Re’eh: How Things Should Be

There is a world we wish for and the real one we’ve got. The core message of Torah is that we, in partnership with the Holy One, can, and therefore must, change the world for the better.

Even the Land of Israel, according to some, is not intrinsically holy, but rather serves as the testing ground for whether or not we will be. Dr. Susannah Heschel writes in her introduction to her father, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s profound (though often overlooked) book, Israel: An Echo of Eternity:

“…the land itself is not holy, according to my father, but is the site for holiness to be created… God is not reached through the physicality of space, my father contends. God is rather met in moments of faith, in holy time. Jerusalem is not sacred in itself, as land; my father would have repudiated the idolatry of the land expressed by some contemporary Jews. He says it quite simply: ‘we do not worship the soil.’”[1]

It seems that the intense contrast between the world we long for and the reality we inhabit is true — even in the Promised Land. Therefore, it falls upon human beings, wherever we find ourselves, to create holiness and thereby sanctify each moment, extending the vision of Jerusalem beyond one beautiful physical place.

A powerful linkage between these ideas and our Parashah can be found in Torah’s instructions to the Israelites regarding the experience poverty when the Israelites:

“There shall be no needy among you — since Adonai your God will bless you in the land that Adonai your God is giving you as a hereditary portion — if only you heed Adonai your God and take care to keep all this Instruction that I enjoin upon you this day.”[2]

There should be no poor. Yet just three verses later we read:

“If, however, there is a needy person among you, one of your kinsmen in any of your settlements in the land that Adonai your God is giving you, do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kinsman. Rather, you must open your hand and lend them sufficient for whatever he needs.”[3]

In other words: In an ideal world, there shouldn’t be poverty, and in our real world, poverty exits.

The Torah challenges us to name the wide discrepancy between the ideal and the real, to do what must be done in and for an unequal world and to know that the world should never have become unequal in the first place.

We must soften our hearts and open our hands. Justice, God’s vision for humanity, demands that we treat each of God’s children with respect, dignity, and a deep sense of communal obligation.

Only then shall there be no needy. Because we showed up and brought the world and all its inhabitants one inch closer to where things should be.

[1] Heschel, Israel: An Echo of Eternity, p. xxiii

[2] Deut. 15:4–5

[3] Deut. 15:7–8