54 | MAY 26 • 2022 

S

martphones can do amazing 
things — few more amazing 
than Waze, the Israeli-designed 
satellite navigation system acquired by 
Google in 2013. But there is one thing 
even Waze cannot do. It can tell you how 
to get there, but it cannot tell you where 
to go. That is something 
you must decide.
The most important 
decision we can make in life 
is to choose where we want 
eventually to be. Without 
a sense of destiny and 
destination, our lives will 
be directionless. If we don’t 
know where we want to go, we will never 
get there no matter how fast we travel. Yet 
despite this, there are people who spend 
months planning a holiday, but not even 
a day planning a life. They simply let it 
happen.
That is what our parshah is about, 
applied to a nation, not an individual. 
God, through Moses, set out the stark 
choice. “If you follow my statutes and 
carefully obey my commands, I will send 
you rain in its season and the ground will 
yield its crops and the trees their fruit … 
I will grant peace in the land, and you 

will lie down, and no one will make you 
afraid.”
If, on the other hand, “You do not 
listen to me, and do not keep all these 
commands …” then disaster will follow. 
The curses set out here at length are 
among the most frightening of all biblical 
texts — a portrait of national catastrophe, 
bleak and devastating.
The entire passage, both the blessings 
and the curses, can be read supernaturally 
or naturally. Read the first way, Israel’s 
fate, at least in biblical times, was a direct 
result of its faithfulness or lack of it to the 
Torah. God was constantly intervening 
miraculously in history to reward the 
good and punish the bad. Every drought 
and famine, every bad harvest or military 
defeat, was the result of sin. Every 
peaceful and productive year was the 
result of obedience to God. That is how 
Israel’s prophets understood history.
But there is also a more naturalistic 
reading, which says that Divine 
Providence works through us, internally 
rather than externally. If you are the 
Israelites in the Land of Israel, you will 
always be surrounded by empires and 
enemies bigger and stronger than you 
are. You will always be vulnerable to the 

hazards of rainfall and drought because 
Israel, unlike the Nile Delta or the Tigris-
Euphrates valley, has no natural, reliable, 
predictable supply of water. You will 
always, therefore, find yourself looking up 
to the heavens. Even quite secular Jews 
often understand this — most famously 
David Ben-Gurion when he said, “In 
Israel, in order to be a realist you have to 
believe in miracles.”

A ROADMAP FOR LIFE
On this reading, the way of life set out 
in the Torah is unique in ways that are 
natural rather than supernatural. It is 
indeed the word of God, but not God as a 
perpetual strategic intervener in history, 
but rather, God as guide as to how to live 
in such a way as to be blessed. The Torah 
is a set of instructions for life issued by 
the Designer of life. 
 That is what the Sages meant when 
they said that at the beginning of time, 
“God looked into the Torah and created 
the world.” Living according to the Torah 
means, on this view, aligning yourself 
with the forces that make for human 
flourishing, especially if you are a tiny 
people surrounded by enemies.
What was unique about the society 

SPIRIT

A WORD OF TORAH

Rabbi Lord 
Jonathan 
Sacks

A Sense of 
Direction 

