Author: Shlomo Bar-Ayal

We are now entering the month of Elul. We are getting ready to be judged by God. It is no accident that we ready the portion of the Torah that informs us of the importance of honest judges.

Justice and honest courts are the basis of any society. When justice is perverted, either by money or politics, then everything else will collapse.

The Torah clearly wants a limited monarchy. This was revolutionary in the ancient world where the king had all the power of his subjects. The Jewish king was limited in in power and what he could and could not do.

The Torah keeps admonishing us to do justice. The difference between the Toah concept and that of idolatry is that the Torah makes no distinction over the economic or social status of the litigants. All are equal before the law.

There is no Hebrew word for slave. The concept was that we have servants, not slaves. A Jewish “slave” has rights, that a slave in a non-Torah society did not have. It is not an accident that the anti-slavery movement was a religious one.

The Torah admonishes us not to add or subtract from the commandments. This is so we do not go crazy and add things and make our lives miserable. & When we subtract we are not following what God wants us to do.

Moses keeps repeating the holidays throughout the Book of Deuteronomy. It is so that we remember that we are on a mission. Once we forget that we lose our reason for being a people.

The problem with false prophets is that what they say sounds good, but it will lead people astray. This is a warning to all generations since we have false prophets today.

We can understand the abhorrence of the Torah to the customs of the non-Jews in the land when we see how they worshiped their gods. Especially child sacrifice, an anathema to the Torah.

The curses that Moses talks about are what will happen if the Jewish people do not keep the commandments in the Land. They will end up like any other nation and will, in the end become a footnote in history.