By Rabbi Moshe Pogrow
The pasuk in Vaeschanan gives us a fact to keep in mind: “limadti eschem chukim u’mishpatim...laasos kein b’kerev haaretz asher atem ba’im shama”—You see that I (Moshe) have taught you laws and social rules in accordance with G-d’s command, so that you should observe them in the land you are about to enter.
Thus, the Jewish people were presented with a fact that is important for our calling and for the significance of these laws, which sets us and our laws apart from all other nations: we are the only nation in the world that had a code of law before it had a land to implement it in.
Furthermore, these laws are not intended as a means to build up a national existence and to achieve independence and prosperity in the land. Rather, these laws are the end—it is the independence, prosperity, and land that are the means. Every other nation became a nation through its land, and afterward created laws for it. We, in contrast, became a nation through the Torah, and we received a land for the sake of observing it.
Each human being is a combination of a guf and a neshama. Asher Yatzar thanks Hashem for the human body, but Elokai Neshama gives thanks for our spiritual dimension, the neshama. Your body is not the real you, it is the clothing of your neshama, which existed before your body was born, entered your body at birth, and will live on after you yourself leave this world. Death can be compared to a person taking off his jacket. He is still the same, though the jacket is left behind. The neshama lives on forever.
This is what the pasuk in Bereishis means when it says that Hashem blew into Adam a nishmas chaim, a soul of eternal life.
Adapted from Emunah in the Classroom
The laws of other nations are the product of their unique character, formed by their land and by their changing needs. But our lawgiver, Moshe, the man from whose hands we received the Torah, never even saw the land. He never so much as set foot in it. The fact that his grave is in the wilderness is the Divine seal on the law that he transmitted; it testifies that these laws are eternal and unchanging, no matter where we are.
The laws of the Torah are absolute. They do not change with the ups and downs of our fortunes—rather, our fortunes and the fortunes of our land change in accordance with our faithfulness to the laws of the Torah.
Now, in Sefer Devarim, the Jewish people stood on the border of the land they are to enter, with the Torah in their arms, in order to observe it there in its entirety. And it was with the Torah in their arms that they were temporarily exiled. But again and again, we stand as a nation whose sole purpose is to live for the observance of this Torah.
So we await the moment when we will be able to once again enter the Land, which was given to us so that we may observe the Torah in its entirety. We, Yisrael, are the people of the Torah, not the people of a land, and without Torah, the land cannot be Eretz Yisrael.
Based on the commentary of Rav Shamshon Raphael Hirsch zt”l on Chumash, with permission from the publisher.
