Sermons & Media

Reflections on Ekev (As a consequence), Devarim (Deuteronomy) 10:16

"Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked." (Deuteronomy 10:16)

Some commandments depend on the hands, others on the feet, some on the words. But there is a commandment in the Torah that seems impossible for the simplest reason of all: no human being can fulfil it physically. Circumcise your heart. The phrase has become so familiar that it has almost lost its strangeness, and it is precisely that strangeness which needs to be recovered. To the first hearer, standing at the banks of the Jordan, the command would have sounded like a riddle. No instrument reaches a heart. And yet Moses is not speaking by accident. He has just recalled the golden calf, the tablets broken and remade, the mercy that kept the story from ending. And it is after retracing all these outward actions that he suddenly turns inward.

Moses is not inventing a new image. He is borrowing the oldest and most intimate sign of the covenant. The word translated "circumcise" is וּמַלְתֶּם umaltem, from the root מול mul (to cut, to remove what covers). Since Bereshit (Genesis) 17, the בְּרִית מִילָה Brit Milah (Covenant of Circumcision) had been the visible mark of the covenant between HaShem and Avraham’s descendants. A sign cut into the body, one that could be seen, passed on, obeyed. But within that beauty lived a quiet danger: it was possible to carry the outward sign of the covenant while the heart remained far from the G-d of the covenant. After the golden calf, Israel remained circumcised in the flesh. Faithfulness, it did not. The problem was never the body. It was what remained covered underneath.

And here Moses’s language becomes surgical in the most literal sense. He speaks of עָרְלַת לְבַבְכֶם orlat levavchem (the foreskin of your heart). The עָרְלָה orlah is the layer that covers, the excess that wraps around and dulls feeling. Just as the flesh had a veil which the sign of the covenant removed, so too the heart has its own covering, a film of pride, self-sufficiency, and habit that blocks sensitivity to what comes from HaShem. The physical sign was never the final destination. It was a living parable, waiting to be read.

But what heart is this? In modern thought, the heart is the territory of emotion. In the Hebrew idiom, the לֵב lev (heart) is far wider: it is the centre of the person, where decisions form, where the will is born, where memory is kept, where one chooses to obey or resist. That is why the Torah speaks of someone speaking to the heart, keeping something in the heart, inclining the heart, hardening the heart. It is not describing feelings. It is describing the direction of a life. When Moses commands the circumcision of the heart, he is not proposing an intense emotional experience. He is saying that something must be removed so the person can hear again. The second half of the verse confirms it: "be no more stiffnecked." The expression קְשֵׁה עֹרֶף qesheh oref (stiff-necked) is the twin image. One describes someone who no longer bows. The other, someone who no longer listens. Two angles on the same diagnosis.

Whose hand holds the instrument?

There is, however, a detail that turns this verse into one of the Torah’s great mysteries. In Devarim 10:16, the command is given to the people: you circumcise. Twenty chapters later, in Devarim 30:6, the subject of the verb shifts: "HaShem your G-d will circumcise your heart, and the heart of your descendants, to love HaShem your G-d with all your heart and with all your soul." First the people must do it. Then it is G-d who promises to do it. A contradiction? Quite the opposite. The Torah is holding, in both hands, human responsibility and divine grace, and refusing to let go of either one. Man is called to remove everything he knows is hardening his heart. But there is a depth of transformation no human hand can reach, and at that depth only HaShem works. The command reveals our part. The promise reveals our dependence. The two walk together, as obedience and grace have walked together since Eden.

This image does not disappear from Scripture. It grows. Jeremiah takes it up almost word for word: "Circumcise yourselves to HaShem, and take away the foreskin of your heart" (Jeremiah 4:4). Ezekiel describes the same miracle in different language: in place of a heart of stone, a heart of flesh, with the Spirit dwelling within (Ezekiel 36:26). What was command in Devarim 10 and promise in Devarim 30 becomes, in the prophets, messianic hope: a day when G-d himself will do, in the depths of man, what man could never do in himself.

