Parashat Re’eh Deuteronomy 11:26–16:17 

Dear TBE Community,

In this third week of consolation, I want to write about how Judaism is shaped by the place from which it rose and where it was first practiced. The biblical narrative cannot be separated from the tangible geography of the land. As the rabbi and scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote in “Israel – An Echo of Eternity”:

The land of Israel—biblical chapters hovering everywhere. Places like Hebrew letters, waiting to be vocalized, waiting for crowns with which to be adorned. The land is a text. Here you are illiterate unless you remember words of Scripture. Wherever you stand you are at the frontier of biblical moments.

Walking through Israel, through the hills and valleys around Jerusalem like Heschel in the quote above, can be an exhilarating religious and spiritual experience, an almost sacred act, and an act of poetry. 

Seeing the sun rise in Jerusalem illuminates why the Gate of Mercy is also called the Golden Gate: the sun touches first the eastern side of the Temple Mount as it emerges from behind the Mount of Olives. Walking down the road to Silwan from the Sultan’s pool reveals why the Gehinnom Valley became the namesake for a hell-like place: as the valley gradually narrows, the southern flanks of Mount Zion appear steeper and higher. The holiness of the Temple must have felt unimaginably far away. A now universal metaphor for hell originated in the topography of a valley near Mount Zion. 

On a different level, an individual’s location or provenance can express a state of being. For example, the rabbis of the Talmud compared those who had traversed an ocean or a desert to those who had been released from either prison or captivity, probably partly due to the confinement and threat to life they had left behind in all instances. In such cases, the notion of place functions as an attribute, a descriptor not so much of a location, but of a defining characteristic. The tangible and concrete are used to express the intangible and ethereal.

One such example, this one from outside of Jerusalem, is in this week’s parsha, Re’eh:

When your God יהוה brings you into the land that you are about to enter and possess, you shall pronounce the blessing at Mount Gerizim and the curse at Mount Ebal. Both are on the other side of the Jordan, beyond the west road that is in the land of the Canaanites who dwell in the Arabah—near Gilgal, by the terebinths of Moreh. (Deuteronomy 11:29-30)

These two mountains do exist, today, they frame the city of Nablus in the West Bank. In the Torah’s narrative, half of the twelve tribes were to ascend Mount Gerizim and the other Mount Ebal and pronounce at each other the blessings and respectively the curses that would befall the Israelites should they not heed God’s commandments. This peculiar enactment comes up three times in Tanakh, besides Re’eh also in Ki Tavo and in Joshua.

I can’t say what exactly they look like today, but Torah commentators point out that in biblical narrative, these two mountains, while located next to each other and exposed to the same climate, looked very different: Gerizim was fertile, covered with trees and grass, while Ebal was without vegetation, making it, in the sometimes rigid black-and-white perspective of biblical imagery, obvious choices to represent blessings or curses. But what matters in the context of this Shabbat missive is that they exist, and that nature, landscape, influenced the rendering of events in Torah that would later influence Jewish law.

The majority of the rabbis of the Talmud assume that modern-day Nablus was indeed the place where the ceremony took place. Nablus in the biblical narrative is Shechem, the first place where Abraham put up an altar after his and Sarah’s long journey to the west. Here is a glimpse into the rabbinic reasoning and fact-finding, from Mishnah Sotah 7:5:

When the Jewish people crossed the Jordan River they came to Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, which are in Samaria along-side the city of Shechem, which is near the oaks of Moreh, as it is stated: “Are they not beyond the Jordan, behind the way of the going down of the sun, in the land of the Canaanites that dwell in the Arabah, over against Gilgal, beside the oaks of Moreh?” (Deuteronomy 11:30), and there it is stated: “And Abram passed through the land until the place of Shechem, until the oaks of Moreh” (Genesis 12:6).

Landscapes shape us and how we look at the world. The oaks, or terebinths, of Moreh… It does indeed sound like a good place to build an altar: on a hilltop, closer to the heavens, in the shade of trees, so rare to find in an arid land! It does sound like a good scenery to stand and pronounce blessings many centuries later. Yet that very same scenery – biblical Shechem in Samaria, modern day Nablus in the West Bank – also comes to remind of challenges ahead. Maybe not precisely the curses Moses had in mind. Yet the long series of consequences embedded in promising one party a land already inhabited by others.

Harkening back to Heschel: The land is text, the land is metaphor; the land determines law and shapes its own history. In Judaism, the secular is conditioned by the sacred and the sacred by the secular, impossible to be broken apart, like good poetry. Much as I resonate with this perspective, I am aware that it is one reason, albeit not necessarily a consolation, for the returning cycles of violence and war, for stubbornly making things worse in a land where milk and honey are supposed to flow.

Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Julia Knobloch
rabbiknobloch@bethelsp.org