If you are familiar with the well-known series Game of Thrones, either in book form (I could not get through them) or in series form (I could not look away), then you might know that there is another book/series set in the Game of Thrones "universe" over one century before the events of Game of Thrones: A Song of Fire and Ice, called House of the Dragon. This book/series depicts the bloody and fiery conflict over who is the rightful heir to the Iron Throne after a king dies leaving a mixed message as to who should be his successor.
The actual details of this story don't really matter. George RR Martin, the author of the book that House of Dragons is based on wrote it from point of view of a historian in the Game of Thrones world, who retells the official version of this history, with all of the details and events of this conflict from a future vantage point, based on available records and oral traditions he has collected.
The show House of the Dragon leans into the unreliable nature of this narrator and often "breaks canon" with the book by adding in extra details, scenes, events, and at times even flat out contradicts the book - to remind the audience that any thinking back over one's memories, any retelling of past events, and especially the creation of an official history is fraught and difficult, almost always reshaping the past based on the perspective and biases of the historian/narrator.
At the beginning of the book of Devarim, which we are beginning to read this morning, it is the first day of the eleventh month, which places us at the end of the winter and the very beginning of spring, with the anniversary of the Exodus coming up in two and a half months.
Moses is our narrator, our historian, our storyteller. The scene is all of Israel encamped on the eastern side of the Jordan River in the fortieth year of the time in the Wilderness. Moses is 120 years old, and aside from Joshua, Caleb and Pinchas, the oldest adult is just 60 years old, and the vast majority of Israel is under the age of 40, which means that they have know nothing but life in the Wilderness.
Moses begins his series of final speeches before his death at the moment when we left the foot of Mount Sinai. And as soon as he begins to recount the events of Bamidbar, which we just finished reading last week, it's clear that Moses is not simply repeating the flow of events and their details as we have been reading over the past several weeks.
What is Moses doing? We have the originals! (Which of course are also stories, and not facts or memories, but in the larger arc of the Torah's narrative, the are "factual memories." Moses is changing the details:
- Yitro, not Moses, is the one who created the judicial system (and this happens much earlier in the timeline as well!)
- God was involved in sending the scouts to check out the Canaan
- Moses glosses over why he is replaced by Joshua
- And later on there will be other details that Moses will change or alter - the experience at Sinai, what we heard, how some of the laws are formulated, and so on.
וּמִי כְּתָבָן? מֹשֶׁה כָּתַב סִפְרוֹ וּפָרָשַׁת בִּלְעָם וְאִיּוֹב.
And who wrote the books of the Bible? Moses wrote his own book, and the portion of Balaam, and Job.
The Talmud declares that “Moses wrote the book of Job, the story of Balaam, and his own book.” “His own book” refers to Deuteronomy: it is his own because a large part of it—the final speeches, including his memory of his interactions with his people—is forged in the creative fire of his own mind. Like all creation, Moses’ words surprise. Instead of repeating his past speeches, he gives new shape to a complex knowledge whose implications are for the first time revealed.
The final book of the Written Torah is Moses' personal Oral Torah, which has become part of the Written Torah.
Moses reviews, revises and reshapes all that has happened between himself, Israel and God over the past forty years - all for a new generation, for a new version of Israel. But mostly, it's not for Israel, it's also for himself.
What does Moses share about himself, God and Israel in these final speeches?
First there is a new relationship forged here: that of a storyteller and his audience.
AZ: In his last months, Moses transfers; Moses goes across from his relation with God to his relation with the people. At the end of a life of conveying God’s words to them and of speaking on their behalf to God, he now addresses them as a storyteller, as a poet.
What does Moses' story begin with?
- In general, Moses conveys how we views the fraught relationship with the people over time.
- His lonely, visceral resistance to the burden of them.
- He appeals to his people to acknowledge their past failures; a failure in “emotional intelligence.” He tells them about his desire to cross over the Jordan and remain their leader, but God shuts this down, and the people at the time did not pick up on the hint from Moses that he needed them to express their desire for him through prayer to God for the same.
