Devarim
What happens when we reopen old wounds?
Reflection by Or HaLev teacher
Dr. Mira Neshama Weil
"Here we are again.
Just like each year around Tisha B’Av, we are about to open the book of Devarim, the last book of the Chumash.
This moment always feels to me like the beginning of the end: with sefer Devarim, also known as Moshe’s testament, we become aware that we are approaching the end of a cycle. We come close to the completion of a whole year of Torah reading, concluding with… starting over again from the same place, opening again the book of Bereshit, `in the beginning`.
Why is it that starting anew often looks so much like coming back to the same place?
In the opening chapter of the parasha Devarim (the words), Moshe recounts God’s instructions to enter the promised Land:
`See, I have set the land before you` (Devarim 1.8)
רְאֵ֛ה נָתַ֥תִּי לִפְנֵיכֶ֖ם אֶת־הָאָ֑רֶץ
Bnei Israel are to contemplate the new land, the promised land they are to finally enter. Yet, this place is not new. Avraham himself had been there, way before there even was such a thing as a Hebrew people.
In this book, which is also called the `mishne torah` (the repetition of the torah), Moshe recapitulates what happened in the previous books of the Chumash.
How can we make revisiting old patterns, rather than a sign of stagnation, or `repetition compulsion,` as it is called in psychology, a forward motion?
Just like so many of the wanderings of Bnei Israel in the desert, getting to a new place often starts by coming back right where we started. More often than not, moving forward, first means revisiting the familiar.
This is what happens in sefer Devarim, and this is what happens on Meditation retreats: for breakthroughs to happen, we often need to reopen old wounds.
This is what Tisha B’Av is also about. On this day, we give ourselves a space to revisit our brokenness. Tears, the Piacezner rebbe teaches, are cleansing. So this difficult moment of revisiting old wounds is essential, as it makes us clearer, more spacious and available for the process of teshuva that awaits us on the other side of brokenness.
As we open sefer Devarim on Shabbat again this year, on the very day of Tisha B’Av, may we set in motion, through revisiting our own stories, our individual and collective movement towards Life."