Ki Tavo: Diaspora Makes us God's People

The term diaspora has become a new contender in the Jewish world for most used and least well understood. For some, using the term inherently re-centers Israel, as “diaspora,” in their estimation, is always in relation to Israel. For others, including myself, diaspora describes the experience of their ancestors, Jewish and not, having moved from place to place, picking up cultural traits and ideas along the way and adding them into the intergenerational stew that we’ve inherited. As the yearly Torah cycle reaches its end, and the Israelites put the finishing touches on the plans for moving into Canaan, a particular verse reaches across time to give us yet another understanding of diaspora.

As they launch into the final section of the speech to the Israelites, Moses and the levitical priests say to Israel: “Silence! Hear, O Israel! Today you have become the people of your God: Heed your God and observe the commandments and laws that I enjoin upon you this day.” (Deut 27:9-10) 

The rabbis of  the Talmud find within this verse a key to understanding the nature of diaspora in their Judaism. Through a series of arguments, they locate the process of Judaism becoming a mobile tradition first in the move of the center of rabbinic thought in 70 CE from Jerusalem to Yavne, a town near the Mediterranean. They explained a precedent for this in the moving Tent of Meeting that Moses used in the wilderness to speak with God—it housed the ark of the covenant outside the camp during the Exodus, and in so doing created a sacred connection beyond the walls of the ordered geography of the Israelites’ moving settlement. Rabbi Yehuda, said, “Just as the Torah says of the ark of God, which was only twelve mil from the camp: “Every seeker of God went out unto the Tent of Meeting”; all the more so should Torah scholars, who wander great distances and go from city to city and country to country to study Torah, be called seekers of God.” (Berachot 63b)

He then goes on to question this week’s Torah portion: It says “Today,” but the Israelites in the story received the Torah forty years earlier at Sinai. And, so, Yehuda takes the most radical interpretation: Today means, literally, today, for whoever is reading the Torah, he and his community back nearly 2000 years ago, and us and ours in our place and time. No matter where or when we are, studying Torah is our center; it is the one thing that connects those in the covenant with God—not geography, not blood, but Torah, in every place and time. 

The Talmud continues glossing the line, and explains that the word for “Silence” is actually to be interpreted differently—it is a command to form classes for group learning, and that is the essence of becoming God’s people in any moment. Jewish Diaspora culminates when Jews gather to learn Torah, whether that Torah was created by rabbis, Rosa Luxemburg, Ella Shohat, or Mel Brooks. This Diaspora is what makes us God’s people, wherever and whenever we do it.