Making sense of the sedra: Devarim

I write this on Sunday. By now you all know that England have lost to Argentina in the World Cup semi-final. As things stood at the time of writing, the game was still to be played. England could be through to the final, or out of the tournament altogether. Both outcomes existed simultaneously in my mind, and I had absolutely no way of collapsing them into one.

Physicists have a name for this kind of situation, made famous by a thought experiment involving a rather unfortunate cat. Schrödinger imagined a cat sealed in a box with a device that has an equal chance of releasing poison or doing nothing. Until the box is opened, the cat is neither definitively alive nor definitively dead. It exists, on paper, in both states at once. The point was never really about cats. It was about what it means to sit with genuine uncertainty, rather than rushing to resolve it prematurely.

We are, this Shabbat, a people living with this uncertainty – for us it is no experiment at all.

We currently find ourselves in Bein Hamitzarim, the Three Weeks between two fasts, walking towards the darkest date on our calendar. And yet, this Shabbat carries a curious title: not Shabbat Eichah, but Shabbat Chazon, the Shabbat of Vision, named for the opening word of this week’s haftarah from Isaiah. Vision, not lament, gives the day its name, even as the lament draws closer.

The Torah portion itself performs a quiet act of the same kind. Weekday Torah readings, the first aliyah of Devarim ends at the verse in which Moshe blesses the people: “May the Eternal, the God of your ancestors, increase your numbers a thousandfold, and bless you as promised.” (Devarim 1:11) Straightforward enough. But on Shabbat, our custom is to end one verse earlier, so that it now concludes: “The Eternal your God has multiplied you until you are today as numerous as the stars in the sky.” (Devarim 1:10)

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Why the difference? Because the next verse after the weekday ending begins with the word Eichah, “How can I bear unaided the trouble of you?” (Devarim 9:12) – the very word, and the very mournful dirge lament, with which we will soon read the Book of Lamentations. Our sages could not bring themselves to let a Shabbat portion open on that plaintive note. So they borrowed a verse from the previous section and used it as a buffer, ensuring the reading opens instead in blessing and multitude. The sorrow has not vanished; Eichah still appears a few verses later, exactly where it always did. But we have refused to let it have the opening word on Shabbat. We have found room, within a genuinely difficult stretch of the calendar, to engineer a moment of light before the darkness resumes.

That, I think, is the real skill of the Three Weeks, and perhaps of Jewish living more broadly. Not denial, and not despair, but a determined creativity in how we hold both possibilities at once. We know exactly where the calendar is heading. We do not pretend otherwise. Yet we still find a verse to borrow, a tune to hold back, a moment of vision to name the day by, even while the box remains closed.

As I wrote this I hoped, fervently, that “It’s Coming Home” would be sung in this country in the joyous key it deserves, rather than in the dirge it can so easily become. But may we take with us the deeper lesson of Shabbat Chazon: that hope, sung out loud before we know the ending, is not naivety. It is, in its own quiet way, a kind of faith.

Rabbi Elchonon Feldman is at Bushey Synagogue and is also Chair of the Rabbinical Council of the United Synagogue