Parshas Va’eschanan: I Repeat, I Repeat, I Repeat Myself

Okay okay, I know I repeat myself sometimes.  There are times when I sit down to write my dvar Torah for the week and the theme I want to address seems glaringly obvious – even though I’ve spoken about it on the blog before.  I guess we all have one-track minds from time to time, and we definitely each have our own interests and themes we want to push to the forefront in our conversations and in our lives.

You see, we all repeat ourselves from time to time.  Sometimes it’s out of habit and sometimes we just forget that we’ve told that story or joke before.  But when the Torah repeats itself, there is always a deeper reason.  The Torah never, ever wastes a word (a lesson we should also learn for our own speech).

In the book of Devarim, which we are reading now, there are 199 mitzvot listed – and only 70 of them are new.  That means there are 129 mitzvot repeated!  Why?

At this point the Jews are about to enter the land of Israel and confront the 7 nations living there.  While they were living in the desert, there were many commandments they were not tempted to break.  They were living in a world where G-d was so intimately involved with their daily lives that He provided all their food and even made sure their clothes never wore out!  They certainly were not living in a world of temptation… but when they entered the land of Canaan, they would be faced with temptation on all sides.

The laws we are reviewing now are primarily focused on preparing us for life in the real world.  It’s sort of like a father preparing his sheltered son for university: there is a lot of important advice to impart.  In this week’s parsha, for instance, Moses warns about the dangers of prosperity and assimilation – concerns the Jews did not have in the desert, but which we definitely face today.

So if I repeat myself, I hope you’ll forgive me.  After all, I am a rebbetzin and it is my job to follow in the footsteps of the Torah.  And if it’s important enough for Moses to repeat some stories and some laws over and over again, well, I guess it’s important enough for me, too!

Shabbat shalom!

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