Weekly Services

Summary:The 40-year journey to the Promised Land has come to an end: The Israelites are now encamped at the banks of the Jordan River, about to enter the land, under Joshua.  Moses, their beloved leader who brought them out of slavery, and led them across the vast, forbidding wilderness, continues his farewell:   
 
“Re’eh! Look, my people!" A blessing and a curse lie before you: a blessing if, in the Promised Land, you live up to the divine ideals I’ve imparted to you; a curse if you fail to do so …” Moses concludes with the words: "…I implore you, choose blessing, choose life!"      
 
Since the day Abraham & Sarah set out from Mesopotamia to seek a new life in the Promised Land, Judaism always believed in the promise of human freedom.  But Biblical civilization emerged in a world that embraced the idea of “fatalism” - the belief that human history is controlled by an unchangeable fate determined by the gods and goddesses of nature. 
 
Thomas Cahill, in his bestseller, How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks,” commenting on Abraham & Sarah’s journey to the Promised Land, writes (paraphrasing):  
“… If we had lived in the second millennium B.C E., what would the nations of antiquity have said about Abraham & Sarah’s journey toward a better life, in a “Promised Land?” They would have surely said: ‘Abraham! Sarah! No one can escape their fate!  Human destiny is fixed forever!  Make peace with your fate as determined by the will of the gods!” 
 
But Judaism brought a new message to the world. It was God’s message: “The way the world is, is not the way it must remain; Human destiny lies in human hands; the world can be changed, and ought to be changed to the way it was meant to be: In a word, Choose Life!” 

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alvin Wainhaus