It is into this river that the Brit Chadashah (New Testament) flows. Yeshua (Jesus), read as the first-century Jew he in fact was, did not come to abolish the sign, but to accomplish what the sign had always pointed toward. Paul, a Jew circumcised on the eighth day, writes that "true circumcision is of the heart, in the spirit" (Romans 2:29), and calls the Messiah’s work "a circumcision made without hands" (Colossians 2:11). This is not new language. It is Devarim 30:6 taking place. The promise that HaShem would circumcise the heart finds, among the disciples of Yeshua, its fulfilment: the layer no human instrument could reach is removed by the One who knows the heart from within. The outward and the inward were never adversaries. They were made to walk together, and in the Messiah they finally do.

We live in an age skilled at outward signs. We know how to display belonging, vocabulary, religious routine, and all of it can be sincere and still remain on the surface. The scene at the Jordan, without moralising, asks a deeper question than any inventory of practices could. Moses does not ask whether Israel knows the commandments; he knows they do. He does not ask whether they carry the sign; he knows they do. His question crosses the centuries intact: what is still covering our heart? Perhaps the question is not whether HaShem is still speaking. Perhaps it is how much of His voice still manages to break through the layers we have let grow, year after year, over the place where decisions are born.

— Adivalter Sfalsin

Reflections on Eikev (As a consequence), Devarim (Deuteronomy) 8:11–9:3

"Take heed, lest you forget the Lord your G-d…" (Devarim/Deuteronomy 8:11)

On the eve of handing an entire nation the land that had been promised to it, Moses could have spoken of a thousand things. Of the war that awaited them, of the fortified peoples, of the walls that rose to the sky. He could have spoken of strategy, of courage, of idolatry. Instead, he halts everything and utters a warning that, at first glance, sounds almost too modest for the moment: be careful not to forget. The verb that opens the passage is not conquer, nor possess. It is הִשָּׁמֶר לְךָ hishamer lecha (take heed), the language of a sentry posted at the door of something precious. And what the sentry must guard is neither the border nor the enemy. It is memory.

This ought to surprise us. Who, after all, would forget the parted sea? Who would forget the manna that fell with the dew, the cloud by day, the fire by night? The Torah’s own answer is disconcerting: almost everyone. And the reason for that collective amnesia is not the one we imagine.

To remember, or merely to recall?

When Scripture speaks of forgetting G-d, it does not describe a lapse of memory. Israel would never intellectually erase the Exodus. The festivals would continue, the stories would be told, the children would learn the name of Moses. The forgetting the Torah fears is of another order. The verb שָׁכַח shakach (to forget) is not opposed here to knowing, but to living as one who knows. Its opposite is זָכַר zachar (to remember), and that word almost never means simply to bring something to mind. When the text says that G-d "remembered" Noah inside the ark, it is not correcting a divine oversight, as though He had lost sight of him amid the waters. To remember, there, is to act on someone’s behalf. It is to let a reality govern the next decision.

This is why it is entirely possible to know everything about G-d and yet forget Him. Israel could recite the story of the deliverance by heart and go on walking as though the Deliverer had been left behind, in Egypt, along with the chains. There is an enormous distance between carrying a historical memory and cultivating a living one. One inhabits the mind. The other commands the hands.

And it is here that the passage reveals where forgetting is born. Not in a public square, before a crowd, but in a far more discreet place. "You shall say in your heart", the text warns, "כֹּחִי וְעֹצֶם יָדִי kochi ve’otzem yadi (my power and the might of my hand) have gained me this wealth." Notice that the sentence need not even be spoken aloud. It is whispered within. Before any outward arrogance exists, there is a silent conversation in which the heart begins to rewrite its own biography. Opportunities become merit. Gifts become achievement. Providence is demoted to coincidence, and gratitude yields to self-credit. Sin, in this passage, begins as a narrative. And whoever controls the narrative of the past is already deciding the direction of the future.

