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.
David Resnick is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Education of Bar Ilan University and immensely enjoyed his first Limmud this last December.
This parsha is one of the most mitzvah-rich in the entire Torah: 55 mitzvot. These run the gamut from radical social legislation (debt forgiveness in the sabbatical year), to a calendar of the three pilgrimage festivals, to the challenge of remaining loyal to the Jewish path in the face of myriad seductions. There are so many mitzvot (and no narrative), that one might lose the forest for the trees.
In addition to proclaiming numerous mitzvot, the parsha also presents overarching rationales for their observance. To be sure, without trees there is no forest, but without some sense of the whole, one might feel that any particular tree is dispensable. Thus, "You are children of the Lord your God" (14:1a) establishes a complex, yet personal, metaphor for our relationship to the Divine Legislator. This metaphor led the Chasidic master Avraham Yehoshua Heschel of Apt to surmise that "the worst sin Jews can commit is to forget that they are royalty." "The Royals" are not high on some peoples’ lists these days, partly because they do not live up to the royal standard. The mitzvot establish the standard to which are to aspire, like "do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kinsman. Rather, you must open your hand and lend him sufficient for whatever he needs." (15:7b-8). Even the Torah soberly observes that "there will never cease to be needy ones in your land" (15:11).
For others, the very notion of royalty grates. Why set up standards which elevate one group above another – and who is to say what the standards should be? Back to the view of the forest: "Be careful to heed all these commandments which I enjoin upon you; thus it will go well with you and with your descendants after you forever, for you will be doing what is good and right in the sight of the Lord your God." (12:28). The (only?) justification for the existence of the Jewish people is as a force for social good, aspiring to the highest forms of goodness – those just beyond our necessarily impaired mortal view.
One thing the Torah does is challenge our current views, and from that disparity may come enlightenment. The parsha contrasts an external, even objective sense of the good, with our current, individualist relativism: "You shall not act at all as we now act here, every person [doing] what is right in his own sight." (12:8). There could hardly be a greater disparity than that. Which is why the parsha is called Re'eh, "see”.
Another Voice - Anita Silvert
Anita is the Adult Jewish Educator for the Pritzker Center for Jewish Education of the JCC of Chicago. She has attended four Limmud NY’s and one in the UK, and welcomes the first Chicago Limmud in Feb. 2010.
In Re-eh, the parsha begins with a really big choice – "I set before you blessing and curse". We read that if you lived too far from the place God had chosen to accept tithes from your fields, you can "convert it into money … and spend it on anything you want". Even though it seems there is no guidance on what you could spend it on, it is good to remember that the money came from something that was to be consumed in a holy place. Every day, we have a choice on where to spend our money. We can support causes, businesses, ideas that add holiness and harmony to the world, or on those things that do not. We can use our tithe-holy-money for blessings.