Rabbi Konigsburg's Blog

There is a comedic meme online about superficial things living “rent-free” in a person’s mind. These “rent-free” thoughts are like tenants in your brain who are not paying for their neural lodgings. Often, these are things you don’t want to be thinking about, like annoying song lyrics you’re humming or celebrity gossip. You don’t want to be dwelling on these things, but nonetheless you find yourself doing just that. And while it is funny to admit to some inconsequential things that you ruminate about, the truth is that we can find ourselves spending time thinking about a lot of things consistently, with some thoughts being more productive, while others being intrusive and unwelcome. Ideally, we would only entertain thoughts that enrich our lives, though our experience suggests it is easier said than done. 

This week, we start the final book of Deuteronomy with Parshat Devarim. Unique among the other books of the Bible which have a third person narrator, Deuteronomy is presented from Moses’s perspective. Nearly the entire book has quotation marks around it as the book preserves Moses’s final speech to the Israelites before his death. However, because of the book being presented from Moses’s point of view, we get a snapshot at some of the things that are living “rent-free” in Moses' mind. For example, Moses could have started his story at the beginning with his voyage down the Nile in a basket and his upbringing in Pharoah’s palace. Or more poignantly, Moses could have framed his story with the burning bush, the Exodus from Egypt, or even the receiving the Torah on Mount Sinai. But instead, Moses starts his speech with the sin of the spies spying on the Promised Land, and their subsequent negative report that invoked God’s punishment for that generation to wander for forty years and die in the wilderness. This is what is on Moses’s mind. And not only do we get to see that it maybe lives “rent-free”, but we also notice that Moses “misremembers” or “misrepresents” what happened, as his account of the event differs from how it is presented in the book of Numbers. Specifically, in Numbers 13, Moses brings the plan to God and God approves the plan. However, here, Moses doesn’t mention God at all. He says that he (Moses) approved the plan, and thus when the spies sow discord in the camp and God gets angry, God is also angry with Moses: “Because of you Adonai was incensed with me too, and He said, ‘You shall not enter it, [the land,] either’” (Deuteronomy 1:37). Pointedly, Moses doesn’t remember the sin of hitting the rock as the reason he can’t enter the land (Numbers 20), rather he presents his punishment as part of the Israelite’s rebellion against God.  

Throughout the book of Deuteronomy, Jewish biblical commentators and scholars will highlight and rectify these discrepancies. Yet, the mere presence of these discrepancies in Moses’s recollection of biblical events evokes how it is human nature to dwell on events and allow things to live “rent-free” in our minds. In turn, this begs us to question ourselves, “What are the things that we find ourselves thinking about? Should these be the things that occupy our brain’s real estate? Are our narratives of ourselves accurate? What might be better things to ponder?” As we read this final book of the Torah and encounter Moses’s perspective of biblical events, I pray we also can take the opportunity to reflect on our own narrative and our own thoughts and do what we can to occupy our minds with worthy endeavors.  

Shabbat Shalom