Our guest author this week is Rabbinic Intern Shawn Weiss, Ziegler Rabbinical School student and Alumni Fellow of the Flesh Family Sinai Temple Israel Center Rabbinical School Fellowship.

How long is advice good for? 

When Moses tells the Israelites in this week’s parshah as they are about to enter the land that was promised to them to, “Take care lest you forget the Lord your God and fail to keep His commandments, His rules, and His laws,” how are we, early-twenty-first century American Jews, supposed to understand that? 

Was he addressing an ancient people, living in a bygone world? Or was he addressing the people Israel for all time—including you and me and everyone we know? 

Because when Moses goes on to say, “When you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in, and your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold have increased, and everything you own has prospered, beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget the Lord your God”—he seems to be speaking directly to us. 

If Moses is speaking directly to us, how do we explain to ourselves our inability to keep God’s commandments? Do we rationalize our level of observance by telling ourselves that no one can possibly perform all 613 mitzvot? That we do what we can? That reality has fundamentally altered since the time before the canon was closed? And anyway, the Torah was written by fallible human beings with social, political, and personal biases; it’s not really divine.   

But if we rationalize our understanding of the Divine, do we unknowingly worship our rationalizations? Is not the rationalization of the divine itself a sign of a heart grown haughty?  There are no easy answers to these questions. Which is why Moses’s advice to take care (sha-mar), was, is, and will always be good. Because if we have forgotten the Lord our God, how would we know we’ve forgotten?