Temple Beth-El Saturday AM Torah Study, Deuteronomy 30:1-3, August 13, 2016

JPS - The Possibility of Restoration (vv. 1-10)

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Having warned of exile, Moses now digresses to offer assurance that if Israel should be exiled, God will nevertheless reinstate it if the people sincerely repent of their rebellion and return to Him and His Instruction. A similar digression appears in 4:29-31, although the promis of return to the land is not explicit there. For the question as to whether or not these assurances would undercut the effect of Moses' warnings, and whether or not they are an original part of the text, see Excursus 5 (below).

The key term in this section is the Hebrew root shuv, "turn," "return," which expresses both Israel's return to God and God's return of Israel to its prior good fortune. It is also used in the idioms that express the idea of "taking to heart" and "doing something again." In all, the root is found in seven clauses in which acts of shuv by God and by Israel appear in a chiastic pattern (Israel acts [twice], God acts [twice], Israel, God, Israel), as follows:

A. you take [hashevota] them to heart...and you return [shavta] to the Lord...and heed His command (1-2)

B. then the Lord will restore your fortunes [shav shevut]...He will again [shav] bring you together(3)

C. You will again [tashuv] heed the Lord...(8)

B'. the Lord will again [yashuv] delight in your well-being (9)

A'. since you will be heeding the Lord...once you return [tashuv] to the Lord (10)

The chiasm shows how Israel's return to the Lord will lead to His returning them. Appropriately, this paragraph is part of the Torah portion read in the synagogue on the Sabbath preceding the Ten Days of Repentance (teshuvah, lit. "return") that extend from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur.

Other leitmotifs in this section are the phrases "the Lord your God" (12 times altogether, in almost every verse) and "with all your heart and soul" (vv. 2, 6, 10). Both phrases appear frequently in Deuteronomy.

Excursus 5: The Promises of Reinstatement (4:29-31 and 30:1-10)

As noted in the Comments to 4:29-31 and 30:1-10, it is not clear why Moses, in the course of threatening Israel with exile, mentions that God will accept exiled Israel's repentance and restore it to the promised land. It is true, as noted in the Commentary, that God swore to give Israel the land forever. But Moses' purpose in these addresses is not to summarize all the terms of the covenant but to deter Israel from violating it by warning of the consequences. The promise of forgiveness could weaken the effectiveness of the warning. Conceivably, Moses reasons that no generation would dismiss the warning of disaster because of a promise that it could be followed by restoration. However, in 30:1-10, the promises of prosperity after restoration are so glorious that they practically overshadow the threats.

On literary grounds, both of these passages seem to be interpolations in their contexts. Both are followed by paragraphs beginning with the conjunction "for" (ki), indicating an explanation or justification of something that has just been said, but in each case nothing in the immediately preceding passage (the promise of reinstatement) is explained or justified. As a result, the NJPS translation had to ignore the conjunction (4:32) or assign it one of its less common meanings ("surely," 30:11). This is because in the present text, 4:29-31 and 30:1-10 have come in between the justifications and the statements that they justify. Since the point of 4:32ff is that the Lord is the only true God, these verses justify verses 25-28, which admonish Israel not to worship false gods lest it be forced to worship such ineffectual deities in exile. They have nothing to do with the promise of restoration in verses 29-31. In chapter 30, verses 11-14 begin: "For [ki] this Instruction which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond your reach" (30:11). This does not explain verses 1-10, which tell what will happen if Israel obeys God's commandments later, in the exile. Rather, it justifies God's demand for obedience in the present, and must therefore refer to the end of chapter 29: "it is for us and our children ever to apply all the provisions of this Teaching" (29:28). These considerations suggest that 4:29-31 and 30:1-10 were probably not original parts of the text but were interpolated during the exile to assure the Jews of that time that if they abandoned the sins of which Moses had warned, if they shunned the idolatry of their environment and returned to God, He would accept their repentance and return them to their homeland.

Nitzavim by Stephen E. Cohen, 1997 (From Voices of Torah, CCAR Press. 523)

In his commentary on Deuteronomy 30, K'li Yakar distinguishes between two types of exile: one of which is imposed upon us, and another that we choose and live with, convinced that we really have no choice at all.

K'li Yakar At first the text says, "Among all the nations into which YHVH your God has driven you" (Deut 30:1), and then later, "Among all the nations into which YHVH your God has scattered you" (Deut. 30:3). There is a difference between "driven"-הדיחך [hidichacha] and "scattered"-הפיצך [hefitz'cha]. "Scattered" refers to the dispersion itself, whereas "driven" implies from the mitzvot--when Israel is among the nations, they can be, as a consequence, exiled from the mitzvot. Now, because of being driven from the mitzvot, the Jews may easily fall into error, saying that the Holy One no longer cares at all about their actions, and in this way, they may despair completely of ever being redeemed, thinking that the Holy One intentionally drove them away from the mitzvot, but this was not God's intention, for God eternally desires your performance of the mitzvot.

Comment K'li Yakar describes here a significant feature of the psychology of American Jewish assimilation. Many of our people do feel "in exile from the mitzvot" and regard it as an imposed condition-arising inexorably out of their historical circumstances. ("If God wanted me to observe the mitzvot, S/He would not have placed me in late-twentieth-century California.")

Verse 1

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Friedman: your God has driven you. The word "driven" is ironic here. It has been used three times until now, always referring to persons who would drive Israelites away from their God (Deut 13:6, 11, 14). But now it describes how YHWH drives Israel away to other lands because of Israel's apostasy. The term is thus another allusion to the fact of divine punishment to fit the crime, which is to say: there is justice.

JPS:

the blessing and the curse. This phrase harks back to chapter 28, as do several others in this section (cf. 18:4,11,63-64), showing that Moses is not referring solely to the curse described in chapter 29, but to the blessings (and curses) of chapter 28 as well. This means that if Israel should bring disaster upon itself, the stock-taking that is a prerequisite for its restoration should include the recollection that obedience led to success, and not only that disobedience led to disaster. Thus Moses is not entirely pessimistic; he expects that Israel will indeed remain faithful and prosper, at least for a time, after his death.

the blessing and the curse that I have set before you. That I have offered you as alternatives. This idiom, repeated in verses 15 and 19, harks back to Moses' preamble to the laws in 11:26.

Alter:

all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse. This opening clause pointedly refers to the great catalogue of blessings and curses laid out in chapter 28. In fact, the immediate reference is to the curses because the end of the verse assumes the condition of exile as an accomplished fact. The blessings and curses, presented in chapter 28 as alternatives between which Israel is to choose by its future actions, here occur as a historical sequence: first the curse of exile, then the blessing of restoration.

that your heart shall turn back. Manifestly, the term "turn back" (shuv, reiterated in this chapter) is the thematic center of this passage, alternating between Israel and God in dialectic interplay.

Sforno: (1) והשבות אל לבבך, you will be able to distinguish the truth between apparently contradictory phenomena. When you become the victim of what has been predicted for the sinners, you will realise how far you had strayed from G’d’s Torah, i.e. from G’d Himself. (2) בכל הגויים, while you are still in exile.

Verse 2

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JPS

return to the Lord. Shuv, "return," is the verb from which teshuvah, the Hebrew term for repentance is derived. As the final phrase in the verse shows, the Hebrew term does not refer only to contrition but to a change of behavior, literally a "return" to God and to the behavior that He requires. The concept of returning to God in the Torah is not identical to its better-known form in the Prophets and in classical Judaism. In the Torah it is mentioned only as something that occurs after punishment takes place: if the people take their punishment to heart and return to God, He will terminate their punishment. The prophets developed the concept further. They called upon people to repent before it is too late, and to thereby avert punishment altogether. The concept of teshuvah in classical Judaism combines both ideas, with emphasis on the latter.

with all your heart and soul. In Hebrew, "heart" (lev or levav) usually refers to the interior of the body, conceived of as the seat of thought, intention, and feeling, and "soul" (nefesh) refers to the seat of the emotions, passions, and desires. God's "heart and soul" refers to His wishes and purposes (1 Sam. 2:35). To do something with all the heart and soul means to do it with the totality of one's thoughts, feelings, intentions, and desires. The phrase is used to describe how Israel must love God, serve Him, observe His commandments, and return to Him (see 4:29; 10:12; 26:16; 30:2,10). In these exhortations the emphasis is on the word "all": Since YHVH alone is Israel's God, Israel must love and serve Him with undivided devotion. This is clear from 13:4 and 1 Samuel 7:3, where the phrase refers to serving the Lord alone without dividing one's loyalty between Him and other gods.

