"Acceptance as a Value."

Acceptance as a Value

This week Moshe continues his address to the people he has shepherded in the desert.

He wants to prepare them for their life in the land they have been travelling towards for decades.

Life there will be very different from the supernatural one they have experienced thus far.

They will need to work the land, raise their own crops and no longer receive food from the heavens and water from a rock.

What do they need to know?

We read about Moses pleading and imploring God to let him go into the land.

The answer to Moshe’s impassioned prayers was always no.

It was not going to be the way Moses desperately desired.

He could look at Israel from afar, but he would not get to step foot in there.

By writing this all down and sharing this lesson, Moses is showing the people that prayer is not about getting what you want.

It is about connecting to and being in relationship with God.

As much as every fiber of Moses’s being wanted his prayers answered in the affirmative, he recognized at the end of it all, it is God who runs the world with Divine wisdom that no living man is privy to.

Perhaps Moshe wants the people to learn that every prayer is heard and makes a difference.

We may be angry, hurt, sad at the Divine decree especially if we really wanted a different outcome.

However, at the end of the day what happens is not up to us.

We would do well to learn from Moshe who at the end of his life, accepted the Divine decree.

Also, in this Parsha, Moshe teaches us the first paragraph of the Shema which is, among other things, a declaration of the Oneness of God.

That there is nothing but God and that we are to connect ourselves to God as best as we can- with all our heart, all our soul and all our might.

This teaching adds on to the previous one to help us understand that everything is One and our job is to recognize that and live accordingly.

Wishing us a Shabbos of comfort,

A Shabbos of recognition of the reality that there is nothing but God,

A Shabbos where we get to taste a little bit of the pleasure of the World to Come,

With love,

Elissa