What Moses Knew About Memory: Reflections from Our Devarim Torah Study

This week, our Devarim Torah study crossed a threshold. After seven weeks together, we closed the book of Bamidbar and opened Devarim, the final book of the Torah. Right away, Devarim asked us to think differently than the books before it.

Devarim is Moses’s farewell speech. He is standing at the border of the Promised Land, looking back over forty years in the wilderness. He is choosing what to remember out loud. That is not a small thing. The way a story gets told shapes what it becomes. So Moses is not just recounting history here. He is shaping it.

The Art of the Gentle Rebuke

One question our Devarim Torah study group sat with is why Moses tells this story the way he does. He does not list out every failure of the Israelites in plain terms. Instead, he uses place names, coded references, indirect language.

Rashi reads this as compassion. In his view, Moses is protecting the people’s dignity even as he holds them accountable. He names the failures, but he does it in a way that does not shame anyone in the room.

Ibn Ezra offers something different. He points to timing. Moses waits until the fortieth year, right before his own death, to deliver this rebuke. Why wait so long? Because prolonging a rebuke, letting it hang in the air between a leader and the people, can do more harm than the rebuke itself. So the timing is the ethics.

We talked about how both of these readings show up in our own lives, in parenting, in teaching, in any relationship where honesty and dignity have to coexist. Moses is not avoiding the truth. Instead, he is delivering it in a way that leaves people whole enough to keep walking forward.

Does Tisha B’Av Still Do What It Was Meant to Do

Our conversation about memory led us naturally into Tisha B’Av, the fast day that commemorates the destruction of both Temples and other losses across Jewish history. Several of us shared how we have observed it over the years. From there, the conversation opened into a bigger question. Does fasting still serve the purpose it was designed for? And are there ways to hold onto the spiritual weight of the day while making the practice feel alive rather than obligatory?

I do not think there is one right answer here. But I think the question itself is a Jewish act. Our tradition has never asked us to observe blindly. Instead, it has asked us to wrestle, to ask why, and to keep showing up even when the answer is not settled.

Maimonides, Moses, and the Work of Translation

We also spent time with Maimonides and his Guide to the Perplexed, a work written for people who already believed but struggled to reconcile certain ideas with reason. What struck me, and what one of our participants named so well in our discussion, is that Maimonides saw himself doing the same work Moses did. He was translating tradition for people standing inside it, trying to make sense of what they already carried.

That, in many ways, is what all of us are doing when we study together. We are not outsiders looking in. Rather, we are translating tradition for our own lives, generation after generation.

Grief, Leadership, and the Book of Eicha

We closed with a conversation about Eicha, the Book of Lamentations, and how it connects to Moses’s own burden of leadership. One of our participants shared a teaching from the Zohar linking the word “eicha” to that burden. We also brought in Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav’s distinction between sadness and bitterness, along with a teaching from the Kotzker Rebbe about how facing the truth honestly, even painfully, can become the doorway to real healing.

True leadership, we agreed, carries an awareness of what might be lost. That awareness is not weakness. In fact, it is what makes the leadership trustworthy.

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