This sermon was delivered at our service on August 2nd, 2025. You can listen to it on Contact Chai podcast or watch on our YouTube channel.
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Whenever we have new staff join Mishkan, I sit down with them and tell them the story of Mishkan. It’s not a long story — we’ve only been around for 14 years — but it’s a chance to hand over some of the institutional memory that still lives only in my head. I share what we’ve learned, what’s gotten us to this point — what we’ve done right, and where we’ve stumbled — so that the next chapter can be written with more clarity.
Deuteronomy is Moses’ version of this very practice — only he’s handing over not 14, but 41 years of lived experience. Much of the story, we the readers already know — we’ve read it in real time. But Moses knows he’s not going into the Land with this new generation. Many of them weren’t around when it all happened, so he wants to be sure they internalize the lessons. As Lin Manuel Miranda puts it, quoting George Washington, “I want to talk about what I have learned, the hard-won wisdom I have earned.” That’s the entire Book of Deuteronomy.
In this week’s parasha, Moses retells a particularly consequential story: the story of the spies. Back in the Book of Numbers, forty years earlier, the Israelites are on the cusp of entering the Land. They send scouts to scope it out and report back. What they hear terrifies them: giants, fortified cities, overwhelming danger. The people panic and weep. They moan that they wish God would just kill them here and now, or better yet, let’s just go back to Egypt God (or, as I like to say, the character of God in the Torah) is so disappointed that God decrees this generation will not enter the Land. Instead, their children will.
And here, 40 years later, Moses is telling those children the story, but he alters the story in subtle but significant ways. He says to the people: “You sulked in your tents and said, ‘It is because God hates us that God brought us out of Egypt — to hand us over to the Amorites to wipe us out.’ Our kinsmen took the heart out of us, saying: ‘We saw there a people stronger and taller than we, large cities with walls sky-high, even Anakites!’” (Deut. 1:26–28)
I know I haven’t told you much and we didn’t do an in-depth study of the two versions of the story side by side, but just on the surface, what sounds different about the two tellings of the story? Why might Moses choose to tell it differently in that way here?
Little pivot: Tomorrow night we observe Tisha B’Av, the 9th of Av, a day of fasting, mourning, sitting on the floor, reading Eicha, and remembering both the calamities of our history and the pain of our present. It’s an intense day — and painfully resonant right now.
When the sun sets Sunday night and the fast ends, we begin a 7 week journey: we move intentionally and methodically, week by week, from that low, despondent place to a place of renewal and hopefulness. The essential act that makes that renewal possible in our lives and in the world, is teshuvah.
Teshuvah means turning, or returning. Often translated as repentance, teshuva means turning away from the habits, systems and maybe even people holding us back; turning toward new habits, new places, new communities, new practices that can support us in becoming the people we want to be in the world. RamBam, the great medieval philosopher, wrote that this kind of moral and spiritual turning is complete only when we find ourselves in exactly the same position as we were when we went wrong, and choose to behave differently. But what happens if circumstances don’t repeat themselves, how do you make teshuvah then?? RamBam says ‘Don’t worry, They always do’.”
Rabbi Alan Lew writes, in his brilliant High Holiday themed book This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: ‘“The unresolved elements of our lives… continue to pull us into the same moral and spiritual circumstances until we figure out how to resolve them… They carry us into harm’s way until we become aware of them, conscious of them, and begin to change them. And we all have recurring motives in the dark unresolved corners of our lives — in the domestic unhappiness we replicate from one marriage to another, and the problems that seem to follow us from one job to the next, and all the mistakes that turn out to be the same mistakes which we make over and over.”
This is why Moses begins the book of Deuteronomy, the second telling, with his own version of the story of the scouts. The Israelites are in precisely the same spiritual and moral predicament they found themselves in 40 years before.” The recurring family story has led them right back to the same place. Last time, they acted from a place of fear and group think and a cycle of collective anxiety that they ratcheted up into a panic, which prevented them from acting with wisdom, patience, decisiveness, strategy and compassion, all the things you lose when you’re reacting from fear. And most painfully, they lost their opportunity to enter the Promised Land. Moses sees that this exact same thing could happen, right now, and so says, I’m warning you, pleading with you: Don’t make that mistake again. You have too much to lose. Make a different choice this time.
This parasha is always paired with this time on the Jewish calendar and this next holiday, Tisha B’Av. Most notable and famous of the calamities recalled on this day is the destruction of the first temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE by the Babylonians, and then about 500 years later, the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 at the hands of the Romans, which included a protracted siege on the city of Jerusalem, and battles that left blood running in the streets, tens of thousands killed and starved, and ultimately the burning of the Temple and the exile and diaspora of the Jews away from their homeland. All this is portrayed viscerally and graphically in the book of Lamentations, which is the text we sit on the floor and read tonight on Tisha B’Av.
But the calamities of Tisha B’Av don’t end there. The Mishnah says the story of the spies, the very story Moses retells this week, also happened on Tisha B’Av. So did the First Crusade in 1096. The expulsions of Jews from England, France, and Spain in 1290, 1306, and 1492, were all on or around this day. The liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and deportation of Jews to Treblinka. Even the Associacion Mutual Israelita Argentina — otherwise known as the AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, the deadliest antisemitic attack outside Israel which killed or wounded close to 400 people — took place on the 10th of Av, 1994.