What makes the warning sharper still is the moment at which this danger ripens. It is not scarcity that provokes it. It is plenty. In the wilderness, each morning was an involuntary reminder of one’s own fragility: without that day’s manna, there was nothing to eat. Dependence was written into the menu. But the promised land inverts the lesson. Houses that were not built, vineyards that were not planted, cisterns that were not dug, a land flowing with milk and honey. Everything works, and it is precisely when everything works that the most dangerous illusion of all takes hold, the illusion that it was always so, that we are the cause of what we merely received. The wilderness taught one to look upward. Abundance invites one to look only at one’s own hands.

It would be easy, faced with this, to conclude that the solution lies in poverty. But the Torah says no such thing. The whole promise points, on the contrary, towards abundance. The problem was never to possess. The problem is to possess without remembering. This is why Moses does not command the people to renounce wealth, but to remember its origin: it is G-d "who gives you power to gain wealth". The sentence deserves to be read slowly, for it goes deeper than it seems. G-d does not merely grant the wealth. He grants the very capacity to produce it: the intelligence, the health, the creativity, the right encounters, the time. Even what we proudly call our own effort rests upon gifts we did not fashion. The Torah does not belittle human labour. It only forbids labour from taking the place of the One who made it possible.

Perhaps this is why the passage is stitched, a few verses earlier, to a commandment simple in appearance and immense in reach: וְאָכַלְתָּ וְשָׂבַעְתָּ וּבֵרַכְתָּ ve’achalta ve’savata u’verachta (and you shall eat, and be satisfied, and bless). Notice the order. The blessing does not come before the meal, when hunger still presses and need makes us naturally humble. It comes afterwards. It comes precisely when the appetite has already been satisfied, when it would be easier to rise from the table and move on. To give thanks, there, ceases to be a gesture of good manners and becomes a deliberate act of memory. Every meal becomes a small resistance against forgetting. It is no accident that from this single verse the Jewish people drew, across the centuries, the entire practice of blessing after eating: to feed the body should never mean to weaken the memory of the covenant.

It is from this same soil that the best-known gesture of the Brit Chadashá (New Testament) springs. At a table, on the last night, Yeshua (Jesus), read as the first-century Jew he in fact was, takes the bread, gives thanks, and says: "do this in remembrance of me". The Greek chooses the word ἀνάμνησις anámnesis (recollection, memorial), and it carries precisely the weight of זָכַר. Not a passive nostalgia, but a remembrance that acts, that is repeated with the body, that is eaten and drunk so as not to dissolve into forgetting. Faced with the same ancient risk, that of a sated heart that forgets, Yeshua does not hand over a doctrine to be memorised. He hands over a table.

And the reading closes with an image that seems to belong to another world, yet belongs to the same one. G-d is described as an אֵשׁ אֹכְלָה esh okhlah (consuming fire) going before the people. It is the fire of the bush, the fire of Sinai, the fire that descends upon the sacrifice. A fire that illumines and, in the same flame, purifies. Centuries later, writing to a community tempted precisely to grow cold and to give up, the Brit Chadashá quotes this very verse: "our G-d is a πῦρ καταναλίσκον pyr katanalískon (consuming fire)". Perhaps memory and fire appear so close together because they share the same nature. Forgetting grows cold. Remembering keeps the heart alight.

We live, today, surrounded by promised land. We have houses we did not build, knowledge we did not generate, abundance we inherited without noticing, and a remarkable talent for crediting all of it to "my power and the might of my hand". Forgetting, after all, almost never arrives overnight, in an act of rebellion. It settles in slowly, in silence, and tends to begin precisely when everything seems to be going well. The question the passage leaves open, and refuses to answer in our place, is perhaps not whether we have much or little. Perhaps it is whether, looking at all we have received, we are still able to see the Hand that first sustained us.

— Adivalter Sfalsin

Reflections on Va’etchanan (And I pleaded), Devarim (Deuteronomy) 5:22-33

"Oh, that they had such a heart as this always, to fear Me and to keep all My commandments, that it might go well with them and with their children for ever!" (Deuteronomy 5:29)

There is a strange sentence hidden in the middle of the Sinai account, and it is strange precisely because of its tone. Everything around it is imperative. Ten words spoken with absolute authority, fire on the mountain, thunder, a people who draw back and ask that Moses listen in their place. And then, in the middle of that architecture of commands, the same voice changes register. It does not say "you shall do". It does not say "you shall keep". It says "oh, that". A hurried reader slides over it, as though it were merely a pious turn of phrase. But a longing in the mouth of the Almighty ought to stop us in our tracks.

