Shabbos Parashat Vaetchanan - 5782

Shabbos Parashat Vaetchanan - 5782

Rabbi Hal Miller

Ascend to the top of the cliff and raise your eyes westward, northward,

southward, and eastward, and see with your eyes, for you shall not cross

this Jordan.[Devarim 3:27]

Not long ago, in Bamidbar 20:12, God told Moshe, "Because you did not

believe in Me to sanctify Me in the eyes of the children of Israel therefore you

will not bring this congregation to the land that I have given them." But now

we see that Moshe will be looking in all directions at the land that God promised

to Avraham and to the children of Israel, implying that he is in the middle of it,

which means he has already led the people into that land. Further on in our

parsha, Moshe tells the people that God "swore that I would not cross the Jordan

and not come to the good land". If Moshe reaches but does not cross the Jordan

he will have fulfilled God's command not to cross, but if he is looking backward

and seeing "the land", he must already be in it. How do we reconcile this?

Rashi notes that in our verse, God tells Moshe to see it with his own eyes. Rashi

says that Moshe asked to see over the Jordan, but God did not limit the view to

just that, bringing Devarim 34:1, "and God showed him the entire land" which is

the implementation of our verse. There is a difference between "over the Jordan"

and the entire land promised to the children of Israel.

So what exactly is "the land"?

In Devarim [34:2-3], God lists some of the places to be found in it, but this is

certainly not an exhaustive list. From this list, some commentators have

deduced maps and boundaries, running from southern Turkey to roughly

Ashkelon, from the Mediterranean across the Jordan, including the Dead

Sea, the Kinneret, Yerushalayim, all of modern day Lebanon, and various

other portions of the region.

What they do not take into account is Bereishit [15:18], where God promises

to Avram, "To your descendants have I given this land, from the river of

Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates River" and then goes on to list a

number of nations that lived there at the time. This extends "the land" to

include the western half of modern Iraq, the northern half of Jordan, the

western three-quarters of Syria, the northern ten percent of Saudi Arabia

and all of modern day Israel from Chevron through the Galil and Golan. This

explains Moshe seeing "the land" in all directions from where he stood in

Moav as that was more or less in the center.

How do we reconcile the different understandings of what is "the land"?

We could perhaps say that much of the territory, although promised to Avram

was meant for his other descendants, Yishmael, Eisav, and the sons of

Keturah, and that Israel only gets the part to the west of the Jordan. But we

see repeatedly that Avraham was promised that his inheritance would be

through Yitzchak and Yaakov, not Yishmael and Eisav. They would receive

portions, and did, but not from this "land".

Sforno gives us a starting point. He discusses Moshe having conquered

Sichon and Og and taken their lands, which were on the eastern side of the

Jordan. Reuven, Gad and half of Menashe settled there, in and around the

Golan. Sforno notes that this was not allocated by lot as was the rest of "the

land", rather by Moshe himself. But it clearly falls within the promise to Avraham.

King David was instructed about two kinds of wars, mandatory and optional.

A mandatory war is to defend the land against attack, while an optional one is

to expand the land by conquering neighbors. Much is written about where a

mandatory war may take place and where only optional war can be fought.

Between King David and Sforno we have a possible answer to our queries.

Perhaps there are two phases of Israel acquiring the promised "land". In the

first phase, Yehoshua conquered all that was west of the Jordan River. He,

and Moshe, apparently felt that the nation would not be able to conquer, hold

and settle more than that for many generations, and should take only a bite

sized piece first. Moshe's war against Sichon and Og, while over land that was

promised to Avraham, would fit for the time being into the optional war status.

Any further land beyond that must fall into phase two, which will come when we

have the Messianic era.

Moshe was forbidden from entering the phase 1 land, but was standing in the

phase 2 portion at the time. He was prohibited from crossing the Jordan, but

not from being in the middle of the rest of the promised land.