Parashat Re'eh: The BIG CHOICE

This week’s parsha begins with one of Deuteronomy’s favorite topics, the BIG CHOICE in life -- the choice between good and bad, between life and death, or, as this week’s parsha puts it, the choice between a life of blessing and a life of curses.

The question of leading a moral life, of choosing good over evil, is a popular one and a universal one. But what makes the Torah’s version of this question special is that it is framed as an issue of relationship, specifically as an issue of the relationship between God and the people of Israel. The parsha does not begin with the words: “These are the blessings and these are the curses.” It begins with a statement of relationship: "See this day I give you blessing and curse.” What makes this blessing and curse important is that I give it to you. And how does one earn this blessing or this curse? Again, through the relationship, either by being faithful to the relationship and obeying God’s commands, or by reneging on one’s relational duties and disobeying Him.

Later on in the parsha, by way of introduction to the prohibition against gashing yourself or shaving the front of your head, the Torah says, banim atem lashem elokeikhem, “You are children of the Lord your God” (14:1). The good and the bad, the right and the wrong, are framed as questions of our relationship to God.

The relationship theme is one of classical midrash’s perennial favorites. Midrash Devarim Rabbah on this parsha explains that both the Torah and the human soul are compared to a ner, a light or candle. When the Holy One blessed be He wanted to warn the people to observe the Torah, says the midrash, what did He say to them? Neri beyadekha venerkha beyadi. “Your light is in My hands, and My light is in your hands. If you keep My light [the Torah], then I will keep your light [the human soul].”

How deeply intimate and inextricable is such a relationship! Each of us holds a piece of God in our hands and God holds a piece of each of us in His. We are in an inter-dependent, symbiotic relationship. Imagine two puzzles completed perfectly except for one piece in each puzzle which is interchanged and fit into the opposite puzzle frame. Someone once said to me that being a parent is like having your heart walk around in someone else’s body. Our relationship to God is of that order. We carry a piece of Him, through the Torah, and He carries a piece of us, through our souls.

Nor is it just any piece. It is the light, the ner, the or, the part of us my daughter would call “the shiny, sparkly part.” For her, that is what makes a dress worth wearing. For us, that sparkly part is what makes a life worth living. It is the song and the spirit, the part of us that soars heavenward, that is always seeking, always yearning to be connected to its origins.

But, oh, what responsibility! To be charged with keeping the light, with keeping God’s light, the Torah, alive on earth. And to be told that our own lives, our own lights depend upon this relationship, depend upon our ability to keep God’s light alive. So much rests on us.

But also what an honor, a privilege, and a joy. To play such an important role, not to be tiny in God’s eyes, but to be large, to be “the carriers of His light.”

The midrash says our souls are bound up in the keeping of His Torah -- when, through the Torah, we bring out the light in the world, we are simultaneously feeding our own souls, making their light shine even brighter. The true “blessing” of Deuteronomy’s BIG CHOICE is the shining of that light – God’s and our own.