Parshas Devarim: The Importance of History

A month or two ago, a friend of Rabbi Ben’s let him know about a meeting of a local genealogy society and asked if he’d like to attend.  Because the subject was old photographs and I love photography, Rabbi Ben offered for me to go instead.  The talk was interesting to me as an artist and photography enthusiast, but the best part was all the people I met there.  I was by far the youngest attendee, which to me meant the opportunity to hear interesting things from the more experienced people around me.

I did have a bit of an interesting debate with one man I met.  We were debating the importance of knowing the true history of an event.  As they say, history is written by the victors.  For example, most people I know believe the American civil war was fought over slavery – the North wanted to free the slaves while the South wanted to oppress them.  Growing up in the South, I learned a different version of the story, one that actually sounds much more believable and makes a lot more sense.  The South was the agricultural producer and the North processed the cotton, tobacco, and other products into goods that could be consumed or worn.  Of course, processed goods can be sold for a much higher price than raw materials, so the North was economically doing very well while the South was just scraping by (hence their need for slaves).  The South wanted to build their own factories but the North blocked them from doing so.  The American Civil War, which in the South is known as The War of Northern Aggression (the name alone tells you something), was started, as many wars are, for economic reasons.

But which story is the real one? Does it even matter?  The man I was discussing this with said that he thought it didn’t really matter what the true facts or history were – the victor’s history is sufficient.  I disagreed; I think it’s the true history that teaches us so we can learn for the future.  If we don’t know what really happened, how can we make it never happen again? How can we prevent something if we don’t know how it really came about? A government can learn from the lesson of the American Civil War by knowing never to allow one region (such as the agricultural sector) to become too impoverished while other regions flourish.  Either mass migration from the poor to the wealthy sector will result (as has happened in Mexico) or a rebellion will eventuate.

So, too, we Jews must learn from our history.  This week we begin the book of Devarim, the final book of the Torah.  The entire fifth book of the Torah is a summary of the Jewish history that has gone before.  But although the Jews are the main protagonists of the story, they are not cast in such a wonderful light.  Usually the victors who write the story make themselves look as good and as right as possible, but the Torah was not written by the Jews – it was written for the Jews by G-d Himself.  And G-d made sure to get the history as accurate as possible.

In fact, we reiterate this history of the Jews particularly so that was can learn from it.  And the only way we can learn from it is if we know what really happened, gory details and all.  We can learn from the story of the spies (read more about this story here, here, and here) not to doubt G-d’s plan for us, but to have faith in Him, to have emunah and bitachon.  We read about the story of the golden calf so that we should never ever repeat it.  We read and learn about what we did wrong precisely so that we learn never to do it again.

Shabbat shalom!

Read more about Parshas Devarim: To Sum It All Up, Just Have Faith

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