Ve'ethchanan: Battle of the Senses

Hearing and seeing  are contrasted in this weeks parsha. 

Moshe reports that he besought  Gd to reconsider and let him enter the Promised Land.  Gd heard Moshe's request to experience the land, to smell and feel and taste the fulfillment of the Promise-  and he was rejected.  Gd did not want to listen to these pleadings anymore.  Moshe was allowed to see the Land from a distance, get an overview. 

Moshe then tells the people to listen to the laws he is conveying , and keep the commandments of the Gd that they have never seen.  It is very important to remember that the laws were given by an invisible entity.  When the core of the law, the ten commandments, were given, the people had an opportunity to see the process, but they recognized the danger and asked for an intermediary.  To look directly at the  sun is blinding, to look at Gd is death...or worse.

Seeing is believing.  To every thing we see, we bring an interpretation from within our own minds.  And if we cannot see something, it  remains vague, ill defined, doubtful.  There is a strong commandment to imagine the Gd who brought us out of Egypt, and gave us the Law at Sinai, and remained silent in the Holocaust, in this way.   There can be no image of Gd, not even a mental one.   Yet, one can pray to Gd...

Gd has spoken to people: both directly at Sinai and through the intermediary, Moshe. The speech of Gd is a broadcast, an utterance available to all and heeded by the wise.  The meaning of the broadcast is open to the interpretation of the listener.  Some concentrate on the particulars, deriving details from traditions that often combine text analysis with historical local superstitions and discarded beliefs.  Others  try to fulfill what they perceive is the purpose for the rule; an interpretation that incorporates contemporary fashions and beliefs that will eventually be discarded.  I reply with a whispered prayer, but whispers to Gd are broadcast