Nizovim Vallelech. How to renew a nation? The Talmud gives an ingenious reading to the line

Torah, Tzivar Lano Moshe, Morshaki, Moses commanded as a Torah as a heritage of the congregation

of Israel, noting that there are 613 commands and that the numerical value of the word Torah is 611,

it says that in fact Moses gave us 611 commands, while the other two, I am the Lord your God,

and you shall have no other God beside me, the first two of the Ten Commandments, the Israelites received,

not from Moses, but directly from God himself.

There is though a different distinction that sages may have made.

Mosheh Rebbein who gave us 611 commands.

And at the very end in Vallelech, he gave us two meta-commands, commands about the commands.

They are Hakel, the command to assemble the people once every seven years for a public reading of key parts of the Torah,

and Vata, Kitvul Rahm, et Asherah Azot, now write for yourself

this song, interpreted by tradition as the command to write or take part in writing our own

Seifah Torah. These two commands are set apart from all the others that were given after all the recapitulation of the Torah in the

Book of Devarim, the blessings and the curses and the covenant renewal ceremony, they are

embedded in the narrative, in which Moses hands on leadership to his successor Joshua.

The connection is that both the laws and the narrative are about continuity.

The laws are intended to ensure that the terror will never grow old, will be written afresh

in every generation, will never be forgotten by the people and will never cease to be

its active constitution as a nation.

The nation will never abandon its founding principles, its history and identity, its guardianship

of the past and its responsibility to the future. Note the beautiful complementarity of the two

commands.

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