The most immediate reading is devotional and comforting: G-d is lamenting human inconstancy, sighing over a people He knows will fail. From there one easily extracts a lesson about perseverance, about not living off passing emotions, about keeping the flame alight once the mountain has cooled. All of that is true. But that reading misses almost everything that is actually at stake. Because the verse is not first of all about their weakness. It is about something G-d could have done and chose not to.

Who will give?

The Hebrew is disarming. The expression rendered "oh, that" is mi yitten (who will give), and it is the classic formula of longing in Scripture. It is the language of Job in his nights, of Moses worn down in the wilderness, of David weeping over Absalom. Mi yitten is never the language of one who commands. It is the language of one who wants something he cannot simply take. And this is the formula HaShem chooses, in the very chapter where He commands and is obeyed, in the very chapter where His voice makes a nation tremble.

There is a further detail the translations cannot quite carry. The text says levavam zeh, "this heart of theirs", the demonstrative pointing. G-d is not describing an ideal heart, hypothetical and far off. He points at the heart that was beating there, in that instant, still warm from the awe of that day. He saw that heart and said: this one. Let this one remain. And the word He uses is levav, written with two bets, a form the Jewish tradition always heard as the divided heart, the heart that carries within itself two inclinations pulling in opposite directions. It is not a flawless heart He longs for. It is a divided heart that keeps on choosing.

And here is the point that changes the whole reading. G-d may command the hand, the mouth, the feet, the Shabbat, the tithe, the resting of the land. He may command what is done and what is not done. But the permanence of a heart belongs to another category altogether: it is the one thing that stops being what it is the moment it is imposed. A heart compelled to remain has not remained, it has merely been held in place. That is why, at exactly this point, the Lawgiver exchanges the imperative for the longing. It is not powerlessness. It is respect. And perhaps that is why the following verse speaks of a road rather than a leap: "you shall walk in all the way" (5:33). Halach, to walk, a slow verb, made of repeated steps that nobody sees.

The Torah, however, does not leave that longing suspended in the air. Twenty-five chapters later, at the close of the same book, Moses returns to the same word and makes an astonishing promise: "HaShem your G-d will circumcise your levav and the levav of your offspring, so that you will love HaShem your G-d with all your heart" (Deuteronomy 30:6). This is the milat halev (circumcision of the heart). What G-d longed for in chapter five, He Himself announces He will do in chapter thirty. The sigh becomes a commitment.

The prophets inherit that line and carry it further with a material image. Jeremiah speaks of a new covenant, and the phrase he uses is literally Brit Chadashah (New Testament, new covenant): "I will put My Torah within them, and I will write it on their heart" (Jeremiah 31:33). Ezekiel is more concrete still: "I will remove the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 36:26). Notice the irony running through all of it. In our own chapter, a few verses before the "oh, that", the text records that G-d wrote the ten words "on two tablets of stone" (5:22). Stone keeps a word for ever, but it does not love it. What the prophets announce is not a different Torah. It is the same Torah engraved on another material.

Centuries later, on a Pesach night in Jerusalem, Yeshua (Jesus), read as the first-century Jew He in fact was, lifts the cup before His disciples and says that it is "the new covenant in My blood" (Luke 22:20). He does not invent the phrase. He is quoting Jeremiah, and everyone at the table knows it. And when Paul writes to a bewildered community in Corinth, he closes the circle with a precision one only notices having read Devarim: you are a letter written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living G-d, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of hearts of flesh (Second Corinthians 3:3). Sinai and Ezekiel in a single sentence. The stone and the flesh. The longing of Sinai finding at last its answer.

