִשֵּׂעִיר֙ לָ֔מוֹ … (ג) …וְהֵם֙ תֻּכּ֣וּ לְרַגְלֶ֔ךָ…:

Devarim 33;2: He said, ‘Hashem appeared from Sinai and shined towards them from Seir…Verse 3: …they assemble (or bow down) at your feet…

Ramban notices that verse two jumps from Sinai to Seir (and Paran), a gap of thirty-eight years. That’s because the Jewish people were in nidui during this time, partially shunned by Hashem, with Moshe Rabbenu not receiving prophecy. I find that a fascinating idea—the Jews gathering their man every day for food, being led by a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, their clothes not wearing out, but also not having any direct interaction with Hashem.

It would likely challenge their confidence that Hashem was leading them, even with all those signs of continuing involvement. That element of it (I skipped other parts of the comment) connects well to Ramban’s reading of the phrase in verse 3, different than the translations I found. In his view, tuku is like huku, were hit, and he takes it to mean the Jews suffered in the desert and yet faithfully followed Hashem. They didn’t care, in Ramban’s view, about famine, drought, serpents and scorpions.

This refers back to Devarim 8;15, where Moshe warned the Jews about how their arrogance might lead them to forget all Hashem has done for them. In his list of what Hashem had done appears the fact that Hashem led them through a land of serpents and scorpions, with no water or food, and produced water from a rock and gave them the man.

Ramban seems to be reading that as if the Jew suffered from all those before Hashem saved them from it, and he mentions Yirmiyahu2;2’s speaking of the Jews’ following Hashem in the desert as chessed ne’urayikh, kindness of your youth, that they went after Hashem in a land that was not planted (and therefore didn’t have readily available food supplies).

It is clearly Ramban’s view, with basis in Tanach, but it raises interesting questions about what counts as a merit and what not. The Jews left Egypt because Paroh kicked them out, and once in the desert, it’s not clear how they’d have made it had they not followed Hashem. Various sources also show that disobedience led to death, such as with the Jews who insisted on going to Israel after hearing the punishment for crying at the spies’ report.

He’s not fabricating anything, but to see the Jews as having suffered for Hashem in the desert is a particularly beneficent viewpoint.

There Will Be Twelve

The last comment we have time for this week picks up on the fact that Moshe does not bless the tribe of Shim’on. Ibn Ezra and Rashi attribute that to their malfeasance, that they were the main sinners at Pe’or. We infer that from the fact that Zimri, whom Pinchas killed, was the head of a clan of that tribe, and that Shim’on’s numbers dropped over the course of the Bamidbar much more than any other tribe—in the count at the start of the book, there are 59,200 men in Shim’on, and only 22,300 in the count in Pinchas.

Since 24,000 people died in the plague that punished those who worshipped Pe’or, tradition thought Shim’on must have participated disproportionately in the sin, and therefore lost numbers disproportionately as well.

Ramban argues that other tribes also lost population, and Shim’on lost many more than 24,000. Besides, verses make clear that Pe’or was a national sin, not limited to one tribe, and had already been atoned. So that’s not sufficient reason to exclude Shim’on from the berachot in this parsha.

Regardless of the historical fact, his alternative suggestion is also more far-reaching. He says the Jewish people always have twelve tribes. When Ya’akov blessed them, Ephraim and Menasheh were grouped together as part of Yosef (as they were at the ceremony on Mt. Gerizim), so there were twelve; at the dedication of the Mishkan, in their encampments (and settling the Land), Levi wasn’t included as a tribe, so there were again twelve.

In VeZot HaBerachah, Levi needed to be explicitly included, since they weren’t going to get a share in the Land. Yet Moshe also wanted to ratify Ephraim and Menasheh’s identities as tribes, which had been true of them throughout the time in the desert. Somebody had to be left out, because there needed to be twelve, to correspond to natural phenomena that come in twelves (the months of the year, for one example–  Ramban doesn’t expand, but he clearly means that the tribes in some way represent or reflect some aspects of Nature, giving the Jewish people, in their tribes, a role in the workings of the world at large).

Yechezkel 48 doesn’t mention Levi at the beginning of the chapter, because Yosef’s sons are named individually. Later in the chapter, when he does bring up Levi, he refers to Yosef rather than Menasheh and Efrayim.

A Tribe That’s Part of the Whole

Why make Shimon odd man out? Because there weren’t that many of them, and Ya’akov’s minimal blessing was that they would be scattered throughout the people. If so, they could benefit from those other tribe’s blessings, and Moshe could leave them out here.

The specifics of Shimon’s fate as a tribe in all honesty interest me less than Ramban’s assumption that twelve was the necessary number of tribes, because the tribes correspond to deep truths of the universe (such as months of the year, mazalot in the sky, and so on).

It’s a good reminder of Ramban’s view of the intermixing of the physical and metaphysical, a view that also expressed itself in the first verse of the parsha, about Moshe’s blessing and its connection to Hashem’s view of the future of the world (and that seems to me to be a main theme of Ramban in Devarim as a book).

The Abomination of Worshipping Powers Other Than Hashem

דברים פרק לב:טז יַקְנִאֻ֖הוּ בְּזָרִ֑ים בְּתוֹעֵבֹ֖ת יַכְעִיסֻֽהוּ:

Devarim 32;16: They incite His jealousy with strangers, anger Him with abominations.

