4 August 2018 23 Av 5778 Shabbat ends London 9.39pm Jerusalem 8.13pm Volume 30 No. 46 Ekev Artscroll p.980 | Haftarah p.1197 Hertz p.780 | Haftarah p.794 Soncino p.1032 | Haftarah p.1051 Shabbat Mevarechim Rosh Chodesh Elul is next Shabbat and Sunday In Loving Memory of Barry Taylor z’l (Benyamin Labe ben Pincus) Forever in our hearts and thoughts. “For the Lord, your God, is bringing you to a good Land… a Land of wheat, barley, grape, fig, and pomegranate; a Land of oil-olives and date-honey” (Devarim 8:7-8). 1 Sidrah Summary: Ekev 1st Aliya (Kohen) – Devarim 7:12-9:10 Mount Sinai. At that time, the tribe of Levi was set Moshe encourages the Israelites to keep God’s apart for its special functions of guarding the Ark commandments. This will allow them to prosper and serving God. in the Land and to be the most blessed of peoples. In the same way that God took them 5th Aliya (Chamishi) – 10:12-11:9 out of Egypt, so too He will allow them to defeat Moshe entreats the Israelites to fear and love God the Cana’anite nations. The nation must destroy and to open their hearts to Him. Moshe recalls the the Cana’anites’ idols. Moshe entreats the miraculous Exodus from Egypt, the splitting of the Israelites to remember the 40 years in the desert, Sea of Reeds and the earth swallowing Korach including the challenges involved in eating the and his rebels. manna. God will bring them into a Land with abundant resources, where they will lack nothing. 6th Aliya (Shishi) – 11:10-21 Moshe goes on to say that God always has “His Point to Consider: What is the meaning of the eyes” on the Land of Cana’an. He then tells them word ‘ekev’ in the first verse of the sidrah? (see a passage which we recite twice daily as the Rashi to 7:12) second paragraph of the Shema (see green siddur, p.68). It spells out the benefits of fulfilling 2nd Aliya (Levi) – 8:11-9:3 the commandments and the consequences of Moshe warns the Israelites not to forget God once neglecting them. The mitzvot of tefilin, mezuzah they have entered the Land. They should not fall and studying Torah and are stated. into the trap of thinking they inherited the Land thanks to their own efforts and merits; rather, Question: What produce will the ‘early and late it was God who guided and protected them rains’ allow the people to gather? (11:14) Answer during the years in the desert. Failure to heed this on bottom of page 6. lesson will result in exile from the Land. 7th Aliya (Shevi’i) – 11:22-25 3rd Aliya (Shlishi) – 9:4-9:29 Moshe encourages the people to remember their The Israelites should remember that they are a Torah learning and to have a connection with “stiff-necked people” and they are not inheriting Torah scholars (see Rashi). the Land because of their own righteousness. In fact, since leaving Egypt, they repeatedly Haftarah provoked God, initially with the sin of the golden Taken from the book of Yeshaya, this is the second of calf, which Moshe now recalls in detail. He also the seven ‘haftarot of consolation’ read after Tisha reminds them of the sin of the spies. B’Av. Just like a mother will not forget the child of her womb, so too God will never forget the Jews and will 4th Aliya (Revi’i) – 10:1-11 avenge those nations who have persecuted them. Moshe describes how he carved two new stone He calls upon the Jews to be a “light unto the tablets, having broken the first set upon seeing the nations”. worship of the golden calf when descending United Synagogue Daf Hashavua Produced by US Living & Learning together with the Rabbinical Council of the United Synagogue Editor: Rabbi Chaim Gross Editor-in-Chief: Rabbi Baruch Davis Editorial Team: Rabbi Daniel Sturgess, Michael Laitner, Sharon Radley Available also via email US website www.theus.org.uk ©United Synagogue To sponsor Daf Hashavua please contact Gila Howard on 020 8343 5699, or [email protected] If you have any comments or questions regarding Daf Hashavua please email [email protected] 2 No Fear by Rabbi David Lister, Edgware United Synagogue “And now, Israel, what does altogether: an awe-struck awareness of God’s the Lord your God require of power and majesty. you? Simply: • to fear the Lord your God To grasp this, think of something dizzyingly large or powerful: the biggest mountain you have ever • to walk in His ways seen, towering up into the sky, perhaps wreathed • and to love Him in clouds or capped with snow; a jet engine seen close up, so