Turn North
Thirty-two start-ups are back in the Galilee. More than a hundred worked up there before the war, so nobody should oversell this. But on Tuesday a room of Israeli and American business people in New York went through what it would take to bring the rest of them home — the hiring, the grants, the founders weighing whether to move a family back to a town that spent nearly three years under rocket fire. Fifty-odd jobs so far, and fifty-five thousand kids and teenagers in programs across twenty-seven communities up north.
Thirty-two out of a hundred.
The parsha this Shabbat, Devarim, opens the last book of the Torah with Moses on the far side of the Jordan doing something he has mostly avoided doing at length: talking. Forty years of walking are behind him. He has about five weeks to live. And he starts to retell the whole thing — where they went, what it cost them. It is the longest speech in the Torah and it works like a debrief.
Out of forty years of material, here is the first thing he quotes God saying.
יְהֹוָ֧ה אֱלֹהֵ֛ינוּ דִּבֶּ֥ר אֵלֵ֖ינוּ בְּחֹרֵ֣ב לֵאמֹ֑ר רַב־לָכֶ֥ם שֶׁ֖בֶת בָּהָ֥ר הַזֶּֽה׃
The ETERNAL our God spoke to us at Horeb, saying: You have stayed long enough at this mountain.
Horeb is Sinai. Nobody here is being told to leave a bad place. This is the mountain — the fire and the voice, the most important address in Jewish history. They have been camped there about a year. They built the Mishkan there. They organized the whole camp there, tribe by tribe, and it works.
And God says: enough. Rav lachem shevet bahar hazeh. You have stayed long enough at this mountain.
The mountain was where they got equipped. The land was where they were going.
Then forty years pass. The spies. The funerals. Almost everyone who heard that first “enough” is dead by the time Moses gets to the next part, where God uses the same two words again.
רַב־לָכֶ֕ם סֹ֖ב אֶת־הָהָ֣ר הַזֶּ֑ה פְּנ֥וּ לָכֶ֖ם צָפֹֽנָה׃
You have been skirting this hill country long enough; now turn north.
Rav lachem again. But the verb moved. The first time it was shevet, sitting. This time it is sov, circling.
Sitting still at least looks like what it is. Circling looks like progress. You are covering ground. You are putting in the mileage. Your legs are tired at the end of the day and you can point to the distance you made. And, yet, you are precisely where you started, because you have been going around the same hill for a generation.
They are already moving. What God gives them is a bearing.
P’nu lachem tzafonah. Turn north.
It is the plainest sentence in the parsha. There is no metaphor in it. After all the retelling, all the grievance and the accounting of who failed where, the instruction comes down to a compass heading. Stop going around. Point yourselves at something.
I want to be careful here, because Moses is standing in Edomite hill country and his north is not the Galilee’s north. It is not the same map. But Jews have been reading this sentence for three thousand years in places that had nothing to do with Moav, and the shape of the instruction survives the move.
Which brings me back to thirty-two.
Two-thirds of those companies have not come back. Roughly a third of Kiryat Shmona’s people are still not home. And, looking around, I can tell. I write this to you while looking out over a plaza that faces the main street coming up through Kiryat Shmona.
There are plenty of people — and yet not enough — bustling around getting ready for Shabbat. You can see, most days, stores and restaurants bustling. People are happy and laughing and living life. Yet. You can see military vehicles around at nearly all hours. From caravans of flatbeds hauling tanks to jeeps with anti-drone netting strung up over them like they’re in a soccer goal. And yet, the people live. Amazing. But there is still far, far to go. Anyway, I digress.
Plans get announced in rooms in New York, and a room in New York is a long way from a founder in Tel Aviv deciding whether to sign a lease in a town that took direct hits. Anyone who tells you the north is fixed is selling something.
But every one of those thirty-two is somebody who looked at a hill they had been circling and turned. They had every reason and every excuse to keep going around. There is no verse with their names in it, and nobody made them do it. They picked a direction.
That is where the simcha is hiding this week, which is a strange week to go looking for it. This Shabbat is Shabbat Chazon. The vision Isaiah opens with is not a kind one, and the fast comes next Thursday. Devarim always lands right here, on the doorstep of the worst day on our calendar — the debrief read out just before we sit on the floor and mourn, because a debrief is what you owe the dead.
And the debrief has rav lachem in it. Twice. The book that opens the Nine Days opens with God telling a people who had every reason to stay put that the staying was over, and then, forty years later, telling their children that the circling was over too. Moses puts those sentences in his closing speech as instructions. They assume a next step, and they assume somebody takes it.
Thirty-two so far.
Shabbat shalom.
— Uriel ben Avraham