Rashi, based on Sifrei, took “abominations” to refer to homosexual relations and to witchcraft, both of which the Torah calls to’evah, abomination. Ramban disagrees, because he sees this entire Song as directed at avodah zarah, worship of anything other than Hashem. That, too, is described as to’evah, particularly the Molech practice of passing one’s children through the fire.

At one level, Ramban is disagreeing with Rashi about the technical issue of whether the two halves of the line address different issues or repeat the same one. More interestingly to me, he’s saying Ha’azinu is about one central flaw, that the key to success for Jews is avoiding just one error, that of worshipping any power other than Hashem. If only we avoid that, he seems to think, we’d be largely ok (and yet we have not avoided that, repeatedly in Jewish history).

Women’s Contribution to This Downfall

דברים פרק לב:יט וַיַּ֥רְא יְקֹוָ֖ק וַיִּנְאָ֑ץ מִכַּ֥עַס בָּנָ֖יו וּבְנֹתָֽיו:

Devarim 32;19: Hashem saw and rejected them, because of the anger [created by] his sons and daughters.

Scripture doesn’t usually single out women, it usually encompasses them in the word “sons” or “men.” Ramban says the Torah changed its practice here as a hint that women would be particularly egregious actors in the generation of the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash [when Ramban sees a hint in Scripture to later events, I don’t think he means it was fore-ordained. I think he thinks that Scripture has many insights into possible futures and as history unfolds, we find those that were brought to fruition by our accomplishments or misdeeds].

Yirmiyahu 44;15 tells us that the men who fled to Egypt (against Yirmiyahu’s prophecy, a terribly sad story worth rereading for its many contemporarily applicable lessons) knew their wives were offering incense to heavenly bodies, and it was those women, two verses later, who brazenly refused to accept Yirmiyahu’s admonition, who insisted on continuing to sacrifice to the hosts of heaven.  Yechezkel, too, has verses that identify women as the main players in acts of idolatry.

Ramban doesn’t theorize as to why, he just reminds us that at least in that generation, the women were implicated in this central sin as much or more than the men.

Our Many Exiles

דברים פרק לב:כא הֵ֚ם קִנְא֣וּנִי בְלֹא־אֵ֔ל כִּעֲס֖וּנִי בְּהַבְלֵיהֶ֑ם וַאֲנִי֙ אַקְנִיאֵ֣ם בְּלֹא־עָ֔ם בְּג֥וֹי נָבָ֖ל אַכְעִיסֵֽם:…(כו) אָמַ֖רְתִּי אַפְאֵיהֶ֑ם אַשְׁבִּ֥יתָה מֵאֱנ֖וֹשׁ זִכְרָֽם:

Devarim 32;21: They incited Me to jealousy with a no-god, angered Me with their worthless items, I will make them envious by a no-people, with an ungrateful nation I will cause them anger… Verse 26: I said I would scatter them, cause their memory to cease from among people.

Ramban identifies the “no-nation” as the Kasdim (the Babylonians), whom Yeshayahu 23;13 says were never considered a full-fledged nation, that Hashem only caused them to be elevated to nationhood so they could be a vehicle of punishment. The goy naval, ungrateful nation, which forgets kindnesses done for it is Esav [Ramban doesn’t highlight it, but this is the third use of that word in this Song. Perhaps this hints at how important it is for us to remember and notice when good has been done to and for us], who doesn’t [choose to] remember the pact he made with his brother Ya’akov.

Then Ramban adds “this hints to the two exiles,” meaning that the Babylonians were the Kasdim and the Romans the descendants of Esav. Those are common identifications, but remind us that Ramban thought (he also said it when commenting on the tochacha, the long list of punishments predicted in both Bechukkotai and Ki Tavo) that Hashem laid out the course of history for us ahead of time, should we fail to live up to the minimal standards of avoiding avodah zarah.

Sadly, and so it was.

More Than Exile

דברים פרק לב:כו אָמַ֖רְתִּי אַפְאֵיהֶ֑ם אַשְׁבִּ֥יתָה מֵאֱנ֖וֹשׁ זִכְרָֽם:  (כז) לוּלֵ֗י כַּ֤עַס אוֹיֵב֙ אָג֔וּר פֶּֽן־יְנַכְּר֖וּ צָרֵ֑ימוֹ פֶּן־יֹֽאמְרוּ֙ יָדֵ֣נוּ רָ֔מָה וְלֹ֥א יְקֹוָ֖ק פָּעַ֥ל כָּל־זֹֽאת:

Devarim 32;26: I said I would scatter them, erase their memory from humanity, Verse 27: Were it not for the anger caused by the enemy, lest the adversary refuse to understand, lest they say our hand triumphed, and Hashem did not do all this.

The word for “scatter” in verse 26 is afeihem, which Sifrei took as a compound of af ei hem, but where are they? Ramban explained that the people would become unknown—their whereabouts and identity—as happened to the Ten Tribes. As for erasing their memory, that’s our current exile, in which the Jews aren’t thought of as a nation at all.

(It bears remembering that before the State of Israel was established, the world at large and many Jews had forgotten that Judaism intends to be both a religion and a nation, a political entity as well as a religious body.)

