re'eh

Re'eh: 

רְאֵ֗ה אָנֹכִ֛י נֹתֵ֥ן לִפְנֵיכֶ֖ם הַיּ֑וֹם בְּרָכָ֖ה וּקְלָלָֽה׃  See, this day I set before you blessing and curse:

Why re'eh? It is beyond superfluous. The meaning of the sentence, "I place before you a blessing and a curse," does not change in its absence.  But it is worse than that. There is nothing to see! The speech occurs thousands of years ago, the reader cannot be there. Its contemporaries can't see concepts in the physical sense.

This seeing is not a matter of light waves stimulating the retina.  This is the real seeing, making sense of the stimuli, creating a model and checking it against the inputs (seeing is believing). The sentence includes the idea of the existence of the blessing and the curse; they are incorporated into the model. In our world, we are taught to see the world without  value judgements; Moses is giving them to us. Actions have consequences that need to be foreseen

Leading with "see" implies  that the good and bad are instinctive and obvious; you just have to look.   But the pronouncement:

{ח} לֹ֣א תַעֲשׂ֔וּן כְּ֠כֹל אֲשֶׁ֨ר אֲנַ֧חְנוּ עֹשִׂ֛ים פֹּ֖ה הַיּ֑וֹם אִ֖ישׁ כָּל־הַיָּשָׁ֥ר בְּעֵינָֽיו׃ You shall not act at all as we now act here, every man as he pleases,

denies this personal value system.The good of this parsha is not personal, it is not relative; it is absolute.  It is absolute, in part, because of its shared nature.  It is the common good.   Not like here (in the wilderness) where everyone does what is right in her own eyes, rather, the service is to performed at the designated location, the  conceptual center. 

The nature of "the good" is democratic, the people keep it as a common; and that good supersedes personal taste and bias.  The people as a whole keep the ancient message, they check each other for the accuracy of transmission.  The people as whole modify that message as necessitated by circumstances, especially circumstances that physically remove them from that center, the exile that alienates

This  is also an instruction that defies the situation.  That central place, its geographic and  tribal location, have not been defined.  That is not the important part. The fact that it had these properties, that it is not a concept, that it has  coordinates and terra firma beneath it are important. We retrofit Shiloh and Jerusalem, but the text comes in a context that predates these settlements.  Later events, the kingdom of David,  fixed Jerusalem as an eternal Zion. I am struggling to understand what that means now; I am certain it has not meant unity. The holiness of Jerusalem today is the inscrutable sanctity that I do not understand

It is said  that  at one time, the sacrificial rite, the ritual slaughter of animals and sprinkling their blood, was the core Hebrew ritual activity. To many modern individuals, this is a distasteful idea, the prayers for the restoration of these rituals are said with ambivalence.  These rituals served to unify the people.  They brought a significant portion of the nation together in one place, where they could renew their relatedness.  They provided the nation with a set of activities that are theirs's alone. They established uniqueness.

The parsha contains other methods for the maintenance of Hebrew distinctness:  kashruth and the  festivals of Passover, Shevuoth and Succoth.  These are sets of customs that have unified and differentiated the Jews for hundreds of generations.Is the distinctiveness of the Jew important? Is it a “good. ”

רְאֵ֗ה אָנֹכִ֛י נֹתֵ֥ן לִפְנֵיכֶ֖ם הַיּ֑וֹם בְּרָכָ֖ה וּקְלָלָֽה׃  See, this day I set before you blessing and curse: