From Generation to Generation

Thoughts on Parshat Devarim in Memory of My Father

Dear readers,

I’ll be in touch next month with some new stories about Israel in these troubled and horrific times. In the meantime, this.

Haim

From Generation to Generation

Devarim 5785-2025

An English version of my annual dvar Torah in memory of my father and teacher Sanford “Whitey” Watzman, who left us ten years ago on 2 Av. The original appears in “Shabbat Shalom,” the weekly portion pamphlet published by the religious peace movement Oz Veshalom-Netivot Shalom.
The original Hebrew version can be downloaded here.

“Better is a poor and wise youth than an old and foolish king who doesn't know how to receive admonition anymore,” wrote the wisest of men, King Solomon, in his old age. Perhaps this thought ran through the mind of Moses when he stood before the Children of Israel on the Plains of Moab to teach them the Torah he received on Mount Sinai. His purpose was to instill it in the young new generation that was about to set aside the nomadic way of life and settle in the Land of Israel.

If so, he was no different from any other person who reaches the age at which he sees before him not only his children but also his grandchildren and wonders what he wants to pass on to a generation that is living in a world very different from the one that he himself grew up in and experienced.

Throughout human history, rarely has there been a younger generation that has not had to find a way to live in a world different from that in which its grandparents lived. For that reason, the younger generation is often inclined to reject the past and to offer new ideas and practices radically different from those that had been the conventional wisdom just a few decades previously. As a general rule, new ideas that are not grounded in past wisdom fail, because their view is a narrow one, and because they presume that new knowledge always supersedes and surpasses old knowledge, rendering the latter obsolete. There is something of the sin of hubris in this.

Moses may have realized that the younger generation would demand innovation. And that might explain why he chose not to convey the whole of the Torah to his people when he received it at Mt. Sinai, as Ramban (Nachmanides) writes in his introduction to his commentary on Deuteronomy:

“And he further adds in this book precepts of which no mention was made [in the previous books of the Torah], such as leverite marriage, and the law of the slanderer, and divorce, and false witnesses, and other such. And all of them were conveyed to him at Sinai or in the tabernacle during the first year, before the spies, because he innovated nothing on the Plains of Moab, only the words of the Covenant that he elaborated.”

Note the difference between Moses’s point of view on the Plains of Moab and that of the people. From Moses’s perspective he was conveying precepts and commandments that he had known many years already. In contrast, the younger generation, on the verge of entering the Land, was hearing these for the first time, and as such they sound new and radical. Most importantly, they seem to be of specific importance to a society about to settle down, as opposed to one that lives in the wilderness.

Moreover, Moses not only conveys what he received. He also interprets the Torah under different conditions, and in light of years of experience since they were received, and in that sense he innovates.

An old and wise king (or grandfather) understands that, to pass on his wisdom, he needs to cast it as something new and radical. He needs to draw from old doctrines innovative ideas that were not evident previously, conclusions that previous generations would have seen as inconceivable in the world that they knew—even though they are innovations grounded in the Torah that Moses received on Mt. Sinai. “One generation goes, and another generation comes; but the earth remains forever.”