The next verse tells Ramban we deserved eternal exile for our sins (an example of how Hashem punishes us less than we deserve, in contrast to how we often experience it), which tells him that tamah zechut Avot, the merits of the Patriarchs have been used up (in contrast to what we say in our High Holidays liturgy, a topic to think about as RH and YK are on the horizon).

How Other Nations Help Us

What saves us from that fate is that our being redeemed and restored to Israel is part of sanctifying Hashem’s Name, as Yechezkel 20;41 and 44 pointed out (and as Moshe Rabbenu said earlier in the Torah, when the Jews’ sins threatened them with annihilation).

None of the other nations, at the time of the Giving of the Torah, remembered Hashem’s power or role in the universe. They all had strayed far, denied Hashem’s existence or power, leaving only the Jewish people to stand up for that idea. It was through the Jewish people that Hashem re-inserted Himself into human experience, by performing signs and wonders on their behalf.

Were Hashem to cause the Jews to be permanently forgotten, those lessons would again be lost, and people would return to believing in the powers of the stars and other such idolatries. Since that would defeat the purpose of creation, Hashem will in fact restore the Jews to Israel, whether or not they deserve it, to help humanity get back to the path it was supposed to take [not that Ramban takes it there, but that means that as we watch the restoration of Jews to Israel today—even, soon, a majority of world Jewry—we cannot be sanguine that it says we are or have become good enough to deserve it].

The Sad and Continuing Denial of Non-Jews

The Song then speaks in a way that Ramban takes to be about non-Jews (who were the topic of the previous verses, when Hashem said they were the reason He’d redeem us).

דברים פרק לב:כח כִּי־ג֛וֹי אֹבַ֥ד עֵצ֖וֹת הֵ֑מָּה וְאֵ֥ין בָּהֶ֖ם תְּבוּנָֽה:…   (לב) כִּֽי־מִגֶּ֤פֶן סְדֹם֙ גַּפְנָ֔ם וּמִשַּׁדְמֹ֖ת עֲמֹרָ֑ה…

Devarim 32;28: They are a nation without sense, with no discernment… Verse 32: Their vine comes from the vine of Sodom and the fields of Gomorrah.

Ramban takes the lack of sense or discernment to be the nations’ refusal to spot Hashem’s role in what happened to the Jewish people. Seeing what’s happened to us should have told the whole world that Hashem exists, has expectations of all of us, and the best we can do for our souls is serve Hashem as we are told. The non-Jews refuse to take those lessons, to realize the history of the Jewish people (including our sufferings, where we’ve been much weaker than made rational sense) should demonstrate Hashem’s power and involvement more than anything else.

That’s because their roots are in Sodom and Gomorrah. The Jewish people respond to tragedy by recognizing how they’ve gone wrong and returning to Hashem (at least, that’s how the Book of Judges portrayed it; it was probably true of the Jewish communities Ramban knew as well. Sadly, in our times, many Jews have lost that). Non-Jews, without that historical memory of how to respond to tragedy, reject those lessons, and continue to worship powers other than Hashem.

Lessons of the Song

The Song, in Ramban’s reading, is a lasting testimony, a way for Jews to interpret all that will eventually befall them. It reminds us of Hashem’s many kindnesses in taking us to be His nation, extracting us from Egypt and caring for us in the desert. Ramban adds (as the Song couldn’t) giving us the Land of Israel and much good and wealth.

Our comfort led us to rebel and worship powers other than Hashem, in reaction to which Hashem will punish us, but eventually take vengeance against the nations who were the vehicles of that punishment. They will deserve that because they did not hurt us out of a desire to punish our idolatry, but because we act differently than they do. Had they been responding out of righteous anger at our betrayal of Hashem, Ramban seems to think they would not deserve or receive punishment for their actions.

We, on the other hand, will eventually be redeemed, return to serving Hashem, observing His commandments, and refrain from sacrificing to or worshipping any powers other than Hashem. That didn’t happen in the Second Temple, where promises of this Song (such as that other nations will join us in Hashem’s worship) did not come to fruition.

The last point we have space for is that it does not make repentance a condition. That’s because Hashem might redeem us only for the sake of His Name, to keep humanity from completely forgetting simple truths of how Hashem runs the world. It will be much better if we repent and return (as in the two tochachot), but even if not, the end will be that we’ll get back to Israel, and the non-Jews of the world will come around to accepting that the only way to live successfully is to do what Hashem wants.

Unchanging Perfection

Ha’azinu starts—and is mostly taken up with—a song that Moshe Rabbenu was told to teach the Jewish people, as a lasting witness of right and wrong ways to act. An early verse refers to

דברים פרק לב:ד הַצּוּר֙ תָּמִ֣ים פָּעֳל֔וֹ כִּ֥י כָל־דְּרָכָ֖יו מִשְׁפָּ֑ט

Devarim 32;4: The Rock, all his works are perfect, for all his ways are just…

Ramban sees the word haTzur, the Rock, as indicating the middat ha-din, Attribute of Justice, and says the verse is telling us that whatever that Attribute does is whole and complete, and will not change forever. The “will not change” comment reflects a view Rambam held as well, that perfection can never change (because it would imply that until then was not perfect; Ramban does not say it here, but especially since we think of Hashem as independent of time or space, we have a harder time saying that Hashem would change to meet new situations).

