On my way to London recently I bought two books. The first was Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus, a book about how information affects societal cohesion. The second was Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s When We See You Again, a memoir about her son Hersh, who was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023 and later murdered in captivity. One explores what holds human societies together. The other is a mother’s account of what happens when everything falls apart. Yet both are asking the same question: how do human beings survive?
Harari argues that civilizations endure because enough people believe in the same stories. Faced with the unendurable, Goldberg-Polin persists by telling a story, a personal story from a period in Jewish history that we are all living through. In the book we begin this week, Devarim, Moses offers the same answer: tell a story that people believe in. A story that brings his people together.
Standing on the plains of Moab, knowing he will never enter the land of Israel, he retells the nation’s story. The rabbis call this book Mishneh Torah, a second telling of the Torah. Moses understands that nations, no less than individuals, live by the stories they tell about themselves. He is doing what both Harari and Goldberg-Polin illustrate, in very different ways: preserving a people through memory.
But memory can also distort. A people can become trapped by fear or nostalgia no less than by forgetting. This is why Moses does not offer nostalgia. The antidote to false memory is neither forgetting nor romanticizing the past. It is learning to see clearly.
The generation of the spies remembered Egypt’s power and their own vulnerability so vividly that they could no longer imagine a different future. Faced with the challenges of entering the land, they reduced reality to a single story of fear. They saw only giants and fortified cities, and as a result of their fear, they were not permitted to enter the land of Israel. Mature vision requires holding complexity, courage, and uncertainty all at once.
Memory gives rise to identity, identity to belonging, and belonging to meaning. In retelling Israel’s story, Moses thus transforms a generation’s failures into the foundation upon which the next generation will build.
This helps explain an insight emphasized by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: a nation ultimately survives not through military strength alone, nor through possession of a particular territory, but through the stories and words that bind its people together. A politics based only on power ends when power is lost, and a politics based only on land ends when a people is exiled. Israel, however, was built on something more enduring: words. The very name Devarim means “words.” As Rabbi Sacks put it, “So long as the word exists, Israel exists.”
I am often asked why we moved to Israel. The simplest answer is that I wanted to be part of my people’s story. For many years that journey felt primarily like one of triumph. Today it contains tragic elements as well. Yet it remains mine because it belongs to my people. I wanted to be part not only of its past, but of the next chapter being written.
This was Moses’ gift to the Israelites on the plains of Moab. He gave them more than laws or memories. He gave them a place within a larger narrative—and taught them that as long as they continued to tell that story, it would endure.
Dr. Tanya White writes, teaches and lectures on Tanach and Jewish Philosophy in Israel and abroad. She is a senior lecturer at the Matan Women's Institute for Torah Studies and LSJS and a lecturer in Jewish Philosophy at Bar Ilan University.
This essay was written as part of our collaboration with The Rabbi Sacks Legacy Sacks Scholars.
