Devarim
Abraham Joshua Heschel on Parashat Devarim, read on Shabbat Devarim · Shabbat Chazon · Tisha B'Av weekend — with one of this week's three questions for the two of you.
This is the heaviest Shabbat of the year — Shabbat Chazon, the Shabbat of vision, the Shabbat just before Tisha B'Av. The haftarah opens with Yeshayahu's terrible vision of a people who have lost their way. And yet, in Heschel's reading, the destruction of the Temple was not the destruction of Israel's holiness — because Israel's holiness was never finally housed in stone. It lived in time, in the Shabbat the Jewish people had been keeping for a thousand years before any Temple stood. On the evening destruction fell, the rebuilding was already underway. The Sages went so far as to say: Mashiach was born on Tisha B'Av. The very moment of falling already contains the first motion of standing again.
What is something between us — small or large — that has been broken or diminished, and that this week of remembering invites us to acknowledge honestly?
The full week — the passage itself with its source, the other two questions, and the closing verse of hope — lives in the app. Together Tomorrow on the App Store.