He is less focused on the static aspect of Hashem when it comes to the next phrase, which he takes as a reference to Hashem’s mercy [most obviously because he took tamim as about justice, but I think it’s also because the verse refers to derachav, His ways, which was what Moshe requested to learn just before Hashem taught him the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy]. Since he’s explicitly talking about mercy, the verse’s saying that all those actions are be-mishpat cannot have its usual meaning of justice but seems to me to mean that they are apportioned well.

Ramban’s reading makes sense in terms of the difference between justice and mercy as well. Mercy doesn’t need to be affirmed as unchanging or perfect, because mercies aren’t a principled stance. No one deserves mercy, it’s how Hashem acts with people above, beyond, or otherwise without paying attention to absolute right and wrong. Justice, that which makes Hashem HaTzur, the unchanging Rock, never alters, so that’s where the Song affirms perfection.

Applied to the world, justice is balanced with leeway for mitigating circumstances. There, the goal isn’t perfection, it’s disbursing mercy fairly and reasonably (justly, in a loose sense).

Ramban seems to me to be speaking of a balance between Hashem Himself, as it were, Who is whole, perfect, and perfectly just, who is a Rock all of whose works [by which he perhaps means endeavors Hashem conducts alone, as it were] fit that model, but Who also has ways, modes of interacting with other beings (people and, perhaps, living creatures) that incorporate mercy. Those can’t be perfect by definition, but they can be administered in a way that we can agree that it’s fair.

The People Are the Reverse

דברים פרק לב:ה שִׁחֵ֥ת ל֛וֹ לֹ֖א בָּנָ֣יו מוּמָ֑ם דּ֥וֹר עִקֵּ֖שׁ וּפְתַלְתֹּֽל:

Devarim 32;5: They have dealt corruptly with him, their blemish making them no longer His children, a wicked and twisted generation.

The end of verse four (the beginning of which we saw above) speaks of Hashem as tzaddik ve-yashar, righteous and straight. Ramban says that ikesh, crooked, is the opposite of yashar [Ramban, like Rashi, relates it to Michah 3;9, which says that all that which is straight ye-akeshu, they will make un-straight] and petaltol is the reverse of tzaddik.

Two points commended themselves to me: first, that the Jews’ flaws are mentioned and then the fact that they fail to hew to the straight and righteous path. To me, that’s because the flaws are what cause the later wrongful action. Sure, the actions are a problem, but the roots are worse.

Second, when the contrast is to Hashem, it might not be surprising that we fail to meet those standards. I think the way to understand it is that we’re not expected to be as straight and just as Hashem, we’re to understand that Hashem set up a situation where all we have to do is go straight (in a humanly very possible way), and we’ll be doing what’s right. It’s that we develop reasons or justifications to do other than that which is straight that gets us off the path.

The Foolishness of Ingratitude

דברים פרק לב:ו הֲ־לַיְקֹוָק֙ תִּגְמְלוּ־זֹ֔את עַ֥ם נָבָ֖ל וְלֹ֣א חָכָ֑ם…    (טו) וַיִּשְׁמַ֤ן יְשֻׁרוּן֙ וַיִּבְעָ֔ט…וַיִּטֹּשׁ֙ אֱל֣וֹהַּ עָשָׂ֔הוּ וַיְנַבֵּ֖ל צ֥וּר יְשֻׁעָתֽוֹ:

Devarim 32;6: Will you repay Hashem this way, ungrateful and unwise nation… Verse 15: And Yeshurun became fat and rebelled… abandoned the Gd who made him, and was ungrateful to the rock of his salvation.

The translations I saw do not notice that one of the adjectives in verse six has the same root as the verb at the end of verse fifteen. Ramban did, and cited other verses from Scripture to show that naval is the opposite of nadiv. A nadiv does good for others for no reason, and a naval fails to do good for the other when there is a good reason (primarily, that that person has done well by him/her in the past). For the best-known example, Naval the Carmelite from I Shemuel 25 is described as fitting his name because he would not accept that David had done a favor for him in protecting his flocks, and therefore refused to give him anything in return.

That puts the Jewish people’s failure to serve Hashem properly in a new light. It’s not only that Hashem told them to, it’s that they are repaying Hashem’s many kindnesses with rebellion.

Worse than ungrateful, it’s self-defeating, in that Hashem made us, and made the rules by which the universe works, so to go against Hashem is to try to deny the way the world works.

On verse 15, Ramban identifies the ingratitude in the people’s rejecting Hashem– more than simply going elsewhere, they said that there was no utility in serving Hashem (as Malachi 3;14-15 quotes evildoers among the Jews as saying there was no benefit from following Hashem’s rules, or the wicked women of Yirmiyahu 44;18, who attributed their exile to Egypt after the destruction of the Temple to their failure to properly worship the hosts of heaven).

A naval is ungrateful, and that refusal to recognize debts owed leads to foolish and self-destructive behavior.

The Benefits of Aloneness

דברים פרק לב:יב יְקֹוָ֖ק בָּדָ֣ד יַנְחֶ֑נּוּ וְאֵ֥ין עִמּ֖וֹ אֵ֥ל נֵכָֽר:

Devarim 32;12: Hashem leads him alone, and there is no foreign god with him.

The second phrase of the verse uses an unclear pronoun. The easiest possibility is that Hashem runs the world alone, without any other power’s participation. If so, that’s a common message of monotheism [although a complicated one for Ramban, since he thought Hashem in some sense delegated parts of running the world to angels, as we’re about to see].