- The issue between Moses and the people is his personal desire and disappointment.
- Moses intimates his susceptibility to them, to their desires, to their prayers. He is affected by them, in ways that are difficult for them to grasp.
His audience: The people are more mature now; They are not the stiff-necked generation of their parents. This is a new generation that can be handled in subtler ways. Their lives are nothing like the lives of their parents of grandparents. The words that Moses shares with them now, these chapters of Torah, will affect them more deeply than the crude impact of a stick. AZ: "Now, their stony heart is capable of softening into flesh."
Instead of a passion to cross over the Jordan, Moses is now possessed by a new passion—to reach across to his people, before he dies. He lays his intimate narrative at their door. What is it precisely that he wants of them?
At the same time, in the next breath, he answers God’s call with a question about the I—“Moses! Moses!”—who is being called: “Who am I?” (Mi anochi [3:11]). He pleads inadequacy to the role of redeemer, of God’s spokesman to Pharaoh and to his newfound brothers. “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and free (otzi) the Israelites from Egypt?” How does one persuade a slave people to emerge from slavery? How does one emerge from one’s own complexity and act in the world? How does one draw water from a rock?
In the ethical moment of encounter with the Other, Moses responded out of the anguish of his fragmented identity that, nevertheless, trusts that he is indeed a character in a narrative. His complex response is the “chord” effect of Hineni and Mi anochi?—“It’s me here!” and “Who am I?”
HIS OWN BOOK
It is against this background that Moses’ final speeches in Deuteronomy stand out in high relief.
In these autobiographical speeches, a complex I for the first time appears in the biblical text. As he recounts the events of the last forty years, he constructs, from his present perspective, the narratives of the past. Shema yisrael, “Hear o Israel,” he says, in his own voice, exhorting the people now and here to internalize and teach others what was undergone many years ago: laws were given and dramas played out in those days and in that time, in which I played a key role. In saying I, over and over, Moses gives an account of himself that effectively creates his past self. As a feeling, knowing person, he is giving birth to himself in this new I; he is answering his own original question, “Who am I?”
When the Talmud declares that Moses “wrote his own book,” therefore, it suggests that he wrote this book of Deuteronomy with a singularly intimate intent. It is “his own book” because in it his I is animated to feel and know as never before. In this, as in so much else, he plays out the implicit tensions of his people’s narrative. For the first time, he cites himself with a sense of his implication in their dilemmas.
He not only tells it to the people but then also writes it, at God’s behest, into “his own book.” We, generations of readers, know not only what happened between Moses and God but also that Moses chose to communicate this to his listeners and readers, for all time. The final choice is, of course, the narrator’s decision to narrate this intimate episode in this way.
He began as a foundling.
Then a prince.
Then a shepherd.
Then a prophet/a leader/a law giver/a judge/a teacher.
Over time, he divested himself of many of these roles.
But in the end, he is what we all become. A storyteller.
Richard Wagamese (October 14, 1955 – March 10, 2017) was an Ojibwe Canadian author and journalist wrote:
"All we are is story. It is what we leave behind. We are not the things we accumulate. We are not the things we deem important. We are story."
All we are is story.
Moses' life, career as a leader, begins with that chord of Hineini and Who am I?
And his final speeches, his reviewing, his revision, his reshaping the narrative with him in it with them, this is Moses' personal Torah, which has become part of the Torah for all of us.
This invites us to do the same: to look back over our lives from the moment of first wondering Who am I to the integration and realization of Hineini - This is me. Here I am. And to share our lives, our Torah, with the next generation. To share the meaning of our lives with others, including the frustrations, the vulnerabilities, the disappointments, the failures.
We take these memories and share them into a story to tell us something about ourselves, related to the past, and all that helps us better live into the future.
Moses challenges each of us to write our own book, our own part of the Torah, our Teaching and Instruction and Wisdom for the next generation, in a way that they will hear something from our lives that will help them navigate their future better. Each story not told, every book of that larger Torah unrevealed is experience untold and wisdom lost.
We each need to write our own Torah. In the end, all we are is story.