Re'eh
Moses sets before the people the choice of a blessing if they obey God or curse if they do not. Moses details many laws including those of Kashrut. Details of the tithe system are set out as well as the three pilgrim festivals.
Re'eh - Steve Miller
Steve Miller has been a social entrepreneur and social activist for over 30 years - and a fixture at Limmud for over 20 years. Founder of the Jewish overseas development charity, Tzedek, Steve is currently Chair of the Make Poverty History Jewish Coalition, a Board member of the Jubilee Debt Campaign and is working in the field of social and economic regeneration in the UK.
Most of us reading 'A Taste of Limmud' are amongst the affluent in the world. Our affluence allows our lives to be full of choices - where and how we live, how we travel, how we spend our leisure time and how we use that affluence for our immediate desires or the future of ourselves, our children and others. The Limmud Conference epitomises this life of choice - we struggle with too many choices and agonise over the 'best' session to attend.
The choices available to those on low incomes are restricted and, to the more than a billion people living in extreme poverty, the concept of choice is a distant dream.
But Avner Offer in his book "The Challenge of Affluence" suggests that there is a paradox in our affluence. Economic orthodoxy suggests that the more affluent you are the more likely you are to make choices that are well informed, far-sighted, and prudent and that, "in economics, it is implicitly assumed that the unfettered choice of individuals adds up to maximize the welfare of society". Yet close observation shows that not only do we invariably prefer the immediate and the personal gratification over the longer term or the wider benefit, but that we continue to do this in the face of all rationality.
The Torah has its own take on choice and freedom. The sedra Re-eh opens with a pair of opposites, "You can therefore see that I am placing before you both a blessing and a curse ..." (Deuteronomy 11:26), the classic formulation that demonstrates that we have free will. We are not God's puppets - we can choose our own destiny.
A few chapters on we have another pair of opposites - "God will then bless you in the land ... and there will be no poor among you ..." (15:4), "For the poor will never cease out of the land ..." (15:11). Both appear, in context, to talk about a time to come, and despite their separation by several verses, their seeming contradiction troubled our classical commentators. I'd like to suggest that this is another occasion where we are faced with a pair of opposites bound by the choices we make. We have known for decades that extreme poverty is not inevitable. In Nelson Mandela's words, "Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings." So, we are left with the freedom to choose - we can choose to act in ways that mean that the poor will "never cease" or in ways that may ensure that there will be "no poor among us". It is our choice. Mandela again: "Sometimes it falls up on a generation to be great. You can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom. Of course the task will not be easy. But not to do this would be a crime against humanity, against which I ask all humanity now to rise up."
Another Voice
In this week's parshah, Re'eh, we find one of the Torah's many commandments to help the poor. What is remarkable about the 7 verses on this subject is the utter contradiction between the beginning and the end of the section. Deuteronomy 15:4 reads, "There will be no needy among you," but 15:11 says, "For there will never cease to be needy people in your land." How are we supposed to understand the gulf between the two?
As is often the case, there are at least two answers: a facile one, and a harder but more meaningful one. The easy answer is that the Torah only promises that there will be no needy people if we observe God's laws totally; since this has never happened, we need to be told what to do with the poor people who have always existed. But I prefer the explanation of Gunther Plaut in his commentary to the Torah: the first verse is an exhortation, the second a full acknowledgment of reality. Both are necessary in life - the ideal, and the real.
Yoni Berger