But Ramban also offers the reading that it refers to the Jewish people, is a restatement of the idea that the Jewish people’s affairs are shaped solely by Hashem, not by the angels or heavenly powers that guide other nations. In this view, it’s reminding the Jews they are metaphysically different than other nations, more directly connected to and supervised by Hashem.

Then Ramban quotes a Sifrei that links Hashem’s guiding us alone to our having chosen to be alone, getting no benefits from other nations [I am not clear on when before Ha’azinu Sifrei thinks that happened; it could be Avraham, or it could be the time in the desert, although that wasn’t voluntary].

As a reward, the Jews will also be separate in the World to Come, other nations not getting any benefit from them. Or, as he says on the next phrase, “there is no foreign god with him,” no ruler of another nation will be able to control them. That makes it less about their getting benefit from us than their ruling over us—it’s by walking their own path that the Jews merit the independence of walking that path, and reaping its benefits.

In this first part of Ha’azinu, Ramban has stressed qualities of Hashem’s perfection, and the mistakes we make in failing to do what we can to join ourselves to Hashem.

Partial Return, Partial Punishment

Only a Sith thinks in absolutes, the movies tell us, and Ramban points to two verses in this parsha that remind us that Hashem is no Sith.

דברים פרק לא:יז וְחָרָ֣ה אַפִּ֣י ב֣וֹ בַיּוֹם־הַ֠הוּא וַעֲזַבְתִּ֞ים וְהִסְתַּרְתִּ֨י פָנַ֤י מֵהֶם֙ וְהָיָ֣ה לֶֽאֱכֹ֔ל וּמְצָאֻ֛הוּ רָע֥וֹת רַבּ֖וֹת וְצָר֑וֹת וְאָמַר֙ בַּיּ֣וֹם הַה֔וּא הֲלֹ֗א עַ֣ל כִּֽי־אֵ֤ין אֱלֹהַי֙ בְּקִרְבִּ֔י מְצָא֖וּנִי הָרָע֥וֹת הָאֵֽלֶּה: (יח) וְאָנֹכִ֗י הַסְתֵּ֨ר אַסְתִּ֤יר פָּנַי֙ בַּיּ֣וֹם הַה֔וּא עַ֥ל כָּל־הָרָעָ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר עָשָׂ֑ה כִּ֣י פָנָ֔ה אֶל־אֱלֹהִ֖ים אֲחֵרִֽים:

Devarim 31;17: My wrath will burn on them on that day, and I will leave them, hide My face from them, and they will be consumed, many trying evils will find them; and [the nation] will say on that day, behold this is because my Gd is not in my midst, that these evils have found me. Verse 18: And I will continue to hide My face on that day, for all the evil they did, in that they turned to other gods.

The verses seem to speak of the Jews realizing they’ve done wrong but not repenting. Because if they repented, why would Hashem continue to hide His face?

Ramban doesn’t address that question explicitly, but his comment answers it. He says that verse 17 isn’t referring to repentance. The end of the tochacha in Vayikra, for example, speaks of the Jews articulating their sins (ve-hitvadu is sometimes translated as confessing, but I prefer R. Mayer Twersky’s word for it), a full-fledged repentance: recognition, regret, and determination to do better in the future.

All that our verse mentions is that they know what they’ve done, recognize their guilt, and accept that the troubles they are suffering stem from that behavior. That’s good, and will positively affect them, but it’s missing the crucial component of deciding to change.

The next verse speaks of a continuing hester panim, hiding of Hashem’s face [a metaphor for withdrawal of hashgachah, beneficent supervision], because of all the evil they’ve done (and have yet to put aside), but Ramban thinks there’s still a change from before. It will no longer be a hester panim allowing for terrible troubles, it will only prevent the redemption.  

Hashem will never abandon them, and from that point on will protect them from troubles. Their partial return will merit a partial redemption. But full redemption depends on a proper vidui, that comes with a complete repentance.

The Growing Role for Yehoshu’a

Based on Hashem’s expectations about the future of the Jewish people, Hashem gives Moshe a song, Ha’azinu; but the command to incorporate it into the Torah raises two issues for Ramban.

דברים פרק לא:יט וְעַתָּ֗ה כִּתְב֤וּ לָכֶם֙ אֶת־הַשִּׁירָ֣ה הַזֹּ֔את וְלַמְּדָ֥הּ אֶת־בְּנֵי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל שִׂימָ֣הּ בְּפִיהֶ֑ם לְמַ֨עַן תִּהְיֶה־לִּ֜י הַשִּׁירָ֥ה הַזֹּ֛את לְעֵ֖ד בִּבְנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵֽל:

Devarim 31;19: Now, write for yourselves this song, teach it to the Jewish people, place it in their mouths, that this song be a witness for me at the Jewish people.

His first concern is the verse’s wavering use of singular and plural. Hashem tells Moshe to write the song for yourselves, in the plural, but the command to teach it to the Jewish people is in the singular. He takes the plural to refer to Moshe and Yehoshu’a (whom he had said was watching this as part of learning to be the new leader).

Yehoshu’a was to be part of the writing of Ha’azinu, to hear it as Moshe did, then to see Moshe write it (verse 22 makes no mention of Yehoshu’a) and read it as it became part of the Torah. That way, he will have served as a functioning prophet in Moshe’s lifetime, will not be a complete beginner when Moshe is taken away.

But just as Moshe is central to the writing, he will be the one who does the bulk of the teaching. Verse 32;44 does add Yehoshu’a’s name when Moshe finally recites Ha’azinu to the people, but Moshe is the main actor.

The second issue about Ha’azinu on which Ramban raises a point I wanted to share is that it’s called a song. He says that’s because the people will always sing it in a tune, and it’s written in the Torah like a song. The second point is banal, but the first raises an interesting point for us, in that in the wealth of Jewish music we have today, few songs come from Ha’azinu. Ramban is suggesting Hashem wanted these words to be a significant part of the soundtrack of our lives, so that just as other sings reverberate in our heads, the messages of Ha’azinu would as well.

Assuming the Worst, or Realistically Knowing What’s Coming

דברים פרק לא:כא וְ֠הָיָה כִּֽי־תִמְצֶ֨אןָ אֹת֜וֹ רָע֣וֹת רַבּוֹת֘ וְצָרוֹת֒ וְ֠עָנְתָה הַשִּׁירָ֨ה הַזֹּ֤את לְפָנָיו֙ לְעֵ֔ד כִּ֛י לֹ֥א תִשָּׁכַ֖ח מִפִּ֣י זַרְע֑וֹ כִּ֧י יָדַ֣עְתִּי אֶת־יִצְר֗וֹ אֲשֶׁ֨ר ה֤וּא עֹשֶׂה֙ הַיּ֔וֹם בְּטֶ֣רֶם אֲבִיאֶ֔נּוּ אֶל־הָאָ֖רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר נִשְׁבָּֽעְתִּי:

Devarim 31;21: When terrible evils and troubles find them, this song will bear testimony against them, for it will not be forgotten from its [the nation’s] descendants, for I know their inclination, that he [the nation] does this day, before I bring them to the Land I swore.

Ramban fastens on the word “know” that Hashem uses for their inclinations. When people speak of knowing the future, it usually means something less than full knowledge, since they’re not prophets. They mean it seems very, very likely.

But Hashem knows the Jewish people in their actuality, in their conduct in the desert, and that knowledge—for Hashem—suffices to provide the certainty expressed in Ha’azinu, that they will sin in the future, leading to the various predicted troubles. Without the experience of the desert, it would only have been appropriate for Hashem to express himself in the conditional, as happens inYeshayahu 1;19. It’s because of how they’ve acted already that Hashem can be so confident about the future.

[In the event, all of this did come true, but Ramban’s comment raises freewill questions. Does he mean the Jews’ conduct in the desert made the course of Jewish history inevitable? It seems odd, since it would doom the project of the prophets from the start; it’s strange to say Hashem would spend centuries calling for the people to improve themselves if there was no way they could.

It makes more sense that Ramban means that had the desert not happened, Hashem shouldn’t have weighted the conversation, would have acted as if all possibilities were equally likely. Now that the Jews have gone down certain paths, they’ve established defaults, under which the future Hashem is predicting in Ha’azinu is assured. They can change those, can repent fully, but that’s difficult, rare, and unlikely enough to justify this phrasing. That’s how it seems to me].

The Order of the Final Giving of the Torah

 דברים פרק לא:כד וַיְהִ֣י׀ כְּכַלּ֣וֹת מֹשֶׁ֗ה לִכְתֹּ֛ב אֶת־דִּבְרֵ֥י הַתּוֹרָֽה־הַזֹּ֖את עַל־סֵ֑פֶר עַ֖ד תֻּמָּֽם: (כה) וַיְצַ֤ו מֹשֶׁה֙ אֶת־הַלְוִיִּ֔ם נֹ֥שְׂאֵ֛י אֲר֥וֹן בְּרִית־יְקֹוָ֖ק לֵאמֹֽר:(כו) לָקֹ֗חַ אֵ֣ת סֵ֤פֶר הַתּוֹרָה֙ הַזֶּ֔ה וְשַׂמְתֶּ֣ם אֹת֔וֹ מִצַּ֛ד אֲר֥וֹן בְּרִית־יְקֹוָ֖ק אֱלֹהֵיכֶ֑ם וְהָֽיָה־שָׁ֥ם בְּךָ֖ לְעֵֽד:

Devarim 31;24: When Moshe completed writing the words of this Torah, Verse 25: Moshe commanded the Levi’im, the bearers of the Ark of the Covenant of Hashem, saying, Verse 26: Take this Torah scroll, and place it on the side of the Ark of the Covenant of Hashem Your Gd, and it will be there as a witness.

Ramban is troubled by how Moshe can be giving them a full scroll, since he has not yet recited the blessings of VeZot HaBrachah, nor taught Ha’azinu to the people. He therefore suggests that Moshe wrote the Torah, as reported in verse 9, and gave it to the kohanim, the priests, without telling them what to do with it.

Then he was commanded to write Ha’azinu. He did that, taught it to the people, added it to the Torah [there is a discussion to be had about Ramban’s view of adding to the Torah, which was given at Sinai. I assume he means the principles and ideas of Torah were all given at Sinai, the specific manifestations of it, including a song that reacted to the Jews’ conduct in the desert by laying out the path they were on, coming as late as now]. Then this verse was where he gave it, complete, to the priests, and told them to place it on the side of the Aron.

That doesn’t account for Ve-Zot HaBerachah, that last parsha. So he suggests a slightly different chronology, that Moshe wroteHa’azinu, taught it to the Jews tribe by tribe [a reminder that the tribes were independent units within the larger whole of the Jewish people], then included it in the Torah, gave that to the priests, and told them where they were going to place it.

Then he gathered the whole people to hear Ha’azinu again [to me, this emphasizes that they were supposed to also be a whole nation; the nation shouldn’t subsume the tribes, but the tribes weren’t to be completely independent either]. At that point, 32;49, Hashem tells him to go up Mount Nevo. Impelled by this command, he blesses them, writes that down, includes VeZot HaBerachah in the Torah, which is now complete, then goes up.

So, for Ramban, the final few pieces of the Torah were included in a fairly brief period of time right at the end of Moshe’s life, written down and taught to the people just before we lost this great leader.

It’s a transitional time, when Hashem tells us where we stand, the path we’re on, a path we will likely only be able to leave partially before fully; a transition of leaders, where Yehoshu’a starts taking part in the leadership of the people; and a transition for Moshe, where he rushes to get his work done before going to his final rest.

Putting Pieces in Place So Moshe Rabbenu Can Leave the Scene

Unable, Unwilling, or Not Allowed

Moshe Rabbenu introduces the Jewish people to the fact that this is the end of his life with the words,

דברים פרק לא:ב וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֲלֵהֶ֗ם בֶּן־מֵאָה֩ וְעֶשְׂרִ֨ים שָׁנָ֤ה אָנֹכִי֙ הַיּ֔וֹם לֹא־אוּכַ֥ל ע֖וֹד לָצֵ֣את וְלָב֑וֹא

Devarim 31;2: He said to them, “I am today one hundred and twenty, I will no longer be able to go and come [before you, as your leader]…

“No longer able” might sound like a physical issue, but 34;7 says he was in full health (his eyes had not dimmed, his face had not lost its youthful look). It was to comfort them, says Ramban (to let them think this was a necessary concession to old age, rather than a Divine decree, which can be harder for some people to accept).

He then mentions Sotah 13b, which reads this verse as telling us that the springs of wisdom had been sealed off from him; Ramban says that was done miraculously (not that his mind went, but that Hashem stopped him from accessing the wisdom there), so that he not worry about handing the reins over to Yehoshu’a, that he accept the finality of the passing of the baton.

Moshe’s inability was for someone’s benefit, but whether the people’s or Moshe’s is unclear.

Who Is Illuminated by a Torah Education

After writing and giving a Torah scroll to the priests (which Ramban thought contained the entire Torah, even the parts that hadn’t yet happened, although later in this parsha, Ramban thinks that Ha’azinu was taught to Moshe after this), Moshe relates the mitzvah of Hakhel, a gathering that happened every seven years (on the sukkot after a shemittah year), and was described as:

דברים פרק לא:יב הַקְהֵ֣ל אֶת־הָעָ֗ם הָֽאֲנָשִׁ֤ים וְהַנָּשִׁים֙ וְהַטַּ֔ף וְגֵרְךָ֖ אֲשֶׁ֣ר בִּשְׁעָרֶ֑יךָ לְמַ֨עַן יִשְׁמְע֜וּ וּלְמַ֣עַן יִלְמְד֗וּ וְיָֽרְאוּ֙ אֶת־יְקֹוָ֣ק אֱלֹֽהֵיכֶ֔ם וְשָׁמְר֣וּ לַעֲשׂ֔וֹת אֶת־כָּל־דִּבְרֵ֖י הַתּוֹרָ֥ה הַזֹּֽאת:  (יג) וּבְנֵיהֶ֞ם אֲשֶׁ֣ר לֹֽא־יָדְע֗וּ יִשְׁמְעוּ֙ וְלָ֣מְד֔וּ לְיִרְאָ֖ה אֶת־יְקֹוָ֣ק אֱלֹהֵיכֶ֑ם…

Devarim 31;12: Gather the people, the men, women, and children, and the strangers in your gates, that they will hear and that they will learn, and will revere Hashem your Gd, and will take care to do all the words of this Torah. Verse 13: And their sons who never knew, will hear and learn to revere Hashem your Gd…

Ramban is troubled by the verse’s speaking of women and children learning, since he assumed women could not learn the content of the Torah [he seems to mean that unless one knew the Torah ahead of time, it would be impossible to absorb content just by hearing it read at a Hakhel event; when the Chief Rabbinate has Hakhel-type events in our times, it seems to me that Ramban has it right, that those who do not already know the passages being read cannot really follow the content], and children often means those too young to learn.

He suggests that even if they could not follow the reading, the women would learn fear/ awe/ reverence (yir’ah), a reminder that inspiring those emotions is an important part of maintaining observance as well. On the other hand, the children would not be so passive—where the verse says they’ll hear and learn, Ramban says they’ll hear and ask, that the event will stimulate them to question and then learn.

That assumes an age for the children that does not match Chagigah 3a, which says the men will learn, the women will hear (separating the verbs in the verse, applying one to the men and the other to the women), and the taf, the children, are told to come so that those who bring them will get reward. That characterization sees them as too young to learn [although Ramban could have argued the children in verse thirteen aren’t the taf from verse twelve]. 

