When we are called the Chosen people, it means that God chose us to show the world how a moral and ethical society behaves. We are not superior to others.
The Land, the Covenant, and How We Treat One Another
In this week’s portion, Moses reminds the Jewish people that keeping the covenant is not limited to the commandments between man and God. It also includes the commandments between man and man—the moral and ethical obligations that determine how we build a society and how we treat one another.
The Jewish people are about to enter the Land of Israel. This is the land promised to them, the place where they are supposed to build their national life. But Moses makes clear that possessing the land carries responsibilities.
It is not enough to perform rituals. It is not enough to say that we believe in God. If we do not behave morally and ethically toward one another—if we abandon justice, compassion, honesty, and responsibility—then eventually we will lose the privilege of remaining in the land. We will be dispersed among the nations.
But that is not the end of the story.
Moses also promises that when the Jewish people return to God and return to the values of the covenant, God will gather them from wherever they have been scattered and bring them back to the Land of Israel.
That idea makes me think of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, Rav Kook, who became the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Mandatory Palestine.
Rav Kook had an extraordinary attitude toward the early Jewish pioneers. Many of these pioneers were anything but traditionally religious. Nevertheless, Rav Kook would travel to their settlements, meet with them, encourage them, and celebrate what they were accomplishing.
People asked him: Why?
These Jews were not keeping the commandments in the traditional religious sense. Why should a great rabbi celebrate what they were doing?
Rav Kook saw something deeper.
These young Jews could have left Russia and gone to New York or somewhere else where life would have been much easier. They were intelligent and capable people. They could have built businesses, entered professions, taught in universities, and created comfortable lives for themselves.
Instead, they went to the Land of Israel.
They went to places filled with swamps and malaria. They faced enormous hardship. They drained swamps, cultivated difficult land, built settlements, and worked to restore a country that had suffered centuries of neglect.
And Rav Kook recognized something important in them. Even if they did not yet express their Jewish identity through traditional religious observance, they were building communities. They cared for one another. They sacrificed for one another. They were rebuilding the Jewish homeland.
Perhaps, Rav Kook believed, something greater was taking place. Perhaps these pioneers themselves did not completely understand what was driving them. Perhaps they were participating in the beginning of the redemption.
That lesson remains important today.
The strength of Israel cannot be measured only by how many people observe one particular commandment or another. An essential question is: How do we treat one another?
And by extension: How do we treat the rest of humanity?
One of the remarkable characteristics of modern Israel is its willingness to help when disaster strikes elsewhere in the world. Earthquakes, collapsed buildings, humanitarian emergencies—Israeli medical teams, rescue personnel, and specialists have repeatedly traveled thousands of miles to help people they have never met.
Why?
Because the Jewish mission was never supposed to end at Israel’s borders.
The purpose of building a moral and ethical society in the Land of Israel is ultimately to demonstrate what a society based upon responsibility, justice, compassion, and respect for human life can look like.
That is part of what Moses is telling the Jewish people before they enter the land.
The covenant is not simply about our relationship with God. It is also about our relationship with each other.
And perhaps one of the greatest measures of our faithfulness to that covenant is not simply what we say we believe, but how we behave toward another human being.
Something to think about.
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