When we look at this staggering stacking of traumatic historical events at this time, we have two options. Option one: say, “This is a cursed time. Tragedy just keeps happening to us. We are history’s eternal victims and this is the time of year we honor that. [Like those posters back in the day, The Religions of the World,” and it was like 20 different expressions of the phrase Stuff Happens. Christianity is “Christ died for your stuff.” Buddhism is “This stuff is an illusion.” Catholicism is “If stuff happens, you probably deserve it, now say three Hail Mary’s.” Judaism is “Why does this stuff always happen to us?” Cute… But not particularly spiritually helpful. The alternative is we look at these recurring catastrophes and understand, “They will keep happening until we learn what we need to learn, and change our future.”
The first approach is easy, the second one is hard. And the rabbis who designed Judaism picked the second orientation: inviting us as Jews, as spiritual practitioners, to accept agency for what keeps happening to us and ask us to consider what we might do differently, so that we can break out of the cycle of tragedy. That is teshuvah.
The biggest change in Moses’ retelling of the spies story is this: he shifts the focus. In Numbers, the failure belonged to the leaders—the spies. In Deuteronomy, the people themselves are held responsible. Yes, the leaders may have stirred the panic—but now Moses says to the people: You must take agency. Don’t wait for better leaders. Be better people.
He invites the people not to fall back on the role of victim, rather to claim their agency in the story.
The rabbis who designed our cycle of Torah readings and calendar of holidays, including the holiday we enter tonight, had the same instinct as Moses did: of course to mourn historic tragedy and give it voice by telling the story, but also, to use it as an opportunity to learn from past mistakes so we do better next time.
The rabbis of the Talmud ask, why was Jerusalem destroyed? The could have said The Babylonians or the Roman’s powerful and unstoppable army. But that’s not what they say. Hundreds of years later they look back and say, Jerusalem was destroyed because of sinat hinam– gratuitous hatred. Factionalization, toxic polarization, dehumanization, the turning of our family into enemies.
The Talmud goes on to describe how the leaders in Jerusalem had fortified themselves inside the city with enough grain in storehouses to survive for 20 years, in order to avoid fighting the Roman army, preferring to wait out the Romans, or negotiate diplomatically. But there was a minority of violent Jewish extremists– the Biryonim– who wanted war. So the Biryonim burned the storehouses of grain, starving their own people. Eventually they were forced to open the gates of the city to access food, and when the Roman army came pouring in, the Jews were too weak, and too divided, to fight them. And Jerusalem burned, and the Jews were sent into exile.
So why don’t the rabbis of the Talmud blame the Romans or the Biryonim, for the destruction of Jerusalem? It would certainly be easier to say “They did this to us! We were just trying to live!” Turns out neither the rabbis nor Moses cared about actual history. They were spiritual leaders. The only question worth asking about any conflict, any recurring catastrophe, is this: What is my role in it? How can I prevent it from happening again?
The story of the burning of Jerusalem is not a direct analogy to what is happening right now in Gaza. But many the same elements exist, if distributed differently to different players in the story: There is a side with a much more powerful army. There is an area under siege in which its inhabitants are being starved and dying, not by natural causes but through the choices of those in power who would rather fight than negotiate. There are violent extremists, yes Hamas, and also those in the Israeli government, who are willing to sacrifice the lives of their own people, and certainly the people on “the other side,” to continue to fight til the victory — that’s the literal Hebrew on the billboards you’ll see in Israel “Ad ha’nitzahon!” What is victory if all that is left is rubble, destruction, humiliation and anger, leading only to more violence, if not tomorrow, the day after that? The Biryonim to draw their own people into a fight they promised would bring security, and it brought only bloodshed, suffering, destruction, exile. What is victory, if it means justifying and standing by starvation of children?
And so the spiritual question of this season — and of this moment — is not: Which side deserves more of our outrage? The question is certainly not how can our side do a better job at PR because the public relations war is what’s really killing us. Yonit Levy, a centrist Israeli news anchor this past week, said on live TV about what we’re seeing in Gaza, “This not a PR problem, it’s a moral problem.” The question for us is: What is my role here? As the story unfolds this time, what part can I play to change things for the future?
In the haftara reading for Today the Prophet Isaiah calls out to the Jews a prescription for transformation: He says “Cease to do evil, learn to do good. Devote yourself to justice, aid the wronged. Uphold the rights of the orphan and the widow. Though your sins be like crimson, they can turn white as snow.” Tisha b’Av is followed 6 days later by a little-known holiday called Tu b’Av, which in ancient times was a day designated for a community wide Sadie Hawkins dance, where girls would dress up in white and go dance in the vineyards and get paired up with eligible young gentlemen. The darkness of the 9th of Av is eclipsed by a day, and then a season, of love and a sense of possibility and transformation. Devastation can be replaced with rebirth.
Moses, our prophets and sages, all have the same message: we must honor our pain, and then let it move us to action so we can change ourselves and the world, to make different choices, to make the teshuvah that is uniquely ours to make and heal the brokenness we’ve inherited.
Ken Yehi Ratson