What are the duties of a wise ruler, say, king or queen or newly elected fascist leader? As Charles III is learning how to handle his new path he may want to take notes of what’s in today’s chapter in the Book of Words.
Moses is no monarch - he fought the King of Egypt long enough to fight for people’s freedom and new political existence, but his last speech instructs the people on what kind of ruler they may want once they are settled in their land. A king is not a must - it is an option, with five specific prohibitions and only one required task. He is a He, cannot be a foreigner, must not amass too many wives, or too much wealth or too many horses. His only duty is:
The king is to keep his handwritten Torah scroll with him always, “to read in it all his life, so that he may learn to revere his God, to observe faithfully every word of this Torah as well as these laws.”
What’s fascinating here is that the term used for ‘the copy of the Torah’ is the name that will eventually become synonymous with the fifth book of the Torah - Deuteronomy - the Secondary Book. Most scholars agree that Deuteronomy is the only one of the five books which repeatedly calls for and describes its being copied/committed to writing as a self-contained unit - The Torah. The king’s sole role here is to exhibit literacy and to hold on to the scroll, always.
We don’t know if David, Solomon or any of their heirs held on to or knew how to write or what a Torah was. They were surely guilty of too many wives, horses and much more.
But the most likely candidate to be responsible for this text’s existence is King Josiah, referenced in the second Book of Kings. 16th in the line of the Judean Kings, he is credited with the ruthless religious reforms that rooted out pagan practices, and either found or wrote the Torah - or least this fifth and final book. Most scholars think these verses were not written as a pre-kingdom set of instructions - but rather edited by King Josiah’s scribes to illustrate that he is the ideal king, following forgotten rules. Thus he is hailed as the ideal scholar-king.
The Talmud offers a more mystical interpretation. What’s the meaning of ‘Mishne Torah’ - the copy of the Torah in the king’s lap? He actually had two, both written by him. One scroll stays home in the palace, safely guarded. But the other is tiny, an amulet, attached to his arm, so that it’s with him on every journey, every battle and royal tour. The Talmud cites the poetry of King David as the model for this embodied Torah. SHIVITI YHWH L’NEGDI TAMID - I Place Divinity in My Presence Always (psalm 16)
What would the world look like if every one of our leaders, and every single one of us, took this aspirational law to heart and took the highest law of love and wisdom into bed with them, and into every battle, each and every moment of the day? Shiviti is Majestic.
Shana Tova.
Image by @YoranRaanan, Israeli artist reinterpreting Torah and this chapter.
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Shviti -- Teshuva
To replace, to remind, to return?
A little a(r)mulet that reminds us, like a spiritual wristwatch -- a shviti segulah, a teshuvah talisman...