It’s a whole-nation ceremony, in Ramban’s view, designed to teach content and affect.

Inducting Yehoshu’a

With Moshe’s passing fast approaching, Hashem tells him,

דברים פרק לא:יד וַיֹּ֨אמֶר יְקֹוָ֜ק אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֗ה הֵ֣ן קָרְב֣וּ יָמֶיךָ֘ לָמוּת֒ קְרָ֣א אֶת־יְהוֹשֻׁ֗עַ וְהִֽתְיַצְּב֛וּ בְּאֹ֥הֶל מוֹעֵ֖ד וַאֲצַוֶּ֑נּוּ וַיֵּ֤לֶךְ מֹשֶׁה֙ וִֽיהוֹשֻׁ֔עַ וַיִּֽתְיַצְּב֖וּ בְּאֹ֥הֶל מוֹעֵֽד:  (טו) וַיֵּרָ֧א יְקֹוָ֛ק בָּאֹ֖הֶל בְּעַמּ֣וּד עָנָ֑ן וַיַּעֲמֹ֛ד עַמּ֥וּד הֶעָנָ֖ן עַל־פֶּ֥תַח הָאֹֽהֶל:

Devarim 31;14: Hashem said to Moshe, the day of your death is near, call Yehoshu’a, and stand at the Tent of Meeting, and I will command him, so Moshe and Yehoshu’a went and stood at the Ohel Mo’ed. Verse 15: And Hashem appeared at Ohel Mo’ed in a pillar of cloud…

Rashi read the word va-atzavenu, I will command him, as va-azarzenu, I will exhort him to act with alacrity. Ramban cannot accept that, since Hashem actually commands Yehoshu’a to be strong and of good courage in verse 23. Once it’s a specific Divine command, Ramban says, acting lazily would be a capital offense.

[It’s a surprising claim, with far-reaching ramifications. The least radical reading would be that since Yehoshu’a will hear this personal command from an established prophet, the failure to obey immediately and zealously is a capital crime. Even that, I think, would surprise people.

It’s odder in this case, to me, since the messenger for this command to Yehoshu’a was Moshe Rabbenu, who also taught us the entire Torah, so why wouldn’t failure to obey any mitzvah be a capital crime? I think the difference might be the hearing it directly from the prophet in question, but it’s a topic for further consideration].

The encounter itself involves Hashem descending in a pillar of cloud, Ramban says to speak with Moshe in Yehoshu’a’s earshot (a metaphor, since we don’t think Hashem’s communications with Moshe were audible to anyone else unless they were also worthy, so it’s not a question of volume or proximity). Moshe himself could have gone into Ohel Mo’ed, but Yehoshu’a was restricted to just outside the tent.

For Ramban, Yehoshu’a’s first step as leader of the people was to witness—but not partake, since he was not at that level– his teacher’s interaction with Hashem.

Hashem’s Role/Relationship to the Land of Israel

What Yehoshu’a saw was Hashem’s predicting/warning Moshe that the people would go astray after his death, and that they therefore needed Ha’azinu as a lasting reminder of how the history of the Jewish people works. The beginning of that was

דברים פרק לא:טז וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְקֹוָק֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה הִנְּךָ֥ שֹׁכֵ֖ב עִם־אֲבֹתֶ֑יךָ וְקָם֩ הָעָ֨ם הַזֶּ֜ה וְזָנָ֣ה׀ אַחֲרֵ֣י׀ אֱלֹהֵ֣י נֵֽכַר־הָאָ֗רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֨ר ה֤וּא בָא־שָׁ֙מָּה֙ בְּקִרְבּ֔וֹ…

Devarim 31;16: Hashem said to Moshe, you are about to rest with your ancestors, and this nation will rise and prostitute themselves after the foreign gods of the land to which he is coming in its midst.

The phrase “foreign gods of the land” stands out, because what makes them foreign [my instinct would have been to suggest that they’re foreign in that they’re not Hashem, but the phrase in Hebrew is elohei nechar ha-aretz, gods foreign to the Land, not just foreign gods]?  Rashi had said it the gods of the nations of the land (and it’s those nations who are foreign). Ramban disagrees, says that it’s the gods themselves who are foreign to this land (in a way they are not in Egypt or Syria), because Hashem is the Gd of the Land of Israel. For support, he points to II Melachim 17;21, to the words of the religion experts who were consulted as to why lions were eating the people that the King of Asshur imported to replace the exiled Ten Tribes.

To explain that these people needed to act differently, they said that the new arrivals did not know “mishpat Elokei Ha-Aretz, the laws of the Gd of the Land.” So, too Hoshea 9;3 refers to Israel as eretz Hashem, the Land of Gd.

Ramban seems to mean it relatively literally, that there is a meaningful sense in which Israel is more the Land of Hashem than other places in the world, such that even non-Jews’ violation of certain laws brings more direct and immediate consequences. That’s a lot to wrap our minds around, but it’s how Ramban understands these verses, that it’s a fact of the world’s workings, a matter of tangible reality that Israel is more Hashem’s land than elsewhere.

As Moshe’s life approaches its end, some of his grip is taken away from him, giving some urgency to his putting Yehoshu’a into the leadership role and preparing the Jewish people for a time when they will no longer have him to kick around (or to help keep them on the proper path).