big that it dwarfs the people next to • and to serve the Lord your God with all your it and so powerful that it can thrust the aircraft heart forward at hundreds of miles per hour; a volcanic • and (to serve Him) with all your soul eruption, blasting through the sides of a mighty crater, spewing out countless tons of ash which • to observe the commandments of the Lord hang in the atmosphere for months on end. • and (to observe) His statutes” (Devarim 10:12- 13). Then remember that, however powerful that thing is, it is absolutely insignificant next to God’s power. On the divine scale, the mountain is not This Biblical passage is apt to provoke a wry even a wrinkle on the Earth’s surface. The jet smile. The introductory “simply...” (‘ki im’ in engine is a feeble, wheezing toy and the volcanic Hebrew) seems to be at odds with the seven- eruption is a tiny, gentle breeze. point menu which follows, especially when we see how profound and demanding the requirements are. Furthermore, the first directive Perhaps Moshe is telling us to bear this in mind – fear – seems like a recipe for unhappiness and above all else. The phrase “ki im”, normally anxiety. Is this really what God wants of us? translated as ‘simply’, in this context means ‘nothing but’. Moshe invites us to have ‘nothing but’ God’s supreme power at the forefront of our Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch (d. 1888) minds. If we feel the might of His presence in a examines the cantillation of the passage and way that transcends and permeates all other derives a helpful understanding. He points out experiences, then following His commandments that there is a telisha gedola which slows down becomes almost automatic. How can one do the reading for the word ‘fear’, followed by kadma anything but walk in God’s ways, fall in love with v’azla, mahpach and pashta, quicker notes that Him and keep His commandments when He is so hurry the reading of the rest of the passage. This, present in every part of our lives? he suggests, indicates that fear is the key to all the other tasks set before us. If we can but fear God, pausing and reflecting on this mindset, all the other ideas which Moshe outlines will cascade out, as unstoppable and inevitable as the way the rest of the passage is sung. What kind of fear is it that brings about so many other lofty ideals as a natural result? Rabbi Hirsch writes that, rather than referring to panic or terror borne of the prospect of grisly retribution, Moshe is actually recommending something else In memory of Devorah Bat Avraham 3 Solutions in the Sidrah: Anne Frank’s Final Message by Rabbi Yoni Birnbaum, Hadley Wood Jewish Community The final entry in Anne what they could achieve ‘if there were no other Frank’s diary, dated 1 August people in the world’. In other words, how they, 1944, was written just three personally, could seek to ensure the fulfilment days before she and her of the mission of the Jewish people in their own family were betrayed to the lives. Nazis. It reads as follows: When we read the diary of Anne Frank we know the meaning of the blank page that follows her “Dearest Kitty, final entry. Yet we also know that is not what the I'm split in two. One side contains my exuberant book is about. It is about a 15-year-old girl trying cheerfulness, my flippancy, my joy in life and, to discover herself and her place within the above all, my ability to appreciate the lighter side inexplicable world that she had been born into. of things… This side of me is usually lying in wait to ambush the other one, which is much purer, Anne never had a chance to find out what she deeper and finer… could and would have become – the future that lay ahead of her. When everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning But if there was one thing that Anne Frank would my heart inside out, the bad part on the have wanted people to take from her life and outside and – and keep trying to find a way to diary, to be her legacy, it might have been this become what I'd like to be and what I could be very question: ‘To find out what I could be if only if… if only there were no other people in the there were no other people in the world….’ world. Yours, Anne”. Ultimately, that is a view that the Torah wants us to take as well. In this week’s sidrah, Moshe recounts at length the events surrounding the Giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai.