The Word That Carries Both

On Thursday I packed a suitcase in a Jerusalem apartment for the last time this trip. Sunday we fly home. Again. The backpacks are heavier than when we arrived — a few books from a shop near the shuk, and a bag of spices that will may not survive customs with its dignity intact.

Sunday is also Tisha B'Av — the ninth of Av, the day Jews fast and mourn the destruction of both Temples. The saddest day on the calendar. We are leaving Israel on the day that commemorates exile from it.

I keep noticing the timing. You don't choose when Tisha B'Av falls.

The parsha this Shabbat is Devarim — "Words" — the opening of the fifth and final book of Torah. Deuteronomy. Moses stands on the eastern bank of the Jordan, across from the land he will never enter, and begins to speak.

אֵ֣לֶּה הַדְּבָרִ֗ים אֲשֶׁ֨ר דִּבֶּ֤ר מֹשֶׁה֙ אֶל־כׇּל־יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל בְּעֵ֖בֶר הַיַּרְדֵּ֑ן בַּמִּדְבָּ֡ר בָּֽעֲרָבָה֩ מ֨וֹל ס֜וּף בֵּֽין־פָּארָ֧ן וּבֵֽין־תֹּ֛פֶל וְלָבָ֥ן וַחֲצֵרֹ֖ת וְדִ֥י זָהָֽב׃

These are the words that Moses addressed to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan.—Through the wilderness, in the Arabah near Suph, between Paran and Tophel, Laban, Hazeroth, and Di-zahab,

— Devarim 1:1

The list of place names reads like geography. These are the places where Israel sinned — the golden calf, the complaints about the manna, the spies — but Moses doesn't name the sins. He names only the locations. The rebukes are coded. Tucked into the landscape, mentioned and moved past. Because he loved them, Rashi says, he criticized by allusion.

This is how the final book of Torah begins. Not with a law. Not with a command. With a man standing at a border he cannot cross, choosing his words carefully for people he is about to leave.

A few verses later, Moses recalls a moment from forty years earlier:

אֵיכָ֥ה אֶשָּׂ֖א לְבַדִּ֑י טׇרְחֲכֶ֥ם וּמַֽשַּׂאֲכֶ֖ם וְרִֽיבְכֶֽם׃

How can I bear unaided the trouble of you, and the burden, and the bickering!

— Deuteronomy 1:12

Eichah. How. The same word that opens the Book of Lamentations — Eichah, read on Tisha B'Av, the scroll of Jerusalem's destruction. The same word. But here in Devarim it carries a different weight entirely.

Moses says eichah because there are too many people. Too much life to manage alone. God had just multiplied them until they were as numerous as the stars. The nation was so alive, so full, so loud with bickering and demands and needs, that one man couldn't hold it all.

Moses's eichah is an eichah of abundance.

Rabbi Levi says three prophets used the word eichah: Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. He compares them to three friends of a noblewoman. One saw her in her glory. One saw her in her recklessness. One saw her in ruin.

Moses saw Israel thriving — and still said "how."

Isaiah saw them straying and said "how."

Jeremiah saw them broken and said "how."

The same word. Three registers. The first eichah was spoken because things were overflowing.

This week, between packing and last errands, I read that Kibbutz Kissufim — a community near the Gaza border devastated on October 7 — inaugurated a new cowshed. The dairy farm manager, Reuven Heinik, was killed two days after the attack while checking on his herd. The cows were slaughtered or scattered. The milking installation was demolished. The farm was the economic center of the kibbutz and a place where children grew up visiting the animals. All of it, destroyed.

They rebuilt. The cowshed reopened. A calf that was four months old on October 7, displaced and relocated during the war, came home to the new facility and gave birth herself. The dairy now produces twenty-five percent more milk than before.

I keep thinking about that calf. Displaced, relocated, brought back. Life continuing in the exact place it was meant to end. Twenty-five percent more. Not restoration. Increase.

Near the end of the parsha, Moses makes his request — the one that every reader knows will be denied:

אֶעְבְּרָה־נָּ֗א וְאֶרְאֶה֙ אֶת־הָאָ֣רֶץ הַטּוֹבָ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֖ר בְּעֵ֣בֶר הַיַּרְדֵּ֑ן הָהָ֥ר הַטּ֛וֹב הַזֶּ֖ה וְהַלְּבָנֹֽן׃

Let me, I pray, cross over and see the good land on the other side of the Jordan, that good hill country, and the Lebanon.”

— Deuteronomy 3:25

God says no. Go up to the summit. Look at it. See it with your eyes. You shall not cross.

Moses gets the view but not the entry. The seeing but not the staying.

I am aware of the difference between a man denied entry to the promised land by divine decree and a man leaving it voluntarily on an El Al flight with a layover in Athens. The comparison does not hold. But the feeling of standing somewhere you chose, somewhere that chose you back, and knowing you are about to be on the other side of it — that much is real.

Tomorrow is Shabbat Chazon — the Shabbat of Vision, named for the haftarah from Isaiah: "The vision of Isaiah." It is the last Shabbat before the mourning of Tisha B'Av. The tradition is to sit with what you can see even when what you see is hard.

Moses sees the land. He names it good. He does not cross. He speaks instead. The entire book of Deuteronomy — Devarim, "words" — is what comes out of the mouth of a man standing at a border. What he could not carry in his feet, he carried in language.

The sign at Ben Gurion Airport says ברוכים הבאים — welcome. I have read it as a tourist, as a new convert, as a volunteer, and now as someone leaving on the day the calendar says exile began.

Each time the sign stays the same. Each time I read it differently.

Eichah. How. The word that holds the weight of a people too alive to manage and the weight of a city emptied of them. The word that carries both.

Sunday we fly. The land stays. Our hearts? Two places at once, it seems.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham