Devarim
Deut. 1:1-3:22
By Jen Smith
If someone handed you a time machine, where would you go?
I’ve thought about this question in so many ways: would I go back and warn my younger self before making that terrible decision? Should I go back in time to say the words I wish I had said before saying goodbye to someone I love? Love someone a little better (including myself)?
Most of us carry around a quiet list of moments we wish we could revisit.1 Not because we want to relive them, but because we wish life in that moment had unfolded differently.
This week, we turn the page to the fifth book of the Torah, Devarim, which opens with Moses experiencing the same phenomenon. Standing on the edge of the Promised Land, Moses begins retelling the entire story of Israel’s journey through the wilderness. In this midst of this moment, something interesting happens: Moses doesn’t simply repeat history – he reframes it.
The portion begins with:
These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan…
(Deuteronomy 1:1)
At first this sounds unremarkable; until you remember that just one verse earlier at the end of Matot-Masai, the exact same place is called the Plains of Moab. Suddenly, without anyone moving an inch, the Torah changes its name. Why?
There is plenty of commentary on this about-face, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe2 noticed that the answer is profound. In the Book of Numbers, Israel is still wandering and then wilderness is the story – both the physical and the spiritual. Every hardship, complaint, and failure deserves its own chapter.
But Devarim is different because the Israelites are no longer looking backward; they are looking toward the Promised Land.
From this new perspective, the Israelites shed the wilderness from their identity. Instead, it becomes part of the journey that brought them home. The place once known as the Plains of Moab is now simply the other side of the Jordan; a place defined not by where they have been, but rather by where they are going.
I find that incredibly comforting.
Judaism has never asked us to pretend that painful things didn’t happen. We do not erase history, nor do not deny grief, and we certainly don’t ignore our mistakes.
In fact, the very week we read Devarim, we enter the days leading up to Tisha B’Av, when we intentionally remember our greatest heartbreaks (including the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem) as a People. Memory matters.
But Judaism also insists that memory is not static.
Teshuvah is often translated as repentance, but maybe it is better understood as returning to our truest selves. The mystics teach that every sincere act of growth releases hidden sparks of holiness trapped inside even our darkest moments. They imagined that nothing in creation is beyond redemption, as even brokenness can become a vessel for Divine light.
That means our past is never finished. While the events themselves cannot change, their meaning absolutely can. The failure that once defined us can become the reason we develop compassion. The heartbreak that nearly broke us can become the catalyst for learning resilience. The disappointment we’d erase if we could may eventually become the chapter without which the rest of our story makes no sense.
Once again, we become spiritual time travelers – not by changing history, but by allowing ourselves to reflect on the outcome and using our growth and healing to essentially rewrite an event’s significance.
I wonder if that is what Moses is doing.
He is preparing for a new generation to cross into a new future, but first he teaches them how to remember. He doesn’t erase the experience in the wilderness; he simply refuses to let the chaos of the wilderness have the final word. And maybe that is one of the greatest acts of faith.
The Baal Shem Tov (and the Buddha) taught that we are wherever our thoughts are. If our minds remain trapped in old failures, then spiritually we are still wandering in the desert. But when we direct our hearts toward hope, possibility, and holiness, we have already begun to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land.
As Tisha B’Av approaches, we remember destruction – not to become prisoners of the past, but to become the builders of the future. Jewish memory has never existed simply to preserve pain. It exists to transform our anguish into wisdom, anger into compassion, and ultimately, despair into redemption.
For me, the deepest lesson of Devarim is that while none of us can jump in a real time machine (yet), each day we are given something almost as miraculous: The chance to tell yesterday’s story through the lens of who we are becoming today.
We cannot always choose the chapters that have been written, but with God’s help, we can always choose how our story continues.
Shabbat Shalom.
1. In a 2010 survey of over 6,000 subjects, the Pew Research Center, the second most common answer was about going back in time to choose a different career. Thankfully, Baruch Hashem, I cannot identify with this feeling at all.
2. In a 2010 survey of over 6,000 subjects, the Pew Research Center, the second most common answer was about going back in time to choose a different career. Thankfully, Baruch Hashem, I cannot identify with this feeling at all.