Our own age has a peculiar difficulty with this, because we have learnt to treat permanence as a technique. We have applications that count consecutive days, reading targets, January resolutions, systems for becoming better people by sheer method. None of it is bad. But there is a quiet difference between disciplining a behaviour and receiving a heart, and confusing the two produces a very particular kind of exhaustion: the exhaustion of always feeling in debt to one’s own most inspired self.

What remains of this scene is less an exhortation than an invitation left open. G-d saw a heart He could have fixed in place with a single word, and He chose instead to long for it. A longing, unlike a command, waits for an answer. Perhaps the question that is left over, and the text will not answer it on our behalf, is not whether we can manage to remain by our own strength. Perhaps it is whether we have ever asked Him for the heart He Himself confessed He wanted to give.

Reflections on Devarim (Deuteronomy) 1:19-33, with Shemot (Exodus) 4, 14 and 19

"Yet in this thing you did not believe the LORD your God." (Deuteronomy 1:32)

There is a sentence in the opening chapter of Deuteronomy that ought to stop us in our tracks, and almost never does. Moses, standing on the plains of Moab, looks back over forty years and names the crime that cost a generation the Promised Land. Not idolatry. Not rebellion. Unbelief. What they lacked was אֱמוּנָה, emunah (faith, faithfulness).

Now consider who he is talking to. These are the people who watched Egypt come apart plague by plague. They walked between walls of water. They ate bread that appeared on the ground each morning like frost. They stood before a mountain that burned and shook whilst a voice came out of it. And Moses tells them they did not believe in God?

If believing means thinking that God exists, the accusation is nonsense. There was not a single atheist in that camp. Whatever they had lost, it was not their conviction that God was there. So the word must mean something else, and that something else is precisely the point at which most of us have quietly gone wrong for most of our lives.

The Hebrew helps us. Emunah comes from the root אמן, aman, and the Torah uses this word in a place that has nothing whatsoever to do with religious feeling. During the battle against Amalek, Moses raises his hands, grows weary, and Aaron and Hur hold his arms steady. The text says his hands remained emunah until the going down of the sun (Exodus 17:12). Steady. Reliable. Not wavering. The word does not describe an opinion about God. It describes a quality of holding.

Take that word out of the world of arms and place it in the world of persons and you have something far more demanding than mere assent. Emunah is the steadiness of one who leans his whole weight upon another. It is trust with the body in it. And that is precisely what that generation refused to do. They arrived at the border of the land, looked at the giants, and refused to lean.

Here is what deserves our attention. When Moses makes his accusation, he does not demand a blind leap. He argues. He points to evidence. The LORD your God who goes before you will himself fight for you, just as he did for you in Egypt before your eyes, and in the wilderness, where you have seen how the LORD your God carried you, as a man carries his son (Deuteronomy 1:30-31). In other words: you had grounds. You had every reason. That is what makes the refusal culpable. Faith, in Moses’ mouth, is not a virtue that floats free of reasons. It is what a reasonable person does with the reasons he already has.

And the Torah itself builds those reasons before our eyes. The word emunah appears three times in the Exodus narrative, and each time it marks a different discovery, as though faith were being assembled piece by piece, in precisely the order in which a person would need them.

The first is at the very beginning. Moses comes to the elders with the signs, and the people believed, because the LORD had visited the children of Israel and had seen their affliction (Exodus 4:31). That is the first pillar, and it is love. Before I can trust you, I need to know that you see me. That my suffering registers with you. That I am not a rounding error in your universe. A God who exists but does not care is a God upon whom no sane person would lean their weight.

The second comes at the sea. The waters close over the chariots and the people believed in the LORD and in Moses his servant (Exodus 14:31). That is power. Caring is not enough. I have known people who loved me sincerely and could do absolutely nothing for me, and that love, however real, was not something I could stand upon. Compassion without capacity is a friend at a funeral. Necessary, and not sufficient.