The repentance must be as thorough and sincere as the original duty.

Alter: And you shall turn back to the Lord your God and heed His voice as all that I charge you today. The grand exhortation of this whole speech, evoking the prospect of Israel's return to God, exhorting Israel to choose life and good rather than death and evil, and reminding Israel that the divine word is intimately accessible, makes it a fitting peroration to the series of speeches or sermons that constitute the bulk of the Book of Deuteronomy. Appropriately, the closing of the frame here includes several verbal echoes of the frame at the beginning, especially chapter 4. After this speech, the book moves on to matters pertaining to Moses's death and the transfer of authority and to the two poems that mark the book's conclusion.

Sforno:

Verse 3

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JPS: restore your fortunes. Hebrew shav 'et shevut, literally, "return a return," is an idiom meaning "restore." Midrashic exegesis takes it to mean "God will return with your captives," meaning that God himself, so to speak, returns from exile when Israel does. He accompanies Israel in exile, suffers along with them, and returns only when He brings them back. This interpretation, homiletically attractive in itself, is reached by disregarding the idiomatic meaning of shav 'et shevut and assigning each of the three words a meaning which it has when it appears separately elsewhere: "return" (intransitive), "with," and "(your) captivity."

Alter: And the Lord your God shall turn back your former state. The meaning of shevut, here rendered as "former state," has long been disputed. Many interpreters derive it from the root sh-b-h and hence understand it to mean "captivity." The use of the same verb (shuv) with this noun shevut in Jeremiah 48:47 immediately after the term shivyah, which unambiguously means "captivity," would seem to lend support to this understanding, But precisely this idiom is employed for the restoration of the fortunes of Job (42:10), where there is no question of Job's having been in a prior state of captivity.

Nitzavim: God in Exile by Stephen E. Cohen, 1998 (From Voices of Torah, CCAR Press. 523-524)

Friedman: bring back your captivity. This expression occurs about twenty-five times in the Tanak. It is grammatically unclear. The verb (sab) would normally be in the Hiphil, but here (and usually) it is in the intransitive Qal. The noun may reflect the root swb, "bring back" (making it a cognate accusative with the verb), or it may reflect the root sbh, "captive." On the former root, the phrase would mean "to produce a coming back." On the latter root, it would mean "to bring back a captivity." These two meanings are very close to each other in any case. Those who take this phrase to mean figuratively "to restore your fortunes" have a good parallel in Job 42:10; but all the occurrences in Jeremiah, which is linked closely with Deuteronomy, fit the meaning of "coming back" or "captivity" far better. Note especially Jer 30:16-23 and 48:46-47, in which this expression occurs in proximity to the related word for captivity: sebi.

--Jeremiah 30:16-23 ​(16)Assuredly, All who wanted to devour you shall be devoured, And every one of your foes shall go into captivity בַּשְּׁבִ֣י יֵלֵ֑כוּ; Those who despoiled you shall be despoiled, And all who pillaged you I will give up to pillage. (17)But I will bring healing to you And cure you of your wounds-declares the LORD. Though they called you “Outcast, That Zion whom no one seeks out,” (18)Thus said the LORD: I will restore the fortunes of Jacob’s tents And have compassion upon his dwellings. The city shall be rebuilt on its mound, And the fortress in its proper place. (19)From them shall issue thanksgiving And the sound of dancers. I will multiply them, And they shall not be few; I will make them honored, And they shall not be humbled. (20)His children shall be as of old, And his community shall be established by My grace; And I will deal with all his oppressors. (21)His chieftain shall be one of his own, His ruler shall come from his midst; I will bring him near, that he may approach Me-declares the LORD-For who would otherwise dare approach Me? (22)You shall be My people, And I will be your God. (23)Lo, the storm of the LORD goes forth in fury, A raging tempest; It shall whirl down upon the head of the wicked.

--Jeremiah 48:46-47 Woe to you, O Moab! The people of Chemosh are undone, כִּֽי־לֻקְּח֤וּ בָנֶ֙יךָ֙ בַּשֶּׁ֔בִי וּבְנֹתֶ֖יךָ בַּשִּׁבְיָֽה For your sons are carried off into captivity, Your daughters into exile. וְשַׁבְתִּ֧י שְׁבוּת־מוֹאָ֛ב But I will restore the fortunes of Moab in the days to come-declares the LORD. Thus far is the judgment on Moab.