The third comes at Sinai, and it is the one we forget. God tells Moses that he will come in a thick cloud so that the people may hear him speaking, that they may believe in you for ever (Exodus 19:9). What was proved there? That the gulf could be crossed. That a God utterly unlike us, unseen, untouchable, could actually make himself understood to a man, and a man could actually understand him. Call this third pillar understanding. Because I may know that you love me, and know that you are strong, and still hold back if I suspect that you do not really grasp what I need. Love, power, understanding. Remove any one of the three and trust becomes irrational. Put all three in place and trust becomes reasonable, but it does not become automatic.

And here is the hard part, which no amount of evidence ever removes. Even with all three pillars standing, the act of leaning is still an act. It costs something. To place your fate in another’s hands is to lose control, and losing control feels uncomfortably like losing yourself. It is always easier to remain where you are and call it prudence. The generation of the spies looked at the land and preferred Egypt, because Egypt was a misery they already knew how to endure.

Now observe what came next, because it is the most chilling thing in the entire account. Having refused, they had to explain the refusal to themselves. And rather than say the honest thing, that they were afraid, they said this: Because the LORD hated us, he brought us out of the land of Egypt, to give us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us (Deuteronomy 1:27). They did not merely stop trusting. They demolished the first pillar. They rewrote every kindness they had ever received as evidence of hatred. That is what cowardice does when it will not admit its own name. It goes back through the record and edits the love out.

Notice what actually triggered the collapse. It was not a defeat. It was a wait. Forty days of silence whilst the spies were away, and in that interval the people had to hold a conclusion about God’s character with nothing new arriving to confirm it. Delay is the real laboratory of emunah, because the three pillars are all proved in the past tense, and the waiting always happens in the present.

And it is precisely about that interval that Yeshua (Jesus) builds one of his most uncomfortable parables. He speaks of a widow who seeks a judge for justice, and of a judge who neither fears God nor regards man. It is worth pausing to consider who this judge is in light of the three pillars. He has no love, because the text says expressly that he does not care. He has no understanding, because he never truly listens to her case. He has only power, and that is the one thing he has. One pillar of three. And yet, by sheer persistence, the widow obtains what she seeks. Then Yeshua turns the argument from the lesser to the greater: if even such a man eventually does justice, what of him who holds all three? And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? (Luke 18:7).

The widow is the figure of emunah because she sustains the weight through the interval. She has received no new evidence. Nobody has told her that things will work out. She simply keeps leaning upon what she already knows, day after day, without sign, without confirmation, without answer. Moses’ hands held up until sunset and the widow returning to the judge’s door for the twentieth time are the same image. Steadfastness sustained in the midst of silence.

And her opposite, in the parable, is not the sceptic. It is the person who interprets delay as verdict. Who reasons, quite calmly, that if the answer has not come it must be because the judge does not care. There is the ancient sentence returning in a modern voice. Because the LORD hated us. It is the pillar of love being pulled down so that an unwillingness may pass for a lucid perception. That is how the wilderness generation lost the land, and it is how trust is still lost today during a long wait.

It is for this reason that Yeshua closes the parable not with a promise but with a question left hanging in the air: Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? (Luke 18:8). The Greek word there is πίστις, pistis, the very word the Greek translators of the Torah used to render emunah. He is not asking whether people will still believe that God exists. Belief in God’s existence has never been in short supply. He is asking whether anyone will still be leaning when the answer is slow in coming.

All three pillars, of course, come together in one place in the Gospels. Yeshua weeps before a tomb, and that is love. He calls the dead man out of it, and that is power. He is called the Word made flesh, God’s own self-expression pitching his tent amongst us, and that is understanding. Every reason a person could ask for, delivered in a single life. The evidence has been supplied. The leaning has not been done on our behalf.

The question, therefore, is not the one we tend to ask ourselves when faith comes up in conversation. The question is not whether you believe that God exists. Even the generation that ate manna managed that much, and it saved none of them.

He asked whether he would find faith on the earth. So here is the smaller and far more uncomfortable version of his question. In the last long silence you went through, when nothing was arriving and nothing was explained, did you keep your weight where it was, or did you quietly go back through the record of your life and begin to edit the love out?

— Adivalter Sfalsin